by Sandra Field
“I was wondering about that,” Rowan replied. “I made a couple of calls, and I should be able to reschedule all of you out of Antigua in the morning. Should I go ahead?”
As everyone nodded, Peg said hastily, “It’s not because we haven’t had a wonderful time.”
“You’ve done a brilliant job,” May seconded, and again everyone nodded.
“Thanks,” Rowan smiled. “I’ll get on the phone after supper and see what I can arrange.”
But what would she do herself? And what about Brant?
Rowan spent well over an hour on the phone, at the end of which she’d got flights for everyone tomorrow except herself and Brant, the only two Canadians. Great, she thought, just great. She and Brant now had an overnight stay on Antigua all by themselves and they weren’t even on speaking terms. Top that one for irony.
As the leader of the group, she had a duty to let him know what was happening. As an estranged wife, she didn’t want to go near him. The wife won, hands down. She fell into bed at ten o’clock and slept like the dead until the alarm the next morning.
Brant didn’t show up for breakfast. Rowan waited until everyone else was tucking into fruit and deliciously flaky pastries before excusing herself to go and find him. Anxiety pooled in her throat, she tapped on his door.
Silence from the other side, and yet she was sure he was there. Was he playing games with her, refusing even to speak to her? Emboldened by a rush of temper, she knocked louder.
Woken from a nightmare in which he was being chased by a polar bear through a rain forest, Brant surged to his feet. The bed was rumpled, the bottle of pills still sitting on the glass table beside it The digital clock said six forty-five. No way, he thought, it can’t be that late, and flung the door open.
It was Rowan. She looked cool, crisp and capable. She also looked angry. But when she saw him, her face changed. “Brant—you look terrible.”
To keep himself upright, Brant had grabbed at the door frame. He’d taken one painkiller too many through the night and was now paying for it, his brain fuzzy and his balance out of whack. Fingering his unshaven jaw, knowing his hair must be as rumpled as the bed and that his eyes were probably bloodshot, he said, “What are you doing here?”
Even to his own ears, he sounded far from friendly. He watched concern vanish from her face, to be replaced by a frosty reserve. “Breakfast,” she said in a staccato voice. “There’s been a change of plans. Because the rest of the group saw the birds in Antigua the first day, they’re all going home this morning. But I couldn’t get any seats to Toronto.”
He rubbed at his forehead, wondering if he’d ever felt at such a disadvantage in his life. “Play that by me again,” he said. “One fact at a time.”
“Have you got a hangover?” she demanded.
“Painkillers. I had headache last night.” Although headache was too mild a word by far.
“I see,” she said noncommittally, and relayed the information again.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked.
She tossed her red curls. “I’ll probably fly to Puerto Rico with the rest of them and do some birding. You can do what you like.”
He was going to lose her, Brant thought in cold terror. Right now, standing here in his briefs looking like death warmed over, he was losing the one person who could give his life meaning. He said harshly, “Stay in Antigua. With me.”
“Why? So you can tell me one more time to stay out of your life? No thanks! Some of us know when to quit.”
His words came out without conscious thought. “I only got drunk out of my mind once in my life—the day I got home from the hospital in Toronto. The condo was empty, all your things were gone, and in the pile of mail was a letter from your lawyer saying you were filing for divorce.”
He moved his shoulders restlessly, wondering where he was going with this, knowing he had to keep talking. Although stray memories of what had happened last night were plucking at his brain cells, they refused to clarify themselves into any kind of coherence. God knows what he’d said to her. By the look on her face, plenty and none of it good. He labored on with painful exactitude. “The way I felt the next morning in the condo and the way I feel right now are about on a par...don’t ask me what I said last night because I can’t remember, but—”
“How convenient—now you’ve got amnesia.”
“I told you, I had a headache!”
Her gaze roamed past him to explore the untidy bedroom. “How many of those pills did you take?”
“I don’t know—four or five.”
Her voice rose, her eyes blazing into his, “Maybe you don’t remember what you said. But I sure do—and it’s making Puerto Rico look pretty darn good.”
In a flash of insight that came from nowhere Brant said, “Whenever my dad would yell at me, I’d try and hide. Run away like an animal to lick my wounds.”
There was a small, charged silence. “Are you saying that’s what you were doing yesterday?” Rowan asked.
Brant’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the frame. “Yeah...I was running away. Trouble is, in those days there was nowhere to run. And no one else to keep me safe. Only my father.” He looked right at her. “But now there’s you.”
In true anguish Rowan cried, “You’ve got to learn to stop running! It’s too painful, Brant, when we’re together as we’ve been the last couple of days and then suddenly you go away. Close me out. I can’t bear it!”
He said roughly, knowing it was a moment of commitment that meant more than any wedding band, “I’ll try my best never to do that again, Rowan. I promise.”
She was staring at him, and this time the silence seemed to last forever, playing on all his nerves. If he’d lost her, he thought sickly, he had only himself to blame.
She whispered, “I’ve got to go back. The others will be wondering where I am.”
“I’ve got a journalist friend from Antigua who owns a villa that he said I could use anytime. Let me see if it’s available tonight, and go there with me. If it’s not, we’ll find a hotel.”
“It was you and your father on the beach yesterday,” she said, not very sensibly.
“Of course.”
She was twisting her hands in front of her. “I’m like one of those boxers who never knows when to lie down. All right, I’ll go.”
“Thanks,” he said hoarsely.
Rowan nodded, her face full of uncertainty. “You’d better get ready, the van’s coming in three-quarters of an hour to pick us up...at least I only have to get through one more morning without all of them realizing about us.”
“Steve, Natalie, Peg and May already know. Karen and Sheldon don’t care.”
“What?”
Rather pleased that she looked more like herself, Brant said, “I told them.”
“You’ve got a nerve!”
“I must have, to be contemplating living with you again,” he said with a smile that felt almost normal. “Rowan, if I’ve only got forty-five minutes, I’d better get moving. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
“Bring your room key,” she said faintly, and turned away. Brant watched her walk down the pathway, her hands thrust in her pockets. Then he went into his room, closed the door and picked up the phone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE flight from Guadeloupe was uneventful. In Antigua there were a couple of hitches in the new bookings Rowan had made; sorting them out required persistence and patience on her part. As for Brant, he was doing his best to contain a raging level of impatience. Much as he liked May, Peg, Natalie and Steve, he couldn’t wait to see the last of them.
Eventually, however, the six other birders were called to go through security for the American Airlines flight to Puerto Rico, which would connect to their various destinations in the States. Natalie hugged Brant. “We’ll send you an invitation to the wedding and we expect Rowan to come with you.” Then Steve shook his hand, giving him a man-to-man bang on the shoulder.
Peg and May hugged h
im more sedately. “If you sight a little egret, don’t tell me,” Peg said.
“They’re not going to be birding,” May said and gave him an innocent smile.
“You could time your next wedding for the Point Pelee migration,” Peg suggested. “Then we’d come, wouldn’t we, May?”
“We’d come anyway, Peg.”
The migration, for which Ontario was famed, was in mid-May if Brant remembered rightly. “Plan on it,” he said, and wondered if he was tempting the gods.
Karen and Sheldon smiled at him and politely shook Rowan’s hand. Finally, to his great relief, they all headed for the security area. Steve was the last. He gave Brant a thumbs-up signal, draped his arm around Natalie’s hips and disappeared behind the frosted glass.
Brant turned to face Rowan. As he stood on the sunlit pavement, surrounded by travelers and airport employees, he realized that, paradoxically, he’d achieved his aim. He was alone with her. Finally. He said abruptly, “The villa’s available—Keith’s away. The housekeeper said she could have it all set up within the hour, food in, the works. Then she’ll vamoose.” He hesitated. “You look tired out and I’m still woozy from those bloody pills. But that doesn’t matter, not really. This is about us, about our marriage—even if we aren’t married right now. It isn’t about a perfect romance in a perfect setting, like an ad in a glossy magazine.”
“Us,” Rowan said uncertainly.
“About good times and bad—those vows I made so lightly seven years ago without having any inkling what they meant.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
The smart thing for him to do would be to take her straight to the villa; it was a setting he remembered as idyllic, by far the best place to end the long silence about his childhood and to convince Rowan to marry him for the second time. His heart thudding in his chest, his throat dry, Brant grabbed her by the elbow. “I’ve got to tell you about my father,” he said jaggedly, “it won’t keep any longer.”
“Here?” she said, glancing around her. “Now?”
“I’ve waited too long—seven years too long. I can’t wait anymore, Rowan.”
She looked, Brant saw distantly, extremely frightened, and somehow that strengthened his resolve. When he’d rehearsed this in his mind, he’d planned to give her a dryas-dust psychological portrait of Douglas Curtis as a father figure, keeping himself safely in the background. But as he pulled Rowan back in the shade of a pillar, other words fell from his lips as though a floodgate had opened, an irresistible rush of words he couldn’t have dammed up to save his soul. “My father arrived five days after my mother died,” he said hoarsely. “I was crying when he walked in the room. Bad beginning. He had three rules. Don’t show your feelings, never show you’re afraid, and always push yourself to the limit.” Brant leaned his spine against the rough pillar. “It didn’t matter that I was only five and had just lost my mother, whom I loved. He had no use for tears, especially in his own son whom he was convinced his ex-wife had ruined. So he set out to educate me.”
A plane took off behind them in a roar of exhaust. Beneath the noise Brant’s voice sounded as rough-edged as an engine in need of a tune-up. “He lived in a barn of a house, full of stuffed game trophies, horns, antlers, tusks, you name it. Along with an arsenal of guns. He sent me to a private day school, where I had to learn to defend myself against the bullies. Defend and go on the attack. If I cried, I got shut up in the attic, which was gloomy and full of shadows and spiderwebs, and held all the animals that weren’t in good enough condition to be downstairs—there was a boa constrictor that used to give me nightmares. If I defied him, I was locked in a dark cupboard—oh, hell, Rowan, I hate talking about it! It all sounds so trivial.”
“Keep going,” she said.
Her dark brown eyes were fastened on his face. Puzzled, he asked, “Are you angry with me?”
“Not with you. With him. And nothing you’ve told me so far is the least bit trivial.”
“Oh...well, I soon learned not to cry. I also learned to hide my feelings, to bury my real self so deep he couldn’t reach me...I never showed him anything that could be construed as weakness. He used to slap me around quite a bit—called it toughening me up, making a man of me. He couldn’t keep that up indefinitely, though, because I had a growth spurt at thirteen and started getting a lot stronger...I moved out as soon as I turned sixteen and legally could be on my own.”
Restlessly Brant rubbed at the back of his neck. “He taught me some good stuff, I suppose. I learned to be a dare-devil skier, a rock climber, a surfer. Whenever I mastered one thing, he pushed me to the next, always upping the ante...I guess somewhere in all that I got hooked on danger. On living on the edge as a way of life—that was the one feeling he did allow. Hence my job.” He gave the woman facing him a mirthless smile. “It has a certain logic, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Oh, yes,” said Rowan.
“But do you see why I’m so afraid of becoming a father? What if I turn out like him? I couldn’t bear to subject another little boy to that!”
“Brant, you won’t. I watched you on the beach with Philippe, the way the two of you played together. The way you stood up to his father.” Her voice shook with the depth of her feelings. “I think you’d be a wonderful father because you’d be so aware of all the pitfalls.” With a sudden grin she added, “Anyway, you think I’d put up with the kind of garbage your dad handed out? No way.”
A little of the tension loosened in Brant’s body. But he hadn’t finished. Not yet. “I think I married you knowing you’d be my salvation,” he said harshly. “That you’d give me intimacy, comfort, companionship, everything I’d missed out on. And then I blew it. I acted like a carbon copy of my father, tearing around the globe proving what a macho man I was.”
Rowan stood taller, her curls bouncing with energy. “But you were always so tender and loving to me in bed. That side of you didn’t atrophy. Your father didn’t—couldn’t—kill it, no matter what he did.”
“But I could only be tender in bed. Sexually. Not the rest of the time.”
“That’s changing,” she said forcibly. “Besides, if it was only sex, anyone would do. Gabrielle, for instance. But it has to be me, doesn’t it?”
She was right, of course. He’d known from the first moment he’d seen Rowan that no other woman existed for him. He wiped his damp palms down the sides of his jeans, noticing absently that the pavement was eddying with new arrivals, brightly dressed tourists, laughing and talking; they could have been a million miles away. Then Rowan put her arms around his waist and rested her cheek on his chest. “Thank you for telling me,” she whispered.
Automatically Brant held her to him, staring blankly over her shoulder into the brilliant sunlight where an Antiguan family was milling around a pile of luggage. He’d done it. He’d broken all the rules his father had drilled into him, and described things he’d expected to carry to the grave unsaid. But instead of jubilation or release, Brant felt naked and exposed, as though he’d been staked out under a sun that had burned the skin from his body.
He said without a trace of emotion, “I arranged for a rented car. I’ll get it so we can go to the villa.”
Rowan looked up. Tears were glimmering on her lashes. “Brant, I can’t—”
“Stay with the luggage, will you?” he interrupted in a clipped voice and pulled free of her, striding across the pavement into the glare of light. He was running away again. But he couldn’t face Rowan’s tears, the intensity of her gaze. Enough, he thought. Enough. He’d made a fool of himself, yammering on about spiderwebs and boa constrictors. A total fool. He should never have opened his mouth.
The clerk at the rental agency looked after him right away. He filled out the forms at the counter and couldn’t have said two minutes later what he’d written. Then he walked outside, crossing the road, not even glancing in Rowan’s direction. Some children were throwing a ball back and forth in the grass that surrounded the parking lot, their parents perched on w
hite-painted rocks in the shade. He’d rented a red sedan; but when he tried to fit the key he’d been given into the lock, it wouldn’t fit, and when he checked the licence number on the tag against the number on the car, they didn’t match.
His fingers tightened around the key in a flare of pure rage. What had Rowan said on the beach in Guadeloupe? You’ve got to share your feelings. Well, he’d shared them, all right. And it had left him feeling worse that he’d ever felt in Colombia. Ten times worse. A thousand times worse. Passionately he wished that he and Rowan were like that perfect couple in all the ads, heading for a lighthearted romantic tryst by a tropic sea. No undercurrents, no battles. No past.
But they weren’t. They were two real people instead. Two real people who loved each other, he thought, minimally heartened, and headed back across the lot toward the road. The children were now playing tag. He’d like to have half their energy.
Rowan had moved the luggage out into the sun. Her shoulders were drooping, her hair an aureole like a miniature sunrise. She was a woman of many contradictions, he knew that, for she could be fiery and gentle, capable and vulnerable. Yet ever since he’d met her, she’d fought him wholeheartedly with all the passion in her nature, because she believed in him and loved him.
Fight or flight. By telling her about his father, he’d chosen the very opposite of flight.
He waved the key at her, indicating the general direction of the rental agency, and was about to step off the curb when he heard a vehicle rounding the corner in a squeal of tires. A battered yellow van careened toward him, traveling much too fast. And then, to his horror, he saw one of the children, a little boy in a bright blue shirt, dash from the grass onto the road.