When Natalie arrived at the commons, David and her father were dragging the decrepit examination table from the clinic into the center of the gazebo. They were both soaked to the skin.
“Hollio,” she called out cheerily.
David lifted his hand in a greeting.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Dad said, obviously preoccupied. “Could you go to the clinic, Nattie, and bring that box of supplies from the bottom of the cabinet in the exam room?” He described the box to her—in English. He apparently didn’t have time or patience for language lessons this morning. “Be sure and wrap it in plastic so it doesn’t get wet on the way over here. David, I think I’m going to need that small table from the clinic after all. Could you bring that over too, please?”
David nodded and turned in the direction of the clinic.
“David?” Natalie said, holding her umbrella high, and offering a spot underneath for his six-foot-five frame.
“Oh …” He looked at her as though she’d presented him with a decision that required careful consideration.
“We’re going the same way,” she explained lamely.
“Um, thanks,” he said finally, speaking English, “but I’m already so wet I don’t know what good it would do.” He ducked from under the thatched roof of the pavilion and made a dash for the clinic.
“Okay,” she said to the empty air. She shrugged and followed behind him, dodging the puddles that pockmarked the trail. He soon disappeared into the dense foliage ahead of her.
When she got to the clinic a minute later, David was moving the supplies off the table onto a nearby countertop.
“Here, let me help,” she offered, picking up a glass canister of longhandled cotton swabs.
“It’s okay. I’ve got it,” he said without looking at her.
“Okay …” she said, putting the canister back and holding her palms out in surrender. He was obviously in a lovely mood this morning. She left him to himself and went into the exam room to find the supplies Dad needed. The cabinet she thought he had been talking about was full of bottled water, towels, and paper goods. She opened a few other doors, but none yielded the box she was looking for.
“Hey, David,” she called into the outer room.
He appeared in the doorway. “Yeah?”
“Didn’t Dad say that box was in here?”
“I thought he said right there.” He pointed to the first cupboard Natalie had looked in.
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s what I thought too. But I’m not finding it.”
David grunted, came into the room, and started opening and slamming shut the same cabinet doors she’d just looked behind. Trying to stay out of his way, Natalie went to the other side of the room, double-checking places she’d already searched.
When they met in the middle of a row of cupboard doors, David took a step back, tucked his hands in the pockets of his khakis, and panned the room. “Hmm, I sure thought he said they were in here.”
“Me too.” Natalie nodded.
“I’ll check the other room,” he volunteered.
Natalie searched the exam room again, but David’s “aha!” interrupted her from the next room.
She went to the doorway. “You found them?”
He held up a cardboard box in triumph. “They were in the bottom of this cabinet,” he said, cocking his head toward one wall. “I think your dad just misspoke.” For the first time this morning, he actually looked her in the eye, and his mood seemed to lighten a bit.
Natalie crossed the room and took the box from him. “Thanks,” she said. “I think Dad’s kind of worked up about this morning.”
David returned her smile. “He gets that way sometimes. He’ll be fine once the villagers start coming. And this weather isn’t helping matters any.” He lifted one end of the table with a grunt. “This is heavier than it looks.”
“Here.” She set the box down on the table. “This box is light. I’ll just set it in the middle and carry one end.” She lifted her side of the table.
He hesitated. “Well, we can try it, I guess. Is there anything breakable in there?”
Natalie peered inside the box. “It doesn’t look like it. Okay. I’ll swing my end around. Ready? One, two, three …”
They both lifted, but David’s end went a full foot higher off the floor than hers, sending the box sliding. They laughed.
“You need to grow a few inches,” he said.
“I’ll work on that,” she said wryly.
“Hang on. I’ve got an idea.” He went to a drawer and came back with a roll of duct tape. He wrapped a length of tape around table and box, and ripped the tape from the roll with his teeth. “There. Try that.”
After another false start, they managed to maneuver the table through the door. Natalie had left her umbrella lying on a counter in the clinic, and before they’d gone twenty feet down the trail, the rain had plastered her hair to her scalp.
“Yep, it’s sure a good thing you brought that umbrella,” David teased, avoiding her eyes.
She gave a little snort, and put out her tongue to catch a drop of rain as it rolled off her nose.
They finally deposited the table in the commons, where her father was already greeting the few villagers who had arrived. David tried to peel the wet tape from the box, but it held firm.
“Here, let me try,” Natalie said, stepping close to him and taking hold of the tiny corner of tape he’d managed to loosen. “I’ve got longer fingernails than you.” Her bare arm brushed his, and he pulled away as though she’d pinched him. She looked at him for an explanation, but he quickly averted his eyes and went to help Nate.
He barely spoke to her the rest of the morning. Natalie wondered what she’d done to offend him. Then the minute Nate gave the go-ahead, he started to head back to the mission office. “I’ll come back right after lunch and move the furniture back to the clinic,” he stopped and said over his shoulder.
“I can help,” Natalie jumped in. “I’ll be here anyway.”
“That’s okay,” David said, shaking his head. “You don’t need to.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. We kind of had a system going there with the duct tape.” She smiled.
“No. I can get it,” he said. She was sure he didn’t notice her smile because he refused to look at her.
Dad looked from her to David, and Natalie just shrugged. It seemed every time she thought she and David were beginning to get along, she did something to set him off.
The rest of her morning was spent helping her father. She held down squirming, screaming toddlers while he inoculated them. With her limited vocabulary, she tried to convince half a dozen mothers to allow Dr. Nate to give their children the shot, explaining that some pain and anguish now could prevent later heartbreak. She was mostly unsuccessful at that. Natalie wished she could have found a better way to convince them, but they merely walked back to their huts with their children in tow.
The rain finally let up, and she and Dad carried the smaller supplies back to the clinic. Natalie fixed rice and beans for their lunch on Dad’s fogoriomo, and they ate at the table outside his hut.
“Thanks for your help this morning, Nattie. I appreciate it.”
“Well, I wish I could communicate better. Maybe I could have talked a few more of the women into letting their babies be vaccinated.”
“Don’t worry about it. We did the best we could.” He stood and picked up his bowl. “Now, why don’t you let me do these dishes, and you take the rest of the afternoon off. It looks like there’s another storm front rolling in.”
Natalie went to her utta and settled into the hammock with a novel she’d found on a bookshelf in Dad’s hut. But her mind was replaying the morning. What was it about her that seemed to rub David Chambers the wrong way? Was he mad because she’d been speaking English? He’d made no effort to speak Timoné to her. Dad had been anxious enough getting things set up to administer the vaccine. It had been no time for a language lesson.
David wa
s scheduled to leave tomorrow to spend a few days in San José del Guaviare. As far as Natalie was concerned, he couldn’t go fast enough or stay away long enough. She was getting tired of having to tiptoe around his moods.
She wished she could recapture the laid-back way they’d had with each other that first week when Betsy was still here. She wasn’t sure what had changed. Maybe Betsy had served as a buffer. Maybe David had just been on good behavior because they were company. Okay, she conceded, maybe they’d both been on good behavior that first week. Whatever it was, she couldn’t deny that she seemed to bring out the worst in the man. For Dad’s sake, she was determined to get along with him, but things were certainly more peaceful around here when David was gone.
She reread the first page of the novel, realizing that she hadn’t absorbed one word her first time through. She read for a while longer, and as the clouds moved in again and the afternoon rains fell, she dozed off. She wasn’t sure how long she slept, but she’d just awakened and opened up the novel again when she heard her father’s voice beneath the covered stoop.
“Hey, lazybones. Are you awake up there?”
“Come on up, Dad.”
Within five seconds, he was standing beside the hammock looking down at her with mock disgust.
“And don’t call me lazybones,” she laughed. “If you’ll recall, you were the one who gave me the day off.”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “I thought you might want to clean your utta or wash your clothes or something. I didn’t mean come up and lounge the day away.” He reached up and gave the ropes that supported the hammock a playful shake, causing her to grab on to the sides of it to avoid falling out.
“Hey, you,” she squealed.
He paced the floor for a minute, ostensibly inspecting the thatch of her ceiling and stopping to snap off a branch that had crept underneath the roof of the open porch. “You’re going to have more than lizards in your house if you don’t keep these branches pruned back, Nattie.”
“Thanks,” she told him.
When he cleared his throat and took a seat on the bench beside the hammock, Natalie realized that he’d come to see her with a purpose. “What’s on your mind, Dad?”
He nodded. “I wanted to talk to you about David.”
She sat up on one elbow, interested.
He looked at the floor. “I notice you two seem to have—well, let’s just say that sparks fly whenever you two are together, and—”
“Dad—” She held up a hand, as though to ward him off. “I promise I’ll try to get along better. It’s just that he’s so …” She let out a low growl of frustration. “I don’t know. He just always has to—”
“It’s not really your end of it I wanted to talk about, Nattie,” Dad said. He rubbed his hands together thoughtfully, as if he were having trouble deciding what to say. Finally he looked up at her. “There are some things about David that you don’t know—things that I think might help you understand his reactions to you.”
She waited, curious.
“It’s not my place to give you all the details, Nattie, but David—well, let’s just say he got burned … by a young woman. A college girl, actually. I think maybe you remind him of that.”
“What happened?” She pulled herself upright and shifted to sit on the edge of the hammock.
“I don’t think it would be fair for me to say any more, Nattie. The only reason I’m telling you any of this is that I think maybe David’s attitude toward you isn’t just about you, but about what you represent to him. I could be a hundred miles off base, but … well, maybe knowing this will help you to respond differently when he says something that gets your dander up … it might help keep things reasonably tolerable around here.”
She looked askance at him. “Do you think they’ve been intolerable?”
“That might be too strong a word, but the air has been pretty thick at times when you two are in the same room. Or the same village. Or the same continent …” He grinned.
She ignored his attempt at humor. “Dad, I am trying my best to get along with him, but it’s not easy. It seems everything I do puts him in a … a mood.”
“He could probably say the same thing about you. You do tend to have a mind of your own.”
“And what’s so wrong with that?”
“That didn’t exactly come out right. What I mean is that you have a tendency to get a little bossy sometimes.”
She smiled sheepishly. “Okay. You might have a point there.”
He reached out and patted her knee. “I don’t mean to imply that this is all your fault. Exactly the opposite, in fact. And as far as ‘intolerable,’ honey …” He swallowed hard. “You have no idea how much I’m enjoying having you here. It’s been the biggest bless—” His voice broke, which made a lump rise in Natalie’s own throat.
She bounced up from the hammock and sat on the sliver of bench that was left beside him. He put an arm around her, and she leaned her head on his shoulder. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too, Nattie.” With his scarred hands he lifted her head gently off his shoulder as he stood. “Now some of us”—he cleared his throat meaningfully—“have work to do around here.”
She laughed as he tousled her hair the way she’d seen him do with the Timoné toddlers that morning.
He left her alone with her thoughts, and she lay there for a long while pondering what Dad had said about David Chambers and trying to picture David with a heart broken by some college girl. Soon her thoughts of David became intertwined with thoughts of Evan. That had happened several times lately, and she wasn’t sure why. Something about David Chambers made her miss what she’d had with Evan. She wondered if Evan was missing her too.
Thirty–Three
Natalie made her way down the mossy path toward the clinic. The evening breeze was cool, and the birds of the rain forest sang a cheery vesper. But Natalie couldn’t seem to embrace their mood.
Ducking to avoid some palm fronds that overhung the trail, she ran headlong into a gossamer web some spider had knit across the path. The white mesh of filaments caught in her hair and stuck to the fabric of her cotton blouse. She sputtered and blew and batted, trying to disentangle herself from the gluey strands. But it was no use.
She had dreamed of Sara last night. The dream began with a joyous reunion—Sara standing in front of her, so real Natalie could almost reach out and touch her strawberry hair. But the visions quickly turned dark. Images and sounds of the party out at Hansens’, of Sara’s voice pleading with her, had quickly spiraled to the horror of the accident, the hospital, her jail cell. The look of unfathomable sorrow in Jon Dever’s eyes.
All day the melancholy of the memories had clung to her like the spider’s web, refusing to be brushed away. How long, God? How long will this torture go on? How far away do I have to go to escape it?
She had fallen asleep last night with a smile on her face, thinking warm thoughts about her day with the Timoné children. What had caused her to suddenly have the dream again after all this time? She’d had them often after the accident. Terrifying nightmares that began with her falling through endless darkness—and ended with the distant wail of sirens and the echoing slam of a jailhouse door.
But they’d come far less often once she’d arrived in Colombia. If she were honest, perhaps it was the thing she liked best about being here. The foreignness of the culture had erased so many of the triggers that reminded her of Sara’s death. There were no sirens or hospitals or beer commercials in Timoné to torpedo the guilty memories into her consciousness. No Mom or Daddy or Maribeth or Jon. No Evan. None of the people who knew her guilt too well.
So why had the dream visited her now? Are you trying to tell me something, Lord?
She wiped away the worst of the sticky web and continued down the path, struggling to turn her thoughts toward pleasanter things. David had returned from San José this morning, and she had a special dinner planned. She intended it to be the first installment of a peace of
fering. She had planned a little surprise for her father as well. She’d had to sneak several items onto the shopping list Dad had sent to San José with David, but she had managed to pull it off.
As she started the fire and made preparations for the meal, she prayed. By the time Dad and David came to the table, her spirits had lifted a bit. As they’d taken to doing since Natalie had moved into her hut, the three Americans ate together in the clearing that served as a yard between the clinic and Nate’s hut. To Natalie’s relief, her father had spoken with David earlier and had pronounced that from now on English would be spoken over the evening meals.
“This is delicious, Natalie,” Dad said now as he finished the last bite of fish. She had made it with a spicy cornmeal coating and fried it the way Daddy always fixed the catfish he caught on the river back in Kansas. It was pretty good, if she did say so herself.
“You cleaned the fish,” she reminded him. “And for that I will be eternally in your debt.”
“It is good, Natalie. Very good,” David said, wiping his mouth on the coarse square of linen that served as a napkin, then stroking his beard as though to be sure there were no crumbs lurking there. He took a sip from his coffee mug and held it up as if to make a toast. “The thing I’m most impressed with is your coffee.” Smiling, he turned to Nathan. “Sorry, Nate, old buddy, but this girl’s cazho puts yours to shame … and mine, for that matter,” he admitted, turning back to Natalie. “I don’t know what you do different, but this is what a cup of coffee ought to taste like.”
Natalie smiled her appreciation for the compliment. “Well, for one thing,” she explained, “you guys don’t grind the beans finely enough. And you need to grind them fresh every couple of days. I think the stuff in that coffee can was growing mold. It smelled like it anyway.”
After the Rains Page 28