Once Upon an Island

“Was there something you needed?” I ask my dad.

He clears his throat again. “Darn right there is.”

I head to the kitchen. Whatever it is, this needs coffee.

“Isla, I’m not good at this sort of thing.”

“Mhmm,” I say. For a correspondent, my dad is surprisingly terrible at communicating.

“Isla, I was shot.”

“What?” I stumble and grab the kitchen wall. The kitchen tilts and sways as I push down my panic.

“Where? When? Are you okay? What happened? Should I come?” The words tumble out of me. My dad was shot and no one told me? Why didn’t I hear about this?

“What happened?” I say again.

I realize that I’m clenching the wall so tightly my nails are gouging into the paint. I carefully pull my hand away.

“No, no,” he says gruffly. “I’m fine. It was a flesh wound. Nothing serious.”

I close my eyes. I readjust the picture I had of my dad bleeding out in a war zone, to a barely bleeding graze.

“Dad. Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t Mom?”

The feeling of aloneness deepens. While I was in Britain, worried about Kate, and Arya and everything else, my dad was shot.

“I told her not to,” my dad says. “That’s why I called.”

“Okay,” I say. My voice is small. I walk to the table, pull out a chair and drop down.

He clears his throat again, then says, “When I was shot, before I realized it was nothing, only one thought was in my mind.” He pauses, and it suddenly occurs to me that my dad might be struggling not to cry.

“What was it?” I ask, although I’m almost afraid to hear.

The wooden chair digs uncomfortably into my legs as I wait for his answer.

Finally, he says, “I was sorry that I wouldn’t ever be able to tell you how proud I am of you.”

His voice cracks at the end. My mouth quivers and my throat goes tight. I never realized how much I’ve wanted to hear him say that until just this moment. I can’t respond. My throat feels too raw.

“Isla?” He pauses.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“I’m proud of you. I never needed you to be like me. I only needed you to be you. It may have appeared otherwise, but I always hoped you knew how I felt.”

I stare down at the wood grains of the table. My dad has always been…proud.

And I never, ever knew it.

I took his outside demeanor, his lack of words, as evidence that he didn’t approve of me. All along, the opposite was true.

“You’re proud of me?”

“Of course I am,” he says, and I hear the warmth in his voice. “Ever since you were a toddler, climbing coconut trees and swimming in deep water, you’ve gone your own way. How could I expect you to follow my path when you’ve always made your own?”

I close my eyes and hold my breath so that my dad can’t hear me crying over the phone. All these years I thought he didn’t approve. And he did. He does.

I wipe at my eyes with the back of my hand. Then I clear my throat and say, “Dad?”

“Yes, Isla?”

“Try not to get shot again, okay?”

He laughs, loud and long. I smile at the richness of the sound.

“I’ll do my best,” he says.

He hands the phone back to my mom, and she asks me all sorts of questions about England, and Harriet, and my plans for the biography. We talk for another fifteen minutes until I yawn so loudly she hears it over the phone.

“Go on, now,” she says. “Have some coffee. Your father and I are going to the beach. He’s displaying some unique mating rituals, I believe they must be coming from his pseudo-near-near death experience. For example, the other night—”

“Mom,” I say.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Right. I forgot. You’re not an objective researcher.”

“Not at all.”

She pauses, but she can’t hold it in, “Regardless, dear, if a man ever pulls you down a beach in the moonlight and drops you to the sand—”

“Mom.”