Page 45 of Wild Life

Maris’s eyebrows drew closer. “Is that why you put flowers on those two dirt beds?”

I nodded. I still remembered the day she had followed me out there when I was visiting Ma and Dad’s graves. I went often to clean them of weeds and offer new flowers. I sometimes talked to them about things, mostly complaining about life.

Her face twisted like she wasn’t well.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She hugged herself tightly. “You were only a child when you had to bury your parents. I remember attending my parents’ funeral, and that was the hardest thing I had to do. I can’t imagine having had to bury them myself.”

“Ma helped me with Dad’s g-grave. We cre-ma-ted him on the beach and spread his ashes deep in the jun-gle since he was too heavy to carry. And then when she was too sick to w-walk, she wanted to stay with him. So, I knew she would want to be b-buried next to him.”

A tear dripped down Maris’s cheek, and I wiped it with my finger. I didn’t need them, but for some reason, watching her cry halted my own tears. Caring for her first was my priority.

“And no one ever came to find you? Not even your family?” she asked, quietly crying.

“We didn’t have much family in New Zealand. Dad wasn’t cl-close to his, and Ma’s were back in India. She n-never spoke to her family either. They didn’t like that she broke her en-ga-ge-ment and ran away to m-marry my father.” I had never met any of my family in India, but I still connected to my culture through the way Ma raised me. I may not have spoken or understood her mother language, but my heritage spoke strongly within me.

“My only family that I talk to is my Aunt Sherri. We were never really close, but I still think she’s looking for me right now. Where are we, by the way?”

“I’m not sure. Somewhere in the South Pa-ci-fic. Dad n-navigated east of the Cook Islands, and I think we were cl-close when the storm hit us.”

“That was how I ended up here, except we were on our way to Fiji, and then the storm hit, and I fell overboard.” She let out a soft chuckle. “Guess the universe had some weird-ass plan for us with all this inclement weather.”

“Terrible plan,” I agreed.

“Yeah.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek. “You said you were ten when you landed. How long have you been here?”

“Twenty-four years.”

“Fuck. Decades?! That’s a long time. So, wait, that makes you thirty-four years old?”

I nodded.

“We’re close in age.” She motioned in the air between us. “I’m thirty-two.”

It was remarkable that we had so many things in common, like age, the loss of our parents, this island.

“How were you able to keep track of time so well? I can barely keep up with how long I’ve been here. It feels like years already.”

“The trees.”

Realization dawned on her. “The ones with the marks on the trunks? Like they’d been attacked by sloth claws or something.”

“I m-mark each day that passes.”

“Like a calendar?”

I nodded.

“Wow.” She took a minute to digest everything. It was a lot of information, even for me, and it was my own story. “So, how do we get out of here?”

“I don’t know. I never really tried to l-leave.”

Her face twisted like she had eaten something sour. “What?! Why not? It sucks living here.”

It wasn’t so bad. “I was young when I came here, too young to think of a good es-cape plan. I didn’t know how to build a boat. It took for-ever to learn how to start a fire on my own after Ma died. I was skinny and helpless and b-barely able to find food.” How would I ever have braved the ocean to find civilization? Eventually, as I grew older, this place became my life, the will to leave was replaced by daily chores to keep me alive.

“No boats or planes ever randomly passed by?”

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