No Signal

The first thing Lorelei noticed was the sound. Not silence — she had expected silence — but a roaring, ceaseless, all-consuming noise. The surf. It came from every direction, a white static that swallowed everything else, and for a long, disoriented moment she thought she had gone deaf and the world had filled the gap with its own voice.

She opened her eyes.

Blue. An impossible, almost violent blue stretched above her, broken only by a single cloud shaped like nothing she could name. She blinked. Turned her head. Sand — fine, pale, almost white — pressed into the side of her face, warm from a sun that had apparently been working on her for hours. Her lips were cracked. Her skin felt tight and hot, the way skin does after it has been punished.

She sat up slowly, and the world tilted.

---

It took her most of that first day to piece together what had happened — or rather, to accept the shape of what had happened and stop trying to reshape it. The boat was gone. Not washed ashore, not stranded on rocks somewhere down the beach. Gone. Three days, she told herself, examining the peeling skin on her forearms, the way her hair had stiffened with salt. She had been in the water for three days. She had no memory of swimming. No memory of anything after the hull cracked open beneath her feet and the Pacific swallowed the Marguerite whole.

Three days.

Lorelei stood at the edge of the water and stared at the horizon until her eyes burned. Nothing. No ship. No contrail. No smudge of another landmass. Just water and sky, sealed together at a seam so clean it looked drawn.

She had no phone. No watch. No shoes — she'd kicked them off instinctively, she supposed, when the water came in. She was wearing the clothes she'd left the marina in: cutoff shorts, a gray tank top now stiff and ruined with salt. In the pocket of the shorts, miraculously, a folding knife she always carried. Nothing else.

She sat down on the sand and laughed. It came out dry and cracked, more cough than anything, but it was a laugh. Because the absurdity of it was enormous. She had spent weeks — months, really — planning her disappearance. Chartering the Marguerite, mapping a route that passed through no major shipping lanes, telling no one. She had done everything right. She had been meticulous. And the ocean, indifferent as always, had simply taken the plan and broken it into pieces.

She was invisible now. She had wanted to be invisible. She just hadn't imagined it would look like this.

---

By the end of the second day on the island — the fifth day since the capsize, though she had no way to confirm that — Lorelei had mapped the shoreline in her head. The island was small. An hour's walk, maybe less, to circle it completely. Volcanic in origin, she thought, though she knew nothing about geology. The interior was dense with trees she couldn't identify: broad-leaved, heavy, tangled things that blocked the sun and made the air underneath them feel close and green. A freshwater stream cut through the middle of the island, shallow and fast, running off a ridge of dark rock near the center. She found it by following the sound. She drank from it on her hands and knees like an animal and felt no shame.

She built a shelter on the third day after waking up from the crash, she had worked through a migraine that was gradually getting worse the more she thought about sand and sipped on some fresh water she had collected from the stream in a makeshift cantine she made from the leaves of the tree she had slept in the first night she came to. A crude thing — branches leaned against a fallen log, broad leaves layered over the top. It leaked when it rained in the late afternoon, which it did every day, a short violent downpour that turned the beach into a mirror for twenty minutes before the evening sun came back and evaporated it, leaving the beach cold and the shoreline colder. But the shelter kept the worst of it off her, and that was enough.

Fire came on the fourth day. She found two pieces of dry driftwood and spent the better part of an afternoon rubbing one against the other until her palms blistered. When the first thin wisp of smoke curled up between her hands, she made a sound — not a word, just a raw exhale of relief — and fed it carefully, the way she imagined a mother feeds an infant, one tiny piece of tinder at a time.

She ate fruit she couldn't name, testing each one carefully, waiting hours after each small bite to see if her stomach rebelled. Most of them were fine. One — a small, bright orange thing with a bitter rind — made her vomit violently into the surf. She avoided it after that. She caught a fish on the sixth day, or what she thought was the sixth day, using a sharpened stick and a patience she didn't know she possessed. She cooked it over the fire and ate it with her hands and it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

---

The loneliness came in waves, like everything else on the island.

During the day, when there was work to do — finding food, maintaining the fire, gathering fresh water, patching the shelter — she could keep it at bay. Her hands were always busy. Her mind was occupied with the immediate, the practical, the next problem. This was how survival worked, she was learning. It didn't ask you how you felt. It simply presented the next task, and you did it or you didn't.

But at night, when the fire burned low and the darkness pressed in from every side and the only sound was the surf and the occasional shriek of some unseen bird, the loneliness arrived like a tide she couldn't outrun. She would lie in her shelter and stare at the underside of the leaves above her and think about the life she had left behind trying not to think about the life that had welcomed her back when she woke up on the beach nine months ago. Not all of it. Not the parts she was running from. Just the small, ordinary things. The coffee she used to make every morning. The way the light came through the kitchen window in her apartment in the early hours. The sound of the city waking up. Things she had never once thought to appreciate.

She thought about her mother once, and only once, and then she made herself stop. Her mother would not come looking. Her mother did not know she was gone. That was the point.

She thought about David, and she did not stop herself, because thinking about David was not the same as thinking about the rest of it. David was a memory she could hold without burning herself. He had been dead for two years. He could not hurt her. He could not tell anyone anything, not even if he could, noticing Lorelei was missing. He was the one door she had walked through cleanly, the one severance that had cost her nothing but grief, and grief, at least, was honest.

The rest of it was not honest. The rest of it was the thing she had sailed away from, the thing she had crossed an ocean to put distance between herself and. It was the one thing that helped her forgive her new situation honestly. She did not think about it by name. She did not think about him by name. She simply felt the shape of it — a cold, heavy presence at the back of her mind — and she made sure it stayed there. In the back. Behind everything else.

She was getting good at that.

---

On what she believed was the ninth or tenth day of the eleventh month, Lorelei sat on the ridge near the center of the island at dusk and watched the sun go down. The sky turned colors she had no words for — not just orange and red but shades of violet and green at the edges, the light bending strangely through the humidity. The ocean stretched out below her, vast and still, and for the first time since waking up on this beach, she did not feel afraid of it.

She had a routine now. She woke with the light, tended the fire, ate, gathered water, explored. She was learning the island the way you learn a language — slowly, through repetition, through mistakes. She knew where the freshwater was cleanest. She knew which trees bore fruit and which did not. She knew the tides well enough to wade into the shallows at low water and find shellfish clinging to the rocks. She was, in the smallest and most fundamental sense, surviving.

And something else, too. Something she hadn't expected.

She was starting to feel calm.

Not happy — that was too large a word, and she had spent enough of her life reaching for words that were too large. But calm. Quiet in a way she hadn't been in years. Out here, there was no one to perform for. No one to lie to. No one to watch her and calculate what she was worth. The island did not care about her history. The ocean did not judge. The fire burned because she fed it, and the rain fell because it fell, and the sun rose and set on a schedule that had nothing to do with her at all.

For the first time in a very long time, Lorelei felt like she could breathe. This was day four hundred, she marked it in the tree she had slept in that first night using her pocket knife kindly.

---

She heard the boat on the eleventh day of the fourteenth month.

She was at the stream, filling a large shell she'd been using as a container, when the sound reached her — a low mechanical hum, distant but unmistakable. A motor. She went very still, the way an animal goes still when it hears something it cannot yet identify.

Then she stood, and she listened, and the sound grew louder.

Her first instinct was to run toward the beach. To wave. To signal. She took three steps in that direction before her body stopped her — some older, deeper part of her brain that had been running calculations she hadn't consciously made. She stood frozen in the green half-light of the trees and listened to the motor grow closer, and she felt the calm she had been building begin to crack, like ice in spring.

No.

She moved before she thought. Back to her shelter. She kicked sand over the fire pit — dead now anyway, but the ash would tell a story she didn't want told. She gathered the shell, the sharpened sticks, the few scraps of anything that might mark this place as occupied, and she carried them into the interior, deeper into the trees, away from the beach. She moved quickly and quietly, the way she had learned to move in another life, another country, under another set of rules.

The motor sound grew closer, then stopped.

She crouched behind a fallen tree, her heart loud in her ears, and waited.

Minutes passed. Then she heard it — footsteps on sand, the crunch of dry vegetation, a voice calling out. Not shouting. Calling. Patient. Unhurried. As though whoever it was had all the time in the world.

"Lorelei."

The voice carried through the trees like something that belonged there. Like it had always been there, underneath the surf, underneath the birdsong, waiting for the right moment to make itself known.

She pressed her back against the fallen tree and closed her eyes.

The calm was gone now. In its place was the old familiar cold — the weight of it settling back into her chest like something that had never truly left. She gripped the folding knife in her hand, the only thing between her and the sound of footsteps moving closer through the undergrowth, and she breathed, and she did not move, and she waited.

The island, indifferent as always, said nothing.