Days passed. Joshua had fallen into a quiet rhythm on the island. He rose with the sun, ate whatever fruit he could find that appeared unbitten and untouched, and spent his hours moving between the shelter in the cove, the waterfall clearing, and the shoreline. He had grown careful with his steps and calm with his breathing. The island, for all its strangeness, was beginning to feel less like a prison and more like a place he was meant to understand.
His memory returned in fragments. Not full scenes, but impressions. The smell of coffee on a Sunday morning. A pair of worn leather shoes by a door. A child's laughter somewhere behind a wall. He could not hold onto any of it long enough to make sense of the pieces, but each fragment felt like a small proof that his life before this island had been real. That Margaret had been real.
He kept the bible close, reading whatever pages remained intact. Some passages were smeared beyond recognition. Others were clear enough to follow. He read slowly, sometimes aloud, his voice rough from days of near silence. He did not feel the warmth of the words the way he once must have. But he read them anyway, the way a man drinks water he is not sure is clean because thirst leaves him no other choice.
On what he estimated to be his ninth day on the island, Joshua sat at the edge of the shoreline just before midday, drawing patterns in the grey sand with a stick. The sky was bright but pale, the wind gentle. He had almost settled into the stillness of the moment when the sound reached him.
Voices. He stopped moving. He sat completely still and listened, certain at first that his mind was playing the kind of trick that loneliness and hunger are known to play on a man. But then it came again. Louder this time. Unmistakable.
"Help! Somebody please help us!"
A man's voice. Deep and desperate. And then, cutting through the sound of the waves and the wind, a woman's voice. "Help! Is anyone there! Please!"
Joshua was on his feet before he had made any decision to stand. The stick fell from his hand. He turned in the direction of the voices, scanning the water and the shoreline in both directions. There. Far down the beach to the south, two figures were in the shallow water near the shore, one of them waving both arms above their head.
Joshua ran. His ribs screamed at him with every stride but he did not slow. The sand shifted beneath his feet. The sun pressed down on his shoulders. He ran toward the voices the way a man runs toward the only light he has seen in a very long time, not thinking, not calculating, only moving forward with everything he had left.
He was not alone on this island after all.