The Art of Finding

The morning they found us, I thought of Sara.

Not that I hadn't thought of her before, certainly. There'd been days, weeks even, where I spent my waking hours picturing her eyes, her smile. The scrunch of her nose when we uncovered a ripe DB, or the way she'd tilt her head before saying something she thought was particularly witty.

But human beings are adaptable as a species, and those of us with healthy psyches are eventually able to face reality.

No one was coming.

I indulged the other survivors at first, mostly to stay in their good graces. We gathered reflective surfaces from the baggage and wreckage debris, and clustered them together on the eastern shore. Tony was sure the makeshift mirror would catch the eye of a passing pilot, and we'd be found any second. I just nodded and continued to dig the graves.

I'd been appointed the undertaker for the island, after the others found out what I did back home. During the first few days, bodies washed up on shore constantly, so I stayed busy. With no shovel handy, most of my time was spent digging the graves. It was quiet work, lonely work, but thoughts of Sara's voice kept me company. On my breaks from digging, I helped with triage, employing my basic knowledge of first aid. I could help the few with lacerations, or broken bones. And the ones with third-degree burns or severed limbs, well, I'd make them comfortable until I could bury them.

By the end of the first month, there were six of us left. We assigned ourselves daily tasks. Tony was in charge of catching fish. Diana and Hayley made sure we had a supply of fresh water at all times, and kept the fire burning. Christopher and Farrah gathered fruit from the mango and palm trees. We went about our jobs dutifully, and almost felt normal.

Sara wasn't the only thing I thought about as I buried corpse after corpse. There were the obvious luxuries: taking a hot shower, sleeping on a mattress, biting into a slice of freshly baked bread. But also things I never would have expected. I missed silence - there was no escaping the sound of waves on the small island. I missed the sterile smell of a computer lab. And I desperately missed intellectual stimulation. There were no mysteries to solve here, no ancient classics to study. No poetry, no paintings, no puzzles. I managed to fashion a rustic checkerboard, but no one else had any interest in playing.

The others called me "Doc." I'm not sure they even remembered my real name. It was easier to accept the nickname, the persona they wanted me to adopt. Even Farrah called me Doc, even during our one intimate encounter.

I suppose it was her fault I thought of Sara that day, the day we were found. I was taking my daily walk around the island, looking for bodies out of habit. On the western shore, as always, I took a break, ate a piece of fruit. At first, the food options on the island - fruit and fish - had seemed exotic, delectable. Now we ate for nutrition's sake alone. Occasionally I'd try grilling up some of the native insects, but the others never caught on to the appeal.

That day, while I was sitting on my break, two figures appeared on the horizon, walking toward me. Farrah and Hayley, together as always. They could have been mother and daughter, with their long brown hair and lean forms, but I'd buried Hayley's young mother, so I knew better.

"Hey, Doc," Hayley greeted me.

I nodded and smiled. "Hello there. What are you two up to?"

"We're on a mission to find new mango trees." She'd developed Farrah's habit of tossing her ponytail when she felt important.

"I see," I replied, leaning forward to rest my elbows against my knees. "Well, that sounds like an important mission. How is it going?"

"Okay. I found one that had a lot of fruit on its top branches. But Farrah wouldn't let me climb it."

Farrah, who'd been glaring at the sand until this point, made a low noise of frustration. "It makes me nervous, Hayley, I told you that. After what happened with Christopher, I shouldn't have to explain myself."

"Doc's seen me climb," Hayley retorted. "He thinks I'm a good climber. He said he thought I could climb any tree on the island."

"Well, Doc lacks something called common sense, doesn't he?"

I chose to stay out of the argument. Hayley was a natural climber, but Farrah had a point, too. Christopher's fall had shaken all of us. His grave was still fresh, and although our fruit supply was low, I'm not sure any of us were hungry enough to send Hayley up in his place.

They started to walk away, still bickering, and I called after them. "Nice talking with you Hayley, Farrah."

Farrah spun around and made eye contact with me - a rare move. "Been working on your pronunciation?" she asked with mirthless grin, before the two made their way into the trees and out of sight.

I guess I should have been glad that she was talking to me at all. We'd been friends for the first two years. I hadn't been interested in her romantically, but after spending that much time marooned with an attractive and willing woman, a man's baser needs override common sense. On one stormy evening she'd led me to a secluded spot and undressed me quickly. We'd had rough, desperate sex, a wild clash of slick skin and tongue and teeth. Afterwards, she'd dressed just as quickly, mumbling that it couldn't happen again. I'd asked what was wrong, and she told me tersely that her name started with an "F," not an "S." I didn't try to stop her from leaving.

That night was the only time I wept on the island. I hadn't while we were falling out of the sky, like some macabre roller coaster. Nor when a piece of the wreckage split my cheek open as I struggled to swim to shore. Nor when I had to tell little Hayley that I'd found the bodies of her parents. No, it was that night, when I awoke from a dream of Sara's breath on my neck, and realized that by now I'd lost her. I had mourned the loss of her presence, but only then did it occur to me that I'd lost her future, too.

She'd have grieved over my death, that I knew. Sara was never one to mask her feelings for me; a quality I'd once thought immature and now considered rather courageous. But she was too beautiful, too smart, too kind to stay alone forever. Men were drawn to her, and with me gone, she'd have to have moved on by now. Marriage, for sure, and maybe children too.

And so as Farrah and Hayley walked away that morning, their ponytails swinging in unison, I wondered if Sara had a daughter of her own. A miniature version of her, same big brown eyes and stubborn streak, but without the ghosts.

I imagined how things would have gone, had my plane transported me to Tokyo and back safely. I remembered leaving her a message during the flight, saying I'd be back on the fifteenth and that I wanted to get together. It had taken me two hours to work up the nerve, fingering the plastic telephone and mentally composing a script. Surely she would have accepted my offer. And I liked to think I'd have been suave on our date - at least, suave for me.

I'd have kissed her hand when she opened her door. Women always seemed to like that move, and although Sara was never a typical woman, I think she would have liked it too. I'd have brought her a bouquet of roses. Red ones, with no room for interpretation as to their meaning. We'd have dined at Mediterra, then taken a stroll down to that ice cream parlor with the homemade hot fudge. At the end of the night, we'd have kissed. It was a given. Her lips on mine, our bodies close, my fingertips resting on her hips. Maybe she would have invited me in; maybe not. Either way, it would have been perfect. We'd have taken tentative steps toward something. We'd be moving forward.

It's hard to move forward when you're stuck in one place.

With a heavy sigh, I stood and started walking away from the beach, toward the trees. The others liked to marvel about how lucky we were, the six of us - well, five, now that Christopher was dead. Out of roughly one hundred fifty passengers, only five of us had survived. We hadn't been sitting in the same section of the plane, nor had any of us paid particularly close attention to the stewardess and her pre-flight crash tutorial. Luck, they all insisted.

No one seemed willing to voice the real luck of it - that more people hadn't survived. Our little island had some mangos and coconuts, and Tony and I had gotten better at fishing over time. But the fruit supply had been running low for over a year. We ate mostly fish, with a daily limit of two pieces of fruit each. Any more people on the island, and we'd have all starved to death by now.

So I headed for the nearest cluster of mango trees, to look for more fruit. Cultivating a garden wasn't an option for us; the only source of fresh water was rain, and we had to conserve as much as we could. None of us would soon forget the one August without rain, when we'd had to rely on coconut milk and mango juice to keep from dying of dehydration. It was with relief that I noted the faint sound of thunder in the distance. We needed the rain.

"Doc!"

Hayley's shriek could only mean that she was looking for someone to plead her case to Farrah, so I continued to scan the branches above my head. If I could find enough mangos before Hayley found me, I might be able to keep her from climbing. And that night, maybe I'd be able to convince Tony to let her start helping with the fishing.

"Doc!" Farrah screamed, and I rubbed my temples. Between the harsh sunlight and the pounding sound of the waves, my headaches had become a regular occurrence. They were always worse before a storm, and the way that thunder was humming, it was going to be a big one. The droning noise was almost constant.

"Doc, for Christ's sake, come on!"

It was only when I ran out to the beach that I realized it wasn't thunder at all. I'd forgotten what a low-flying plane sounded like. I took off down the shoreline after Farrah and Hayley, who were waving their arms and yelling, as if the pilot could hear their voices. The inanity of it was that I was yelling, too.

Six hours passed after the plane disappeared from sight. The five of us huddled together by the mirror, the others debating whether or not the pilot had seen us at all. I stayed quiet, even when the helicopters arrived, even when we landed on the military vessel's helipad. We'd lived for three years in slow motion, and now life was moving fast, too fast. I held onto railings, door handles, the sides of my chair. The speed was dizzying.

Soldiers gathered in front of us, eager for tales of our adventure. Diana described the crash, while Tony interjected wild lies about man-eating sharks. Farrah and Hayley went through the mess hall line over and over, suddenly ravenous. The others cried and laughed, drank cans of Coke and ate cheeseburgers, then threw up and laughed some more.

I just stared out the glass window as we sped toward the California coast, and wondered if I'd lost Sara after all.

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