Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,47

began walking toward the water.

“I feel like putting my toes in!” she called over her shoulder. Soon she was running down the sloping beach.

Vida wondered over what the widow had said. That phrase—maybe it was you—coursed through her body, was her very pulse. Meanwhile Camilla had reached the water’s edge. She laughed with abandon and did a twirl; her dark skirt flew up and revealed her lovely legs.

Fifteen

For a while Vida remained motionless, her gaze fixed, her mind drifting, soaking in the happy mood of the camp. The children playing, their mothers at ease. Camilla a beautiful silhouette against the glaze on the surface of the water. And there, down the beach, was Fitz, striding in his confident manner from the dazzle of the sea. With him were the men who had once been sailors. They rested their makeshift fishing poles over their shoulders and hauled in the fish they had caught. Fitz’s pants were rolled, his voice buoyant with salty air.

He was looking around for someone.

For Vida.

When he saw her, he smiled and raised his hand.

She raised her hand in reply. What Camilla had suggested recurred to Vida with a little drumroll of triumph, a blush of fear, a bright spike of hope, a warm wanting. Maybe she was the one who could tame the famous Fitzhugh Farrar after all. But in the brilliance of that lovely moment she felt no great need for anything to be different. To possess more than she had right now. She knew that in her old life she would have rushed to secure Fitz’s affections. Instead she turned, leaving the kindling she and Camilla had collected, and moved back into the shelter of the palms, wondering if she even was the same girl she’d been before, the kind who was always campaigning, strategizing for what she wanted. Or if she should be—if she already was—a different sort of girl.

She had no idea, so she walked on, in a new direction, and eventually into a little grove surrounded by strange and mighty trees. Those trees were gnarled and vast; their branches reached out to form a great halo of leaves. Their roots were massive, spreading across and deep into the earth. Little birds with bright yellow plumes darted between the high limbs. Yet at the same time there was a profound and living stillness in that grove, as though the place was animated by a spirit of the divine.

The spirit was laughing. For a moment it really seemed like that, like there was a wood nymph and it was laughing at her. Then it occurred to Vida that the laughter was rather masculine, and her eyes adjusted, and she saw Sal sitting on the edge of the lifeboat that they had spent so many hours in. The boat had been transformed, however. Additions had been made, including a contraption that attached what looked like floating planks to the sides, and a mast where she supposed a sail should go.

“What are you laughing at?”

“I was just thinking about the first time I saw you. All dressed up. How impossible it would have been for me then to imagine you as you are now.”

Vida blushed at this reminder of how far she had fallen, appearance-wise. “I didn’t know you imbued our first meeting with such extraordinary meaning.” She had meant this as a riposte. But his eyes went reflective and she knew too late that he did view it with some meaning. “Oh.”

“It was dramatic, you must admit.” He had a laughing way again.

She hadn’t really seen him that night, she realized. There was something about Sal that was easy to look through. His long, lean body posed with a sure confidence, his longish dark hair pulled away from his face. But his dark gaze was shy to make contact.

“It was,” she admitted. “You used to make me so angry. On the ship, that is. In my mind, I called you ‘nobody’ so that I wouldn’t be cut by your judgments.”

He smiled. “That’s fitting. I am nobody.”

“Oh, come,” she said. “Don’t be metaphysical. Of course you are somebody.”

“Your kind of people are always trying so hard to prove you are somebody,” he said with a shrug. “Not me. I go with the current,” he added with such finality that, though she wasn’t sure precisely what he meant, she had no desire to question him.

“Anyway.” She averted her gaze and dried her palms against her skirt. “What’s this?”

“It’s our ship.”

“Ship?” she echoed with mirthless irony. This strange,