• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“If we’re going to do this, I need you with me. And I need you to paddle hard, so we can pull ahead of the break. I can’t do it alone. What do you say, are you game?”

I nodded. And as captain and first mate, paddle we did. John steered us expertly through the chute with the waves rumbling beneath us. At some point, I was frightened and wanted to stop, but he shouted above the roar, “Too late. No turning back, Baby. Paddle. Now!” He was laughing. We were going to make it. We were almost there, a stone’s throw from the beach, when suddenly the tide pulled back to reveal what had been hidden—a large boulder blocking the narrow entrance to dry land.

We were going to wreck. No way around it or through it. I was in front. Beneath the bow, my broken limb lay immobile from knee to foot in its shiny blue brace. My leg and the boat were sure to shatter. I closed my eyes and waited, too afraid to cry.

Then there was a whoosh of sand against the canvas bottom. Not rock—sand. Just as we were about to hit, a wave came, just high enough to carry us over the rock. We—and our craft—arrived without a scratch. John hauled the kayak up. I hobbled out with my soggy crutch, the day pack, and the mango. We caught our breath, unable to speak.

I know now we were in shock. I thought it was just me who was terrified, but then I saw John, my captain, John, who was never afraid. Unable to be still, he paced the beach muttering something, his eyes wide and to the ground. “Don’t tell Mummy, don’t tell Mummy,” he repeated like a mantra to no one. Mummy wasn’t there, and he wasn’t talking to me. I could have passed my hand in front of his eyes, and he would not have blinked. It was then that the danger we had been in really hit me. John was afraid. I had never seen him like this—not skiing down a chute in a whiteout in Jackson Hole or nearly colliding with a gray whale in Baja. There was an exhilaration about him, a high. He was almost smiling. Then he noticed that his hand was shaking. He held it out to show me, and we marveled that it continued to shake for the next fifteen minutes.

We didn’t speak as we set up camp on the small beach. The mangroves on either side grew down to the water and made it impossible to walk to the next beach over.

I took the brace off my leg and left it leaning on the kayak with the crutch. Then I hopped to the towel he had laid out and sat down with the book, the damp copy of Mantak Chia’s Taoist Secrets of Love. John planned to explore the reef. Broken and mottled, it stretched out from the beach for about half a mile, but lengthwise it seemed to go on forever. Close in, the water was shallow—in some places, no more than ankle-deep—and he tightened the laces of his sneakers so that he could walk on the sharp, dead coral to the deeper spots to dive.

Neither of us broached the question of how we were going to get back. But I knew John, and it was best to let him go off on his own. Physical activity calmed him. As he walked away, swim goggles draped over his shoulder, he turned back to me. “Don’t eat my mango, Baby,” he yelled.

I smiled and watched him disappear behind the mangroves. I wanted him—his tanned body, his jones for adventure. Even his mango hoarding. I wanted all of it. We’d been together a long time, but desire was always there. It ebbed and flowed, but the current stayed strong between us.

I took off my white bikini and lay back. The sound of the waves grew faint, broken by the reef. The sun felt good on my body. For this moment, we are safe. We would find our way back. It would be okay. It always was with John. I believed that when I was with him, nothing could happen to me. I believed it, even on that remote beach with the reef out there waiting.

I woke to the sound of voices. There were no roads that we knew of on the high cliffs above, just jungle and goat paths, but through the leafy green, I saw five men making their way down to the beach. Red men—our deserted beach, no longer deserted. Had they seen me? I called for John,