by Marton, Dana
One of the tourists raised a hand as if in school. “Could you tell us more about the different species?” he asked in a heavy German accent.
“Certainly.” The man on the stump smiled even wider. “Most of the bamboo are Myriocladus or Chusquea. The rest are from the genera Rhipidocladum, Atractantha, Guadua, Arthrostylidium, Neurolepis, Elytrostachys, Merostachys‚ and Aulonemia.” His chest puffed out. “We have more Guadua diversity than any other country except Brazil.”
An excited twitter ran through the group. Miranda flashed Glenn an unimpressed look. Apparently, they’d run into botanists on holiday.
“Does bamboo play a major role in the economy?” a young woman wanted to know, her lilting accent decidedly French.
“Unfortunately, no. Not yet,” the guide answered. “Other than the bamboo spoons and bowls and other souvenirs you see in the gift shops, our bamboo resources are underutilized. But the government is conducting studies on how we could better use bamboo as a natural resource.”
He paused before he went on. “Of course, the indigenous people and the peasants build houses from it. It’s also used for drying racks for tobacco. But bamboo-based organic textiles are becoming popular. And bamboo flooring is catching on. Unlike hardwood, bamboo is an easily replenished resource.”
He went on about that for another twenty minutes before the group moved on. His last words were, “I’ll point out species and genera as we go.”
Oh, jeez, let’s get the party started, Miranda thought. But the tourists looked positively titillated, while she and Glenn exchanged snarky expressions. Back at MIT, there’d been a friendly rivalry between the engineering and life sciences departments. They’d enjoyed outdoing each other in the Nerd Olympics.
The tourists soon came into an enormous stand of bamboo. They followed a man-made path, but off the beaten track, the stalks grew too close to each other. In places, Miranda and Glenn could barely squeeze through.
When forward movement became impossible, they waited until the group progressed far enough ahead, then they fought their way to the path and followed behind, out of sight.
Another two hours passed by the time the group stopped again, on the other side of the endless stand of bamboo, where a zip-line course waited for them in the trees. Miranda and Glenn went around them, stayed in cover as the tourists dropped their backpacks, climbed a rope ladder to a large platform twenty feet off the ground, then to a second platform twenty feet above that, then a third platform twenty feet higher yet.
While they lined up for their next thrilling experience, the two guardsmen stayed on the ground.
“I distract the guards, you grab some food and a cell phone,” Miranda whispered to Glenn.
“I’ll distract the guards.”
Seriously? He needed to exert his male dominance now? She rolled her eyes and skirted the clearing, moving as close to the bags as possible. Then she waited until she heard some stomping and branches cracking across the clearing in the woods.
The guardsmen grabbed their rifles and ran toward the sound.
She waited until they disappeared into the bushes before she sprinted forward. One second. In the first bag she found a large, empty Ziploc bag with crumbs, probably the remains of somebody’s breakfast.
Nobody was going to miss an empty bag. She grabbed it. Two seconds. She looked for opened bags of food—pretzels, nuts, bite-size nutrition bars, raisins—and grabbed a handful from each, dumping her loot into the empty bag. At least half a minute ticked by, but by the end she had at least two pounds’ worth of trail mix, and in such a way that nobody would miss anything.
She was elbow deep into a fancy black backpack when a tourist—the young Frenchwoman—climbed down the rope ladder and nearly caught her.
Heart pumping, Miranda jumped behind the tree, the trunk at least three feet wide, enough to hide her.
She peeked toward the bags. Oh, man. The flap on the fancy black backpack lay open. She hadn’t closed it. She pulled back into cover since the woman was heading straight toward the pile.
Would she notice?
Would she stay down here?
Miranda held her breath. If the woman stayed and the guardsmen came back . . . They’d notice her. If not immediately, then when the rest of the botanists returned to the ground and began milling around. She could stay on the opposite side of the tree from one person. It’d be impossible with twenty people spreading out.
Shit.
Think!
Were the guardsmen authorized to shoot on sight, or had they been ordered to bring the fugitives back? Either way, she suspected the end result would be very similar.
The woman sat on the pile of backpacks and drank deeply from her water bottle, even as Miranda could hear voices in the bushes where the guardsmen had disappeared. The voices grew louder as the seconds ticked on. The men were coming back.
She glanced toward the woods. If she ran now, the woman would see her. She’d probably scream. The guardsmen would be after Miranda the next second. Poised to flee, she pulled out her weapon, hoping Glenn was smart enough to run in the opposite direction and save himself once gunfire erupted.
But the Frenchwoman stashed away her drink at last and hurried back to the ladder, climbing back up with agility.
The guardsmen were still shouting to each other in the bushes. So the second the French tourist was on the first platform, Miranda dashed back to the backpacks. She wanted a cell phone, desperately.
She closed the bag she’d left open earlier, then searched the outer pockets. Nothing there, but she found a phone in the second bag she checked. As she tugged it out, her sleeve caught on the zipper of a pink hygiene kit. Would the owner notice if it went missing? Possibly not until she got back to the hostel. Most likely, she would think it had fallen out during her trek through the jungle.
Miranda grabbed the kit and dashed back into the cover of the woods, not a moment too soon. The guardsmen were returning, all muddied up and swearing, talking about a stupid monkey.
She hurried back to Glenn, feeling a hundred percent better about their chances.
They had food and they had a phone. They were as good as saved.
He grinned when he saw her with the food and the phone. He looked as if he was considering picking her up and swinging her around. “Well done.”
She took a small, precautionary step back. “You provided good distraction,” she admitted grudgingly.
While the tourists zip-lined above, squealing, she shoved some trail mix into her mouth, then handed the bag to Glenn. Then she checked the phone. Full battery. Maybe, just maybe, luck was on their side for once.
She held her breath, hoping nobody would choose this moment to call the phone and bring attention to them. But she needn’t have worried. The first thing the phone did was pop a message up on the screen: No Service.
Glenn dropped the phone on the path so the tourists would find it on their way back and the owner would think it had simply fallen out of his bag. Without service, a phone wasn’t much use. They should have figured. Most US cell phone companies barely covered the continental US, let alone the South American jungle.
He and Miranda needed a phone from someone local, a phone that actually worked here.
Knowing now that the population had been notified about fugitives and how strict security was, they decided to spend another day in the woods to strategize and consider their options.
After the great snack heist, they spent the rest of the afternoon searching for water to refill their old-fashioned aluminum canteens; then they boiled the water back at their campsite to sterilize it. They had food, water, and shelter—better than nothing.
Glenn picked through their newfound toiletry bag while Miranda put fresh leaves on their sleeping platform since last night’s bedding was full of bugs that had moved in during the day.
The pink plastic b
ag held one bar of soap in a matching pink plastic case, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, a comb, nail clippers, a handful of cotton balls, and a six-pack of flavored condoms—strawberry.
Okay, that brought back some college memories of discovering sex and really, really liking it, liking it more than engineering. They might have been inexperienced, but both he and Miranda had curious minds, which turned out to be as much as an advantage in bed as it’d been in the class room. When faced with something unknown, they both believed in extensive experimenting and testing. Including nearly the entire contents of an X-rated novelty store one semester.
He held up the pack. “Somebody was hoping to get lucky while on vacation.”
She rolled her eyes. “Botanists. They’re all floozies.”
He grinned at the old college joke. A couple of girls in the dorm room next to Miranda’s had used the botany department lab to mix up herbal aphrodisiacs. They successfully sold a whole variety of love potions on the campus black market. But not as successfully as some of the guys in the department, who were always mixing things that could be smoked.
Miranda scanned the six-pack. “Those could come in handy. We used to get them in our army emergency pack. You can collect and transport water in them. Close to half a gallon, actually. Or use one to hold a wound dressing in place, keep dirt out, and make the dressing waterproof.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Okay. I have to say, my mind went to a different place entirely.”
She snorted as she shook her head, a half smile twisting her full lips. “One of those will keep your tinder and matches dry in a place like this, or if you have to wade through water.”
She went back to working on their bed. “And condoms burn if you have no tinder. A onetime use, so preferably to be avoided. You can use them to make a slingshot and hunt. You can use them to prevent moisture or sand from getting into the barrel of your weapon.” She finished with the bamboo leaf bedding and wiped her hands on her pants as she turned toward him.
“Okay.” He dropped the condoms back into the bag and took out the toothpaste instead. “We’ll save them. Not that I plan on spending a lot more time in the jungle. We’ll find a way into the city tomorrow.”
He snapped off a foot-long, half-inch-wide branch from a fibrous brush, cleaned it, broke it in half, then gave half to Miranda. Then he squeezed some toothpaste on the end and proceeded to brush his teeth. She followed his example, finished first, and went to bed.
Glenn banked the fire before he joined her on the sleeping platform.
She scooted to the edge to give him room. “I’d like to make more progress tomorrow than we made today.” She sounded frustrated.
She would be. She’d always been a type A personality. They both were. Not in things like sports, but they had been driven about grades and projects. For him, that eventually translated to competing in business.
Night fell around them, the birds in the trees quieting, the bugs starting up their serenade, taking second shift.
“Your file said you’re divorced,” she said out of the blue.
He didn’t want to think about Victoria. “Ancient history.”
“What was she like?”
“Harvard Law School. Blonde and tall. Ambitious. She’s Cesar’s daughter. I’ve known her forever. We’ve always moved in the same circles. My mother and Cesar both pushed a union since we were kids.”
She turned toward him, the bamboo-leaf bedding rustling under them. “Like an arranged marriage?”
“Not like that.” But not blinding love, either. “We were good friends. We respected each other. She worked for the company and knew it inside out. Marrying her had been the logical thing to do. We agreed to give it a try.”
Miranda hesitated a moment before saying, “She was the right woman for where you were going, in a way I wasn’t.”
He stilled. “What are you talking about?”
“I wasn’t the right woman for where you were going. That’s what your mother told me when you took me home for Thanksgiving.”
He swore under his breath. “Don’t blame your running away on my mother.”
“Not what I meant. I knew that I didn’t fit even without her telling me. Believe me. The chauffeur who picked us up at the airport, then the maids, and then the cook clued me in. Different worlds.”
She’d left him because she couldn’t deal with her insecurities. Of all the stupid things to do—
“You’re just as good as anyone else. Money doesn’t make a person better.”
“Believe me, that’s not what Gloria thought. She looked at me as she would have looked at termite damage.” A threat to basic structure.
He stayed silent for a long moment. “I’m sorry if that’s how you felt. You should have told me.”
“Then what? You would have talked to her, and maybe she would have pretended harder that she was happy to see me with the heir to the Danning fortune.”
He shifted. “Just as a quick reminder: it’s the twenty-first century in America, not eighteenth-century England.”
“Yet the heir married an heiress. I assume Cesar owns plenty of company stock since he started the business with your father.”
“Twenty-five percent,” he murmured. Then asked a few moments later, “Is that why you left me? The money bothered you that much?”
“I left because my scholarship ran out at MIT. The army promised to pay me to finish my engineering degree. They did.”
“I told you I would pay the rest of your tuition.”
“And I told you I wasn’t for sale.”
He didn’t want to think about the fight they’d had about that, her deliberately misunderstanding his gesture. She’d chosen not to accept his help.
He’d hated the decision back then, and he hated it now. But he gave credit where credit was due. “You wanted to do it on your own and you did it. Got your degree. Rose in the ranks. Found an exciting career after the army. So now you have everything you ever wanted.”
Miranda thought of the empty, one-bedroom apartment she was renting in D.C. She thought of Matthew and Abby, and her heart squeezed painfully. “I have nothing.”
She felt Glenn’s fingers brushing against her in the dark, then taking her hand.
“I’m sorry about your family.”
Not going to talk about it. “Why did you get divorced?” She diverted.
He thought before he answered. “I’m not sure if we were ever in love. Not enough, in any case. We were friends, we had mutual admiration, lust—we were young and healthy. We made great business partners. She worked at the company. I knew I could trust her with anything.”
He paused, and she waited him out.
“We grew apart. Neither of us spent a lot of time at home. I had a couple of projects that were at a stage where I had to travel a lot. She met someone else and asked me for a divorce. I agreed.”
“How very amicable.”
“No sense in throwing a fit over it.”
That sounded cold. And she knew he wasn’t a cold person. She hated to think that maybe because she’d rejected him, he hadn’t been able to trust the next person, hadn’t been able to give himself fully. He had his pride. Maybe he’d decided not to put himself in a spot where he could be hurt again. Which would have been a shame, because he was a great guy who deserved happiness.
He’d been a good friend to her. She wished they could go back to that. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” she said, letting him hold her hand.
And after a moment, he asked, “Were you very much in love with Matthew?”
“Yes.” Not as much as she’d been in love with Glenn in college, but nothing matched first love, she supposed. Their first explosion of passion had been a mythical thing.
She did love Matthew, even if they hadn’t been able to spend as much time together as they’d wanted to. Their deploy
ments had kept them apart for most of their marriage. She’d hoped that would change eventually, but that day had never come. They missed what could have been.
He turned to his side to face her, rustling the bamboo bedding. “Was your daughter sick? Abby?”
The question startled her, but then she remembered his younger brother who had had leukemia and passed away at ten or eleven. She pressed her lips together. Gloria had already lost a child. And now she thought she’d lost Glenn. Even if Miranda had still carried some resentment toward the woman, she would have let it go in this moment. She never thought she was like Gloria in any way, but they did have losing a child in common.
She drew a slow breath, conscious that Glenn was still waiting for her answer. “Abby was kidnapped. Killed.” The words scraped against her throat as if they had claws.
He pulled her into his arms without notice, his chin coming to rest on the top of her head, the gesture making her want to cry for some reason, even as he said, “I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk about it.”
Good, because she was pretty much incapable of that. Her losses were her own. She didn’t discuss them with anyone, ever.
His warmth and strength wrapped all around her and offered precious comfort. This was the friendship that she’d missed. Matthew had been gone by the time she lost Abby, so she’d borne that burden alone.
And she’d been alone since, for the most part.
She’d dated twice since she’d been widowed, but it never felt right. Glenn’s embrace was familiar and somehow easier to give in to. She snuggled against him. Tilted her head up so she could look into his eyes, as much as she could in the darkness. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For being the kind of guy that you are.”
“A preppy mama’s-boy nerd?”
She winced. She might have said that when she’d broken up with him. “I didn’t mean it. I was mad and embarrassed because I had to leave college. And I hated that your mother was right about me. We would have never fit long term. I wasn’t what you needed.”
