Chapter Thirteen
Hunter
Eleanor seemed reluctant to take my hand, but she finally did and I started leading her further down the beach. After the rather flailing but truly impressive display of temper and fury that she had shown, I felt like she needed to get away from the visual of the tattered shelter for a few minutes. I understood what she was feeling. We had put an incredible amount of work into that structure, and as primitive and lacking in amenities as it was, it was supposed to be something that we could rely on for as long as this nightmare of a detour continued. Seeing it ripped apart by a storm wasn’t just upsetting because the work was gone. Part of me imagined what it would have been like had we been in that shelter when the storm hit. We really thought that it would have provided us some level of protection. Now that we had seen the aftermath, though, we knew that it was a far more likely scenario that we would have ended up palm tree shish-kabobs and would likely never have been found. It felt like just another reminder of what couldn’t be trusted.
I tried to get us far enough from what remained of our shelter that we weren't walking through the pieces of it that the storm had thrown across the sand, but no matter how far we walked there wasn't a stretch of the sand that wasn't studded with pieces of bamboo, palm fronds, and other debris. It was surprising in a way, looking like there were more pieces of it once it was blown apart than there had been when it was actually solid. We walked along in silence until we got to the edge of the water and stood letting the cool foam wash up over our feet.
"How much do you really know about what your husband did?" I asked.
Oh, what the grimy-living-holy fuck was that? Where did that question come from? I had absolutely no intention of continuing on with that train of conversation and yet…there it was.
"Ex-husband," Eleanor said with bitterness in her voice.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Your ex-husband."
She shook her head and stared out over the waves. Her hand didn't grip mine tightly, but I continued to hold it, not wanting the connection between us to end. I couldn’t get the thoughts of our night together out of my mind. I could still feel her skin against my palms and her breath on my neck. I could still hear the whimpering, cooing sounds that I had made tumble from her lips just from the light touch of my hand on her breasts. I craved more of her, but I could also feel my heart drawing toward her as much as my body was. Every time that she mentioned her ex-husband and everything that he had put her through, I got angrier, filled with a primal need to protect her.
I wondered if she could feel that energy coming off of me, but by the way that she held herself, I doubted it. She seemed smaller and withdrawn, the age more apparent around her eyes. I knew that she was self-conscious about them. So much of how she presented herself seemed focused around concealed the years that made themselves visible in the corners of her eyes, but I preferred her this way. Each of those lines meant something. They carried with them the testament of all that she had survived and all that had persevered even through the suffering that she had endured. I wondered which of those lines had been there, even in their earliest incarnations, when she met Virgil. Which of them had formed from the days that she had spent smiling and laughing before he darkened her life? Those were the lines that were the most precious. They were the ones that proved that no matter what he put her through, she was still, at her very essence, her.
"I'm not sure," she finally said. "Obviously I don't know the full extent of everything. I'm sure that if I did I wouldn’t be standing here with you.” She gave a short laugh even though I wasn’t exactly sure what she found funny about that. “I know just enough that it is dangerous to him."
"What do you mean?"
Eleanor looked up at me and stared into my eyes for several long seconds as if she was trying to find something in them.
"When I met him, I was completely starry-eyed. His confidence and the power that he seemed to have absolutely won me over. I hate even admitting that about myself." She looked back over the ocean. "I wasn't always this person. I used to be so much stronger. I never would have wanted someone to have power like that over me.”
She had expressed the same sentiment to me before, but this time it sounded more like she was trying to convince herself.
"I like the person you are," I said.
Eleanor gave another short, emotionless laugh.
"You don't even know me," she said. She glanced up at me and then away again. "I don't even know me anymore. I told you that I used to spend a lot of time outside."
"Yes,” I said. “But you didn’t have the right uniform so you weren’t allowed to go on Cub Scout campouts.”
She looked at me with a glimmer of a question in her eyes and then they widened and she nodded.
"Right. Well, before all that, I would go camping with my father and my brothers. We did it every summer. We never really knew when we were going to go. My father was not exactly a planner. He would just get up one morning and come into our rooms fully dressed in his camping gear and tell us it was time to go. We'd be on the road right after breakfast."
"Do you still camp with them?"
I knew that she was going to say that she didn't. It was obvious that she had separated herself from that part of her long ago. I just didn't want her to stop talking.
"No," she said, shaking her head. "We stopped when I was a teenager."
"Why?"
Her head dropped and I saw a tear forming in the corner of her eye. I wanted to brush it away, but I worried the touch would break the stream of thought that she was now following. It seemed like something that she had had coiled tightly inside of her was starting to loosen and I wanted to give her the opportunity to let out whatever she needed to.
"There was a storm," she said weakly, as if she was unsure of whether she even wanted to say the words. "The weather was supposed to be clear the whole weekend. We were out on the lake in the little canoe that my father loved. The clouds came in so fast. We barely had time to react. It was like it went from day to night in seconds. By the time that we headed back to shore the rain was already making it almost impossible for us to see. My brother stood up to try to grab a flashlight from our kit." She drew in a shuddering breath and I tightened my grip on her hand. "He went over the edge. We could see his face bobbing in the water in the flashes of lightning. I could see his mouth open. I knew he was screaming, but the thunder and the rain on the water was so loud that I couldn't hear him. We didn't find him until the next day."
"I'm so sorry," I said, not sure what else to say.
Now it was painfully clear why she had been so afraid when the storms came. I wished that I had known the story before so that I could have comforted her.
"We tried to keep up our trips after that, but it was just too hard. They got shorter and then we missed a year. They just tapered off. My father put all of his camping stuff in storage and we just never talked about it again. Storms have been really hard for me ever since."
"I'm glad that I was with you last night, then," I said.
She looked at me with a blend of emotion in her eyes and I immediately felt a pang of guilt. She turned away from me, dropping my hand and walking a few steps in the opposite direction. Her head was down as if she felt bad about the way that she had weathered the storm the night before rather than spending it afraid and sad as she imagined was her usual response.
"Eleanor," I said, starting toward her.
"Is there something that you wanted to talk to me about?" she asked, turning to face me.
I didn’t know what to say. Something had shifted in her tone and I felt like she had put everything away in a neat little file cabinet, closed the drawer, and walked away, not ready to see or think about it.
“I just wanted to make you feel better,” I said, feeling like the sentiment fell flat. “I want you to know that I’m here to help you and protect you if we face any danger here.”
"I feel like I was already in some pretty serious danger literally running for my life through a cruise ship."
"I know and I'm sorry that I didn't find you faster, but the point is that I did find you. I found you and I got you off of the ship safely."
"You threw me off of the side of the ship."
"I didn't throw you. I helped you jump."
I absolutely threw her.
"And now we are on quite literally a deserted island with absolutely no way of getting off."
"I know. There’s not really anything that I can do about that. I wish that there was. That wasn’t really what I thought was going to happen when I got us off the ship.”
“Really?” Eleanor asked. “What exactly was going through your head when you scooped me up and tossed me into the ocean? How did that situation play out in your mind?”
“I didn’t honestly have any plan beyond that. It was a bit of a split-second decision. I hadn’t really thought anything through.”
“Good to know that I’m in such analytical and quick-thinking hands.”
I smiled at her, relieved to hear some of the levity in her voice. Eleanor let out a sigh and looked around. It was almost like she was seeing the damage from the storm for the first time, as if her mind had erased her reaction and was allowing her to re-evaluate. This time it seemed that she was seeing the carnage from a more practical and logical place rather than one fueled by emotion, and that was a place where I was comfortable camping out for a while.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked.
I looked around with her, trying to let my eyes follow the same path that hers did so that I could see what she had and hopefully get some of the same perspective.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “There’s so much to do, I don’t even know where to start.”
Eleanor let out a long sigh.
“I thought Noah said that you were some kind of organizational wonder,” she muttered, more under her breath than to me.
“What?” I said.
She looked at me as if surprised either that I had heard her, or that I was actually going to call her out for it.
“Hmmm?” she said with mock innocence.
“Did you say something about Noah?” I asked.
She stumbled and stuttered for a few moments and then nodded.
“Yes,” she said shortly. “It’s just that he has told me that you work for him at the advertising agency and that you are really good at your job.”
I narrowed my eyes at her.
“He told you that?” I asked, the comment striking me as strange. “I didn’t realize that you kept in touch that closely. How often do you talk to him?”
Eleanor’s eyes widened slightly.
“Pretty often,” she said with another slow nod. “I guess that you never get over being someone’s guidance counselor.”
“Third grade teacher,” I corrected, tilting my head at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Third grade teacher,” I repeated. “I thought that you said that you were Noah’s third grade teacher.”
“Yes,” she said again, the voice almost exploding out of her. “Third grade teacher. Guidance counselor. Mid-term soccer coach and spring jubilee coordinator and costume designer. That was a tight year for the school budget. We all kind of chipped in and did our best.”
"We need to find Gavin," I said, trying to give myself time to process what she had said. That was a lot. "He's been gone for too long. He could have gotten hurt in the storm."