by Sandra Field
Dumb question, Brant.
“Wonderfully well,” said May. “How about you, Brant?”
He’d cut himself shaving because he’d been thinking about Rowan, and there were circles under his eyes. “Great,” he said, and sat down. Rowan, he could see, was struggling with a reprehensible desire to laugh. He grabbed the coffee jug and filled his cup.
They all got to the airport on time, Brant sat next to Rowan on the plane, and at the Guadeloupe airport, a replica of the one at Martinique, the van was waiting. Their hotel was on the beach and his room was air-conditioned. As he dumped his haversack on the bed, the two espionage novels he’d bought in Dominica fell out of one of the pockets, along with the notebook in which he’d jotted his own plot.
Brant sat down on the bed, gazing at them, his brain racing. He was a writer by trade. Realistically, he also knew he was a very good writer: his boss wouldn’t have tolerated him if he were anything other than first-rate. Furthermore, he needed a new job and he had enough money to tide him over a lag in earnings.
He’d write his own book. Heaven knows he had enough experiences to draw on for a dozen books. A whole series of books. He could even make a collection of some of his best essays and hawk that. The sky was the limit.
Excitement kindled inside him. If he could get a novel published, at least two of his problems would be solved: job plus income. Which only left fatherhood.
Leave the worst until the last, why don’t you?
He glanced at his watch. They were meeting for an early lunch in half an hour. He’d stay in the hotel the rest of the day and tomorrow and get started. He’d have to do a lot more work around characters and plot; but he could do it, he knew he could.
Do it and enjoy it, he thought. Take a rest from constant tension and the seductive lure of danger.
Rowan was seduction enough for any man.
He locked his room and went to the main desk, where he found out he could rent a laptop computer from a company in Pointe-à-Pitre. In rapid-fire French he made all the arrangements to have it delivered to the hotel that afternoon. Then he bought a couple of pads of lined paper in the boutique, and went for lunch.
“Not coming with us?” Peg said, astounded. “But you’ll miss the seabirds at Pointe des Châteaux.”
“You’ll come tomorrow, though,” Meg said confidently, “for the bridled quail dove and the Guadeloupe woodpecker.”
He said mildly, “I’ve got a writing project I want to start—I’ll have to skip the dove.”
“But it’s a real coup to spot one,” Peg protested. “They’re notoriously difficult birds. And the woodpecker’s an endemic.”
“You can tell me all about it at supper tomorrow night.”
“Dear me,” said May, “are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
“Never better,” said Brant and grinned at Rowan. “A novel’s hatching in my brain. Espionage, dictatorships and a good dollop of sex. The kind of novel that might just make a bit of money.”
Her eyes widened. “What a good idea,” she said.
“So good I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it sooner.”
“You’ve been distracted,” Rowan said demurely. Then she began an entertaining story of how she’d dragged a whole group out of bed at four-thirty one morning expressly to see the dove, which hadn’t deigned to appear until five hours later.
After lunch Steve grabbed Brant by the elbow and in a loud whisper said, “Congrats, man. Nothing like getting laid, is there?”
“You don’t have to tell the whole world.”
“I asked Nat to marry me last night and she said yes.”
Brant clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s great!”
“You going to hitch up with Rowan again?”
“That’s the plan.”
Steve nodded sagely. “We’re not getting any younger. Time to settle down.”
Steve was probably ten years Brant’s junior. “True,” said Brant. “Give my congratulations to Natalie, Steve... I want to catch Rowan before she leaves, excuse me, would you?”
Hurriedly he took the pathway to Rowan’s room. As she let him in, he saw she was gathering her stuff for the afternoon hike. He said, “As soon as I get back to Toronto, I’ll call my boss and tell him I’m quitting. I may have to go over to London to clear up some loose ends—but I won’t go anywhere else, Rowan, I promise.”
She clasped her binoculars to her chest. She was, he saw, on the verge of crying. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she gulped.
“I’m past due for a change,” he said awkwardly.
“To be able to sleep at night without worrying about you, to wake up in the night and know you’re there...it’ll make a world of difference.”
This wasn’t an opportune time for Brant to hear his father’s voice taunting him. She’s done you in, hasn’t she? Emasculated you, tamed you, domesticated you... how long before you regret this wonderful decision, Brant? You know your boss well enough to know that when you quit, that’s it. No going back. Sure you’re ready? Perhaps you should reconsider...
He fought the voice down and said, “I feel as though I’ve put in a thirty-six-hour day the last twelve and I’m not referring to sex. Whoever said love was easy?”
“Maybe that’s why not very many people do what we’re doing.”
“When this is all over, I’ll take you on a honeymoon. A proper one. Unaccompanied by birders.”
“Moonlight and roses,” she said dreamily.
“Gondolas in Venice?”
“They smell. I’d rather have satin sheets and candlelight.”
“Black satin sheets,” Brant said promptly.
She giggled. “You’re on.” Then she wrinkled her brow. “You know, I’ve been thinking...we’re both trying to change. But there aren’t any guarantees, so we don’t know where we’ll end up. That’s pretty scary.”
“We’ll end up together, Rowan,” Brant said strongly.
She flung her arms around him and hugged him with ribcracking strength. “I could bawl my head off again, which is kind of crazy when I’m so happy.”
“Off you go and find some purple-winged storks.”
She laughed and looped her haversack on her back. “Even Karen and Sheldon might pay attention if I did.”
Brant kissed her thoroughly and with enjoyment, and then went to his room. It seemed very empty without her. He took out his new pad of paper and his scribbled notes and determinedly began to work.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BY THE next afternoon Brant was both excited by the directions his imagination was taking him, and appalled by the amount of work it was leading him into. At two-thirty he decided to take a break and go for a quick swim; he didn’t expect the others back for another couple of hours. He hoped Rowan had been successful in locating the elusive quail dove.
Rowan...she’d slept with him again last night, and they’d made love with a passionate intensity after dinner and with a languorous sensuality at two in the morning. As he strode to the beach, he found himself wishing her wedding ring wasn’t in Toronto; he wanted it back on her finger, his seal on her publicly, their commitment restated.
Patience, Brant, he told himself, and plunged headlong into the sea. He swam for twenty minutes, feeling his head clear; with any luck he’d get another hour or two of work before the group got back to the hotel.
He didn’t like waiting for Rowan. Even for a day. How had she ever managed when he was gone for weeks at a time to places like Peru and Afghanistan?
He’d been a selfish bastard.
But not anymore. He’d learned his lesson.
He waded to shore. A little boy of perhaps four or five was playing in the sand right by his towel. As Brant picked up the towel and wiped the salt from his face, the boy piped in French, “I’m building a castle.”
The heaps of sand were lopsided and one of the tunnels was in danger of caving in. Speaking French, too, Brant said, “It’s a fine castle.”
“Want to help?”
The boy’s hair was brown and his eyes blue. Brant’s hair had been that light a brown when he’d been younger. “Sure,” he said, and knelt down on the sand. The boy passed him a green plastic bucket, which Brant packed with damp sand to make a tower. Before long they’d constructed a new tunnel and an impressive series of battlements topped with shells and scraps of seaweed. The boy’s name was Philippe, he was five years old and he lived in Alsace.
Brant said finally, “The tide’s coming in and I have to go, Philippe, I’ve got some work to do.”
A wave tickled the little boy’s feet. “The sea’s going to wash away our castle,” he said, his face puckering.
“You can build another one higher up.”
A bigger wave rushed toward them, swamping the lower row of towers and gurgling into the tunnel. Philippe frenziedly tried to shore it up, but the backwash collapsed the last of the roof, leaving only a waterlogged groove in the sand. He began to cry, a heartbroken wail of protest. Brant said, giving the boy a comforting pat on the shoulder, “It’s okay—we had fun making it and I’ll help you start another one if you like.”
His novel could wait. A little boy’s feelings were far more important.
Then, from behind them, a man’s voice yelled, “Stop that crying, Philippe! This minute.”
Philippe flinched, trying to swallow a sob and scrubbing at his cheeks. But as grains of sand caught in his eye, his tears overflowed again. Brant took the dry corner of his towel and wiped around the boy’s eyes, saying pacifically to the man who’d stationed himself beside them, “He got sand in his eye, he’ll be fine in a minute.” Then he stood up.
The man was unquestionably Philippe’s father; he had the same blue eyes and wide cheekbones, although his face was choleric and his jowls flabby. Ignoring Brant as if he didn’t exist, he shouted, “Be quiet—what are you, a sissy to cry for every little thing?”
“I got sand in my eye,” Philippe snuffled.
“Sand in your eye, that’s nothing—you’d think you nearly drowned. Quit your bawling or I’ll give you something to cry for.”
Almost the same words had been thrown at Brant time and again many years ago, hurtful, belittling words that, at first, used to make him cry all the harder. Only later had he learned never to cry, that tears were like the red flag to the bull and that feelings were to be buried so deeply they were never in sight. Standing up, his voice like a steel blade, Brant said, “You don’t need to shout at the child—after all, he’s only five.”
The man glared at him. “This is none of your business—he’s not your child. Stupid little crybaby, I thought I had a real son and I’ve got a mama’s boy instead. But I’ll make a man of him if it’s the last thing I do.”
Brant clamped his fists at his side and made a huge effort to speak rationally. “You’re going about it the wrong way.”
“When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it.”
“The way to teach your son courage isn’t to shame him publicly,” Brant said. “It’s to show him your own courage.”
Something his own father had never been able to do.
“Keep your nose out of the affairs of others,” the man blustered, and grabbed Philippe by the hand. “You can go to your room, Philippe, until you learn to behave like a real boy.”
Philippe was still sniffling. But as he grabbed for his pail he said with a flare of defiance, “Thank you, Monsieur Brant. It was a good castle.”
“It was a wonderful castle,” Brant said, “I enjoyed building it with you.” Then he watched the two of them leave the beach, Philippe running to keep up with his father’s longer strides.
If he’d followed his instincts, he’d have knocked the man to the ground regardless of the consequences. But somehow he’d had enough sense to realize that in the long run it would have been Philippe who would have suffered from such an action.
That whole scene was a replay. It could have been himself. Himself and his own father thirty-two years ago.
He felt flayed, every nerve ending exposed to the merciless sunlight. Memories that were insupportable crowded his brain, threatening to submerge him as the waves had so easily submerged Philippe’s castle. Clutching his towel, blind to everything but a desperate need for privacy, because at some level he felt as vulnerable as a five-year-old, Brant started up the beach toward his room.
And then he saw her. Rowan, sitting on a beach chair watching him, her limbs as rigid as a doll’s.
She must have heard every word.
There was no avoiding her. It was a good thing, he thought savagely, that she’d chosen a patch of shade that was away from the crowds near the pier. He kept going and when his knee butted against her chair and the shadows struck cool on his bare shoulders, said in a guttural snarl, “Spying on me, Rowan?”
She stood up with that coltish grace of hers, putting a hand on his arm. “Don’t, Brant.”
He shook her off, suddenly aware that he had a splitting headache. “I’m going to my room. Just don’t follow me, not if you value living.”
“I don’t know what happened there, but—”
“No, you don’t. So why don’t you butt out?”
“I was not spying on you! We got back early and I went looking for you in your room. When you weren’t there, I thought I’d try the beach.”
“Why didn’t you join me and Philippe?”
“I was enjoying watching the two of you—”
“Yeah...spying, like I said.”
Rowan grated, “We’re in this together, don’t you understand that? That little boy was you, wasn’t he? You and your father.”
Brant’s forehead was throbbing like a pneumatic hammer and he should never have eaten curried shrimp for lunch. “When I need your diagnosis, I’ll ask for it. In the meantime, stay out of my life. Because it’s my life, Rowan. Not yours.”
The color drained from her face. “You’re running away again.”
With surgical precision he said, “Don’t exaggerate. I’m only going to my room—not to Afghanistan.”
“It doesn’t matter, surely you can see that,” she cried. “Please let me come with you, Brant. I won’t say anything, I won’t bother you—I only need for us to be together.”
“No.”
Behind Brant’s eyes the hammer had reached bone, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to keep to his feet. He had to be alone; he craved solitude as a lover craves a mistress. But Rowan was speaking again, and through a haze of pain he heard her say, “You don’t mean no. Tell me you don’t!”
“I’m not cut out for spilling my guts all over the map. Some things are private, and best kept that way.”
“Not if you want to be married to me,” Rowan said, clipping off the words one by one.
“Your problem is you want to own me, body and soul.”
“It’s not about owning—it’s about sharing!”
“Now you sound like that pup of a psychiatrist they foisted on Gabrielle,” Brant sneered. Dimly he realized he was behaving unforgivably; and also knew he’d say anything to get Rowan off his back so he could be by himself. Anything at all.
For a long moment Rowan stood very still, staring at him, the shadows of the palm fronds slicing her throat and face. Then she said in a dead voice, “All this has been for nothing, then....our reconciliation, our plans to live together again. If you won’t share your feelings or allow yourself to need me—we’re done for.”
And what was he supposed to say to that? “Just don’t come looking for me. Not tonight.”
“I won’t,” Rowan said, her chin high and her eyes like stones. “You don’t have a worry in the world on that score.”
“Good,” Brant said, and somehow managed to steer a course around her chair and up the path to his room. He’d put the key around his neck. It was as much as he could manage to yank the string over his head and unlock the door. Slamming it shut behind him, he ran for the bathroom and lost what felt like every meal he�
�d eaten in Guadeloupe. Then, his knees feeling like rubber, he doused his head in cold water, took a painkiller and fell facedown on the bed.
Left alone on the beach, Rowan eventually got up from her chair and went for a swim. She felt as shaky as if she were recovering from the flu, as lethargic and dull-witted as she’d been after the miscarriage. Wincing away from that thought—from thinking at all—she swam back and forth parallel to the beach, her slow, rhythmic strokes gradually calming her. Only then did she go back to her room, shower, dress for dinner and make a couple of business calls. Finally she sat down on the bed.
She wouldn’t be sleeping with Brant tonight. She was sure of that. But when she tried to whip up a rage that would sustain her through a dinner she didn’t want and a night that would be crushingly lonely, she failed miserably. She didn’t feel angry. She felt frightened and defeated and very much alone.
Brant had never, in the years of their marriage, talked about his father. It was a taboo subject, she’d learned that during their brief, tumultuous courtship when her innocent questions about his family had met with minimal information about his mother, and none at all about his father other than that the man was dead. At the time, she’d been so madly in love it hadn’t seemed important. Now she was convinced that Douglas Curtis, killer of animals, had also killed something in his son’s spirit.
His father was the one who’d driven Brant’s feelings underground; had he also been the one who’d caused Brant to spend his adult life playing with danger?
Had his father shamed him as that horrible man on the beach had shamed the little boy called Philippe?
She couldn’t answer these questions, questions that she knew were crucial. The only one who could was Brant. And he wasn’t talking.
If he wouldn’t talk to her, they were finished.
Around and around her thoughts carried her until, thankfully, she saw it was time for dinner. Brant didn’t show up for the meal. She made some kind of an excuse for him and valiantly chatted with the group as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Then May said, “We’ve been talking about our stay in Antigua tomorrow night. We saw all the birds on the list in our stopover the first day...the concensus of the group seems to be that we could go home a day earlier.”