by Tory Cates
But no photograph could ever capture all this. The grass sinfully lush in the fading light, the monkeys light and tawny against it, gleefully discovering the wonders of dewberries and tall trees. The troop spread across the sanctuary, just waiting for an eighteenth-century landscape painter to happen by and include them in a bucolic masterpiece.
Malou lingered, savoring the monkeys’ newfound happiness, until the last drop of sunlight had been squeezed thin over the darkness that finally absorbed it totally. Even in the darkness, she carried the scene in her mind. It was a scene that was perfection itself until that one inescapable thought wormed its way in to ruin everything: If only Cam could be here.
Cam. Just three letters, one syllable, but they defeated Malou. They stole her zest in what she was doing and left her with a blanketing weariness and too many regrets. There was no point in staying on. As she turned back to face the cabin, a mocking jack-o’-lantern of windows bright in the night, she made up her mind to speak to Professor Everitt about finding someone to take over for her at Los Monos. Then she would write to Kenya and tell them that she would be taking that fellowship after all.
The one-year fellowship wouldn’t be nearly long enough. Maybe she could get them to extend it another year. Time. That was what she needed. Time to heal. To forget. Malou knew she couldn’t depend on distance to do the job. Kenya wouldn’t be far enough. No place on earth would be far enough since she would be taking her heart with her wherever she went. A heart that belonged to Cameron Landell.
Chapter 13
Yes, but I still don’t understand precisely why you bolted off from the party like that.”
Malou’s mother’s eyes, as steady and as piercing as a hawk’s, probed her for an answer. In the week since Malou had fled the station and come to her parents’ house to stay, it was as close as her mother had come to asking why she was there and why she was behaving as if her world had come to an end.
Malou, sprawled across her bed with her mother seated in a white wicker chair next to her, searched the eyes probing hers, looking for an opening into which she could pour her burdened and breaking heart. She yearned to do just that. To tell someone how bad it hurt and to be held and comforted and told that, someday, it would all be better. That someday she would stop hurting. Was this the moment? Was her mother, for the first time, inviting her daughter’s confidence? Her mother answered that question.
“I mean, Malou, what was I supposed to think when I found your present lying there in a heap amid the azaleas? And a lovely present it was too. I’ve been wanting that particular piece of Steuben glass for some time now. I meant to write you a note, but my study has just completely preoccupied me. Anyway, about your running off from the party. Helmut asked where you’d gone to and I had no answer.”
Helmut. The Nobel Prize winner. So that was what it had taken to ruffle her mother’s concern.
“I hope it didn’t have anything to do with that young man.”
She looked again into her mother’s eyes and saw for the first time that they weren’t piercing at all. They were blind. Utterly, totally blind. How could she not see that it had everything to do with “that young man”?
“Well, if you’re in one of your noncommunicative moods, I’ll just leave you to stew in your own juices. Your father recruited two hundred subjects for me, and now I have to go break them down into my study groups.” Mrs. Sanders stood to leave.
“Mother, wait. I have a question for you.”
Mrs. Sanders cocked her head toward her daughter. “Yes, Malou, what is it?”
The expression on her mother’s face and her tone of voice, even the question, were all so familiar. They had ruled Malou’s early life with a kind of gentle tyranny. She remembered herself as a young girl coming to her mother after she’d fallen out of one of the tall pecan trees in their backyard. She’d bravely staunched her tears and gone to tug at her mother’s skirt. And she had been greeted by, “Yes, Malou, what is it?” and by that expression. Even more than the brisk question, the expression had communicated her mother’s air of strained patience. It told Malou that she would be willing to listen to her complaint only if she would state it clearly and succinctly and not make any more demands than were absolutely necessary on her time.
And so, Malou had learned that whether it was a bump from falling out of a tree, or a girlfriend who had stopped asking her to come and play, or boys who didn’t like girls who were so much smarter than they, her mother had very little time and no comfort to offer her. Now the expression of strained patience was just about to put her off again. But the question that had popped into Malou’s mind, formed in just the past few seconds, seemed too important to stifle. Malou knew that if she didn’t ask it now she never would, and that, somehow, she needed badly to know the answer.
“Yes, Malou,” her mother prompted.
“Why did you marry Father?”
Mrs. Sanders’s lovely, patrician brow crinkled with peeved bewilderment. “What an odd question. Are you feeling all right?”
“Yes. Perfectly,” Malou lied. “Tell me, why? Was he handsome? Did he make your heart sing? Could you not live without him?”
“Malou, you sound like some corny pop song. This isn’t like you.”
“Just answer me, Mother. Please.”
The note of pleading in her daughter’s voice coaxed Mrs. Sanders into answering. “Well,” she began, flustered now by memories nearly three decades old. “Handsome? Yes, I suppose I’d have to say that your father has always been a good-looking man, though I’ve never been one to be particularly impressed by looks. Did he make my heart sing? I think, more to the point, we were in tune.” Mrs. Sanders smiled, pleased with her response and feeling more sure of herself.
“We shared the same aspirations. Yes, that was it. Neither one of us had his head all stuffed full of this ‘moon in June’ nonsense. We both knew that we wanted to do something important with our lives. And your last question, could I have lived without your father?”
Malou nodded, and her mother’s gaze turned inward. She’d been trained as a scientist and always prided herself on looking at the facts straight on and reporting them as accurately as she could. She did so now.
“Yes, of course I could have lived without him. But my life would have been poorer for it.”
For the first time since her mother had begun, Malou felt a surge of emotion. It died away quickly when she continued.
“Your father has been of immeasurable help to me in my work. He’s always been supportive, always ready with new ideas and approaches. Does that answer your question?”
Malou met her mother’s clear-eyed gaze. She still did, and would always, admire her tremendously. Her answer had been honest and had described a marriage that had been happy and successful for close to three decades. Still, Malou couldn’t help thinking that they would have been just as happy and successful being research associates as they were as husband and wife.
“Yes, Mother,” she answered gently.
Mrs. Sanders smiled distractedly at her only child. “We’ll have to chat like this more often.” She strode to the door, then paused and looked back. “Oh, have you heard anything yet about Kenya?”
“Not yet,” Malou said, struggling to inject some animation into her voice. “Professor Everitt said he’d call as soon as word came from the sponsoring foundation.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you. With your reputation, you’re a shoo-in. I was talking about this with your father last night, and he agrees that you’ve made the right decision. You’ve gotten everything you can out of Los Monos. If you’re really going to distinguish yourself, you need some field experience out of the country now. I mean, Africa is where Goodall and Fossey established themselves, isn’t it?”
“It is.” Malou gave a wan confirmation to her mother’s statement.
“Good. Listen, you will be able to fend for yourself for lunch, won’t you? Your father’s invited me out. He has some ideas about settin
g up my control groups.”
“Sure, I’ll be fine.” Malou flagged a limp wave to her mother and Mrs. Sanders was gone.
Malou turned her face to the wall. She didn’t want to think. Not now. Not for a very long time.
* * *
Malou let her cell ring a half dozen times before she struggled to her feet and answered the call. It was Professor Everitt.
“Well, kid, you got it,” he announced.
Malou made an effort to sound jubilant and came close enough to fool someone over the phone.
“You know, I thought it was kind of rash of you to leave Los Monos the way you did,” Professor Everitt confided. “But it worked out, and good thing it did too, or you wouldn’t have had a field placement anywhere. I’m sure that by now Landell has replaced you with one of the candidates I suggested, so you couldn’t have gone back to Los Monos if Kenya hadn’t come through.”
“But it did,” Malou repeated.
“It sure did. The spot is open and waiting, so the quicker you can get yourself over to the other side of the world, the better. Congratulations, Malou. I’ll be looking forward to reading about your work in the journals, and probably National Geographic as well.”
Malou faked a tepid laugh and they hung up. She stared around her room. Her collection of bird eggs was still propped up on top of the bookshelf crammed with volumes about animal behavior. The pictures on the wall showed her at various stages through her teens, holding up the ribbons she’d won at science fairs and grinning into her father’s camera. Her first microscope, a present on her ninth birthday, occupied a place of honor inside a glass case.
She could still remember how excited she’d been when her father had pressed a droplet of water between two slides for her to look at. She was astonished to see the teeming, wriggling life that could exist in that one tiny wet globe. That simple sense of joy and discovery seemed now to have occurred in someone else’s life. Perhaps one of those dedicated young pioneers of science she’d read about as a girl.
She turned her gaze up at the wall and snorted a dry laugh. With no changes, her room could be preserved as a shrine to the Great Scientist that her parents had raised her to be. All she had to do now was to fulfill her destiny in Kenya. Do some groundbreaking fieldwork, making sure to take enough good color photos that National Geographic would be able to do a nice spread on her and her research. Then marry someone “supportive.” Perhaps a linguist working on a Fulbright in Botswana. And then what? Malou asked herself. And then the linguist and I have ourselves an appropriately brilliant offspring that we can thoroughly train in the scientific method.
“But just one,” Malou whispered to the ceiling. “Any more than one would take too much time from our research.”
She saw, in that moment, with stunning clarity, that this was her parents’ vision of her future. It was the vision that had brought and kept them together. It was a vision that Malou realized now had guided her through most of her conscious years. It was one she would even have been happy living out had it not been for one devastating event—meeting Cameron Landell.
But she had met him. She had loved him. She loved him still. And those very significant details had changed everything. Now the vision she and her parents had once shared seemed dry as a corporate merger. A life with all the grants and fellowships and awards any scientist could ever win seemed nothing without that one secret ingredient that Cam had introduced her to—passion. Without it all the rest seemed hollow.
Hollow though it may be, Malou reminded herself, it would have to be enough, for Cam had left her, and with him he’d taken all the passion that would ever be in her life.
It was meager indeed, but self-pity was the only comfort that offered itself to Malou. She was just giving in to the tears that had been puddling every time she thought of life without Cam, when it finally struck her—she was the one responsible for her destiny, for where she was right now, and where she would be going. Her parents may have given her the native intelligence, the microscope, and the desire to succeed, but, she reminded herself, she’d been the one to fulfill the promise. She’d been the one who’d stayed home studying when other kids were out playing. She’d been the one who’d put in the long nights in the lab and the long days in the field. She’d written the papers that had won the awards. Her parents may have set her in a certain direction, but she’d been the one to walk the rocky path in following it.
And now, I want to change directions. She sat up in bed. Energy she hadn’t known for weeks coursed through her from the hidden power of these revelations. Kenya and awards and a collegial relationship with a linguist who helped her work out experimental designs wasn’t what she wanted anymore. She wanted Cameron Landell.
But he doesn’t want you, a cautionary voice pointed out.
Malou felt like sticking out her tongue at the voice that spoke for the emotional coward dwelling within her. It was this coward who had caused her to run from anything in her short life that looked remotely like an entanglement that would tie up her timid heart. Well, for the first time she was seeing quite clearly what listening to a timid heart would get her—one linguist and all the journal articles she could type.
So Cam was going to be hard to get! What in her life had ever come easy? she wanted to know. She’d chased after everything she’d ever gotten; why should Mister Cameron Landell be exempt?
Malou was giddy with the bubbles of new courage percolating through her as she jumped out of bed and flipped through her closet. For the first time she regretted how heavily her wardrobe ran toward khaki. Fortunately she did have a few numbers suitable to her purpose today. She whipped out a wonderfully skimpy jersey creation and held it up against herself. The soft sage green fabric clung to her curves. She’d purchased the dress in a fit of disgust with her usual khaki drabness, then had never been able to work up the daring to wear it.
Well, she had the daring today. Besides, since Cam had expressed so much admiration for her legs, shouldn’t he be entitled to see them? She hung the dress on the back of the bathroom door while she took a quick shower. Once bathed, powdered, and perfumed, Malou slid into the bold dress and went to view herself.
Yes, the legs, long and tanned, showed up to spectacular advantage. She ran her fingers through her hair and let the wet strands settle into curls to air-dry. Cam seemed to like it that way. She fumbled a bit with her eyeliner and mascara but was finally satisfied with the result. Now, she laughed to herself, remembering Cam’s joke, if I only had a monkey to perch on my shoulder.
It was only on the drive to San Antonio that Malou’s newfound courage began to desert her a bit. But she parried the doubts and second thoughts that assailed her as she zoomed down I-35 headed for San Antonio and Cameron Landell.
She couldn’t hold them off entirely, though, once she was standing in front of Cam’s receptionist asking if she might have a moment with him.
“He’s in a conference right now,” the woman informed her, “and he’s asked me to hold all calls and visitors. Would you care to wait?”
Malou nodded, wondering if the woman knew why she was there. She took a seat on a dove gray sectional. Her skirt hiked up to the middle of her thigh when she sat down. Malou tried to tug it down, but there wasn’t enough fabric to stretch. After the hot drive, the air-conditioning chilled her, raising goose bumps all along the expanses of exposed flesh. Malou suddenly yearned for a nice, concealing pair of khaki slacks. What had possessed her to wear this scrap?
With each moment, Malou’s goose bumps and anxieties rose until she finally stood, ready to retreat. She went to the receptionist, who glanced up at her and kept on typing.
“Could you tell Mr. Landell . . .”
The receptionist kept staring.
“Never mind. Don’t tell him anything. I can’t wait any longer.”
The receptionist’s eyes shifted from Malou’s face. Malou followed them.
“Are you here to see me, Malou?”
Cam. He’d never lo
oked better. For a moment his attention was diverted by the formalities of bidding farewell to the half dozen men who filed out of his office, their smiles indicating the completion of a successful meeting. How on earth, she wondered, could one man be so meltingly attractive while pumping a banker’s hand? At last they were gone and he was staring at her again.
“Come in.” He stood back from his office door.
Malou straightened, swallowed hard, and went in. The door shut behind her.
“I understand from Professor Everitt that you’re planning to go to Kenya,” Cam said as he sank into the high-backed swivel chair behind the vast barricade of his desk.
Malou’s heart sank as she took the chair he indicated. They might have been nothing more than distant acquaintances that business had thrown together for a time. He seemed supremely unconcerned whether she went to Kenya or the moon.
“Well, I did get a grant to do some research there,” she equivocated, hoping to wring a shred of emotion out of him.
“Congratulations,” he replied stiffly. “What was it you wanted to discuss with me?”
Was there absolutely no emotion to wring? Could he be as totally unaffected as he appeared to be? Malou found it staggering that a relationship that had completely unhinged her life and left it swinging open and empty could have meant nothing to him. But apparently it had. She scoured her mind for an excuse for why she’d come to see him.
“I wanted to . . .” She stumbled. He leaned forward ever so slightly. Did he seem to be listening a bit more intently? Had the chill in his eyes warmed the barest bit? But then he leaned away again. “I wanted to ask you about my replacement at Los Monos,” she finally blurted out.
“And that’s why you drove all the way over here?” he asked skeptically, continuing to stare at her. To be exact, he was staring at her mouth.
With a jolt Malou realized that she was gnawing away at her lower lip. Oh, what the hell! She had one chance at a life with passion and this was it. So the odds were a hundred to one that all she’d succeed in doing would be to make a complete fool of herself. She’d take them.
