Helena Chu (lostchu) wrote in thefield, @ 2009-05-20 19:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | cross, helena, z - 1st tribe - day 20 |
Eggshells
Who: Cross and Helena
Where: on the island
When: late afternoon
What: Preparing the first meal of the day.
The faint sound of voices reached Cross from where he was crouched in the sand digging up as many clams as he could find. There were now six mouths to feed here on the island, to which he and Helena had walked back once the first group from the climber tree camp had found them at the spindle trees. They'd figured there was no point in taking that long walk in the direction of their first camp once they found out that everyone was making the trip to Grazer Island. It had been an experience getting one of the blond kids across the lake, since he didn't swim. Cross couldn't imagine how anyone could not know how to swim, but he'd made no comment. Also, one of the kids was just a kid, looked to be eleven or twelve, which was a new twist that he didn't like much. This was no place for a child.
He sighed and sat back on his heels, using the back of one bare arm to wipe sweat from his forehead, taking a few seconds' break.
Helena sloshed back up onto the beach looking like the creature from the black lagoon. She was positively festooned with the goopy ropes of lake seaweed. Spotting Cross, she trudged off in his direction, her legs feeling like jello. How much swimming had she done today, between swimming the new arrivals across and swimming back and forth with their packs? More than she'd anticipated. If this kept up, she'd have the body of an Olympian in no time. "Seaweed's done," she said, out of breath as she flopped down in the sand next to Cross. She handed over his pocket knife, borrowed to cut the tough fronds of the water plant. "Is it bedtime yet?" She didn't even bother to shrug off the long ropes of seaweed.
Cross' eyes gleamed with amusement as he watched Helena approach. He didn't quite laugh at her, but it was a near thing. "Not even close," he said when she asked him if it was bedtime. He took the knife from her and then reached for the nearest strand of seaweed, pulling it off and putting it down on the sand next to her. "You mean you're not lookin' forward to the clambake?" It would be hours until they saw any edible food, but he was so tired he didn't particularly care at this point, and Helena looked as if she felt the same. He didn't anticipate anyone having to rock him to sleep tonight.
"About as much as I'm looking forward to sleeping with four extra people in the one lean-to tonight." Tomorrow would see them looking for ways to bring down the five remaining disc trees. They would need that lightweight wood to erect a few more of the dwellings, and maybe make them a little bit more private than the one very basic one was. Still, the more bodies in the lean to, the warmer it was likely to be. The nights were cooler out here on the island than she remembered them being in the forest. Maybe the trees insulated them better? Broke up the wind? She wasn't sure.
"Doesn't sound that comfortable to me, either," Cross said honestly. The thought of having to pile up with that many people made him antsy, and he had every intention of getting some more lean-tos built as soon as they could. They'd need them with everyone else from camp arriving within another day or two. "They settling in alright?" he asked of the group of one girl and three boys. He'd barely spoken to any of the three older ones while they'd been at the other camp, and the newest kid--. Well, Cross had no idea how to deal with children, so mostly he just didn't.
Concern etched Helena's face immediately. "I think they're doing ok. Last I heard, Payne was going to investigate the spring and I think they may have all gone with her. Rook just looked...angry at me for not bringing him. But he seems to have found boots for the walk, so that's good." She pushed herself upright and shrugged off more of the plant life. "None of them are talking like anything bad happened. I guess they're just impatient and they went ahead of the group." She'd asked around delicately about why they had come a day early instead of helping with the moving. She'd been treated to a bunch of blank looks and shrugging shoulders. She didn't know what to make of that. It didn't seem like a very socially conscious decision to her.
Cross just shook his head a little, his expression blank. He thought it was stupid for Payne, Rook and Clay to take off apart from the rest of the group, particularly with the other little kid in tow, but he also suspected that they wouldn't care about his opinion, either. Least they hadn't run into any trouble. Sure, he and Helena had gone on a scouting mission, but he considered that to be very different. They were older and more capable, and he personally felt as if he could handle anything that came along from a strength and endurance standpoint. "When the others get here, we can see what they have to say about it," he suggested, bending back down to unearth more clams.
Helena's generous mouth pressed into a firm line for a moment and she nodded once before turning her attention to building a usable pit for the clam bake. They hadn't built a permanent clam bake pit in conjunction to their large camp fire but she had plans to do so eventually. Until then, the heavy round rocks which conducted heat so well were plenty available on the island and she dragged some over, dumping them into the pit she scooped while Cross moved up and down the small section of beach, unearthing their dinner. Once she had a fire set, she rejoined him. He'd been good about keeping his shirt on and the burn on his forearms seemed to have switched from red to gold. "How's the sunburn?" she asked him as she bent to gather up his findings and move them closer to the fire.
Cross had begun to wonder if there was any end to the amount of clams to be found here. He'd dug up probably more than six people could eat, and he could see another at the edge of the piles of sand he'd dug up, and probably another beneath that. Not that he was complaining. The clams made a wonderful dinner when they'd been steamed in a pit. He picked up some of the clams along with Helena and accompanied her to the fire she'd built. "Better," he said in answer to her question. "No more blisters, at least. Just peelin' under my shirt and itching like hell." He was tempted to find something rough against which to scratch his back, and he didn't care if he clawed some of the hide off when he did.
Helena chuckled. "I lucked out with my skin. My mother is Korean but my father was from Laos. My mother goes as red as a beet but I just brown. I don't think I've ever had a serious sunburn in my life." She dropped down a safe distance from the fire, piling her armload of clams. It would take a while to get the rocks red hot, until then they had nothing to do other than discuss.
Cross was never exactly what one would call a conversationalist but she appreciated that he always thought before he spoke and he didn't dress things up. So far, she felt he'd always been direct and honest with her, which was nice. And yet, they had spent days working side by side and she didn't really know anything about him. She knew he'd arrived from London and that he was an electrician but nothing more. "What about you? Were both of your parents British?" she asked. It would certainly explain the fair skin.
"That is lucky, out here," Cross said, lowering himself to the ground as well once he'd put down his freight of clams. Helena had a lovely complexion; had he been the sort to hand out compliments, he might have said so. No amount of sun seemed to make her skin look rough or dry, he'd noticed. He, on the other hand, burned long before he tanned. He'd been out here approximately two and a half weeks, and his skin was an odd range of shades going from palest white where his underwear always covered him to light tan to deep brown to fiery, peeling red.
His expression was a combination of mild surprise and vague amusement when she asked him if his parents were British. Of course, she wouldn't know. It wasn't as if Cross was forthcoming about himself or his life before he'd arrived here. "They were both born and raised in Alabama," he told her. "I transferred to London for work several years ago."
That did bring an expression of surprise to her face. "Alabama. I never would have guessed that," she told him with a smile. "There isn't a hint of the South in the way you speak. Did you live there long? Or are you just one of those lucky people who absorb local inflection really well?" Her smile broadened even more. "My two best friends, whom I worked with at the school, are from the Bronx and Queens, respectively. I tried to pick up their accents because they just sound fun but I could never make it sound natural." She looked almost crestfallen at that confession. Her mother would have killed her if she'd ever picked up the Bronx way of speaking, she thought. As it was, you could tell she was from New York state, but not so much the city.
"I didn't grow up in the South," Cross said. It was true that his voice did not carry any particular inflection. The only reminders of his past life were the scar he bore and the two missing fingers. "We moved to Colorado before I even started school, lived there 'til I was nearly grown." Alabama, Colorado, California and then London, and he carried no traces of any of those locales. It was almost as if he were a chameleon, blending in with his surroundings. "You always live in New York?" he asked, stretching out his legs with a sigh. The khaki pants were hot, but he was loath to take them off with four extra people running around. It might seem odd to them. Strangely enough, he hadn't considered if Helena might mind it the other day.
She quirked a smile and shook her head. "Not the city, no. I lived in a college town upstate called Clearwater my whole life. I got married at twenty, though, to a guy whose whole family have lived in New York for a century. Sort of...made men, you know?" And made very well. Edward Sagong's ancestors had worked on the railroad, owned laundries and opium houses (though that wasn't talked about around the ebony inlaid dining table. "It worked out really well for them," she continued, "They became land and finance barons and now they all sit pretty on Park Avenue. It was...alot of pressure. Not really my thing."
She'd spoken of her marriage before only to mention that she was divorced. Cross' brow furrowed a little when she said she'd married at twenty. That seemed terribly young to him, and he had to wonder how anyone could be certain of what they wanted at that age. At twenty, he'd still been running around booting cars and settling into what he thought would be his life as a slightly more intelligent than average thug. "Be hard to get used to that," was his comment. "College town to Park Avenue." It wasn't that he didn't think Helena capable of the transition. It was simply that she seemed like such a warm and yet practical person, it was difficult to picture her fitting into a smooth, seamless, moneyed existence from what he knew of her.
She let her breath out in a whoosh, blowing her growing bangs out of her eyes. "Tell me about it. Edward was my best friend and we even managed to part with our friendship mostly intact," she said. "But if I never see his mother again, it'll be too soon." She shuddered. "That woman was so cold I wouldn't be surprised if she shattered if someone pushed her over. I could never figure out how she'd managed to raise Edward into a funny, sincere and truthful person. I later learned it was because they'd paid someone with those qualities to rear them into him." She gave Cross a wry smile. "We've been divorced about a year. He was still probably the first person to notice I went missing." Her dark eyes were sad when she talked about her ex-husband but there was no missing the fact that she had accepted her life here as permanent. A life without Edward and all of their trials and tribulations.
"A year's not so long," Cross said, something gentle in his tone despite his calm, almost stoic expression. He wondered if Helena still loved the man, and yet it was a question he'd never ask despite the confidences they-- well, mostly she-- were sharing. Being divorced would have been another big adjustment for her after being married... how long? He was not sure exactly how old Helena was, and that was another question that did not seem politic to ask, but he thought she had to be at least thirty. Asians frequently looked younger than they were. Cross himself looked older due to the lines that tension had left on his face and the rough, rugged condition of his skin from years spent out in the hot sun, from years of hard work and stress.
Helena smiled and shrugged, the sadness not quite shedding. She didn't really know how to explain that her feelings had changed long before the divorce papers were signed. That by the time she'd taken off her wedding ring for the last time, she had just been so sad about the whole thing, that it had been a relief. Every mile that she covered since that time had just lightened the load in her heart. Now, the past three weeks without any contact with Edward at all, well, she finally did feel like it was receding behind her. "It's long enough," she said.
Long enough. Cross nodded slowly, his eyes holding hers. He could easily understand the process of putting emotion away when one could change nothing; that was a lesson he'd learned at an early age. Hidden in the depths of oneself, it could be almost as if nothing adverse had ever happened. All around them was silence. Wherever the four kids who'd joined them here on the island might be, their voices, laughter, movements were not heard. The wind blew, stirring the smoke from the fire, fanning ripples in the water that lay just ahead of them. Silence, and in it Cross' sober gaze did not drop. He felt as though he should say something else, but then words had never been his strong point, so he did not.
She held his gaze for as long as she could before color that had nothing to do with the sun flooded her cheeks. She turned her attention to the fire, feeding more wood into it to stoke the heat higher. She sighed and glanced back at Cross. "So you're an international man of mystery, then. A world traveler." She smiled, turning his stoicism into a game to cover her flustered feelings. "Not a diplomat or negotiator because you're not much for lying or persuasion," she continued to assume. "Maybe....Electrician to the stars? Royalty, even?"
When Helena looked away, Cross did as well, his blue eyes scanning over the water of the lake, a very faint smile turning the corners of his mouth upward. He knew that he'd gotten to her in a way that could not necessarily be spoken, and he hadn't been trying to... it had just happened that way. Well, she'd gotten to him, too, and it was probably better that she was doing her best to lighten up the conversation. "I'm a man who got to move to London for his job," he said dryly, his head turning very slowly so he could pin her with his gaze again. "Never been out of the states before that." It really wasn't nearly as interesting as she was trying to make it sound, although he had enjoyed London.
"I've traveled a bit," she said with another small smile. With an ex-husband as well off as hers had been, of course she'd seen Christmas in Paris and had wedding anniversaries in exotic, sandy locales. "Nothing as fantastic or unusual as this though." She gestured around them. "I guess this qualifies as the ultimate trip abroad." She chuckled at she prodded at the fire, adding a few more of the broken sticks they'd trimmed from the tall bushes nearby. The round rocks at the heart of the pit were white and ashy.
Fantastic was a pretty good word for it, Cross thought. He'd gotten used to the purple grass by now, but at first it certainly boggled the imagination, particularly for someone who was more pragmatic than imaginative, like himself. "The ultimate trip abroad if you're insane," Cross qualified. His tone was dry, but for him that qualified as a joke of sorts. He'd always wanted to get to other parts of Europe since he'd been so close, but that wasn't likely to happen now, he supposed.
She must have spent enough time in Cross's company now since his joke did in fact bring a smile to her face. "Guess I've had enough reasons in my life to believe that I might have lost my mind," she said. "Though I always thought that if it ever did happen, it would happen in public. Sort of a grand traumatic straw that broke the camel's back. Not snug as a bug in bed on a cold January night." It wasn't impossible, she thought even though she'd known he was making a joke. Insanity was still a viable option and not for the first time Helena wondered why everyone had accepted the impossible - alien abduction - so easily over the likely story that they were all insane. A part of her didn't like the idea that she might only be someone's alter personas. Her dark eyes finally locked on his again and she tilted her head slightly as she looked back into his cool blue eyes. "So am I one of your split personalities or are you one of mine?"
Cross did not believe in things that could not be seen. He still hadn't made up his mind as to how they'd really gotten here, though he wasn't inclined to believe it was inside his own head. Aliens? Maybe... but he'd have to see one for himself. There was a television show that he'd seen occasionally about a plane crash that had left the survivors on a mysterious island, but he tended to believe this was even stranger than TV writers could conceptualize. "If you were, or I was," he replied levelly, "how would we ever know?" He wasn't much for speculating when it came to abstract theories.
Helena smiled. "We wouldn't. We would be guessing." She could tell from his face that he wasn't much for guessing games. "Just like any other theory anyone has about why we are here or how." She sighed and dropped another bundle of twigs into the fire.
"What do you think about all of this?" she asked him, tossing a quick curious look at his face. He was still looking at her in that same level way and this time a chill raced down her spine. She had to fight to prevent from shuddering with it.
"Not sure what good theories'll do us," Cross said. It was possible that he <i>had</i> wondered, deep in the night when he couldn't sleep, why exactly the hand of fate had dropped him here. Why him, a nearly forty-year old electrician who finally had his life about where he wanted it? The suppressed traumas of his childhood were well past, his tempestuous mother was safe and settled into a secure lifestyle now that she was in her late fifties, he had no dependents to worry about, nor did he ever expect to. And now this. "We're here. What good does knowin' why do us?"
He sighed when she asked him what he thought, a rare visible sign of mild impatience. "I think this is what we've been dealt, and we're stuck makin' the best of it," he said, his tone slightly flat. There was something almost challenging in his gaze as he blinked stubby eyelashes at her, his eyes coolly blue beneath them.
She heard the chilly impatience loud and clear. Strangely, Helena felt herself recoil from it. She compressed her mouth into a grim line and dropped her gaze. She gave him a single nod and mild sound of agreement before shifting her body toward the fire. It was not that she felt he had to indulge her with any sort of whimsy. It was just that she'd been trying to get him to talk to her without feeling like she had to pry into his past. She'd been forthcoming about hers but he hadn't spoken of much of anything. He hadn't offered up ideas for improvements for the camp, he hadn't confessed his undying adoration. Frankly, she'd come to the end of her polite conversational repertoire. "Sorry if that seemed like a silly thing to ask," she said tightly, eyes fixed on the rocks as she waited for the comforting red glow that told her it was time to sweep away the fire.
Cross would have had to be blind and deaf not to have realized that she was less than pleased with his reaction. He was more accustomed to acting than he was to thinking and discussing, and that sometimes came through in his conversations, when he had them. He also despised feeling helpless, and her asking him what he thought reminded him of that in an unavoidable way. His head turned toward the fire, and he fell into complete silence until Helena apologized for the silliness of the question she'd asked. "Nothin' wrong with the question," he murmured, his voice completely noninflected and yet somehow calm, too. "That's just the only answer I have."
Helena nodded and realized she had no right to feel stung. She'd asked what he thought and he'd told her directly. Just because it wasn't fantasy and make believe and dreams, well that was no reason to be hurt. She'd been his traveling companion long enough to know that sort of thing wasn't Cross. Still...maybe she had needed just a little bit of hope in her fatigued moment of weakness. "You're right, regardless," she admitted. She'd thought it a hundred times herself. Why and who didn't matter so much as their immediate needs being met.
Cross wasn't so sure he was right. Maybe he should be able to paint a pretty word picture for her, distract her from her fears... but he couldn't. His practical brain simply did not work that way. He glanced at her once, twice, and then back down at his hands again, feeling mildly remorseful but at the same time unable to force out words that did not feel natural to him. Finally he said, "How long 'til we're ready to put the clams in?" That was a practical concern, something everyday and matter-of-fact, something to which he could relate.
"We should be just about ready now," she told him, her shoulders sagging a touch with relief. This was safe, easy. They could talk about the meal preparations and then after? Probably camp building preparations. Anything but how they felt about anything, especially each other. The rest of the tribe would likely arrive tomorrow and then it would be too busy and crowded for them to have much conversation time anyway. She picked up a bundle of twigs that she had bound into a rough broom and started to sweep the flames and ashes away and out of the pit. The round white stones in the heart of the pit glowed like red coals and the smell of hot rock was hard to miss.
Cross hauled himself up to collect the clams, thinking along the same lines she was. It was time to prepare the food, then there'd be other chores to do... gathering wood, building, doing as much as they could to get the camp ready for habitation by quite a few other people. It was safer that they cut the conversation off here, despite the uneasy feeling it gave Cross to know that, whether he'd admit it or not, he was feeling things to which he was not accustomed. The brief reality of having their own private island was over even before the bulk of people from the climber tree camp arrived. That was probably for the best, he decided.