Micah's Island by Shari Copell Read Free Book Online

some
other round, greenish fruit that I’d never seen before.  They were very good. Sweet
and juicy.
    He cracked open the top of the coconuts
with a hatchet, which surprised the hell out of me.  Where had he gotten a
hatchet? 
    I asked him, knowing I wouldn’t get a
verbal response, but this time I wasn’t giving up until I got some kind of an
answer.  I think he finally understood what I wanted, because he pulled me to
the edge of the deck and pointed down into the sand.
    It was like his personal junkyard out
there, though I didn’t think it was junk to him.  There were boat propellers,
several old wooden trunks, various scraps of wood, bits of angle iron, rope, and
some chain.
    “Where did you get this stuff?” I asked
him.
     He jumped down off the edge of the
deck, then reached up and took me around the waist, lifting me down beside him.
I wandered around looking at all of it, talking to him as I did so.
     “Do you have a name?”   I got no answer,
of course.  I tried a different angle.
    I put my hands to my chest and said
carefully, “Gee-ah-na. My name is Gee-ah-na.”
    A light seemed to come on in his eyes,
but all he could manage to say was “Gee.”
    I felt like I was on the edge of a
breakthrough.
    “Yes, yes!” I said.  “You can call me
Gee if you want to.  Gee-ah-na.  Gianna.”
    “Gee”, he replied.
    So far, so good! He was getting it!
    I put my hands on his chest and said “Your
name?  Is it…David? George?  Robert?  Peter? Michael?”
    He shuddered when I said the name
Michael.  His eyes grew wide, his lips trembled a little.
    “Michael?  Is that it?  Is that your
name?” I was really excited now!
    He grabbed my wrist and pulled me over
to an old steamer trunk, one corner buried in the sand.  Twisting the small key
in the lock in the front, he threw the curved lid up and looked up at me with
an expression that I can only describe as pleading.
    “Is there something in here you want me
to see?”
    He vigorously dug around in the trunk,
finally coming up with what looked like an old photo album.  There were a few
colored pages of construction paper sticking out of it.  It looked as though it
had gotten wet quite a few times.
    I sat down in the sand.  He sat down
across from me, elbows on his knees, and leaned forward expectantly.
    I slowly opened the book.  What I found
broke my heart.
    There were many faded Polaroid pictures
of a man and a woman holding a small boy. Some of the pictures also had a
little girl in them. The boy in the pictures was clearly the man who sat before
me. 
    “Is this you?”
    He pointed at himself in the picture, then
poked his chest.  Yes, it was him.
    “This is your mother and father? Your
sister?”
    He didn’t understand that at all, but I
knew, given the proud smiles on their faces that they must be his parents. The
clothes they wore and their hairstyles dated the picture to sometime in the
early 1980’s. (The Chevy Citation in some of the pictures was also a good
clue!) That would make him at least 30 years old, probably more like 33 or 34.
    “God, how long have you been here?” I
whispered. Was he the only survivor of a shipwreck?  Had the child raised
himself to manhood alone on this island?
    He pulled at the edge of the
construction paper that was sticking out of the middle of the album.  I opened
the album to that page.
    Various pictures, drawn in crayon by the
hand of a child, fell out into my lap.  One of them was a stick figure drawing
of a man, a woman, an older boy, and a younger girl.  A dog and cat completed
the family grouping. 
    I caught my breath. Scrawled across the
bottom in blue crayon was a name. 
    I looked up at him.  Goosebumps rose all
over me.
    “Micah?  Is your name Micah?”
    He grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled
me up roughly, and gave me the bear hug of my life. Everything that had been in
my lap tumbled into the sand as he squeezed the breath out of me.
    He could hug me as hard as he wanted.