“You can show me first,” Steve said aggressively; he had the build of a wrestler and the buzzed haircut of a marine.
“Oh,” piped Karen, who had fluffy blond curls and artless blue eyes, “what’s that black bird with the long tail on the ledge of the patio?”
“A male Carib grackle,” Rowan replied. “The equivalent of our starling, we’ll be seeing a lot of them.”
Sheldon, Karen’s husband, said nothing; he was too busy gazing at Karen in adoration.
Everyone else, Brant saw, had brought binoculars to the table; he’d forgotten his. Rowan looked as though she hadn’t had much more sleep than he’d had. Good, he thought meanly, and took another croissant. He was already beginning to realize that keeping up with this lot was going to take a fair bit of energy and that he probably should have read more of the bird book and thought less about Rowan on the long flight from Toronto.
Not that he was here to see birds.
He was here to see Rowan—right?
By the time they left the hotel, the sky had clouded over and rain was spattering the windshield. Their first stop was an unprepossessing stretch of scrubby forest on the side of a hillside, the residence of an endangered species called the Grenada dove. Brant trooped with the rest up the slope, thorns snatching at his shirt and bare wrists, rain dripping down his neck. Wasn’t April supposed to be the dry season? Where was the famous sunshine of the Caribbean? Where were the white sand beaches? And why was Rowan way ahead of him and he last in line? Natalie, not to his surprise, was directly in front of him, an expensive camera looped over her shoulder, her hips undulating like a model’s on a catwalk. He’d met plenty of Natalies over the years, and avoided them like the plague; especially when they were teamed with bruisers like Steve.
When they were all thoroughly enmeshed in the forest, Rowan took out a tape deck and played a recording of the dove, its mournful cooing not improving Brant’s mood. She was intent on what she was doing, her eyes searching the forest floor, all her senses alert. Maybe if he blatted like a dove she’d notice he was here, he thought sourly.
They all trudged further up the hillside and she played the tape again; then moved to another spot, where there was a small clearing. Rowan replayed the tape. From higher up the slope a soft, plangent cooing came in reply. She whispered, “Hear that? Check out that patch of undergrowth by the gumbo-limbo tree.”
Brant didn’t know a gumbo-limbo tree from a coconut palm. Peg said, “Oh, there’s the dove! Do you see it, May? Working its way between the thorn bushes.”
“I can see it,” Natalie remarked. “Not sure I can get a photo, though.”
“Then why can’t I find it?” Steve fumed.
“Come over here, Steve,” Rowan said, “I’ve got it in the scope.”
She’d been carrying a large telescope on a tripod; Brant watched Steve stoop to look in the eyepiece. Then Karen and Sheldon peered in. Rowan said, “Look for the white shoulders and the white patch on the head. Brant, have you seen it?”
He hadn’t. Obediently he walked over and looked through the lens, seeing a dull brown pigeon with a crescent of white on its side. Natalie rubbed against him with her hip. “My turn, Brant,” she murmured.
May—who had mauve-rinsed hair while Peg had blue—said to him, “Isn’t that a wonderful bird?”
She was grinning from ear to ear; Brant couldn’t possibly have spoiled her pleasure. “A terrific bird,” he said solemnly.
Ten minutes later they emerged back into the cleared land at the base of the scrub forest, and Rowan swept the area with her binoculars. Then she gasped in amazement. “Look—near the papaya tree. A pair of them!”
Brant raised his binoculars. Two more doves were pecking at the earth, their white markings clearly visible. Peg and May sighed with deep satisfaction, Natalie adjusted her zoom lens for a picture and Rowan said exultantly, “This is one of the rarest birds of the whole trip and we’ve seen three of them! I can’t believe it.”
Instead of staring at the doves, Brant stared at Rowan. Her cheeks were flushed, her face alight with pleasure; she used to look that way when he’d walked in the door after a three-week absence, he thought painfully. Or after they’d made love.
She glanced up, caught his fixed gaze on her and narrowed her eyes, closing him out; her chin was raised, her damp curls like tiny flames. Steve snapped, “Hurry up and put the scope on them, Rowan.”
Rowan gave a tiny start. “Sorry,” she said, and lowered the tripod.
Don’t you talk to my wife like that.
His own words, which had been entirely instinctive, played themselves in Brant’s head like one of Rowan’s tapes. She wasn’t his wife. Not anymore. And why should it matter to him how a jerk like Steve behaved? Furious with himself, he raised his glasses and watched the two doves work their way along a clump of bushes.
Then Peg said, “A pair of blue-black grassquits at the edge of the sugarcane,” and everyone’s binoculars, with the exception of Brant’s, swiveled to the left.
“How beautiful,” May sighed.
“This is the only island we’ll see them,” Peg added.
“Take a look in the scope, Karen,” Rowan offered.
They all lined up for a turn. Brant was last “All I can see is sugarcane,” he said.
Quickly Rowan edged him aside, adjusting the black levers. Her left hand was bare of rings, he saw with a nasty flick of pain, as if a knife had scored his bare skin. “There they are, they’d moved,” she said, and backed away.
Into his vision leaped a small glossy bird and its much duller mate. A pair, he thought numbly, and suddenly wished with all his heart that he was back in his condo in Toronto, or striding along the bustling streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s capital city. Anything would be better than having Rowan so close and yet so unutterably far away.
They tramped back to the van, adding several other birds to the list on the way, all of whose names Brant forgot as soon as they were mentioned. He couldn’t sit beside Rowan; she was in the front with the driver. He took the jump seat next to Peg and tried to listen to the tale of habitat destruction that had made the dove such a rarity.
They drove north next, to the rain forests in the center of the island, where dutifully Brant took note of hummingbirds, tanagers, swifts, flycatchers and more bananaquits. Not even the sight of a troop of Mona monkeys cavorting in a bamboo grove could raise his spirits. His mood was more allied to the thunderclouds hovering on the horizon, a mood as black-hearted as the black-feathered and omnipresent grackles.
When they reached some picnic tables by a murky lake, Rowan busied herself laying out paper plates and cutlery, producing drinks and a delicious pasta salad from a cooler, as well as crusty rolls, fruit and cookies out of various bags. She did all this with a cheerful efficiency that grated on Brant’s nerves. How could she be so happy when he felt like the pits? How could she joke with a macho idiot like Steve?
He sat a little apart from the rest of the group, feeding a fair bit of his lunch to a stray dog that hovered nearby. He had considerable fellow feeling for it; however, Rowan wasn’t into throwing him anything, not even the smallest of scraps. To her he was just one more member of the group; she’d make sure he saw the birds and got fed and that was where her responsibility ended.
He felt like a little kid exiled from the playground. He felt like a grown man with a lump in his gut bigger than a crusty roll and ten times less digestible. He fed the last of his roll to the dog and buried his nose in the bird