The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment Page B

starvation before anyone found me. Then a wand of moonlight glanced off a tin can rolling in the tide.
    I ran to the water’s edge and fished it out. The label was gone, but it had to be ours. Holding it to my ear, I gave a hard shake. Something edible sloshed within. I picked up a rock and started hammering. I was so hungry, I didn’t care if I woke the whole village. I pummeled the can until the rock came apart in my fist. Then I picked up a bigger rock and whacked away. It fractured against the tin after two blows. Shaking the cylinder by my ear again, I became convinced I could actually hear which particular fruit was inside. Pineapple chunks! I kept shaking the can—frenetically, ravenously—in the hope that between my frustration and the internal pressure of the churning juice, the lid might blow. I found a jagged piece of coral and tried to saw through the hermetically sealed, unyielding seams.
    At some point during the night, I must have given up and lain down, because when I woke, it was already midmorning. The can was gone. A baked yam sat in its stead.
    I didn’t even bother to brush the sand off it. I ate it in fistfuls, as a toddler eats cake, then scanned the ocean for any sign of the Pearl. I walked the whole crescent of beach, squinting into the distance. I climbed onto the highest boulder and stood on tiptoe. A small white cloud shaped like a ship’s smokestack drifted up out of the horizon and almost brought me to my knees.
    When I looked again, the cloud was gone.
    I sat down on the boulder, but every few minutes or so, I’d rise back up onto my tiptoes to peruse ship hulls that turned out to be glare, engine smoke that wafted away as haze. I kept telling myself the ship might appear any minute. It might already be Tuesday. Then again, it might be Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, and the ship long gone.
    The sun reached its zenith. I drew the top of my blouse over the bottom half of my face to keep it from getting burned.
    I would have wept, but I was too dehydrated.
    When the smokestack cloud appeared once again, this time glimmering on the horizon to my east, I refused to put any stock in it.
    For the next fifteen minutes or so, I watched as the tiny cloud changed from a smokestack into a waterspout, a rain curtain, an armada, a guano-stained rock islet, until the white shimmer finally stabilized as the prow of an ocean liner. Gulls were wheeling above it.
    I got to my feet and started batting my arms above my head.
    The ship was still miles away. No one on board, of course, could see me. At most, the beach was now only visible in the mate’s binoculars.
    I eased myself off the boulder, picked up the largest palm frond I could find, then hurried to the place on the beach where I figured I could best be spotted, on the highest, bone-white dune.
    I didn’t need to turn around. I knew the islanders were right behind me, watching my every move from within the forest. They’d probably spotted the ship long before I had.
    I didn’t make a sound or tense a muscle, lest I provoke them before someone on board had a chance to see me.
    Only when the ship reached the outer reef, a mile at most offshore, only when the skiff was lowered into the water and the two sailors clambered aboard, only then did I wave my frond above my head like a football pennant and shriek.
    The islanders didn’t try to stop me. Quite the contrary. They ran onto the beach beside me, a hundred to my left, a hundred to my right. They were dressed in their full “welcome” regalia—foot-long penis gourds and straw skirts. A half dozen of the young men wore Philip’s red-striped boxer shorts and my lace brassieres: they wore them as headdresses. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the dune’s crest, they formed their great tapestry again, of which I was now evidently a panel. I was woven into the living cloth between the old woman and a warrior.
    Everyone who could find a palm frond picked one up and shook it at the sailors in