Beneath a Southern Sky - By Deborah Raney Page 0,11

shadow of emotion clouded his eyes. He nodded and surprised her by answering in English. He motioned wildly with his arms. “Everybody burn. Everybody die… All the hut,” he said emphatically. “A big fire. Very big.” Again his arms painted a wide arc. “I run to help Dr. Nate. I see only many body. Quimico see also. Nobody come out.”

She was aware of Paita standing in the doorway behind her, but she needed no interpreter this time. Daria understood his halting words perfectly.

Now Tados held up a hand. “You wait,” he commanded. Leaving his basket on the ground, he crossed over the stream and strode toward his own hut. A few minutes later he returned, holding something out to her in his upturned palm. “You take.”

She descended the steps and took the object from his hand. Her breath caught as she recognized Nathan’s watch—the expensive gold watch his parents had given him upon his graduation from medical school. Nathan never removed it except to bathe. She turned it over in her hand. Its face was black with soot, and though she tried to clean the crystal, rubbing it hard with her thumb, the Roman numerals on the face had been obliterated.

She looked up at the young native, a question in her eyes.

“You take,” he repeated.

She thanked him. With a single, silent nod, he turned, retrieved his basket, and crossed back to the other side of the stream.

She heard Paita go inside. Climbing the steps, she sank down on the stoop again, and sat there staring at Nathan’s watch, numb. She knew she must get word to Nate’s parents and hers. Perhaps Bob Warrington had already taken care of that. She hadn’t thought to ask him. There was a place in San José del Guaviare where they could sometimes get through by telephone or perhaps send e-mail—if the paramilitary groups hadn’t commandeered it.

She could not see herself remaining here without Nathan, but neither could she imagine going anywhere else. Her life in the States seemed like a story she had read long ago, one she remembered fondly but that had no bearing on reality for her. She pressed her fingers to her temples and tried to stop the flow of thoughts.

For now she wanted only one thing—to weep. Nate was dead, and she needed to mourn him.

Daria merely went through the motions the rest of the day. She felt removed from her surroundings, as though she hovered in a different dimension. She folded the few items of clothing Nathan had not taken with him to the far village. They were heavy with his scent, and she held them longingly to her face before placing them in one of their small duffel bags. She packed her own belongings next to his, and she allowed herself to remember Nathan Camfield.

She thought of his hands. Skilled hands, strong and able and roughened because he wasn’t afraid to work alongside the men in the village when he was needed there. Yet his hands were gentle when he examined a sick child, and sublimely tender when he loved her, when he caressed her face, her body. She saw his lanky figure. Nathan had run cross-country in high school and college, and he had a runner’s body, full of energy, like a wire spring, never static. And his wit. He delighted in good-natured teasing. He loved to make her laugh. In her mind she heard his laughter now—a musical, contagious, uninhibited crow. Just conjuring it in her memory made her laugh out loud.

The sound of her own laughter shocked her. Reality struck—a spasm in the pit of her stomach—and her voice caught in her throat, suspending her breath in that strangling place between laughter and tears. She gasped for air, frightened at the depth and the conflict of her emotions. Near panic, a moan exploded from her. She wept then, her body racked with sobs for this loss of a very part of herself.

Her heart would never again thrill at the sight of Nate’s lean, tan body hurrying across the stream, anxious to be with her after a day away from the village. He would never again make her laugh as he teased her about her cooking or babbled in her ear in his own silly made-up language, poking fun at her first feeble attempts at the Timoné dialect. She would never again lie in his arms, sleepy and wholly satisfied as his lover and his wife. Weak with grief, she fell upon the sweet-smelling mat—the bed