holding his gaze, I registered the color of his eyes for the first time—a striking reddish brown. Yes, I had occasionally seen such eyes of people with dark red hair.
The soldier gave his little yelp again, but this time it resembled the question Why? and so I quietly explained that my friend Adam and I had seen his plane go down, and his parachute open. Adam had climbed up through the trees and brought him down.
“Your jaw was dislocated and broken, too, so we’ve immobilized it.” I watched him watching my lips forming the words. Without thinking, I brushed my own lips with my fingertips, and then I reached out and touched his lips. His eyes now seemed focused, comprehending. “Your ankle was broken, too.”
Tightening his muscles, he lifted his neck and his foot to inspect the splint. Without doubt, he understood my words and their import. Carefully, he lowered his head and closed his eyes for a moment as though the effort had caused him pain.
I said gently, “You’re bruised, of course. Probably better just to lie still.”
He made a sound in his throat that sounded affirmative. As he drew in rapid breaths, I watched the stenciled name on his shirt pocket—“F. Riley”— rise and fall. Gradually he resumed breathing in a more normal fashion. Slowly he opened his eyes again, and I saw the question in them.
“This is real,” I said. “You’re not dreaming.” An unspoken explanation was gathering in my own mind: This place is where we come for peace and healing. Pieces of the past are here—gardens and trees. We call it Eden. Instead, sensible words passed from me to him. “You’re going to be all right, but you’re hurt.”
His gaze shifted to my naked breasts.
Instead of replying, I withdrew my hand from his and crossed both arms modestly over my nakedness. “We’ll take care of you—my friend and I. I promise.”
When Adam brought back saplings and a bouquet of huge leaves for our hut among the redwoods, he also carried a stalk of sugarcane and two oranges clamped between his upper arms and his ribs. Before he began to construct the shelter, he cut off a joint of the sugarcane stalk and, with the tip of his knife, hollowed out the pith to make a narrow cup. I remembered my grandfather, how he had carved away the hard casing and cut off rounds of sugarcane with his jackknife for Grandmother and me. At one end of the segment of cane, Adam left the pith undisturbed to form a plug.
He used the pilot’s sharp knife again to cut the oranges into sections and with one hand squeezed their juice into the cup while I held it upright. Pulling F. Riley’s lower lip out to make a small pouch, I poured less than a teaspoon of orange juice into the lip-well. “Close your lips tightly and see if you can swallow. Don’t try to open your jaw.”
When he succeeded, his lips made a small smile. With surprising energy, he gave the thumbs-up signal with both hands. I poured more sips of orange juice into his lip pouch, then waited as he swallowed the juice around his clamped teeth. It was a slow process.
After Adam had constructed a lean-to wide enough to accommodate the three of us lying close together, rain began to fill the air. I folded the parachute and laid it over the pilot. Adam suggested he and I lie down under the shelter on our sides with our backs to Riley. “Human heaters,” he said softly. When we were in place, I lay still, staring into the hastily constructed weave of poles and large leaves that made up the side of the lean-to.
In my mind’s eye, I also saw us from a detached viewpoint: the soaring tree trunks surrounding a dwarfish hut huddled close to the ground. I pictured the air filled with mist formed by the shattering of raindrops as they fell through the high redwood foliage. Yes, that was the explanation for the moist veil we breathed: the high branches of the redwoods had sieved the rain into the fine mist that blurred vision and made us want to lie still. The mist gentled the scene.
Dampness and new chill impinged on my unprotected skin every time I moved. At that moment, the pilot used his hands to open and spread the parachute on both sides so that Adam and I in our nakedness were covered also by the silky orange fabric.
“Thank you,” Adam