Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,87

feeling. “Did you give me this?” she demanded.

“Of course—didn’t you see my note?”

Her cheeks were flushed. “No,” she admitted.

“I just thought you should have it—you were so brave on the island. We didn’t talk like this then. But it could have been different. Worse. You showed everyone how to adapt to the place—I think that made the difference. I didn’t think you could, but you proved me wrong. You have my—my—” For the first time, Vida saw Sal a little tongue-tied, and it made her heart drop. “You have my admiration,” he concluded, finally, with effort. “I’m sorry I said you weren’t who I thought you are. Now I know who you are, it’s impossible for me to be around you and not allowed to talk to you all the time. That’s what the note said. That—and some other things I thought you should know.”

“Oh.” Vida felt very childish, and drew the box back inside her coat. She itched to open it again, to read the note that Sal had written her. Then she thought of something else. “Are they staring?”

They stood facing each other only a few feet apart. Sal was wearing a navy cloth coat and simple hat, and his eyes were intent upon her. Then they lifted, surveyed all that was behind her in the lobby, and found her eyes again. “Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have been so loud. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

“We should go.”

“Where? I’d ask you to go for a walk, but your shoes . . .”

Vida put her hand on the elbow of the doorman who had been studiously pretending that he couldn’t hear a word. “Would you get us a cab?”

“That’s the sort of thing people talk about,” Sal said.

“I didn’t think you cared about such niceties,” she answered, and in that meaningless phrase she knew she made her wishes plain.

A minute later they were situated in the back of a hansom jerking its way through traffic in the direction of Central Park.

Vida removed the box from her coat and put it on her lap. “Why did you give me this?”

“I just told you—”

“Now—why did you give it to me now?”

“Because I’m leaving.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t leave.”

“A few months ago,” Sal said, “you didn’t know I existed.”

Vida swallowed hard. Her mouth was dry. She wanted to tell him how glad she was to know now. But instead her voice was cold, glib. “I didn’t mean you should stay for me, of course. Fitz needs you.”

Sal looked away from her. Outside the business of the world went on—men in suits, women in hats, trucks, deliveries, newspapers, their headlines shouted by children on corners. “He employed me as his assistant when he went on explorations, that’s all,” Sal replied. He sighed, released some bitterness into the winter air. “And there aren’t going to be any more of those.”

“He told you, too?”

Sal nodded and kept his attention fixed on the white drifts and dark buildings outside the little window of the cab.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. It couldn’t have gone on forever.”

“But you’re sad, I can see it.”

Sal shook his head at the passing scene, the droves of people in furs and dark hats, on sleds, on horseback. Then he turned back. Vida felt overwhelmed with gladness to see his curious, off-kilter smile. “Not because of that.”

They had entered the park, and were jostled along its path by a pair of horses dressed in their own flannel coats. “I was thinking of you last night,” she said. “I was remembering how when we came out of the ocean I could still feel the movement of the waves.”

“Yes,” Sal said. “I remember that too.”

They sat in a comfortable silence as the carriage moved through the very manicured nature of the big park at the center of Manhattan. The trees were painted white by an early winter snowfall. Eventually the driver reversed course, and she knew they were heading back to the hotel, and Vida felt a strange grasping within, as though something very precious had disintegrated, become sand, and was slipping through the narrow of an hourglass; that if she didn’t think of something very clever soon she would lose it without ever knowing what it was.

“Here we are,” Sal said.

“You should take the cab back wherever you’re going, and tell them to charge it to our suite.”

“All right.”

“All right then.”

“It was nice knowing you.”

“Yes.” She could think of nothing suitable to the moment that was building inside her and taking on frightening force. “It was.”

Sal was looking at

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