Chapter 4 - Solomon
1993
“Help is on the way. Keep pressure on it. Your friend is lucky. His leg is in a lot better shape than his board.”
Jack O’Connor didn’t feel lucky. He and his best friend, Wyatt Sullivan, had only been in Fiji for a few hours and had barely arrived on Malolo Island when the attack occurred. Wyatt caught the first big wave and had a good opening run, but as Jack paddled out to get in position, something bumped his board, a bump that seemed more curious than hostile. Jack couldn’t see anything, but by the time he heard a female voice behind him scream “Shark!” it was already too late.
The impact was brutal, surfer and board both going airborne, board in pieces and Jack O’Connor leaking blood from a gash on his leg.
Defying fear, and maybe common sense, two sets of hands ferried Jack to the safety of the remote stretch of Malolo Island beach, dragging him from the water. She acted quickly, assessing the damage wrought by the razor-sharp teeth and deciding they’d missed the femoral artery.
The handsome American would probably survive his trip to the South Pacific, although with a nasty scar as a souvenir.
Once they’d reached dry land, the local girl had called for a friend nearby to summon an ambulance while she stayed with the strangers. She instructed Wyatt to press his towel on the wound to staunch the flow of blood, and she took hold of Jack’s hand and leaned over him, speaking softly. “Just hang on. You’re alright now. We’re right here with you.”
For his part, Jack couldn’t decide if he was alive or dead. He was in no pain, although he did feel cold, so he could be alive and going into shock, or, more likely, a shark had killed him. More likely, he thought, since he was clearly holding hands with an angel. When the girl looked into his eyes and smiled, his heart stopped and the breath caught in his throat.
He’d never seen such beauty.
She was dark, darker than the girls back home in Ohio who tanned in booths. This girl was golden. She had to be an angel. He managed to whisper his thanks to her as she placed a palm on his cheek. A flurry of activity swirled as the paramedics arrived, and suddenly she was gone.
Wyatt accompanied Jack to the medical center, where a doctor confirmed the girl’s diagnosis – deep, nasty gash, but Jack’s critical femoral artery was spared by less than an inch. He’d need many, many stitches, lots of pain pills, and plenty of bed rest, but he’d live. And he’d have a story to tell that would have the coeds back at The Ohio State University fawning over him.
Wyatt’s wealthy father financed the trip as a gift for the two friends before they headed off to grad school in the fall; symbolic since they had likewise planned to graduate from surfing American beaches to those in the South Pacific.
Wyatt had taken Jack along on beach vacations since the two were seventh graders, all over Florida and the Carolinas, with trips to California starting after high school ended.
During their college years, the pair became more serious about their surfing, spending chunks of the summers in Hawaii, all on Wyatt’s old man’s dime. Clearly, it was good to be the scion of the furniture king of southwest Ohio.
Wyatt and Jack could probably claim to be the two most accomplished surfers in Ohio by the time they left for Fiji, which as Jack would joke “is something like being the best tennis player above the Arctic Circle.”
* * *
“Welcome back, Jack-O! How ya feeling, buddy?” Wyatt was relieved to see his best friend’s eyelids flutter open, and he was eager to find out what he remembered from the attack and the aftermath.
There was only one thing, however, on Jack O’Connor’s mind. “Where is she?”
Wyatt did little to hide his delight. “That’s the Jack-O I know and love. Not ‘how’s my leg,’ not ‘thanks for the rescue,’ all you can think about is pussy. That’s my boy.”
“Shit, it’s not like that. She saved me. We have to find her. I know this sounds weird, but I swear I was dreaming about her.”
“Dude, they’ve got you hopped up on pain meds. I wouldn’t trust anything going on in here,” Wyatt rapped on his friend’s skull through his wavy blonde locks to emphasize his point. “At least not right now.”
Jack surveyed the damage to his leg, running his hands gently across the bandages, wincing when he hit the repaired flesh. “Any idea what kind of shark it was?”
“Probably a bull, but the water here is loaded with sharks, all kinds. Lucky for you, your board didn’t taste good enough to come back for seconds,” Wyatt replied.
“How long have I been out?”
“Four or five hours? Blood loss knocked you out initially, then they sedated you to patch you up.”
“Sorry to ruin our trip, bro, but I don’t think I’ll be back on a board anytime soon. Not that I have a board to be on anymore, anyway,” Jack offered.
Wyatt laughed. “You don’t expect me to sit here in the hospital or in our hotel room with you for the next two weeks, do you? I intend to be on the beach bright and early tomorrow. Besides, you’re ‘shark bite guy’ now. You’re a local celebrity. You’ll have plenty of volunteers to help nurse you back to health.”
* * *
The next morning, Wyatt returned to the beach, intent on swallowing his fear and conquering the Fijian waves. Surveying the tide, he was aware of a presence sidling up to him.
He’d seen the girl who helped save his friend the prior afternoon, but he hadn’t really looked at her. As she approached, he drank her in, an exotic beauty beyond compare to the coeds back home in Ohio. She wore a black bikini top and jean shorts, her black hair a thick, wild, windswept mane. Her skin was more gold than brown and seemed to glow, rippling over tight, natural muscle.
Wyatt Sullivan wasn’t typically intimidated by anyone, especially women, but his voice had shriveled up deep inside when he tried to say hello. She stood next to him, watching the waves crash, surveying the set for herself.
“How’s your friend?” she finally asked.
Trying, but failing, to give off the cool, disinterested vibe he’d honed over the years, Wyatt cleared his throat to regain his voice before answering. “Oh, Jack? That was you yesterday?”
Her gaze never left the water as she nodded her reply.
“He’s in the hospital, they stitched him up. He’ll be ok. Probably won’t be doing anymore surfing, not this trip anyway.”
“Don’t they have bicycles in America?” she asked.
Perplexed by the question, Wyatt gave the native girl a sideways look. “Yeah, of course we do.”
“Then I assume Jack has ridden one, no?”
Wyatt nodded.
“And when he was learning to ride, he fell off a few times. Surfing, real surfing, is like that. If you let every little shark bite, jellyfish sting, or wipeout send you scurrying back to the beach, you just don’t get it. Surfing isn’t what you do, it’s who you are.” She smiled, but not at Wyatt. She was smiling out at the ocean, as if they were in on a secret that someone like Wyatt could never understand.
Wyatt watched as the gorgeous girl dropped a towel, wriggled out of her shorts, and made for the water with her board. He watched her paddle out, impressed by her guts. He’d wrestled with this moment ever since hearing Jack screaming and seeing the churning water near him run red in the aftermath of the attack.
Wyatt walked toward the water but stopped short as the first waves lapped at his toes. His feet sank and he let them. Watching the girl knife effortlessly through and between waves left him awestruck. Whatever skills he and Jack had developed paled next to the instinctual grace this Fijian goddess displayed.
Motionlessly, he watched her entire set and watched her emerge from the waves, glistening.
“Unless you’re planning to go out,” she said, motioning to the ocean. “Why don’t you take me to see your friend? I have to work this afternoon, but I have some free time now.”
Wyatt wasn’t going into the ocean, not in front of her. He knew how clumsy and awkward his attempts to surf would be, and any chance he had to score with her would be lost if she actually watched him surf.
Not like it wouldn’t be gone anyway once she visited Jack in the hospital, but she was so beautiful that he couldn’t help but hope.