I awoke to the sound of a roaring I couldn't place and a pounding headache. Forcing my eyes open, I saw blue, a deep sky blue. I turned my head to the left and saw a row of thick mangroves and palm trees. To the right I saw the ocean crashing on the shore. I was on a beach.
Sitting up, the world tilted, and I was hit with a wave like dizziness that threw me off center. I fought against it and examined my body, which ached like I had just had the stuffing beaten out of me. It reminded me of being in school, suffering the abuse of Scott Raintree, who brutalized me in one way or another throughout my high school years. Well, until our senior year when his new girlfriend wouldn't put out and he started coming to me for blowjobs.
As the dizziness began to subside, I looked around and wondered what happened. I was on a beach, presumably alone, and had no idea how I got there.
The yacht!
My father chartered a yacht to tour the pacific as a college graduation present, or an expression of his midlife crisis, depending on how you wanted to look at it. His new twenty-four year old girlfriend of the week was on board She was a dingbat, a true blonde airhead. She was nice enough, until I reminded her that my father came with a son who was a year older than she was, making her my new stepmom. My father's money be damned, she didn't want to be my new mom. Besides that, the yacht was staffed with lovely women who shunned my father's awkward advances with polite smiles, always shooting my new stepmom with an apologetic look.
I spent most of my time on the deck watching the hot, hunky deck crew working, when I wasn't hidden away in my cabin reading. There were a few walks on the beach, and one memorable, rebellious skinny dipping that began with me diving off the side of the boat. Father was not amused, but he got the hint and tried to find activities that didn't leave me bored half out of my mind. Father was my best friend, and he would have done anything for me. Now, I stared out at the ocean and wondered where he was.
A storm blew in from nowhere, and I ignored the captain's warnings and went onto the deck to see what was happening. I love thunderstorms and wanted to see what it was like at sea. The waves grew into large hills of water, occasionally cresting into mountains. The yacht was tossed about like a toy boat, the winds and stinging rain pushed me around like a paper doll. That's when I was washed overboard.
One of the deck hands dived in after me, and soon after a life raft was launched. We made it to the yellow, tented raft, but something went wrong on the yacht and the lights went out. Sometime after the darkness swallowed the world, we realized the raft was speeding across the waters. The yacht was going down and it was taking us with it.
The deck hand produced a pocketknife and cut the line connecting us to the yacht. There were distant voices calling out beneath the growling thunder and screaming wind. He told me to hold onto the raft and distribute our weight evenly across it. For hours we floated above the mountains of waves, shivering in the dark. I wept silently for the loss of my father, certain he went down with the yacht. At some point, it all went black and I woke up on the beach.
I saw the life raft and tried to stand, but I fell back to the earth. Crawling, I slowly made my way to it, hunting for the deckhand I was with. The raft was empty, but I saw him lying in the sand nearby.
"Don't be dead," I whispered to myself as I crawled to him, "Don't be dead. Don't be dead. Don't be dead."
I reached him, a blonde haired man with sun-kissed skin and handsome features. He was wearing his deckhand uniform, a red polo and khaki shorts. I remembered his name was Steve, that he had been kind to me, teaching me how to tie knots and demonstrated the anchoring system. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, a bosun, and had been yachting since he was eighteen. He was an old hand at life at sea, and I was glad it was him I found myself in this predicament with, and not one of his lesser trained coworkers. A sense of relief washed over me as I looked down on the hunk of man lying in the warm, dry sand.
I placed my fingers on his neck, searching for a pulse. My inexperience failing at this, I feared the worst, then rolled him onto his back and listened for his heart beat deep in his muscular chest. Thump-thump, I heard. I shook him, trying to wake him, then knuckled him in the middle of his chest, something I saw an ambulance worker do on TV. His eyes opened, and he began to cough, like he was choking on something. I helped him onto his side, so he could expel whatever it was he was choking on.
"Where am I?" he asked when his coughing fit subsided. I was thrilled to hear his familiar low tones. "Whoa!" His hand went to his head as he sat up. "What the fuck happened?"
"We almost died." I stood, testing my legs again and wobbled to the raft, searching for the emergency pack I knew would be somewhere in its tented yellow rubber structure.
"Oh, fuck, the yacht!" Steve cried out as his memory returned.
I found what I was looking for and returned to sit down next to him, unpacking it slowly, taking inventory of what we had as I searched for what we needed. I handed him a bottle of water and then a packet of aspirin for his headache. I then popped a few aspirin myself and slugged water behind it.
We had some fishing equipment, a flare gun, some basic medical supplies, a flashlight and two thermal blankets, besides four bottles of water and a large pack of survival crackers that I was sure tasted like shit.
Steve pulled a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter from his pocket. They were soggy, and he squeezed the water from them before tossing the pack into the sand. He returned the Zippo to his pocket.
"Hungry?" I asked, offering him the crackers.
"Not that hungry," he told me, looking out at the water. "Under any other circumstance, this would be a beautiful place. A real paradise."
"When you're ready, we need to go look for help." I wasn't in the mood to appreciate the scenery. My father was lost at sea, presumably dead. I could find no joy in any circumstance. All I wanted was to get off the island and return home.
"I'm sorry about your father," Stephen told me softly.
