The Purgatorium

Chapter One and Two

Chapter One: The Island

 

A morning fog was just beginning to thin in the sticky, ocean breeze. Whether it was the sharp smell of dead fish or lingering anxiety from the plane ride, Daphne could not eat when Cam offered to buy her a snack at a stand in the harbor. He bought himself a baked pretzel, and then the two of them followed Dr. Hortense Gray up the ramp and onto the catamaran, pulling their bags behind them.

They maneuvered through a crowd of school-age children in matching yellow t-shirts. Of the twenty or so other passengers, most were men in their thirties and forties. She and Cam were the only teenagers aboard.

Daphne stood at the railing overlooking the water with Cam on one side of her and the doctor on the other. The wind whipped her brown hair around her face despite her efforts to tuck it behind her ears. She missed this beauty. She’d forgotten how breathtaking it was. Her parents used to take her and her brother and sister to the beach all the time. There was nothing like gazing at the ocean where it met the sky on the horizon.

But the beauty could not stop her from trembling, could not stop the dread gripping her chest. Cam had said a wildlife refuge and a resort with pristine beaches. He hadn’t said a thing about therapeutic exercises. She’d had to hear it from this strange doctor who had met them at the airport in Ventura. Was the doctor like a life coach? Would Daphne have to climb a rock wall or plunge down a zipline? She should have known her parents wouldn’t let her go with Cam to a getaway resort just for fun. She should have been more suspicious. Tears pricked her eyes. She felt betrayed. Betrayed by her parents and her best friend.

As the catamaran reached the open sea, a pod of dolphins leapt ahead of them, as if guiding them to their destination.

“Look!” Cam pointed at the group of four leaping in turns from the water beside the boat.

Daphne’s cheeks stretched into a smile in spite of everything. The dolphins were amazing.

“Just wait,” Cam said, his blond hair flattening against his head with the wind. “We might see a humpback whale. Keep your fingers crossed.”

She stood close to Cam’s tall, wiry frame as though the two years they had rarely spoken had never existed. She hadn’t even so much as texted him a happy birthday wish last month when he had turned eighteen. For the millionth time, she wished she could go back to that night she had failed to get out of bed.

An hour passed with no humpback sightings, but soon a great mound of rock could be seen—bald, solid, smooth like the skin of a whale, and round like a bowling ball. Daphne couldn’t imagine how such a rocky place could hold any kind of paradise. Then a long, narrow pier became visible, and beside it, a rocky beach. The boat docked at the end of the pier, and all but Daphne, Cam, the doctor, and the captain climbed out.

Where were the pristine beaches?

The captain then turned the boat north and skirted around to another part of the island, where there were more rocky crags with waves crashing into and away from them, tossing the boat side to side, until they came into a large harbor full of other boats.

To Daphne’s right were hundreds of pelicans roosting on a rocky beach of shale. Some slept standing up, others cleaned their feathers, and still others walked around inspecting the shoreline and the shallow waters surrounding it.

Kara would have liked this, she thought.

“They’re looking for sardines in the kelp beds,” Cam said.

Daphne used her hand as a visor. “Look at them all.”

An even longer pier than the first shot out into the harbor, and they were now moving to it.