“T.J.” It came out no louder than a whisper, and no one in the helicopter heard me. “T.J.,” I said, a little louder.

The man lifted my head and put a water bottle to my lips. I drank, satisfying my raging thirst. The cool water soothed my throat, and I found my voice.

“T.J! T.J. is down there. You’ve got to find him.”

“We’re low on fuel,” the man said. “And we need to get you to the hospital.”

I struggled to understand what he was saying. “No!” I sat up, grabbing his shoulders. “He’s down there. We can’t leave him here.”

Hysteria overwhelmed me, and I screamed, the sound filling the helicopter. The man tried to calm me down.

“I’ll have the pilot alert the other helicopters. They’ll look for him. Everything’s going to be okay,” he said, squeezing my shoulder.

I couldn’t get the image of T.J. slipping under the surface, and not coming back up, out of my head. I shut down, and went to a place deep inside myself where I didn’t have to think or feel. The homecoming with my family, the scene I’d played out in my head hundreds of times over the last three-and-a-half years, failed to elicit any emotion at all.

The helicopter banked sharply and we headed for the hospital, leaving T.J behind.

Chapter 38 – T.J.

I couldn’t identify the noise at first. It hit me suddenly, when my brain figured out that the thwack-thwack-thwack sound was helicopter blades echoing in the distance.

The sound grew fainter until I couldn’t hear it anymore.

Come back. Please turn around.

It didn’t. My hope turned to despair, and I knew I was going to die. My strength was fading, and I had a hard time holding on to the beam. My body temperature had dropped, and I ached everywhere.

I pictured Anna’s face.

How many people can say they’ve been loved the way she loved me?

My fingers slipped off the beam, and I struggled to grab it again. I held on, drifting in and out. A dream about sharks jerked me awake. A faint sound in the distance became louder.

I know that sound.

My hopes soared, but I had used up the very last of my strength and I lost my grip on the beam, my fingers sliding down the wet surface. My head went under and I drifted downward. I instinctively held my breath as long as I could until, eventually, I couldn’t.

I floated in a sea of nothing, weightless, until another sensation overpowered me. Death wouldn’t be peaceful after all. It hurt, the crushing weight of it pounding on my chest.

Suddenly, the pressure vanished. Seawater spewed from my mouth, and I opened my eyes. A man in a wetsuit knelt beside me, his hands hovering above my chest. My back rested on something solid, and I realized I was inside a helicopter. I breathed in deeply and as soon as I had enough air in my lungs, I said, “Go back. We have to find her.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Anna! We have to find Anna!”

Chapter 39 – Anna

I nestled deeper into my numb place. The man gently shook my shoulder, and I didn’t want to talk, but he wouldn’t stop asking if I could hear him. I turned toward his voice and blinked, trying to focus my swollen, tear-filled eyes.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “One of the other helicopters just pulled a man out of the water.”

I struggled to sit up, wanting to hear clearly what he was about to say.

“They said he’s looking for someone named Anna.”

It took a moment for his words to register but when I comprehended their meaning, I experienced elation, pure and true, for the first time in my entire life.

“I’m Anna.” I wrapped myself in my arms and rocked back and forth, sobbing.

We landed at the hospital and they loaded me onto a stretcher and brought me inside. Two men transferred me from the stretcher to a hospital bed, neither of them speaking English. They wheeled me past a pay phone hanging on the wall.

A phone. There’s a phone.

I turned my head toward it as we went by and panicked when I couldn’t immediately recall my parents’ phone number.

The hospital was overflowing with patients. People sat on the floor in the lobby, waiting to see a doctor. A nurse approached me and spoke soothingly in a language I didn’t understand. Smiling and patting my arm, she pierced the skin on the back of my hand with a needle and hung the IV bag on a pole next to my bed.

“I need to find T.J.,” I said, but she shook her head and, noticing my shivering, pulled the sheet up to my neck.

The chaos of so many voices, only some of them speaking in English, thundered in my ears, louder than anything I’d heard in the last three and-a-half years. I inhaled the smell of disinfectant and blinked at the fluorescent lights that hurt my eyes. Someone pushed my bed into a hallway around the corner. I lay on my back fighting to stay awake.

Where is T.J.?

I wanted to call my parents, but I didn’t have the strength to move my body. I fell asleep for a minute, jerking awake when footsteps approached. A voice said, “The Coast Guard just brought her in. I think she’s the one he’s looking for.”

A few seconds later a hand pulled back the sheet covering me, and T.J. climbed from his hospital bed into mine, trying not to tangle the lines of our IVs. He wrapped his arms around me and collapsed, burying his face in my neck. Tears ran down my face at the sheer relief of holding the solid weight of him in my arms.

“You made it,” he said, trembling all over. “I love you, Anna,” he whispered.

“I love you, too.” I tried to tell him about the pay phone, but exhaustion overtook me and my garbled words didn’t make sense.

I slept.

***

“Can you hear me?” Someone gently shook my shoulder. I opened my eyes and for a moment, I had no idea where I was.

“English,” I whispered, comprehending that the man looking down at me was a blond- haired, blue-eyed American in his mid-thirties. I glanced over at T.J. but his eyes were still closed.

Phone. Where is that phone?

”My name is Dr. Reynolds. I’m sorry no one has checked on you for a while. We’re not equipped to handle extra casualties. A nurse took both of your vital signs a few hours ago and they were good, so I decided to let you sleep. You’ve been out for almost twelve hours. Are you in any pain?”

“Just a little sore. And thirsty and hungry.” The doctor motioned to a passing nurse and made a pouring gesture. She nodded and returned with a small pitcher of water and two plastic cups. He filled one and helped me sit up. I drank it all and looked around in confusion. “Why are there so many people here?”

“The Maldives is currently in a state of emergency.”

“Why?”

He looked at me strangely. “Because of the tsunami.”

T.J. stirred beside me and opened his eyes. I helped him sit up and hugged him while the doctor poured a glass of water and handed it to him. He drank it down without stopping.

“T.J., it was a tsunami.”

He seemed confused for a minute, but then he rubbed his eyes and said, “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Did the Coast Guard bring you in?” Dr. Reynolds asked, pouring each of us another glass of water.”

We nodded.

“Where did you come from?”

T.J. and I looked at each other.

“We don’t know,” I said. “We’ve been missing for three-and-a-half years.”

“What do you mean, missing?”

“We’ve been living on one of the islands ever since our pilot had a heart attack and crashed into the ocean,” T.J. said.