Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,65

she turned to the cluster of ladies who she knew were still staring at her and waved theatrically.

“No.” Sal grinned, from where he lay on the sand. “Not too serious, either.”

And Vida flung herself down beside him, folded her arms up behind her head, and allowed herself to laugh. He began laughing, too. The ocean was back to its old way—peacefully lapping at the sand—and the sun was in their eyes. After a while, the laughter died out. She brushed the sand from her bloomers, picked up a tall, forked stick, and wrapped her corset around it to form a cushion where Sal could rest his weight. She offered Sal her hand, pulled them both to their feet so he could try the makeshift crutch.

“It’s good,” he said after a few steps.

Vida, afraid he was just saying this to make her feel better, changed the subject. “We’ll never get shelter built by sunset.”

“No.”

“What will we do?”

“Before the light goes, we’ll have Jack lead the others back to the cave. They’ll sleep there again tonight. You and I will build a fire and we’ll take stock of what we have and make a plan. We’ll keep the fire going all night in case there is a ship passing in the night, and we’ll take turns sleeping. In the morning, we’ll start making new huts, on higher ground this time.”

Those top-drawer people—once capable of talking animatedly for hours on such riveting topics as cherry galettes and fancy dress balls; now the most horrendous gluttons for shade—would surely disapprove of this arrangement. But Vida could not bring herself to see anything wrong in what he proposed. The only right thing that mattered was how to survive another day. She was embarrassed to find that her greatest wish at that particular moment was for Sal to say again that he no longer found her ridiculous. To tell her how brave she had been. But she could see the irony in this desire—she was ridiculous to want him to reassure her she wasn’t ridiculous—so she went off in a hurry to see what else could be scavenged.

“Miss Hazzard,” he called after her.

“Yes?” She shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun.

Though she couldn’t really make him out through the overwhelming brightness, she sensed the way his lips curled up at the corners. “You aren’t who I thought you were at all.”

Twenty-Two

In the days that followed, Vida discovered that she was not precisely who she’d always thought she was, either. Her heart ached for Fitz, and when she closed her eyes she felt his brilliant blue gaze on her, and remembered the promise of their first, wild meeting.

But she refused to give in to despair, and worked day by day to keep herself and the others safe and hopeful.

Without trying she had become an early riser, a fact that would have shocked her old friends. Every morning she was up before the others, and would walk along the rocky peninsula near their new encampment—the one that separated the small cove and the long beach—to the highest point out at the end, where she’d climb up and have a look down into the clear turquoise waters below. She would leap, dive. How her blood charged when she sailed in the air! Her body cutting through the surface like a knife, her skin shocked by the cool water, arcing through the deep until she couldn’t stand it anymore, and would emerge into the upper air breathless and glad.

For another thing, she had become quite freckled and brown. It had been one thing to be flushed pink all the time—that was still a version of the alabaster complexion she had protected under broad sun hats and pretty tasseled parasols on the manicured lawns of San Francisco—but now her forearms were brown as California hills in a drought year.

And, for a third, she had become quite obsessed with finding stones that had broken open in such a way that they could be used to whittle the ends of sticks to a lethal point. She—Vidalia Marin Hazzard, who had once felt it necessary to have a hundred different pairs of shoes—searched, rabid as an American shopping for a season’s worth of clothes in Paris, for stones with a clean, hard break.

As she swam back around the rocks toward the beach she would dive down and peek into the underwater grottoes seeking any useful thing—razor-edge shells, fish bones to make hooks out of, the places where fish were likely to be