We didn’t have any toothpaste either. We used sea salt to brush our teeth, scooping water out of the lagoon and waiting for it to evaporate. The chunks of salt left behind were rough enough to clean our teeth but nothing compared to toothpaste for making our mouths taste good. Anna hated that the most. Now we’d be without soap, too.

“Maybe we should divide this into thirds,” Anna said, studying the bottle of shower gel. “Wash all our clothes, wash our hair, and wash ourselves. What do you think?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

We took everything down to the lagoon and filled the life raft container with water. Anna squeezed some shower gel into it. When all the clothes were submerged, she washed them thoroughly. I was down to one pair of shorts, a sweatshirt that didn’t really fit me anymore, and Anna’s REO Speedwagon T-shirt. I went naked a lot. Anna had enough to wear but I sometimes convinced her to have a naked day, too.

***

I turned twenty in September. I started getting dizzy when I stood up too fast, and I didn’t always feel the greatest. Anna worried a lot and I didn’t want to tell her, but I wanted to know if she was getting dizzy, too. She said she was.

“It’s a sign of malnutrition,” she said. “It happens when the body finally uses up its stored nutrients. We aren’t putting enough of them back in.” She reached for my hand and looked at my fingers, running her thumb over the brittle nails. “That’s another sign.” She held out her hand and examined it. “Mine look like that, too.”

We braced ourselves for the approaching dry season and the end of regular rainfall. And somehow, we kept on surviving.

Chapter 33 – Anna

I threw up my breakfast one morning in November. I was sitting on the blanket next to T.J. eating a scrambled egg, and the nausea came out of nowhere. I barely got three steps away before I puked.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” T.J. asked. He brought me some water, and I rinsed my mouth.

“I don’t know but that was not staying down.”

“Do you feel okay?”

“I feel much better now.” I pointed at Chicken who was walking around by us. “Chicken, that was a bad egg.”

“Do you want to try some breadfruit?”

“Maybe later.”

“Okay.”

I felt fine the rest of the day but the next morning, right after I ate a piece of coconut, I threw up again.

In a repeat of the day before, T.J. brought me water, and I rinsed out my mouth. He led me back to the blanket.

“Anna, what’s wrong?” he asked, a worried expression on his face.

“I don’t know.” I lay down and curled up on my side, waiting for the nausea to subside.

T.J. sat down beside me and smoothed the hair away from my face. “This is going to sound crazy, but you’re not pregnant are you?”

I looked down at my stomach, nearly concave since I hadn’t gained back the weight I’d lost when T.J. was sick. I still didn’t have my period.

“You’re sterile though, right?”

“They said I was. That I probably always would be.”

“What did they mean by probably?”

He thought about it for a minute. “I remember something about a slight chance fertility could come back but not to count on it. That’s why everyone wanted me to bank my sperm. They said it was the only way to be sure.”

“That sounds pretty sterile to me.” I sat up, feeling a little less nauseous. “There’s no way I’m pregnant. Between the two of us, it’s probably impossible. I’m sure it’s just a stomach bug. God knows what’s living in my digestive tract.”

He took my hand. “Okay.”

Later that night, right before we fell asleep he said, “What if you were pregnant, Anna? I know you want a baby.” He wrapped his arms around me tighter.

“Oh, T.J. Don’t say that. Not here. Not on the island. The baby would have horrible odds for survival. When you were sick, and I thought you might die, it was almost more than I could take. If we had to watch our baby die I’d want to die, too.”

He exhaled. “I know. You’re right.”

I didn’t throw up the next morning, or any mornings after that. My stomach stayed flat, and I didn’t have to worry about having a baby on the island.

***

T.J. walked up to the house carrying the fishing pole.

“Something big just snapped my line.” He went inside and came back out. “This is your last earring. I don’t know what we’re gonna do when I lose this one.”

He shook his head and turned to go, heading back to the water to catch enough fish for our next meal.

“T.J.?”

He looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, sweetie?”

“I can’t find Chicken.”

“She’ll turn up. I’ll help you look for her when I get back, okay?”

We searched everywhere. She’d wandered away before, but never for very long. I hadn’t seen her since early morning and she still hadn’t come back by the time T.J. and I went to bed.

“We’ll look again tomorrow, Anna.”

I was sitting under the awning the next day peeling breadfruit when T.J. walked up. I knew by the look on his face that he had bad news.

“You must have found Chicken. Is she dead?”

He nodded.

“Where?”

“Out in the woods.”

T.J. sat down, and I put my head in his lap, blinking back tears.

“She’d been dead at least a day,” T.J. said. “I buried her next to Mick.”

T.J. and I ate our food as soon as we killed it because we worried about food poisoning. Knowing that Chicken had been dead too long to eat saved us from making a meal out of our pet.

T.J. and I were, after all, extremely pragmatic.

I didn’t feel like getting out of bed a few days later, on the morning of Christmas Eve. Curled up on my side, I pretended to be asleep whenever T.J. checked on me. I cried some. He let me get away with it that day, but the next morning he insisted I get up.

“It’s Christmas, Anna,” he said, bending down beside the life raft until his head was level with mine. I looked into his eyes, alarmed by how lifeless they appeared. The color surrounding his pupils appeared a shade duller than I remembered.

Getting out of that bed was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I only succeeded because I sensed it wouldn’t take much to bring T.J. down to my level and that was something I simply couldn’t handle.

He convinced me to go down to the water with him. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“Okay.”

I floated on my back, feeling weightless and insubstantial, as if my body was breaking down from the inside out, which it likely was. The dolphins joined us and brought a genuine smile to my face, if only for a minute.

We sat on the sand afterward, as we had so many times. T.J. sat behind me, and I leaned back against his chest. He wrapped me in his arms. I pictured my family back home, gathered around the big oak table in my mom and dad’s dining room, eating Christmas dinner. My mom would have spent the day cooking and my dad would have been right alongside her, getting in her way.

“I wonder if Santa Claus was good to Chloe and Joe,” I said. I missed watching my niece and nephew grow up.

“How old are they now?” T.J. asked.

“Joe’s eight. Chloe just turned six. I hope they still believe in Santa.” Unless someone spoiled it for them, they probably did.

“I promise you and I will spend Christmas together in Chicago next year, Anna.” He squeezed me, hard, and didn’t let go. “But you have to promise me that you won’t give up, okay?”

“I won’t,” I said. And now both of us were full of shit.

The calendar in my datebook ran out at the end of the month, and I’d have to find another way to keep track of the date in 2005.