The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment Page A

me.”
    “You’re not blind,” I insisted; “your eyelids are swollen shut.” I had no idea if it was true or not. I tried to muster a note of reassurance in my panicked, piping voice. “Try to open your eyes for me, darling.”
    He slowly cracked open his left lid; the right one was still too distended to lift.
    “Do you see anything?”
    “I think I see light.” A sliver of his blue iris waffled back and forth, back and forth across the black stripe. “And outlines.”
    “Do you see me?”
    The black lid fell shut. “It’s too painful to keep open. Do you have any food, Sara?”
    “Did you see me?” I asked again.
    “I’m so hungry. They wouldn’t give me anything to eat, just some kind of drug. Did they feed you? Are you all right?”
    He reached out to touch my face as the blind do, but I dodged his probing fingers and held him by his wrists. I let him explore my eyes only. He palpated my closed lids, my brows, the tips of my lashes. “I couldn’t bear it if they’d blinded you, Sara.”
    Something dropped on the floor behind us.
    Philip jerked his head around. “Is she still here?”
    The old woman was at the far end of the floor filling up a stone bowl with creek water. Two football-sized yams lay at her feet.
    “Can she hear us?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Is she listening?”
    “She can’t hear us, Philip.”
    “I know what day it is.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Sunday. At least, I think it’s Sunday.”
    The old woman set down the bowl with a thud.
    “Is she spying on us?”
    “She’s leaving us food and water.”
    “We have to get back to the camp, Sara. I kept track of the days. No matter what they did to me, I kept count.”
    The old woman padded past us down the stone steps and vanished into the jungle.
    “Where’s she going now?”
    “I think she left.”
    “Tuesday. We are supposed to be picked up on Tuesday. Can you find the beach, Sara?”
    I looked around me: jungle, jungle, and more jungle. I said I wasn’t sure.
    “You have to find that beach.”
    I said I didn’t even know where we were.
    “Follow the old woman.”
    “Now?”
    “Yes, Sara, now. Her village is near our beach. At least I think it’s near our beach.”
    I grabbed his hand to take him with me, but he wouldn’t budge.
    “I can’t keep up.”
    “I’m not leaving you here.”
    “Sara, please, go before you lose her. Meet the ship. The captain will send men for me.”
    “I can’t do that.”
    “For God’s sake, don’t you understand? They have a doctor on the ship. Maybe he can fix my eyes.”
    He then turned away from me and made the most familiar of gestures, an impassioned thrust of his head. It was the same gesture he employed at the crescendo of his old Alliance lectures to electrify us shopgirls into revolution. Now the gesture looked like something else entirely: now it looked like a man banging his head against the bars of his cell.
    I crashed through shrubbery, stumbled over rocks and vines. I kept my hands in front of my tender face lest some branch thwack it.
    The old woman had to have heard me. Wherever I stepped, birds woke up and commenced shrieking. I left whole song lines in my wake. The sun was long gone, the ground slippery. She could have lost me if she wanted to. I could have lost myself.
    Just as I spied the village’s cooking fires, I recognized the path to our camp. At least I thought I recognized it. It was made of white coral, incandescent in the moonlight. A blind man could have found it. I walked until I felt sand underfoot. There was no wind. The ocean was flat. The storm had stripped all the fronds off the palms. The surf had reconfigured the beach into ramparts and dunes. Nothing looked familiar. I glanced around for remnants of our camp—the steamer trunks, the portable shower, our clothes, my paints. Gone.
    For a minute or two, I thought I’d trekked to the wrong beach, that I was profoundly lost, that I’d die of thirst and