He came to stand beside her. For the first time he noticed that her head came just to the top of his shoulder. A breeze captured one golden strand of her hair and tossed it about in front of her eyes. Eyes he knew to be as blue as the patches of sky that appeared between the thick cypress branches. He could not take his own eyes from her as he spoke.
“In this spring light the saw grass is lime green at the bottom and yellowish brown at the top, with a rainbow of colors in between. The mangrove islands look like they’re hanging in the air. The shadows of the clouds turn the water silver and green and gold. I could watch the clouds for hours. Sometimes I feel like Meursault in Camus’s L’Etranger, who passed his time in prison waiting for clouds to drift past his ceiling grate. Western skies are expansive, I’ll grant you, but they’re interrupted by mountains. Here the view goes on forever.”
He spoke with awe, as if he were seeing it all for the very first time and was profoundly moved by it, his softly spoken sensitivity telling Ronnie that he was the kind of man who saw things most others did not.
There was so much she didn’t know about this stranger in whose care she had entrusted herself, yet she felt no fear. The only danger lay in the unseen attraction she had for him that tugged at her heartstrings and left her bewildered. With a sigh she ventured, “What else about you don’t I know?”
John stiffened beside her. “What do you mean?”
“Camus?”
“I read a lot in college. Immersing myself in books helped take my mind off the fact that I was the only Seminole enrolled.”
“It was pretty much the same for me,” she said, “feeling apart because of your background. I chose a local college rather than the Ivy League school my family wanted me to attend because I thought that being around regular, working-class people would help me forget that I wasn’t one of them.”
“Did it work?”
She gave just a little smile, partly because of the irony and partly because it hurt to smile too broadly. “What do you think?”
“I think that no matter how hard you try, you can never get away from yourself.” It was something he had learned in the past eighteen months, but if he told her that, he’d have to tell her the rest. He didn’t want to think about it, and yet he couldn’t think of anything else.
“The tribal council donated the money for my tuition. At that time I was one of the few of my people to even go to college, so I felt it was my duty to make them proud of me.”
“Duty,” she repeated dispassionately. Yes, she knew all about duty. Duty to a mother who married both times strictly for money and who tried to convince her to do the same. And duty to a stepfather who insisted that marriage to Craig Wolfson was the best thing for her. Maybe that was her problem: believing someone else always knew what was best for her.
“It’s a funny thing about duty,” she muttered. “While you’re busy fulfilling your duty to others, you can lose sight of your duty to yourself.”
“Are you talking from experience?”
“Some families are just more complicated than others,” she answered. “And you? Do you have any family?”
He didn’t mind her questions, as long as they did not delve too deeply or were too difficult for him to answer. “My mother lives on the reservation. I have an older brother who raises cattle. He’s divorced. He has a son in high school who likes to dress in baggy jeans and hundred-and-twenty-dollar sneakers and who spends his time watching MTV.”
“You sound as if you don’t approve.”
“Seminole parents send their kids to public school so they’ll be able to compete, but too often the kids forget the old ways. I guess it’s hard for a kid to go to school and at the same time learn his own culture. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a great kid. He’s also Seminole and doesn’t know the difference.”
“You don’t seem to have forgotten the old ways,” Rennie observed, “if that tea you made is any proof of it.”
“That’s because my mother resisted every effort to Americanize my brother and me. When other parents were encouraging their kids to speak only English, my mother never gave up the old language at home. She taught us about healing, how to strain the poisonous juices from the otherwise edible roots of the coontie plant, how to clear brush for a garden, to gather palmetto fronds for thatching, to pole a dugout canoe, to hunt deer. Whatever I needed to know as a Seminole she taught me.”
“And your father?”
He replied matter-of-factly, “He ran out on us when we were kids.”
“And here I thought I had it rough when my father died when I was eight. At least he didn’t leave on purpose.”
“I don’t blame my father,” said John. “Not anymore. He’s like the rest of us. We can’t help being who we are. He was the restless kind who tried his hand at a lot of things. Beekeeping, trapping, cane grinding, running an airboat, gambling. There was always a poker game going in the back room when I was a kid. But I guess the thing he was best at was roaming.”
There was a faint fondness in his tone that children and grown-ups alike often have for a parent who has forsaken them, a love that suffers countless disappointments yet never quite goes away. To hear him speak about the father who deserted him, she realized that his feelings were no different from hers for the father who had died, and it made her feel a special kinship with him despite their differences.
“Why aren’t you raising cattle like your brother?”
Solemnly he said, “I guess you could say it’s my destiny to be here.”
How could he explain that the lure of the wild Everglades was too much for him to ignore? That this was where his heart belonged and where fate decreed that he be? Destiny. Fate. Curse. Whatever he called it, it all boiled down to one thing. He and this land were entwined in the deepest and darkest sense.
He touched his hand to her elbow and turned her gently around. “I think we should go back inside.”
Rennie was curious about the enigmatic man, but other than a few superficial facts about himself, she knew she would learn no more from him for now, for in the taut silence that followed them back into the cabin, she got the distinct feel of a door being shut in her face.
“If you’re not going to be around much, perhaps you should show me where things are,” she suggested.
John’s dark, quiet gaze strayed to the window. Again he thought of nightfall, when the haunting from the swamp would grow and obsess him. It usually began around that time of day when it was no longer light but not quite dark, that lazy limbo in which time seemed to stand still. And then, almost suddenly it seemed, it would be dark, and the longing that haunted him quietly by day would turn into full-blown obsession.
None of that would happen yet for many hours. But no matter how much he dreaded the approach of darkness, for the first time in a long time he could not wait for it to fall across the land. All the wild things of the night could not be as dangerous to him as this slender, tawny-haired woman was right now. Sure, they liked the same kind of soup. And okay, so maybe the loneliness they each experienced at college was not so very different. And losing a father was always tough under any circumstance. All right, so for some crazy reason they had these things in common. It didn’t mean she would understand the part he played in Maggie’s death and not hate him for it as much as he hated himself. Where would he even begin to tell her about it?
“John?”
Her soft voice called him away from the window and his tortured thoughts. “I heard you. I was just wondering where to begin.”
“Why