Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,74

hair. She squeezed her eyes shut and reminded herself that after everything—after being lost at sea, after losing the man she thought she’d marry—she could not cry over this girlish triviality.

When Camilla had finished, the tough tail that had once been her beautiful hair lay at her feet. She felt as though she had been relieved of an enormous burden. Her laughter, too, was sudden and light. She and Camilla linked arms, and walked back toward the camp together.

What exactly had been keeping her so bound all this time, it was hard to say. She had liked her elaborate clothes, and she had always been rather skillful at pushing the rules of behavior that did not suit her. But she felt free in a new way now. The wisps of pale brown hair were weightless on her head; her feet merely grazed the carpet of the jungle floor. All around her she heard the tiny shifting of leaves and insects, water and wind, the sigh of a world she had not known existed.

Twenty-Five

In the afternoon, when she had already been awake a long time and accomplished much, Vida sat on the beach under a palm, her toes buried in sand and her attention quite fixed on the coconut that she was hollowing out for a rainwater-catching vessel. They could never have enough rainwater catchers. But, for the third time, she scraped too hard with the old metal implement, and the shell cracked, and with a whelp of frustration she threw the useless husk as far from her as possible.

“Idiot,” she muttered, and threw down the rusted implement, too.

“Dear one,” said Dame Edna, who had been quietly sitting beside her, pressing bark between two flat stones for paper, “it’s not the coconut, or that old shoehorn or whatever it is, that’s giving you so much trouble.”

“I don’t think it was a shoehorn,” Vida said.

“That was not my point. My point was to do with your vexation.”

“My vexation?” It was true that for some days Vida had itched with a restless energy that she hardly knew what to do with. The camp was functioning well, yet her mind wandered and wondered; she could not find a moment of contentment. “What could be vexing me?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dame Edna with that airy amusement that was her constant manner.

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” Vida said, and put the mystery implement back in the woven basket of all the other rusted metal bits that weren’t quite anything but might someday be used for something.

“Be careful,” the dame said indifferently, not glancing up as Vida passed by.

There was still plenty of time before they built the dinner fire. She might have asked Camilla to come with her. The camp now acknowledged them as particular friends—both were Farrar widows, in a sense, though of course they never said that sort of thing—or Dame Edna, who had asked her for all the details of the far side of the island, or Peter, who was curious about the wild pigs. But, though she could scarcely admit it, it was Sal her mind kept wandering to. Sal’s company she wanted.

And so it was Sal who came with her up the steep climb beside the waterfall and emerged onto the heights.

The last time they had come this way they had been preoccupied with whether or not they’d really be able to hunt a wild beast. They hadn’t noticed much. The patterns of weather on the ocean, near and far, the glimmer of sun on waves, the clouds massing like mountain ranges in the distance in pretty pastel colors. She noticed all that this time. Here, in the midst of unspeakable grandeur, she felt thrilled from the tip of her nose to the nail on her pinkie toe by her sheer existence.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” she asked Sal.

The sun was bright and they both had to shield their eyes and squint to see each other. His dark hair was restrained at the back of his head, but the breeze whipped a few strands across his face, the curve of his nose. His lashes were like the points of black stars. As always with Sal, there was a whole world in what he didn’t say.

“You have?” she gasped, her voice light with wonder. Yet she felt an odd creep of disappointment, too.

“With Fitz, of course. We trekked the Himalayas and crossed the plains of Argentina and . . . I only mean to say that we