In the Shade of the Blossom Tree

by Joanna Rees

  Forcing herself not to crawl back into bed, she got dressed, pulling on the first things that came to hand – baggy white linen trousers and a black tank top. She tied her hair back with a long scarf. When she looked in the mirror, she saw she still had bags under her eyes and that her skin was dry and sallow.

  ‘Past-It-Girl,’ she said to her reflection. But her old bitchy comments from her days clubbing with Marcus, when they’d both assumed they were the bee’s knees, seemed very, very far away.

  She blew out a breath. Minute by minute, she reminded herself. That was what Dr Savage had said.

  She grabbed the dark shades that were hanging over the wooden mirror, put them on and opened the door to the veranda.

  After days of relentless tropical rain, the sun had finally come out and the birds with it. The noise of the rainforest was so loud she instinctively ducked, as if she might be attacked. But after a few moments she realized that the wildlife wasn’t coming for her and she straightened up.

  She wrapped her arms around her body and walked down the path. It was a familiar view, but somehow today it felt fresh and exciting. As if, for the first time, she was allowing herself to see it not as a prison but as a thing of beauty in its own right.

  The trees stretched high up on either side of the pathway, the sparkling sky peeking through the dense canopy. Squawks, whistles and all sorts of strange bird calls came thick and fast from the foliage.

  The clear pools of rainwater on the path were almost visibly evaporating and the humid air was filled with scent. All around her, large tropical ferns had sprouted pink fleshy flowers. A wriggling procession of ants crossed the path, carrying pieces of bright orange leaves.

  Savvy continued gingerly down the pathway, the mud studded with sections of tree trunks as stepping stones. But instead of following the same route she’d trudged, head down, every day on her way to the communal dining area – where she’d steadfastly ignored any approaches from her fellow inmates – Savvy now chose the path round to the right.

  Go wild, she told herself. Let’s see what else this island’s got to offer. Think positive. It’s not every day a girl gets to wake up in a place like this.

  Rounding a boulder, she stopped and gasped. Before her was the most stunning view of mangrove swamps and, in the distance, the sea, the waves breaking in white jottings across the coral. But it was the sky that got her. The expanse of baby-blue sky.

  She pressed on. A sense of – what? Anticipation? Optimism? – filled her. Just being here. Alone. Somewhere new. But not afraid to walk on. Wanting more.

  But now she saw that she wasn’t alone at all. Way down the path ahead, halfway between where she was and the sea, was a circular stone seating area with a tiled floor in its centre. A man, wearing only a pair of rolled-up ochre cloth trousers, was practising yoga. She stared at his strong, tanned torso and slim waist as he saluted the sun.

  And then she realized it was Red.

  By the time Savvy reached Red, he’d finished his practice. His eyes were closed and his hands were in prayer position in front of his chest. He was standing tall and erect, motionless, like a statue. She noticed that he had some bad scar tissue on his legs. Whatever had caused it must have been painful. Although the scars looked old now.

  If he’d heard her approach, he didn’t move, or acknowledge her. She watched his face, seeing only serenity in his features.

  After a long moment, he opened his eyes slowly, as if he was waking from a dream or a prayer. She got the impression that his inner world was enviably pleasant. She thought of how much she dreaded closing her own eyes and facing the twisted memories her dreams might dredge up.

  There was a moment when he stared at her and she felt a deep flush run right through her.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hello. How you doing?’

  Savvy swallowed hard and nodded. ‘Um,’ she began. ‘I . . . I should apologize,’ she said. ‘For before. I was very rude, I think, and—’

  ‘Please don’t apologize,’ Red interrupted, shocking her by suddenly moving and grabbing her forearms. His touch was firm and strong and she was surprised by how it made her feel. It was . . . nice. Nice to be touched. To be connected to someone else. ‘I got it all wrong. I should have handled it differently. I didn’t realize you were so . . . fragile. I’m sorry.’

  She nodded, surprised. And it suddenly occurred to her that Red had probably got into trouble. He’d been assigned as her counsellor and right after their first meeting she’d hit rock bottom.

  It made her very much not want to be fragile in front of him again.

  Then he surprised her even more by stepping closer and lifting up her glasses. He looked into her eyes. His stare wasn’t threatening. It was direct, open and honest. It demanded the same in return.

  ‘Can we start again?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘If you want.’

  ‘Good.’

  He grinned at her, as if it was all settled, then stepped away.

  Then he picked up a bottle of mineral water and took a long swig, before sloshing some over his face. He wiped his mouth with the back of his freckled forearm. ‘Want some?’ he asked, handing the bottle to Savvy.

  ‘Thanks.’ She never normally shared bottles with people – especially strangers. She felt surprised and flattered that he trusted her to drink from his bottle. But this could be some sort of test. To let her prove she wasn’t the princess he’d accused her of being. She took a sip of the water. It was cold, icy.

  ‘Thirst,’ Red said. ‘Thirst and resentment. Halfway through a detox like you are, I don’t know which one is worse.’

  He wasn’t kidding. Savvy’s mouth had been like sandpaper for the last ten days.

  She nodded, handing the water back to him.

  ‘It’s normal,’ he said, sipping the water himself again and glancing sideways at her. ‘Totally normal. You want to drink your own bodyweight in water every half-hour, but can’t stomach even the thought of it. And the rest of the time, you fantasize about killing Dr Savage and his entire pain-in-the-ass team, before busting out of here in a stolen seaplane.’

  Savvy laughed. ‘You’ve been reading my mind,’ she said.

  He smiled at her. ‘I like that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You. Laughing. You should do it more often.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, I haven’t had too much to laugh about lately,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll come,’ he said. ‘Trust me. It’s not so bad here, Savannah,’ he said. ‘In a week or so, you’ll feel better. And then we can take the horses out.’

  ‘Horses?’

  ‘Equine therapy, they call it here. I prefer to call it horse-riding. Because that’s what it is.’

  Savvy hated horses. It was Elodie who’d been into ponies, when they were kids. Elodie who’d won all the riding trophies. Elodie who’d fallen for Luc because he’d gone riding in the Nevada Desert with her . . .

  ‘I can’t ride,’ she said flatly, beating the memories away. She wanted to blurt out that getting on a horse was going to do nothing for her state of mind. Even seeing one would only remind her of her sister lying dead and broken at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Then I’ll teach you,’ he said, smiling. ‘This place is so big, you’ve got to learn to ride just to see it all. You mustn’t miss out. You know, there’s four different kinds of sea turtles,’ Red continued, ‘that come to lay their eggs on the beach down there. And there’s so much more. At the end of your stay you’ll get to go diving in the blue hole. It’s this amazing atoll. Just incredible. And it’s just out there.’

  Savvy squinted and followed his gaze to the blue horizon stretched out in front of them. She felt small in the face of Red’s unbridled enthusiasm. But sceptical too. What was this guy? Some king of PR for Peace River Lodge? Because if he was, she could do without the hard sell.

  Red breathed in and out deeply, filling his lungs with the clear air. He closed his eyes and Savvy looked at the muscles rippling acros
s his stomach and the thick, curly auburn hair of his chest. He really did have an incredible body.

  ‘So,’ he said suddenly, opening his eyes again. He clapped his hands together and smiled brightly. ‘It’s a beautiful day. What about a little exercise? Nothing too strenuous to begin with. Just to get your strength up.’

  Exercise? She wished now she’d never opened her big mouth.

  But then he smiled again and she realized that he wasn’t going to force her. She took a deep breath. Remember . . . think positive. She smoothed her hair behind her ear.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t do any of this . . .’ she flapped her hand dismissively, ‘yoga stuff, or chanting. It’s really not my thing.’

  ‘OK,’ he nodded.

  She felt thrown. She’d expected him to try to coerce her into it, but he offered no resistance. He stared at her for a moment, as if trying to get her measure.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ he said.

  He slipped on some battered flip-flops and a tatty straw hat. He had several faded knotted-thread friendship bracelets on his wrist, yet despite his hippy garb, when he moved he looked dignified. Like an old-fashioned city gent.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, jumping off the far end of the platform on to the narrow mud path and holding out his hand to her. ‘This’ll be fun.’

  Savvy followed Red along the narrow path, which led down between the giant ferns and into the trees.

  ‘So how long have you been working here?’ she asked.

  Red pushed aside a fleshy leaf to let her pass.

  ‘I’m a volunteer counsellor. I came here two years ago as a patient, when my addictions got out of hand.’

  ‘You were a patient here?’ she said, incredulously.

  She remembered the serenity in his face when she’d seen him just now, at the end of his practice. Was it possible to be an addict – and then to get to that?

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘It took Max months to get me straight.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  He didn’t slow, setting off now into the dense foliage beneath the tree canopy. He moved quickly and gracefully, his long legs taking effortless strides. His cloth trousers were low on his hips. The scarring on his legs below his knees was even more severe when seen from the back.

  ‘It was the usual cliché, I suppose,’ he started. ‘My grandfather died and left me and my brother a fortune.’

  ‘What about your parents?’ Savvy asked.

  ‘They died in a car crash that my brother and I luckily survived. My legs were pretty messed up when they cut me out of the wreckage. Fortunately, I can’t remember it.’ He took a big breath. ‘Anyway, by the time I was thirty I was living in London, hosting parties, thinking of myself as Mr Big. And when I got Grandpa’s estate . . . well, that’s when it all went pear-shaped.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  Red sighed. ‘I blew the whole lot.’

  There was shame in his voice and sadness too. It was as if he were talking about a beloved building that he’d burnt down. As if the regret were too much to bear.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Gambling, mainly. I thought I had all the talent in the world. All the luck on my side. The irony was that Grandpa was the wealthiest of the baronets in our line. He left my brother the estate, but he left me his Mayfair house and the casino attached. And it was in that very casino that I gambled away the deeds to them both.’

  How sad, Savvy thought. No wonder he was full of regret. She loved gambling. Always had and always would. But did that make her an addict? Or did you only get labelled a gambling addict when you lost too much money?

  ‘Then there was the crystal meth on top,’ Red said conversationally. ‘But it’s hardly ever just drink, or drugs, or gambling. One tends to lead to the other, you know?’

  She suddenly had a flashback to the SkyBird elevator at the Enzo Vegas, and how she’d felt telling Marcus about the Holy Trinity of Fun.

  But thinking of it now, thinking of that whole bubble she’d been in . . . well, suddenly it didn’t seem so smart. Not now that it had burst.

  They’d reached a steeper part of the path now. Trees were all around them, bathing everything in hazy green light. The noise from the birds and the tree frogs was deafening. Savvy ducked and swatted away a swarm of gnats. Her shoes were wrecked and the bottoms of her white trousers had soaked up an inch or more of muddy water.

  A small waterfall trickled down the ruts in the path. Red held out his hands and she took them, so that she could jump over the water on to the path on the other side.

  ‘The thing with drugs is that you come on and off them,’ he said, making sure she was steady on her feet before setting off on the path again. ‘I went on plenty of benders, but I was smart enough to know that occasionally I had to straighten up my act. I wasn’t some junkie sitting in a doorway with a needle hanging out of my arm, even when the drug addiction got really bad. I was quite civilized about it. Being an addict is manageable, as long as you can afford it and have a never-ending supply. I was unfortunate enough to have both.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, unsure how to respond.

  ‘But gambling . . . drugs . . . they weren’t my worst addiction.’

  ‘They weren’t?’ What else was there, she wanted to know.

  ‘Sex. That’s what really screwed me up and finally made me check myself in here.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ She laughed. He was joking, wasn’t he? He had to be. But he wasn’t laughing. In fact he looked totally serious.

  ‘I was disgusting. I lied all the time to get what I wanted. And what I wanted was thrills. Always involving different girls. I was chasing after a moment of satisfaction that I never found.’

  Guiltily, Savvy looked him up and down. He might want to deny it, but now that he’d admitted his penchant for sex, she couldn’t say she was at all surprised. Red was designed for sex. He was tactile and direct. And those eyes . . .

  She’d bet that plenty of those women he’d lied to had enjoyed the ride too.

  ‘So you’re sworn off sex?’ she asked, still trying to wrap her head around it.

  ‘Yes I am,’ he said firmly.

  ‘For ever?’

  ‘Until I find someone I want to have a real relationship with. One where love comes first. And then, maybe down the line, who knows? I’ll go back to Scotland. There’s still an island that I’m entitled to – although everyone says it’s uninhabitable. Perhaps I’ll go there and run a sheep farm. Then maybe I’ll fall in love with a local girl, get married, have kids . . .’

  He’d just described Savvy’s idea of hell.

  ‘Well, I wish you luck,’ Savvy said. ‘But I should warn you,’ she added, almost without thinking, ‘true love isn’t so easy to come by. And it comes unexpectedly. And believe me, it doesn’t always last.’

  Red paused and looked at her. ‘So what’s his name?’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘The guy you’re talking about. The guy that didn’t last.’

  She was so startled that she thought about telling him to mind his own business. But they were out here all alone in the middle of nowhere. What was the harm in telling Red? After all, who was he going to tell? The birds?

  ‘Luc,’ she said. ‘The bastard’s name was Luc Devereaux.’

  ‘Maybe you can tell me about him some time.’

  But at that moment they broke through the trees to where the mangroves spread down to the beach. The sand was a dazzling white, dotted with shells. It was so idyllic, it was as if they were honeymooners stranded on a desert island, especially when they passed a battered, disintegrating row-boat, tied to the low angle of a tree.

  Savvy smiled, breathing in deeply. Saying Luc’s name out loud just then, well, she’d felt a weight drop from her shoulders. She took off her shoes and watched her footprints disappearing on the wet sand, washed away by the crystal-clear waves. And with each new step, she began to feel free.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The foghorn sounded across San
Francisco Bay, waking Lois. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, remembering, for a split second, how she would wake up in her childhood bedroom to the same noise. But she wasn’t in her parents’ old Chinatown apartment, she was in an exclusive North Beach town house.

  She’d rented it for the weekend through a contact of Roberto’s, who dealt with all the rich Italians who’d made this area such a des-res locale. Lois had already fallen in love with the pretty blue house with its wrought iron and window boxes full of red geraniums. She loved the exclusivity of the neighbourhood too, with its bohemian vintage shops, cafés stuffed with pastel-coloured cupcakes and spectacular views of the city.

  She struggled up in the unfeasibly large bed and saw that her ten-year-old daughter, Cara, was standing by the window, looking out through a small gap in the long blue-and-white flowered curtains.

  Cara was already dressed, in sparkly jeans that were way too tight, in Lois’s opinion, and a faded jeans jacket covered in badges. The outfit was accompanied by very new black and white sneakers which looked far too big. Her hair that had once been long, like Lois’s, had been cut in a short bob and she wore it in an ugly padded headband, straight out of Mary-Sue’s dressing table, Lois suspected.

  ‘Hey,’ Lois said, smiling. ‘What you doing, hon?’

  ‘That noise,’ Cara said, not turning round. ‘It gives me the creeps.’

  Lois could barely believe it. Chris and Mary-Sue had moved Cara to Washington only four years ago, yet she’d already pretty much forgotten all about this place. Or so it seemed. Was she becoming ancient history to Cara too?

  Lois threw back the thick cover and, stretching in her pyjamas, walked to where Cara was standing. She loved the sound of the foghorn and even the familiar sight of the early morning fog itself.

  She stood behind Cara and put her hands softly on her skinny shoulders, looking out at the view with her. She could see the top of some of the more familiar buildings and the red tips of the Golden Gate towers thrusting up through the blanket of fog into the bright blue sky above.