Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,59

But she could make out nothing but the endless Pacific.

He was gone.

Nineteen

The afternoon brought a spectacular sky streaked with peach and robin’s-egg blue. It was a perfect match to Vida’s inner landscape. She was full of pleasant fantasies. As she gathered firewood, as she ripped the leaves from the spines of palm fronds and weaved them into new mats, her mind turned again and again to the man she was sure to be betrothed to by New Year’s. She imagined Fitzhugh and his two sailors masterfully steering their boat over big, gentle waves.

Perhaps right now, at just this moment, he was swimming in the open ocean, catching a fish with his strong, bare hands. Perhaps he had just sighted a big boat, and his men were ferociously rowing toward it. Perhaps they were being lifted up to the high deck of a sugar company’s cargo ship. Perhaps he had already wired Mother and Father to tell them that Vida was alive and well with the others, and that she would be coming home soon. (For everything was going so well—surely her worst fears were false, surely her parents had survived the wreck.)

Perhaps he couldn’t wait. Perhaps he went right ahead and asked Vida’s father for her hand in marriage.

But that was stupid, wasn’t it? Father and Mother would be in Honolulu, waiting for her safe return. In which case, how would he ever guess where to wire them? Or would they have returned home? And if they had returned home, why would they have done that?

Vida knew the answer to that one.

If they had returned home, it would be to bury Vida. To have a funeral without a body for the girl they had raised to be a lady, but who couldn’t control herself, who wanted too much and made a spectacle of herself trying to get it, and had thus put them all in danger.

Vida laid down the mat she was weaving and frowned at her theoretical death.

That it was the imaginary conclusion to an imaginary saga comforted her none at all.

The fantasy of her demise sobered her as though it were real. She glanced up at her surroundings, wanting some reassurance that she was still here, that she was still alive. That was when she noticed how the waves moved in a crazy pattern—now to the left, now to the right. They were all white on top like snowy peaks. She became aware, too, of her physical self, which she had quite forgotten in her daydreaming.

How hot her face was, how the sweat sprang from the delicate skin above her lip, under her chin, at the back of her neck. How her hair frizzed where it had gotten loose from the knot at the nape of her neck.

The air seemed as overheated and significant as in a ballroom when everyone has been dancing, and glancing over their shoulders to see who else is dancing; when everyone is looking their very best, and it is difficult to choose one person it would be most pleasurable to sit next to. The atmosphere was heavy, and she was restless. She stood and went to the place on the beach where Sal still sat gazing out.

“Fine weather, isn’t it?” she asked.

He nodded in a way that did not signify agreement. “‘Fine’ is a funny word, don’t you think?”

“How do you mean?”

“People like you use it carelessly to describe anything that you admire. What you mean is that it is refined, or that it is like finery. But how can you say weather is fine? Weather is so much larger than whatever you perceive of it from a picture window in your overbuilt cities. Weather is a beast. Perhaps it is magnificent. Perhaps it has an awesome sort of beauty. It is almost never fine.”

“Thank you for the lecture. I didn’t know you were such a scholar.”

“I am not a scholar, but I have listened to nonsense from people like you all my life.”

Vida had to smile at that. “It gladdens me to hear you talk this way. When you talk this way I know you are telling the truth. I know where I stand. But when I say fine weather, I am talking about a clear blue sky and a sweet breeze. I am talking about the kind of weather that is perfect for a stroll. Or a sail.”

Now he raised his dark gaze to her. “Then this is definitely not fine weather,” he replied. Her back straightened when she heard his