“Of course.” Vida laughed too, and tried to lift the knot of her hair from the itching skin at the back of her neck. “I thought you were going to spread rumors about me.”
Camilla’s expression flashed with understanding. “I see what you thought. You . . . and Sal. No. No, no. I didn’t think that you—well, you couldn’t. In a hundred years I wouldn’t think . . .” Her face was flushed red as beetroot, and Vida almost felt bad for her. She was so embarrassed she seemed to be having trouble finishing a sentence. “What I mean to say is, girls like us, we are trained too well. Trained to please others with our manners and appearance. It would go against everything to do something that didn’t serve our husbands and fathers and brothers, to do something that might actually please us.”
Vida’s response was so quick it was a kind of instinct: “You don’t think I’d even be capable of a scandal? I don’t mean to be rude, but you were.”
“Yes. I suppose that’s true. This would be different though. I can’t say why exactly.” Camilla lifted her chin and assessed her interlocutor. “Oh, what does it matter? We are here, they may never find us, do what pleases you.”
Now Vida blushed at the implication of Camilla’s words. She felt confused, and wanted to be light, free of weighty thoughts. “Would you do something for me?”
“Anything.”
Vida lifted her clothes and took out the pocketknife that she had held on to since yesterday. “Would you cut my hair?”
“Oh no. I couldn’t. Your hair? What if . . . what if . . .”
“You said yourself they may never find us. But it is a certainty that I will never get the knots out.”
After a moment of hesitation, Camilla crouched behind Vida and pulled back the mess of hair. “Are you sure?”
No, Vida was not remotely sure. Her head swarmed with doubt. Her hair had been one of her best features, or so she had always believed, and its elaborate arrangement had been one of the main tricks she’d employed to distract from the inadequacies of her face. The weight of it seemed the thing that tethered her to the Earth. Without it she might float away, she might be hideous, she might not even be herself.
“I don’t have to,” Camilla said, as though she could hear the blood pumping in Vida’s ears.
“Oh do it, just do it!” Vida almost screamed.
Then she felt the knife sawing through her braid. There was no going back now; she would never again have that particular skein of glossy 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 have—that I have—stood on a few summits.”
Vida wasn’t sure why this should blunt the pleasure she took from the view.
“But I’ve never been here before.”
“No,” Vida said quietly. “And neither have I.”
His smile overtook his face. “This is a good one.”
“Is it?” She couldn’t bring herself to smile back. “How would I know? Maybe this is a very average summit.”
“Don’t you remember what you told me in the dining room of the Princess?”
“No.” Vida had to laugh at that. “Who can remember such things?”
“You told me that the adventures of young women are adventures of the heart—or of husband-hunting. And that it was enough for you to see the heights of the world through the eyes of the man you would marry.”
“That does sound like something I’d say,” she allowed, although the Vida who would have said it seemed very far away. “But of course I have no husband.”
“And I have no other summit. Should we see what more is out there?”
They walked down into the valley, through the grasses, under trees that were entirely different from the trees on the other side of the ridge—trees that dripped purple flowers and disgorged bright birds—walked past streams and wooded pools. They saw shelled sea things that had been broken against the rocks, leaving gleaming piles of treasure. The seabirds had dropped them to make their feast. On the far
side of the island they found another cove, this one even more dramatic than the one where Fitzhugh had entertained her one night by moonlight.
“This place was a volcano once,” he said.
“How can you be sure?” she asked.
“I can’t. I’ve been to places in the world where they know there was a volcano because of the way the ash is compounded in the rock, and because of the lore of the people who live there. They’re always shaped something like this. The island will have a high ridge and a valley, a cove cut open to the sea that long ago was burned by hot lava. My favorite place in the whole world is like that. An island in the Mediterranean. A giant volcano erupted there once, and wiped out a great civilization. We went there to rest after a trek in the Sahara, and I’d go down to the port at sunset and talk to the old fishermen bringing in their haul for the day. If Fitz hadn’t needed to return to New York, I would have stayed there on that volcanic island a long time.”
Vida shivered at the thought. “You don’t think this island could erupt.”
“Oh, no—that was long ago.”
“How does a person know so much?” Vida wondered out loud.
Sal shrugged. “There is an eon of history in every pebble, if only you know how to interpret it.”
“Sal,” she said. The very sound of his name in her mouth made her shiver. She’d said his name so many times by that point. But it was hard to say now—there were so many things she wanted to ask him, and they all seemed very difficult to put into words. “Do you remember when you swam out to me? The night we got the pig, the night the current was strong?”
“Yes.”
“And afterward, on the beach?”
“Yes.”
She was blushing furiously with her own girlish stupidity. Why had she brought that up? It was because she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She desperately wanted him to be thinking about it, too.
After a long pause, to her enormous relief, he said, “That was nice.”
“Yes, wasn’t it nice?” Her words were coming faster now, she didn’t feel that she could control them, she was afraid she would say something too true. “I remember being so easy and full of good feelings.”
“I was, too.”
“Well then why didn’t you—” She was out of breath suddenly, was having a hard time knowing what it was she was trying to say. “What I mean is—you might have tried . . .”
“Tried what?”
Vida’s laugh was high, nervous, stupid sounding. What was that laugh? She didn’t sound like herself at all. It seemed very urgent that he understand that was not her ordinary laugh. She would tell him. She opened her mouth to explain, but instead she heard herself say, in a clear and even voice, “To kiss me.”
“Oh.”
“That was very, very silly of me to say. Why would you want to kiss me?”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to.”
A big breath filled the sail of her lungs and the surface of her eyes was suddenly wet with an emotion that she wasn’t sure she knew the name of. “Then—why?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Vida scowled. It had been so easy to get Whiting, and Bill, and Theodore to kiss her—why should Sal be so difficult? “Am I that hideous?”
“No! No, it’s just that I wouldn’t kiss you if you didn’t want me to. I know that girls like you, your reputation is so important. That if you do the wrong thing you’re finished.”
Vida studied him. “Don’t you want me?” she whispered.
“I’d like to know what you want.” The words sounded like an evasion, but the steady way he held her gaze felt like the opposite.
“How would I even know?” Vida had gone trampling over everyone and everything to take what she thought she wanted, and it had only led to disaster. She was aware suddenly that they were a boy and girl standing on a beach where there was no evidence that people ever had been or ever would be. Just the two of them, in sun-bleached rags, like the only boy and girl on Earth. “I wasn’t raised to know. Not really.”
Sal’s eyes creased. He smiled broadly. “Vida, you’re the most remarkable person I’ve ever met. If you don’t know what you want, it’s because you haven’t asked yourself.”
Vida’s brow flexed in confusion. “So much talking,” she murmured.
The distance between them was about a foot, all of it wild with energy. She could hear his breath, smell his skin. Did she want to kiss him because they were alone on an island together, or because of the black crown of his eyelashes, or because he was mysterious, or because she felt so wonderfully large in his presence? It seemed very important to be sure. And because it seemed important to know for sure, to not be her usual impulsive self, she stepped sideways, away from him, and gazed across the low, damp beach, out across the flat expanse of ocean, and saw . . .
“What in the . . .” she murmured, squinted. There was a little black spot, like a fly on a landscape painting. A shape, way in the distance, like a toy ship on a duck pond.
While she stood alone with Sal, want had bloomed in her like a wild flowering vine. It was still there; it pulled her like gravity.
But she was distracted from that wanting by a desperate curiosity regarding the ship-like thing, this evidence of people beyond this beach, this island. This odd proof that she and Sal were not the only two people on Earth.
And afterward, she would always wonder what might have been if she had not looked away.
“Is that a ship?” she said. Maybe it was a trick of the eye conjuring the thing she had hoped to see every day since their arrival. Then, when she was sure it was not a hallucination, she wondered if it might somehow pass—if it might not notice the island at all—if they might be forgotten twice.
“Yes,” Sal said.
Their eyes met again, but the urgency now was of a different kind. They barely spoke as they hurried back up the ridge, along the edge of the island, the wind cold at their ears, both of them seeking each other’s gaze, then glancing back to make sure the ship was still there, their stomachs tight and hard with the wretched possibility that it might pass and not know that they were here. That this could well be their only chance.
As they descended along the waterfall, their breathing became noisy and anxious, and they grasped for each other’s hands to keep from falling.
“Hurry,” she called to Sal. He was coming along behind, but not fast enough. When the camp was in view she became impatient and began to run. “Get the fire lit!” she cried. She was thinking that if they could get the fire going soon enough, they could light torches and climb to the heights and then surely someone on board would notice them, surely the ship would turn, and they would be rescued. This was all she could think of—and what she had recently wanted in the most deep and secret part of herself—or for that matter what was worth wanting—shrank in her mind. As she emerged from the jungle, she began to shout and swing her arms overhead. “Torches!” she cried. “Torches!”
But the others, those thirty and some people who had become her whole city, the only world, did not hear her.
Already they drifted from the huts, onto the rocks, down the beach, their mouths hanging open, their gaze intent upon the ship that was making a wide turn in the open ocean. It had drawn a circle around their island and was slowly but surely coming their way, the gray smog of the smokestacks drifting over the pinkening sky.
Vida’s shoulders rose and fell. She was trembling all over with the scarcely to be believed possibility that they might be rescued. That they might be found. Within her rib cage was such a war of hope and despair. She didn’t like the trailing gray smoke, and yet she feared the huge ship would dissipate into thin air. Her sun-brown legs went rigid. She braced for what was coming. The wind off the ocean lifted her hair, which had been chopped below the ears, and was now a strange amalgamation of strands, curls, knots, and little braids. It was not until the dinghy was coming into the cove, the silhouette of a man standing at the prow while the oars lifted and plunged into
the waves, that she considered what a feral creature she must seem.
Like the others, she advanced toward the water with her gaze fixed on the seascape.
As soon as she began to wonder if it was him, she knew it was. Then she knew it more so. Then the golden certainty circled her head, firm as a tight-fitting crown. When the dinghy reached the shallow waters, he leapt out and came striding through the water, his dark pants soaked above the knee, the salt spray gleaming on his face. That same sculptured face she had seen in newspaper illustrations, in ballrooms, that she had imagined in her wedding photo. It was that same sand-colored hair rising above his forehead like a wind-shaped bluff, those blue eyes like a crystal glass of water held against a noon sky.
Fitz was here.
He was alive.
That it was really him was hard to believe. Yet she saw that it was true. The wet sand filled the space between her toes, the skin at the back of her knees itched, she felt crazy, like her head was a balloon that might go flying off into the upper atmosphere if her body let go of its string.
What should I do was a thought she heard, as though it had been asked by a passing stranger. There was nothing to do, nothing obvious, and in a moment she began to cry and laugh at the same time. All she had feared and hoped and dreaded since the night the ship sank rose up, overwhelmed her. Meanwhile Fitzhugh, the real and very alive Fitzhugh, strode through the clear azure waves, sank to his knees at the place where the waves broke and receded, and grasped her hands.
“You’re alive,” she managed to get out through the stream of hot tears that drenched her cheeks, the laughter that she couldn’t manage to get under control.
“I gave you a scare,” he observed.
“You’re alive,” she repeated witlessly.
“I’m sorry. You must have thought the worst. But Vida, Miss Vida Hazzard, I’m here now. I will never let you out of my sight again. I promise. I’m here, and I’m going to take you home and make you my wife.”
Beyond him she could see the people in the dinghy bobbing on the water. There were four men sitting at their oars, they were the ones who would row them back to the big ship out in the open ocean. Vida gasped and gasped. Her face was wet with tears, but suddenly she couldn’t cry any more. She managed to take a breath, to put a stop to her strange laughing.
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