A Child To Open Their Hearts

He grabbed his field glasses, one of the few things not smashed in the storm, and fought to get them focussed. The woman was young. A crimson shawl was wrapped around a bundle at her breast. A child?

She was walking purposefully forward, closer to the edge. After the cyclone, the water below was a mass of churning foam. Even as a kid he’d known he had to get a run up to clear the rocks below.

‘No!’ His yell would be drowned in the wind up there, but he yelled anyway. ‘Don’t...’

His yell was useless. She reached the cliff edge and walked straight over.

* * *

Hettie de Lacey, charge nurse of Wildfire Island’s small hospital, rather enjoyed a good storm. It broke the humidity. It cleared the water in the island’s lagoons and it made the world seem fresh and new.

This, however, had been more than a good storm. The cyclone had smashed across the island three days ago, causing multiple casualties. Even though most wounds had been minor, the hospital was full to bursting, and Hettie had been run off her feet.

This was the first time she’d managed a walk and some blessed time to herself. Sunset Beach was relatively sheltered, but she was close to the northern tip, where waves flung hard against the headland. The seas out there were huge.

In another life she might have grabbed a surfboard and headed out, she thought, allowing herself a whiff of memory, of an eighteen-year-old Hettie in love with everything to do with the sea.

Including Darryn...

Yeah, well, that was one memory to put aside. How one man could take such a naïve kid and smash her ideals... Smash her life...

‘Get over it,’ she told herself, and she even smiled at the idea that she should still angst over memories from all those years ago. She’d made herself a great life. She was...mostly happy.

And then her attention was caught.

There was a yacht just beyond the reef. It was a gracious old lady of a yacht, a wooden classic, anchored to the south of The Bird’s Nest. The Nest was a narrow rim of rock and coral, a tiny atoll at the end of an underwater reef running out from shore.

The yacht was using the atoll for shelter.

It’d be Max Lockhart, she thought, and the nub of fear she’d been feeling for Caroline dissipated in an instant. Oh, thank heaven. She knew the owner of Wildfire Island was trying to sail here for his daughter’s wedding. Max had left Cairns before the cyclone had blown up, and for the last few days Caroline Lockhart, one of Hettie’s best nurses, had been frantic. Her father was somewhere out to sea. He’d lost contact three days ago and they had no way of knowing if he’d survived.

She could see him fairly clearly from where she was, but she’d never met him—his few visits to the island during her employment had always seemed to coincide with times when she’d taken leave. But this must be him. The entrance to the harbour was wild so this was probably the safest place he could be.

She went to wave, and then she hesitated. The guy on the yacht—it must be Max—was already waving. And yelling. But not at her. At someone up on the headland?

Intrigued, she headed to the water’s edge and looked up. Another islander out for a walk? Max must be stuck, she thought. He’d be wanting to attract attention so someone could send a dinghy out to bring him in. He’d seen someone up on the cliffs?

And then her breath caught in horror. Where the shallows gave way to deep water and the cliffs rose steeply to the headland, the wind still swept in from the cyclone-ravaged sea.

And up on the headland... Sefina Dason.

The woman was thirty feet above her but Hettie would know her anywhere. For the last few days Sefina had been in hospital, battered, not by the cyclone but by her oaf of a husband. She’d had to bring her toddler in with her because no one would care for him, something almost unheard of in this close-knit community.

There’d been whispers...

But this wasn’t the time for whispers. Sefina was high on the headland and she was walking with purpose.

She was headed for the edge of the cliff!

And then she turned, just a little, and Hettie saw a bundle, cradled to her breast in a crimson shawl. Her horror doubled, trebled, went off the scale.

Joni!

No! She was screaming, running, stumbling over the rocks as beach gave way to the edges of the reef. No!

She could hear the echoes of the guy on the yacht, yelling, too.

But yelling was useless.

Sefina took two steps forward and she was gone.

* * *

Max knew the water under the headland like the back of his hand. In good weather this was a calm, still pool, deep and mysterious, bottoming out to coral. It was a fabulous place for kids to hurl themselves off the cliff in a show of bravado. The rip swept in from the north, hit the pool and tugged the divers out to the rocky outcrop he was anchored behind. As kids they’d learned to ride the rip to their advantage, letting it pull them across the shallow reef to the atoll. They’d lie on the rocks and catch their breath, readying themselves for the swim across the rip back to the beach.

But that rip would be fierce today, too strong to swim against. And the water in the pool...would be a whirlpool, he thought, sucking everything down.

All this he thought almost instantly, and as he thought it he was already tearing up the anchor, operating the winch with one hand, gunning the engine with the other.

His mind seemed to be frozen, but instinct was kicking in to take over.

Where would she be hurled out?

He hit the tiller and pushed the throttle to full speed, heading out of the shelter of the atoll, steering the boat as close as he dared to the beach. He couldn’t get too close. Sheltered or not, there were still breakers pounding the sand.

There was a woman running along the beach, screaming. The woman with the dog? She’d seen?

But he didn’t have time to look at her. He was staring across the maelstrom of white water, waiting for something to emerge. Anything.

He was as close as he could get without wrecking the yacht. As far as he could tell, this was where the rip emerged.

He dropped anchor, knowing he’d be anchoring in sand, knowing there was a chance the boat would be dragged away, but he didn’t have time to care.

There... A wisp of crimson cloth... Nothing more, but it had to be enough.

If he was right, she was being tugged to twenty feet forward of the boat.

He’d miss her...

He was ripping his clothes off, tearing. Clothes would drag him down. If he used a lifejacket he could never swim fast enough.

He had so little chance the thing was almost futile.

He saw the wisp of crimson again, and he dived.

* * *

Sefina.