17

The survivors didn’t think much about it when the crew was late the next morning. The crew came at various times anyway, depending on conditions or factors only they knew. One time Mara had waited for Tom all morning, expecting him to show up promptly as usual. Instead he arrived after the other crew members, still yawning though the sun was high. “We’re out of espresso,” he said aloud. “I fell back asleep.” Ostensibly to his colleagues, but Mara knew the message was meant for her. She crossed her arms over her bare stomach, took a risk. “Gosh,” she said, “it must be hard, waking up in your warm bed without espresso.” It was a simple tease; she couldn’t resist the setup. But the other guys chuckled, and Tom flushed a deep red.

Mara regretted the comment immediately. She needed Tom as an ally, and she’d forgotten how easily men were shamed. But he met her later and brought up the tension himself, before she could say a word. “No espresso, huh,” he said, blushing again. “You really got me.”

“It was a joke,” she said. “Obviously you can sleep in if you want.”

“I know that,” he said. “Obviously.” But he never mentioned espresso again.

So when Tom didn’t show up that morning, Mara’s first thought was that she had offended him, pushed him too far. And though she was still high on the taste of fish, and on Ashley’s affection, she had come down enough to understand that she could use Tom, or might conceivably need him again over the next weeks. She was in no position to throw allies away. Plus she’d grown hungry again overnight, and she wanted her daily bar. There was something comforting about consuming a substance so obviously man-made.

So Mara felt relieved when the rest of the crew didn’t come, either, even as the sun rose high. She had not burned a bridge that, however frustrating, still had a chance of getting her somewhere.

In fact, the mood in camp that morning was one of having been granted reprieve, an unexpected vacation. They found three more fish in the trap, two small but one quite significant—it had whiskers; Bullfrog called it a lawyer—and cooked and ate them and lazed in the grass. Then Mara worked on weaving an open basket that might serve as a fish scoop, or net, and that wouldn’t require wetting a tunic. When the sun grew stronger, she spread ashes on her skin. Ashley massaged them into Mara’s shoulders, gently on the parts that had burned and peeled, and more deeply on the small of her back, which had only tanned.

The survivors seemed, without discussion, to have agreed upon a rest day, and it was not unfathomable that the crew might have come to the same conclusion. Probably they were editing footage in their own camp. Or eating croissants. Whatever it was crews did. As the day wore on, Mara began to feel hopeful that they wouldn’t show up at all, and that she would get to go a whole day without the painstaking performance, the self-conscious conversations, the creaks of twigs and footsteps that followed wherever they walked. As much as Mara hated to admit she cared, she felt pressure to be interesting around the cameras, and had the crew been present she might have felt, if not guilty, a little awkward about taking the afternoon to do nothing at all. Of course there were still cameras in the trees. But at least they were static, part of the scenery.