“I don’t want you to hate her,” he said with a sigh, “I just want you to let her go.”
But it was something Sophie could not do. Would not do. She loved her father, but when he said things like that, she hated him. As far as she was concerned, the day he dragged her across the ocean and forced her to restart her life, he lost all his right to interfere in her relationship with her mom. We could have stayed on Guam at least. Or I could have had a choice. Who knows? If she’d gone with her mom instead back when she was seven, she might have grown up with this Nicholas, maybe stayed friends with Jim. This Skin Island wouldn’t be a strange, menacing place that filled her with anxiety—it would be home.
Despite the secrets it kept from her, from the moment she’d set foot on Skin Island, Sophie had been haunted with an inexplicable sense of familiarity, a kind of kinship with the palms and the sand and the sea. It had been calling to her for years and at last, she’d answered. “Take me to her,” said Sophie.
Nicholas smiled.
SIX JIM
Jim stood and stared perplexedly from the plane to the runway to the beach. If I could just get it to the edge of the concrete, it should slide down the beach . . .
He pushed. He pulled. He cursed. He slapped the mosquitoes that hovered above his bare skin and snuck in a bite whenever he stood still. The plane, which had always felt light as a whisper in his hands when he was lost in the clouds, now felt as if it were weighted with a dozen tons of cement. He took the wheels off to see if there were some way to make use of them, but they couldn’t have been in worse shape if he’d shot them with a machine gun. In frustration, he chucked bolts and the rubber wheels as hard as he could into the ocean. Then he realized the material of the wheels might be useful for patches if he ran out of duct tape, and he had to strip down and dive into the water to find them again. When he emerged, dripping and still minus one wheel, he was ready to give up. He halfheartedly pulled on his jeans, then collapsed into the sand with one arm flung over his face to block out the sun.
“Damn, damn, damn.” He propped himself on his elbows and stared across the channel to Skin Island. It had been over an hour, and he’d seen no sign of Sophie—or anyone else, for that matter.
I shouldn’t have come here. But it seemed to be an alltoo familiar pattern for Jim: plunging into situations before he considered the consequences. There was the time he lost every penny of his once-substantial savings when he bet on his friend Manny to win the island’s annual dragon boat race, and Manny showed up so drunk he fell off the boat and almost drowned before the race even started. Then the time he and his friend Kong thought it would be a great idea to go cliff diving in the middle of the night, and Kong busted his arm and collarbone on the rocks and Jim had to jump in after him— which only left him with a broken arm and several bruised ribs. When he decided to go surfing just as a typhoon was sweeping in, and nearly drowned before his dad rescued him in their neighbor’s canoe. The time he’d asked out Lonnie Hall because he hadn’t realized that she’d just started dating the captain of the wrestling team, who then beat Jim to a pulp with half the school looking on. And cheering. In fact, now that he looked back, he realized his life was a study in “it seemed like a great idea at the time,” going all the way back to the misadventures he dragged Sophie into when they were barely old enough to spell their names. Flying to Skin Island, however, could well be the worst of his great ideas yet.
But there wasn’t any point in lying around feeling sorry for himself. He rolled onto his feet and trudged up the beach, carrying the wheel he’d managed to recover. Then he stood on the runway and stared for a long time at his plane, thinking.
He finally concocted a plan that he was fairly certain wouldn’t work, but he knew he had to try. He dragged as many fallen palm trunks as he could onto the pavement, which amounted to three, since the last two he found were too heavy for him to carry. He laid them in front of the plane and then pushed the Cessna with all his strength. It crunched and scraped in protest, but finally caught on the first log and started, slowly, to roll forward. He almost thought he’d figured it out, but then the warped wheel chassis caught on the log and he had to wrangle with it for a half hour before it finally came off and he could roll the plane forward. It moved fairly easily over the last two logs, and he was feeling pretty good about himself, but then it slipped away from him. The logs rolled once, twice, but not fast enough, and the plane scraped nose first into the concrete. Hissing through his teeth, Jim raced to the front of the plane and twisted the propeller so it didn’t get bent or snapped by the impact. If he lost the propeller, there’d be no hope at all. All the while, a pair of cormorants hopped a safe distance away, watching him with their heads cocked, and he could have sworn that their throaty cries were laughter at his efforts.
Confident his rolling log method would at least get the plane into the water, he set about patching the holes on the undersides of the floats. He ripped open the rolls of duct tape and set to work, moving quickly to make the most of what daylight was left.
Once the holes were patched and all six rolls of tape had been used up, he started the entire process over again, dragging the logs around to the front of the plane and, more carefully this time, rolled the Cessna over them. His back and legs and arms all ached to the point of collapse, and he was drenched with sweat that stung his eyes and his chapped lips, but he kept going. Whenever he was tempted to take a break, he thought of old Nandu and his tale of guards with assault rifles, which was enough to spur him on, to pull on hidden reserves of strength he never knew he’d had. If he and Sophie needed a quick getaway, he would be sure they had one.
It was well after dark when he finally got the plane to the edge of the runway, facing a downhill slope to the sea. He collapsed onto the concrete, his back against the dented fuselage, and almost blacked out from exhaustion. The moon was nearly full and poured silver beams over the water; glimmering rivulets of moonlight rippled over the waves to stain the sand and Jim’s skin pale blue.
Jim stared off to his left, across the channel—now at high tide—at Skin Island. The sky above was dark, but the mountains were darker still, black on deep blue, a vacuum that sucked in the light of the moon and stars. It had sucked Sophie in and held her still. She should have been back by now.
He’d ignored the warnings of the other pilots and his own sense in coming here. He hadn’t even told his dad where he was going. Not that he would have expected Steve Julien to remember or even care where his only son was after he woke from his afternoon alcohol stupor, though he might notice something was wrong when Jim wasn’t there to toss their TV dinners into the microwave. However unappetizing the frozen meals usually were, Jim wished he had one now—he was almost as hungry as he was tired.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Jim said aloud, his eyes fastened on the moon. The moon stared back, indifferent and cold. Jim sighed and rubbed his thumb at the corner of his eye, where a grain of sand had gotten trapped in his eyelash.
“Where are you, Sophie Crue?” Jim muttered. Maybe he should have taken her offer of payment. The repairs to the plane would be costly, worth well more than what he’d have charged the average tourist for a trip like this. If he couldn’t fly the plane properly, he couldn’t make any income. Without income, he couldn’t fix the plane. It was a vicious trap with no easy way out that he could see. It was highly unlikely that he could get insurance to cover anything, not when all the evidence pointed toward Jim as being the primary cause of the crash landing.