To the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “That isn’t enough time to—”

  “How long does it take you to drive to Dana Point?” he interrupted. “Everything you need is aboard, and I mean everything. Even clothes. Swear to God. I knew you wouldn’t let me down. Remember, one hour. ’Bye, Cochran. I’m counting on you.”

  Harrington hung up before she could protest.

  In a daze Cat dressed and stuffed a few things in an overnight bag. She drove to the harbor where the Wind Warrior rode quietly at anchor, its superb maroon wings furled. Diego met her, took her aboard, and showed her to a cabin.

  Cat was relieved that it wasn’t the one she had shared with Travis. She didn’t think she could have stayed in his bed without remembering everything that she must forget. And if she couldn’t forget, it must remain buried beneath ice and silence.

  As she opened cupboards looking for a place to put her few things, she found the camera equipment Harrington had said was on board. In silence she examined item after item—the very latest models of autofocus zoom lens, state-of-the-art Nikon camera bodies and motor drives, film carriers, and more variety of lenses than she knew existed.

  It was everything she might possibly need, more equipment than she had ever dreamed of owning. There were even four camera bodies and a lens system that duplicated the equipment she had sold, as though Harrington had been afraid that she wouldn’t be comfortable with different camera models and lenses.

  Numbly Cat looked at all the equipment, trying to add up its cost in her mind. The wide-angle lens she held in her hand was the latest model put out by Nikon. It cost well over five thousand dollars. The big new autofocus zoom cost at least fifteen thousand. She knew its price because she had promised herself one as soon as she had the money to buy it.

  She doubted Harrington’s explanation that Nikon had lent her the equipment she saw spread out in the tiny cabin. He had bought it himself.

  Or Travis had.

  Unable to stop herself, Cat opened every cupboard in the cabin. Then she stood silently, staring at what had been concealed by polished wood—a very sophisticated computer system that mated with a digital camera. A flat scanner. A slide scanner. A printer whose product was indistinguishable from a quality photographic print.

  And if Cat wanted to go back to the twentieth century for inspiration, the cabin had been fitted out as a seagoing photo lab tailored to her precise needs. There was a refrigerator packed with film. A slide processor had been cleverly suspended to counteract the inevitable surge of waves. The slide duplicator was new, far better than the one she had at home. There was a nondigital system for enlarging and printing images.

  The cabin was a photographer’s dream. Everything that money could buy. Cat looked at the room and wanted to feel something, pleasure or anger or outrage or . . . anything.

  The camera equipment might have been bought recently, but the cabin itself couldn’t have been designed and executed in a few days, no matter how much money was spent. It had to have been done when Travis was trying to get her to run before the storm with him.

  Come away with me. Avalon. Ensenada. Or farther. Hawaii. Papeete. The Seychelles or Tasmania or the China Sea. Anywhere in the world the wind blows, and it blows everywhere, Cat. Come with me.

  Then she had told him that she was pregnant, the storm broke over her, and she was alone.

  Slowly Cat turned in a circle, seeing Travis in every polished length of wood, in the cleverly designed lab, in the computer equipment, in the gleaming symmetry of cupboard and sink. Ordinary things had been reshaped by his mind into a beauty that sang beguilingly of skilled, sensual hands.

  Emotion rippled through Cat, a feeling like warmth breathing over the ice surrounding her, threatening it. Threatening her. She shuddered once, violently.

  Slowly, carefully, she packed away the camera equipment, closed the cupboards, and went up on deck. She felt the timeless rhythm of the open sea as the ship spread its wings and stepped into the wind. Standing at the railing, she watched the coast of California slide away behind her.

  Wind blew around Cat, and sunlight. The sea air tasted of the tears she couldn’t cry.

  Not until it was dark did she go below. When she opened her overnight bag, she remembered that she hadn’t brought anything to sleep in.

  Everything you need is aboard, and I mean everything. Even clothes. Swear to God.

  “Everything better be,” she said wearily. “Swear to God.”

  Cat went through the cedar drawers beneath her bunk. There were clothes in all styles and only one size. Hers.

  Harrington was right. Everything she needed was aboard, including an emerald silk nightgown and one of indigo. She ignored both of them.

  In a different drawer, stuffed way back into a corner as though overlooked and forgotten, she found a black T-shirt. It was soft from many washings and smelled of cedar. She stripped and pulled the shirt over her head.

  It was far too big for her. Only one person could have worn it.

  Cat shoved the thought from her mind. She would rather wear one of Travis’s forgotten T-shirts than the sensuous silk gowns. She lay down on the bunk and felt waves rocking her, heard the wind and the hiss of water dividing on either side of the bow. A vague sparkle of stars came through the lozenge-shaped porthole above her bunk. Finally she slept.

  Three hours later she awoke in a cold sweat. Nausea somersaulted in her stomach. She knew immediately that it wasn’t seasickness. She had simply stumbled into the hole again, falling and turning endlessly.

  The feeling of disorientation faded when she found the lighter shade of black that was the porthole. She fastened onto it like a lifeline.

  Cat didn’t go back to sleep that night. She didn’t want to. It wasn’t worth it, just to wake up sweating and shaking, holding on to herself so she wouldn’t scream. She knew it would pass, eventually. It had before, darkness dragging slowly toward dawn.

  But in the icy center of night, time itself froze, sweating seconds as slowly as a glacier sweated water. Quietly, desperately, she stared out the porthole and counted stars.

  Maybe tomorrow night it will be better, she told herself. Maybe, at least, it won’t be worse.

  Cat was up on deck before the last stars faded into dawn. She spent that day and the following five days sitting at the bow of the Wind Warrior, staring into the horizon, seeing nothing, saying nothing, dreading the coming night when she would wake and stare out the porthole, looking for a dawn that never came.

  At sunrise of the seventh day, Travis was waiting on deck for her.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THERE WAS nothing but ocean in all directions. No ships, no shore, nothing to swim toward even if Cat had the strength to flee.

  After the initial overwhelming realization of Travis’s presence, her first thought was that Harrington had lied to her. Though she said nothing, though she refused to speak to Travis at all, the accusation was written across the taut lines of her face.

  Travis saw it, as he had always seen so much of her. So much, and still not enough. He had understood too late that he had been so busy looking over his shoulder at the mistakes of the past that he had missed the most important truth of all. Cat, his future.

  “Rod didn’t lie to you,” Travis said. “The captain is part of the crew.”

  Cat closed her eyes. Of course. And Travis is captain of this ship. I should have phrased my demand more carefully.

  But she said not one word aloud. Speaking would make it all too real. Make Travis too real.

  When she made no move to speak, he did. “I knew I couldn’t lure you out of your . . . silence. But I thought your cameras would. I thought you would succumb to the beauty of photographing the Wind Warrior as she sailed a long reach at dawn.”

  Cat looked past Travis. Through him.

  Though he wasn’t surprised at her reaction, he was surprised at how much it still hurt. Like having his guts pulled through the eye of a needle. Like watching her slide further and further away with each dawn. />
  “But you didn’t respond to the cameras,” Travis said, his voice hard. “In six days you haven’t so much as unwrapped a roll of film. You’re not sleeping and you’re not eating. Since neither your cameras nor I can seduce you back to life, it’s time for the direct approach.” He shoved a wet suit into Cat’s hands. “Put this on.”

  Her eyes flew open. She looked in disbelief at the wet suit, and then at Travis. She saw nothing in his face but the hard planes and angles of his determination. And the shadow of another emotion that she flinched from seeing at all.

  “If you don’t put it on,” he said flatly, “I’ll do it for you.”

  Once she would have flung his suit and his pity in his face. Now it simply didn’t matter. Nothing did.

  As soon as Cat went below, Diego appeared at Travis’s elbow. “Now, at least, we won’t have to hide you with the cook.”

  “Is everything ready?”

  “As you ordered, Captain.”

  Travis grunted and stalked to the stern of the Wind Warrior.

  When Cat emerged on the deck again, she was wearing the wet suit. It, like the other clothes Travis had bought her, fit perfectly.

  The ship was hove to, resting quietly on the roller-coaster back of the sea. At the stern, Travis was waiting for her, a tall black figure looming against the dawn.

  “I’ll go first,” he said. “The ladder can be slippery.”

  Cat waited with absolute indifference until Travis called to her from the diving platform below. She climbed down and went into the water without looking at him. He dove cleanly, surfaced beside her, and swam alongside her, watching her.

  Diego watched too, ready to launch the Zodiac if it was needed.

  At first Cat swam erratically, more of a flight from the Wind Warrior than a coordinated effort to stay afloat. Gradually the ingrained rhythms of swimming settled her body. Then she swam mindlessly, arms and legs churning, ignoring everything.

  She didn’t know how long she swam. She knew only that when it came time to climb back onto the diving platform, she hadn’t the strength.

  With a smooth motion Travis levered himself onto the platform. He pulled Cat out of the sea, stood her on her feet, and pushed her up the ladder.

  “Captain,” Diego asked anxiously, “is she sick?”

  “She’s fine. Just tired from the exercise. I’ll bring breakfast to her.”

  Travis picked Cat up and carried her back to her assigned cabin. He peeled off her wet suit, toweled her dry as impersonally as a nurse, dressed her in warm clothes, and left her staring at the door in a combination of shock and disbelief.

  He returned in a few minutes, carrying breakfast.

  The first thing she saw was the medicine Dr. Stone had prescribed to help get her menstrual cycle back to normal.

  “Take it with this,” Travis said, holding out a glass of juice.

  Cat didn’t move.

  “You aren’t strong enough to fight me,” he said bluntly. “If I have to, I’ll shove this pill down your throat and pour juice in after it.”

  She took the pill.

  When she made no move toward the food, Travis picked up the fork and loaded it with scrambled eggs.

  “Open up.”

  His words and actions reminded Cat of the night at the restaurant, when they had fed each other dessert and Travis licked up his mistakes. A single look at his smoldering blue-green eyes told her that he was remembering too.

  Pain moved beneath Cat’s indifference. She took the fork away from Travis.

  She would eat, but not from his hand.

  “I’m not leaving until the tray is clean,” he said. “Take as long as you like.”

  Cat ignored him completely, but the plate was empty when Travis took it away. Moments later he was back in her doorway. She hadn’t moved. Her eyes were as empty as her hands.

  “Up,” Travis said curtly. “Get your cameras.”

  Slowly she focused on him. She said nothing, simply looked at him, her pale eyes dazed with exhaustion and disbelief.

  He can’t do this to me.

  Travis leaned over Cat. She could see nothing but him, a tawny-haired giant filling her world until there wasn’t room for anything else, even breath.

  “No mercy,” he said softly. “I’m going to push you until you fight me. Somewhere under all that ice a fire still burns. I’m going to find it. Get up.”

  Cat stood up, knowing that if she refused, Travis would simply carry her up to the deck. She didn’t want that. When he touched her, she remembered things better left buried under layers of ice and silence.

  For the rest of that day and all the days that followed, Cat didn’t look directly at Travis, didn’t argue with his orders, didn’t speak to him at all. He gave up trying to break through her silence and settled for being her nurse and her nemesis, driving her physically in the hope that she would be tired enough to sleep through the night.

  But she wasn’t.

  No matter how far she swam, no matter how many meals she ate, no matter how many exercises she did or how many pictures she took under his critical eye, the hole in the universe was still there beneath her feet.

  And each time she slept, she fell through, awakening to terror.

  When night came and the sea anchor was put out and the crew went below, Cat dreaded going back to her cabin to face the freezing core of darkness. Yet she did just that. Every night. Night after night after night.

  Halfway through the third week at sea, she woke as she had every night, sick, cold, fighting not to scream. When she looked out the porthole to begin the ritual of counting stars, something gave way deep inside her.

  I can’t take this anymore.

  With a choked sound she stumbled out of her bed and fled silently up to the deck. She found a place out of the wind and huddled there, staring blindly into the night.

  Though she had made no noise, Travis appeared. When he picked her up and began carrying her toward the stairs, she went rigid in his arms.

  “No,” Cat said, her voice soft, shattered. “I won’t go back to that cabin. Do you hear me? I won’t.”

  It was the first time she had spoken to Travis in all the long days since he had appeared on the Wind Warrior.

  His arms tightened around Cat as he looked at her drawn face. In the moonlight she looked otherworldly, as fragile and beautiful as frost.

  “It’s all right,” he said very gently. “I won’t take you to your cabin. I promise.”

  Slowly Cat’s body relaxed. Travis carried her to the cabin at the bow of the boat.

  His cabin.

  She didn’t protest. She would do anything, endure anything, rather than count the stars beyond her porthole again.

  “Easy now, sweetheart,” Travis said softly. “We’re almost there. You’re safe.”

  Gently he put Cat on his bed and covered her with a blanket. When he lifted a hand to smooth her hair back from her face, she flinched as though he meant to strike her. His mouth flattened into a bleak line. He sat near the bed, close to Cat but not touching her.

  And not touching her was like feeling his skin peeled from his living body.

  Eventually Cat slept, only to awaken shaking and cold and nauseated. Her low sounds of distress woke Travis.

  “Cat,” he whispered. “You’re safe. It’s all right, darling.”

  She shuddered.

  “Easy, sweetheart,” Travis said in a low voice. “I won’t hurt you. I just want you to know that you aren’t alone.”

  He lay down next to Cat and gently, very gently, gathered her into his arms.

  Cat wanted to fight his touch, but couldn’t. At that instant she could no more have turned from his warmth than the sea could have turned from the pull of the moon.

  For a long time Travis held her, rubbing out the knots of tension in her neck and shoulders, soothing her, stroking her without sensual demand. Yet still she shuddered on some breaths, her body and mind wound too tightly to go on much longer without breaking.
Travis wasn’t even certain she knew that she was being held.

  “Cat . . . Cat, don’t fight against showing your feelings. Scream or cry or smash things, do whatever you have to. Let go, Cat. Let go. You can’t go on living like this.”

  Her only answer was a shudder that wracked her body.

  Travis held her, warming her cold flesh until finally she slept again.

  This time Cat didn’t wake up until long after sunrise. It was the most sleep she had had since telling Travis she was pregnant. She was still trying to understand why she was able to sleep next to him but not alone when he appeared in her cabin. He was wearing a wet suit and carrying hers.

  The daily routine began. Neither one of them said anything about how the night had been spent. When Travis did speak, he didn’t require an answer from Cat. He had learned that she wouldn’t give one. Except for that one stark demand not to be taken back to her cabin, she hadn’t spoken to Travis at all.

  It was as though he no longer existed for her.

  At some point during the day, Cat began to do more than go through the motions with her cameras. The beauty of Wind Warrior’s magnificent maroon sails swelling against the cloud-layered sky finally had seeped through her numbness. She said nothing to Travis about it. It wasn’t something she wanted to put into words, to face. It was easier just to let reflexes take over.

  When the time came to sleep again, Cat went to her own cabin. She woke up shaking and cold, making muffled sounds, trying not to scream. When she was able, she dragged herself off the bunk and started for the deck.

  Travis was waiting outside her door. Wordlessly he carried her back to his cabin. He tucked her between the sheets, climbed in beside her, and pulled her against his body. Saying nothing, she accepted his embrace and his warmth.

  In time the shuddering finally stilled. Travis settled Cat more closely against him. She didn’t resist. Nor did she move closer on her own. He closed his eyes and fought to conceal the rage and despair and anguish that were tearing him apart.

  “Cat,” he said softly, raggedly, “don’t be too strong. Let me help you. Bend before you break. Before we both break.”