Wings

husbands and children, and how much she missed them. She talked about Annabelle and Humphrey, the two children from England. They made her think of Nick again. She thought a lot about him. All the time now.

“What do you suppose they all think has happened to us?” she asked as she shared a banana with Billy, and she noticed he was looking flushed again, and his eyes seemed very intense and a little sunken.

‘That we're dead probably,” he said honestly. Lately, he hadn't been joking as much. All they could do was sit and wait, and think, and eat the same kinds of berries over and over. There was nothing else to eat on the island, and so far they hadn't been able to catch any fish. But they weren't starving.

There was a storm two days after that, and the weather seemed to turn cooler than it had been. She was still wearing her flight suit, but it was torn and not very clean and Billy only had his shorts and a T-shirt. Cassie noticed the morning after the first chill that Billy was shivering even in the sun.

“You okay?” she asked, trying not to look as worried as she felt.

“I'm fine,” he said gamely. “I'll go get some bananas.” He had to scale up a tree to get them, but he couldn't even get off the ground this time; his leg was hugely swollen and oozing pus, and he was limping when he came back with one banana that had fallen.

She didn't know what to do for him anymore. The leg just kept getting worse, and she could tell that his fever was getting higher. She bathed the leg in salt water, but it didn't help at all. She had nothing else to give him. He dozed a lot that afternoon, and when he woke up, his eyes looked even more glazed than they had been. She laid his head on her lap after that, and stroked his forehead, and as the sun went down he began shaking from the chill again, so she lay next to him, and tried to keep him warm from the heat of her body.

‘Thanks, Cass,” he whispered in the dark of their cave that night, and she lay holding him, praying that someone would find them. But it seemed almost impossible now. She wondered if they would be there for years, or just die there. It seemed unlikely they'd leave the island. She knew too well that the search had to have been called off by now. They were presumed dead, just as others had been before them.

His teeth chattered constantly during the night, and the next morning, he was delirious as she bathed his head with cool water. There was a storm that day, and she drank too much of the rainwater herself, and wound up with violent dysentery again. Between the berries and the water and the leaves they ate, she had it all the time now. She could tell from the way her flight suit fit that she had lost a lot of weight since they'd reached the island.

Billy never regained consciousness that day, and that night, she lay holding him, crying softly. She had never felt so alone in her entire life, and to make matters worse she felt she had a fever now too. She wondered if she had caught a tropical disease. Billy had an infection from the coral, but they both were very sick.

In the morning, Billy seemed better again, and a lot more lucid. He sat up, and walked around the cave, and then he looked at her and said he was going swimming. It was chilly outside, but he insisted he was hot, and he suddenly became very argumentative, and very powerful. She couldn't stop him. He waded out into the water where the burned hull of their plane was. Even the storms they'd had hadn't washed it away yet, and it lay there like a reproach, and a reminder of all they had had and lost. For Cassie, it was a final reminder of Desmond.

She watched Billy swimming past the plane, and then back again, and when he came out of the water, she saw that he had torn the other leg, but he didn't seem to feel it. He insisted it was nothing, and she watched him scale up the tree, and eat a banana. He seemed to have unusual energy, but an odd kind of dementia. She could tell that he wasn't himself from the things he said, and the way he looked at her. He was very nervous and very wild-eyed, and by nightfall, he lay shivering in their cave, talking to someone she didn't know about a car, and a candle, and a little boy. She had no idea what he was talking about. And late that night, he looked at her very strangely, and she wondered if he knew her this time.

“Cass?”

“Yes, Billy?” She lay holding him close to her; she could feel his bones, and his whole body shaking.

“I'm tired.”

“That's okay. Sleep,” They had nothing else to do, and it was very dark there.

“Is it okay?”

“It's okay… close your eyes…”

“They are,” he said, but she could see that they were open.

“It's very dark in here. Close your eyes anyway. You'll feel better tomorrow.” Or would they ever feel better, she wondered. She could feel her own fever rising again too, and she was shaking almost as much as he was.

“I love you, Cassie,” he said softly after a little while. He sounded like a child, and she found herself thinking of her nieces and nephews, of how sweet they were and how lucky her sisters were to have them.

“I love you too, Billy,” she said gently.

He was still curled up in her arms, when she woke up the next morning. Her head ached, and her neck was stiff, and she knew she was slowly getting as sick as he was. Billy was already awake, she thought, he was lying very still and looking at her; and then she gave a small scream as she realized that his eyes were open, and he wasn't breathing. He had died in her arms in the night. She was alone now.

She sat there looking at him for a long time, huddled next to him, not knowing what to do, and not wanting him to leave her. She sat crying, hugging her knees and rocking back and forth. She knew she had to do something with him, to’ take him away, or bury him, but she couldn't bear for him to leave her.

She pulled him slowly outside that afternoon, and dug a shallow grave with her hands, in the thicker sand near the rocks, and she laid him there. And all she could think of as she did was his telling her not long before that he wanted to end his life on an island. He had. But that all seemed so long ago. It was part of another life, in a place she would never see again. She knew that now. She knew she was going to die like Billy.

She kneeled down next to him, and looked at him, with his eyes closed, and his freckles so big on the thin face, and she touched his cheek for a last time, and stroked his hair.

“I love you, Billy,” she said as she had the night before. But this time he didn't answer, and she covered him gently with sand and left him.

She sat alone in the cave that night, hungry and cold and shaking. She hadn't eaten all day. She was too sick to eat, and too sad about Billy. And she hadn't drunk water either. And the next morning, she felt weak and confused and she kept thinking she heard her mother calling her. Whatever she had, it was killing her, just as it had killed Billy. She wondered how long it would take, or if it even mattered. There was nothing left to live for now. Chris was gone. Billy was gone. Nick was lost to her… her marriage was over… she had crashed Desmond's plane… she had let everyone down… she had failed them.

She staggered out to the beach and fell down several times, and she was too weak to go up to the rocks and get water. She didn't care anymore. It was too much trouble to stay alive. And there were so many people talking to her now. She saw the sun come out, and she heard them, and as she stood up again, she saw a ship on the horizon. It was a very big ship, and it was coming closer. But it didn't matter, because they would never see her.

The USS Lexington was in the area on maneuvers. It passed through these islands regularly, but it hadn't been there in a while, it had been assigned to other positions. But Cassie didn't bother with it, she went back into her cave and lay down. It was too cold outside… too cold… and there were too many voices…

The Lexington continued to cruise by, and there were two smaller ships with it. It was the lookout on the smaller one who spotted the burned hull of the North Star bobbing in the water half a mile off the island.

“What is that, sir?” he asked an officer next to him, who smiled. “It looks like a scarecrow,” It did, from that angle, in the distance. Part of it had gone down, but there was so little left that the skeleton managed to stay afloat, and with another look, the officer gave a series of rapid orders.

“Could it be the plane that O'Malley and Nolan were flying, sir?” the junior officer asked excitedly.

“I don't think so. They went down about five hundred miles from here, give or take a few miles. I don't know what that thing is. Let's take a closer look.”

They advanced slowly on it, and several more of the men focused binoculars on it, but when they got there, the skeleton eluded them, and dipped in and out of the water. But it was obvious now that it was part of a plane. Half the cockpit was still there, and one of the wings had been blown off. The other had burned down to the frame and melted.

“What does it say?” one of the men was shouting to the other.

“Get some men in the water now,” an officer commanded. “I want that brought aboard.” And half an hour later,