Where the Heart Is

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Then what do you do?”

  “I keep my mouth shut, refund whatever I’ve been paid, and walk away.”

  “Do you do that often?”

  “Not nearly as often as I’d like to. Someday I’ll show you the places I haven’t talked to anyone about. They’re as beautiful now as the day God made them.”

  She looked at his face. It was all but concealed from her in the gathering darkness.

  “Tell me about your favorite place,” she said.

  “It’s tucked up in the Andes, way up, a thousand miles from anywhere. Too high for jungle, not high enough for year-round ice. The mountains are green and black, steep and wild, and the sky is blue all the way to the center of the universe.”

  “I know that kind of blue,” Shelley said. “I haven’t seen it for a long, long time. The air is absolutely pure, like being suspended in fine, fragile crystal. One sound, one careless movement, and it will shatter around you.”

  He smoothed his mustache over her fingers. “Yes, it’s exactly like that.”

  “How did you find your special place in the Andes?”

  “I was following a river up to its source. The water was clean and cold and so pure it was almost invisible. There was no trail, no sign that any man had ever walked where I was walking.”

  “What about the natives?” she asked.

  “Not even them. The land was too steep and rocky to farm. The people in the last village I went through told me there was no way up this mountain, no pass to the other side, and that those who dared disturb the sleeping mountain gods never returned.”

  Shelley leaned closer, looking at the pale gleam of Cain’s eyes, the darkness of his eyelashes, his lips softly curved in a remembering smile. She didn’t have to ask him why he was smiling. She knew.

  There was a quality to the truly wild places of the earth that was unique. They joined humanity’s forgotten past to its mysterious future. Untamed places humbled and elevated civilized people, teaching them that some things must be taken as they are, untouched, their wildness both a reassurance and a challenge to the restless human soul.

  “I was looking for one kind of metal and found another,” Cain said.

  “Gold?”

  He nodded. “It was a placer pocket no bigger than my knapsack. The gold nuggets in that hole were so pure I could draw designs on them with my fingernail.”

  Her eyes widened. “My God.”

  “Yeah. I worked downstream from that point, using a plate from my mess kit to pan for gold.”

  “And?”

  “Barely any traces.”

  “But where did it go?”

  “Where it came from is the megamillion-dollar question,” he said dryly. “You want the mother lode, not a litter of baby nuggets.”

  She laughed and leaned forward, listening, watching.

  “The pocket of nuggets lay just below a point where a network of tributary streams joined the main river,” he said.

  “Where did the streams come from?”

  “They drained several peaks. The gold could have washed down from any one of them. The nuggets were rounded smooth, so they had come some distance in the water before they were trapped in the placer pocket.”

  “What did you do?”

  Her voice was husky. She was caught between his words and the rough silk of his mustache stroking her fingers.

  “If I brought back the handful of nuggets I’d found,” he said, “thousands of men would rush in and tear up that place with hydraulic jets.”

  Without knowing it, she bit her lip and shook her head at the decision he had faced.

  “If I could have pinpointed the source of gold,” he said finally, “I’d have burned candles for the children at the village church and walked down out of the mountains to file my report.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. I kept my mouth shut. The mother lode could have been anywhere within five thousand square miles.”

  “Talk about a needle in a haystack. Even a solid gold one . . .”

  He nodded. “Then there was the fact that this particular government was already making several billion dollars a year in the cocaine trade and spending every dime of it on wine, women, and weapons.”

  “Déjà vu all over again.”

  “Over and over and over. I didn’t see how a handful of gold would make much difference to the dirt-poor natives. But losing their mountain gods would destroy them.”

  He kissed her hand and added softly, “It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. I needed to know that the mountain was still there, still whole, even if I never had a chance to see it again.”

  “Landscapes of the soul,” she said, remembering his words. She kissed the backs of his fingers gently. “Thank you.”

  “For not filing the report?”

  “For being the kind of man you are.”

  He lifted her, settling her between his legs so that her back rested against his chest.

  “I wish I’d had you to talk to before now,” he said, kissing her temple. “No matter where I was, I always felt like a stranger in a strange land. Totally alone. I’d come out of the mountains or the desert and go to the conference tables and try to make men understand what I’d seen.”

  “Did they?”

  “Not a word of it. The people who knew the wild didn’t know the city, and the people who knew the city were afraid of the wild. The only common ground we had was developing resources so that the next generation had a chance at penicillin instead of disease.”

  “My parents talked a lot about that. They had a hard time making people listen, in or out of the country.”

  “They should have tried waving cash,” Cain said. “Revolutionaries and tyrants, bureaucrats and brigands, they all come to a point when you talk money. Cold cash is the universal language, not the needs of children.”

  The bitterness in his voice reminded Shelley of some of her own memories.

  “I wish I’d been there for you to talk to,” she said.

  “I could have used a—” Quickly he bit back the word wife and said, “A real friend.”

  “I used to dream of having someone like that,” she admitted. “None of the kids I met knew how I felt. Nobody else had lived in the wild and the city and everywhere between.”

  He pulled her closer, saying without words that he understood the kind of loneliness she was describing.

  “When I’d talk about a desert spring,” she said, “city people wouldn’t understand the miracle of water. When I’d talk about the astronauts, desert people wouldn’t be able to comprehend men on the moon.”

  Cain smiled slightly and smoothed his cheek over Shelley’s hair.

  “It seemed like every time I made some progress in understanding,” she said, “Dad would wrap up whatever project he was working on and we would leave. That’s when I began to hunger for a home of my own.”

  “Was it a specific geography you wanted, or simply a place where people understood you?”

  “That’s what home is, a place where people understand you.”

  “And L.A. is your home.”

  “Yes.” Her voice was soft, certain.

  “Who understands you in L.A.?”

  He felt her stiffen and knew the answer—nobody in Los Angeles understood Shelley.

  Yet she insisted it was her home.

  “Look out just beyond that line of houses,” he said, pointing. “The moon is the color of pale gold, like the flecks of light in your eyes.”

  She shivered when his lips nuzzled beneath her hair to find the sensitive curve of her ear. But it was more than his touch that made her tremble. Each word he had spoken was a pebble dropped into the calm pool of her determination, words setting off ripples that went clear to her soul, threatening her security, her happiness, her very idea of home.

  He doesn’t understand, she thought wearily. How could he? He never went through the hell I did for the sake of wild places.

  Maybe if he understood
, we could stay together.

  A shaft of pure longing went through her, a homesickness for something she had never known. A sharing of tears and laughter, hopes and fears, triumphs and failure.

  A sharing of life.

  “When I was seven,” she said, “we were staying in a tent somewhere in the Negev. There was a moon like this one. Fever moon.”

  Her hands gripped his forearms. Her voice was thin, strained. Tension vibrated through her. She had never spoken about her terrible fears and equally wrenching hopes.

  “We’d only been in that camp two days,” she said. “We must have picked up the sickness in the city. Dad was out in the field with most of the workers, doing the initial survey. The guide was the only one who spoke English. He was with Dad. Mom and I stayed in camp. She got sick first.”

  Cain’s eyelids flinched. His arms closed reassuringly around Shelley.

  Her hands moved restlessly over his forearms as though she was trying to convince herself that she wasn’t seven anymore, wasn’t alone, wasn’t a terrified child watching her mother slide into delirium.

  “She was hot when I touched her, as hot as the desert sand. Hotter. Then she started talking and laughing and crying. It scared me. She was talking to grandparents I knew were dead. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “You were only seven. No one expected you to do anything.”

  If Shelley heard, she didn’t respond to the soothing words. Her fingers closed around his wrists with punishing force.

  “Mom started calling for Dad. I ran out into the night. The moon was like tonight, the color of brass.”

  Cain looked at the brass-colored moon above the hills and held her even closer.

  “There were two men out tending the pack animals,” she said. “No one spoke English. No matter how much I cried and pleaded, they didn’t understand that my mother needed help.”

  He wanted to kiss her, to stop the torrent of painful words. But he didn’t. He simply held her and ached for the frightened child she had been.

  “Finally I dragged one of the men toward the tent. He refused to come inside. Then he heard Mom laugh and babble and scream. He turned and ran away.”

  Cain murmured softly against Shelley’s hair, rocking her very slowly, holding her. After a minute she took a ragged breath and kept on talking, wanting him to understand just how deep her need for a home went.

  “Years later, I realized that the man had shown great courage even to walk as far as the door of our tent.”

  “He was Muslim?”

  “A very devout one. In his culture the price of being alone in a tent with another man’s woman was death. I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I was terrified and he ran. Mom didn’t recognize me. I was afraid to leave her, so I sat next to her, holding her hand and crying until the fever took me, too.”

  Shelley’s fingers loosened their grip on his forearms. She leaned back heavily against his chest and pulled his warmth around her like a cape.

  “Dad came back sometime before dawn. The man hadn’t just run away. He got on a camel and tracked Dad by moonlight. They nearly ran the animals to death getting back to us.”

  With a long sigh, she rubbed her cheek against Cain’s arm and finished the story.

  “We all survived. But after I woke up, I made a vow. When I was an adult, I would never, ever go to a place where if I called for help, my only answer would be an alien jumble of syllables. I would find a place where people understood me, and I would never leave.”

  Cain was afraid to speak, afraid to push Shelley any more on the subject of understanding and security and home.

  “How did your mother feel about it?” he asked finally.

  She shrugged. “After that she just made sure there was a native woman in camp if we had Muslim workers.”

  “An English speaker?”

  “Mom didn’t care. Just so there was someone who could make our needs understood to the men in an emergency.”

  “A practical woman, your mother,” he said approvingly.

  Shelley hesitated, turning his words over in her mind.

  “I never thought of it that way,” she said slowly. “If I’d been Mom, I’d have climbed on the first camel and left.”

  “Without your father?”

  Sighing deeply, she acknowledged defeat.

  “No. Mom loved Dad more than anything else on earth. She must have. God knows she put up with enough.”

  “I’ll bet she loved the desert, too.”

  “You’re right. The worst arguments she and Dad ever had came when she wanted to go exploring. Sometimes she and I would sneak away and ride out into the desert just to listen to the silence.”

  Cain’s breath wedged at the thought of a woman and a child roaming alone through the vast, trackless deserts of the world.

  “That was a damn fool thing to do,” he said flatly. “No wonder your dad raised hell.”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “You sound just like Dad. Mom was no fool. She could track and ride like an Arab, and she taught me to do the same. I was safer in the desert with her than I was in a city taxi.”

  He thought it over and nodded. “I’m going to enjoy your parents. Where are they now?”

  “Some godforsaken strip of coastal South America where it never rains for years at a time.”

  “The Atacama Desert.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Once. Briefly. Next to the moon, it’s the driest piece of real estate within reach of man.”

  “Or snake,” she said. Then she whispered, “That’s another first.”

  “What is?”

  “I’ve never talked about the fever moon before. Not even with Mom. But I’ve dreamed of it. I still do. The helplessness terrifies me.”

  “Why? You have a home now, a place where people understand you. The dream shouldn’t be able to touch you.”

  Though Cain’s voice was matter-of-fact, the words were like stones dropped into Shelley’s calm certainty, sending questioning ripples through her.

  Frightening ripples.

  For a heart-stopping second, she was seven again, alone in the middle of a desert, holding the hand of a mother who didn’t recognize her.

  He felt the sudden stiffness of her body and cursed his too-quick tongue. The fact that his questions were reasonable only meant that she would fight them—and him—all the more strongly.

  Before she could deny or argue or retreat, he tilted her face up to his and changed the subject in the oldest way of all.

  “Have I mentioned that you taste even better than chocolate chip cookies?” he asked as he bent down to her mouth.

  She accepted his kiss with a relief that quickly became passion. The ripples that went through her now had nothing to do with uncertainty or fear. They came from the excitement of his tongue teasing hers. Turning slightly within his embrace, she let her head slide into the crook of his arm, giving herself to him, hiding nothing of her response.

  To Cain, her sensual honesty was the most potent aphrodisiac imaginable. He kissed her with an honesty that was equally potent. The embrace deepened and lengthened until they were breathing raggedly, straining to be closer and then closer still, wanting nothing between them but the mingled heat of their bodies.

  His hand moved from her face to her throat, caressing her skin, traveling slowly down her body. He hesitated, then stopped short of her breast.

  She made a small sound and put her hand over his, urging him to touch her.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I won’t freeze on you again.”

  Between the words she kissed his lips, his chin, the pulse beating in his throat.

  “Truly,” she whispered. “I know now that you won’t make fun of my body. Touch me, Cain. I want you to touch me.”

  “I want that, too.”

  His voice was rough with the difficulty of restraining himself, yet his hand was very gentle on her breast. He teased the hidden, aching nipple.

 
“I want to do more than touch you, mink. I want to tear off your clothes and feel you all hot and—”

  Abruptly he stopped talking. His hand trembled slightly as he removed it from her breast.

  “I think,” he began carefully.

  “Good, one of us should,” she said quickly. “It’s your turn.”

  He laughed and ached to bury himself in her, warming himself body and soul.

  “We’d better get out of here,” he said. “I think we’ll set fire to this dry brush.”

  “Maybe I’d better do the thinking. Spontaneous combustion is a myth.”

  “Want to bet?”

  His hands shifted and he lifted her, arching her breasts toward his mouth. Her thin cotton blouse and delicate bra weren’t much of a barrier. He felt the instant, hard rise of her nipple against his tongue.

  “You win,” she said. “Spontaneous . . .”

  The word became a moan that was also his name. The sultry heat of his mouth, the exciting edges of his teeth, and the insistent rubbing of his tongue sent streamers of fire from her breasts to her thighs. She dug her fingers into his thick hair and twisted against him, wanting him until she could barely breathe.

  Slowly common sense returned to Cain. Groaning, he tore his mouth from her breast.

  “I don’t want to bruise your soft body on this granite,” he said. “But, God, I want you!”

  With a hungry sound he kissed the wildly beating pulse in her throat. She tilted her head to the side, giving him as much of her skin as he wanted to take.

  And he wanted it all.

  “Which one of us is doing the thinking?” he asked.

  Her only answer was fingernails biting sweetly into his scalp, asking him to bend down to her once more.

  “I was afraid of that,” he said.

  With a swift movement he lifted her from her nest between his legs.

  In the moonlight Shelley’s face was half gold, half wild, and her blouse clung to the breast he had kissed, outlining the hungry ruby peak.

  He couldn’t stop himself from bending over her untouched breast. His tongue flicked out, his teeth nibbled, and then he held her close and hard against his mouth. He didn’t let her go until the nipple was erect and the cotton clung wetly, outlining her arousal.