by Jill Barnett
He didn’t have to be there, though, because his image was still in her mind. The image of his tall body backlit by the setting sun. Like that of a visiting angel.
But she knew him for what he was.
He was no angel. He was a heartache.
Hank went swimming every night. He had to. It was the only way he could get any sleep, swimming in the lagoon lap after lap. It cooled his thoughts. It cooled the fire in his blood, a fire he had trouble controlling for the first time in his life. And he didn’t much like that fact either.
Smitty avoided him. That was fine, considering. Over the last few days he’d spent most of his free time watching her, watching her do anything. Burn a meal, light a fire, chase Annabelle.
He’d even taken a page from Smitty’s book and slinked up the rocks, lurking in the shadows to watch her bathe. God . . . He’d only done that once. There was only so much a man could take.
After that he’d only watched her brush her hair dry in the sunlight.
He’d had the same response.
One afternoon he’d watched her walk on the beach when she didn’t know he was there. She had stopped and drawn words in the sand. And he’d gone back and read them after she’d left. Just single words strung together with no particular meaning: sick, mind, heart, Hank, kiss, no, why?
She was going through the same thing he was.
He wasn’t certain how he felt about that, which was why he went swimming in the middle of the night. After a few more minutes, he came out of the water and pulled on his pants, then walked back to the hut.
It was past midnight. The moon was low in the west. He walked into the hut and quietly closed the door. He looked at her hammock, but it was empty. He scanned the hut, letting his eyes adjust. He spotted her outline on a mat in the corner of the new part of the hut where Annabelle slept.
He moved quietly and stood over them. She was curled on her side, asleep, the baby sleeping in the crook of her arm. Her other hand rested lightly on the baby’s chest as if she needed to feel Annabelle’s heartbeat.
Some foreign emotion hit him, flooded into him. And he stood there, confused but compelled to watch them because doing so filled some empty need in him. After a few minutes he looked at Theodore and Lydia. They were sound asleep, too. He turned back to Smitty.
There had been a time when he had wondered how people could bring a child into the world. It had been something he didn’t understand.
Until the past few weeks.
Standing in the dark and watching all of them, he realized that he had grown to know them as he hadn’t taken the time to get to know anyone in a long time. He felt something so powerful that he couldn’t name it.
He had an insane need to just watch them.
He had no idea how much time passed, but finally he went to his hammock, stretched out in it and rested his hands behind his head. He stared at the woven thatch above him.
The night was fading, he knew. Somewhere outside the moon was going down. Before long it would be that ink black part of night just before morning comes—the darkest part of each day. He’d heard it called the dark before the rising sun.
Hank knew that darkness as well as he knew his own name. He had carried it in his soul for years. But he looked at the children, then at Smitty and Annabelle. He turned back and closed his eyes. And for some reason, the darkness faded.
Chapter 25
One large blue eye stared down at Muddy from the mouth of his bottle. He grinned and waved. The eyeball moved back, and he could see the distant features of Lydia’s face.
With the tinkling of bells, he swung his feet off the striped divan and stood. He checked to make certain the bottle opening was clear, raised his arms, and blasted out.
Just to make the children laugh, he did a backflip, three aerials in mid-air, and a spread-eagle landing, where he hovered over their heads for as long as it took the smoke to dissipate. He gripped his knees, spun, and landed on his feet, bells ringing in his wake.
Lydia covered her mouth and giggled.
Theodore’s eyes crinkled. “Holy cow!” he said in a loud whisper.
Muddy looked around. They were inside the hut. He leaned toward Theodore. “Why are we whispering?”
“’Cause Annabelle’s asleep. See?”
The baby was curled into a sleepy ball in the corner. Muddy smiled and thought, Ohhhh.
There was something about babies, whether they be human babies or bunnies, kittens, puppies, ducklings, chicks, and piglets and even baby elephants. For some odd quirk of nature, when one looked at them sleeping, there was this overpowering urge to say, “Ohhhhh . . . ” followed by a tightening in one’s chest—right near the heart.
Yes, most babies could reduce just about anyone to goo-gooing morons. It was a universal and timeless thing—something that had been true for over two thousand years and in any part of the world.
In fact, he remembered one baby in particular, a little boy that had been born in a stable. He smiled. Three wise men had traveled far, only to say, “Ohhhh . . .” when they saw the little boy in his bed of hay.
Babies held a sweet innocence that could grip the heart of the most cynical. Even Muddy.
There was one exception though.
Baby camels. Baby camels were nearly as obnoxious as adult camels. They were smaller, but they could spit just as far and just as frequently and with surprising accuracy.
“We’re bored,” Theodore told him with a sigh big enough to make his whole chest sag.
Muddy looked at him, then at Lydia. “Would you like to visit the bottle?”
“Me? Truly? I can go inside?”
“Is that a yes?”
Both the children nodded. He held out his hands and said, “Hold on tight and close your eyes.”
A minute later, they were inside the bottle.
Hank grabbed another nut from a candlenut tree and tossed it onto a nearby pile. The nuts looked like chestnuts and contained a strong oil. When they were strung like beads on coconut fiber and lit from the bottom, candlenuts would burn upward and would give a few hours of flickering blue light.
They needed light. The hut was dark enough in the daytime, but at night it was pitch black inside. The last two nights had been too damn dark.
There was no fuel for the tilley lamp. Smitty had made the fuel they’d had last longer than he thought possible. Now Hank wanted the dim glow from the candlenuts so he could watch them sleep.
Every night, he just stood there as if he expected them to disappear. As if he were waiting to find out that it was all a big joke.
Ha! Ha! The laugh’s on you, Hank Wyatt. Fool. You thought you could have it all? Ha!
“Hank! Hank! Lookit here!”
He shook himself a second, then turned toward the sound of Theodore’s excited voice. And froze.
“Lookit! It’s a baseball an’ a glove an’ a bat! Muddy said Leedee and I could pick anything from inside his bottle to play with. I picked the baseball stuff.” The kid thundered toward him until the baseball cap flew off, and he skidded to a stop. He turned around and grabbed the hat, then dusted it off on his pants. He plopped the hat back on his head and started running again.
He stopped in front of Hank and looked up at him from beneath the long brim of a hauntingly familiar cap. “Look!” His face bright and excited, he held up the ball and bat. “Remember the baseball stuff? Will you teach me to play, Hank? Please?”
Hank felt as if every ghost of his past were gathered around him, all chanting and chiding, there to make him remember things he wanted to forget. He stood there, feeling as if he had lost control and hating it.
He’d had enough trouble dealing with Smitty. Dealing with the stupid, pissant heroic reasons he’d walked away from her when every instinct inside him had been shouting “You’re a chump! Take her! Hell, man, she’s yours. Take her!”
Instead he watched her sleep.
“Will ya teach me how to play baseball, Hank?” He turned back to the tree an
d reached for a nut.
“I don’t know how, kid.”
“You don’t?”
“Nah.” Hank didn’t turn around.
There was silence. “Haven’t you ever seen a baseball game or nothing?”
“Can’t do it, kid. Sorry.”
There was no sound from the kid. Hank stood there, not wanting to turn around. Finally he gave in.
Theodore was looking the bat and the ball as if they had suddenly broken.
“Tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll teach you how to fish.” He reached for another nut from a branch just above his head. His fist closed tightly over the nut. “But when it comes to baseball, I can’t teach you anything.”
“Oh.” There was a wealth of childish disappointment in that one word.
Hank tossed the nut on the pile without looking at the kid. He turned back to the tree. “You go on now. It’s almost dark. You can’t be running around in this jungle alone.”
“But you’re here. Can’t I stay?”
Hank leaned down and picked up a couple of the nuts. “Here. Put some of these in your pockets and take them to Smitty. Tell her to light them. They work like candles and will burn for about fifteen minutes. I’ll come back in a little while.”
Theodore frowned down at the plump brown nuts in his hand, then turned them this way and that. “What is it?”
“A candlenut.”
“What’s a candlenut?”
“Smitty can figure it out.”
Theodore gave him an odd look.
“You be a good buddy now and go on.”
The kid stood there, looking as if he wanted to argue.
“Buddies, remember?”
Theodore looked down and crammed some nuts into his pockets, then picked up the bat. He gave it one last look of longing before he ran back through the trees.
And Hank stood there, staring at nothing but an old memory.
Muddy flew low over the jungle, darting in and out of the tall ebony trees and flying around a giant banyan with a crown as big as a mosque. He circled above a figure, a tall man with black hair, who stood near a candlenut tree as stiff and unmoving as a statue.
Drifting on the trade wind, Muddy circled, then flew down and lit on the upper branches of a nearby dragon tree with thick foliage, a squat shape, and a branch with a view of the clearing.
Finally Hank shifted, bending and picking up a broken branch from an ebony tree. He gripped the branch in two hands, then shook it slightly as if he were testing the weight of it. He rested it on his shoulder like a bat. And again he stood there, silent and looking angry.
He grabbed one of the candlenuts from the three-foot pile, tossed it high in the air, and swung. He hit it. The nut sailed over the trees like a home run.
He picked up another nut and slammed it east. Another and slammed it south. Another and slammed it north. He hit pop flies. He hit fouls. He hit every nut in the pile. Again and again, like fly balls.
When the nuts were gone, he let the branch drop to the ground. He leaned on it while he tried to catch a breath. Sweat glistened from his forearms, forehead, and face, and poured down his neck and temples.
Muddy heard a slight rustling and looked down. Margaret stood beneath the dragon tree with Theodore. Muddy watched them, wondering what they would do. She held onto Theodore’s small skinny arm, then bent toward the boy and lifted a finger to her lips, signaling him to be quiet. She waved him back into the trees, taking easy, quiet steps backward. They just stood there, watching.
Hank didn’t move. He was still bent over the branch like a tree broken by a wind too strong.
Theodore stared at him as if he’d lost his best friend. Very quietly he looked up at Margaret and said, “Hank said he didn’t know how to play baseball.”
She pulled Theodore back a bit closer to the tree trunk and whispered, “Let’s leave him alone for now, okay?”
“But he said he couldn’t teach me. He said he didn’t know how.”
“I know, sweetie.”
“Just like he said he didn’t know how to be a dad.”She looked down at the boy and held out her hand.”And he forgot the question game. He forgot. He never forgets. It’s like a circle.”
“Hank has some troubles on his mind, Theodore. I don’t think he forgot on purpose.”
Theodore’s expression said he didn’t understand. He turned and looked back at Hank one last time, then, his head hanging down, he slid his hand into Margaret’s and they turned and walked away.
Muddy watched them leave and quietly move into the dense thick jungle. They had only gone a few feet when Theodore began to cry.
Chapter 26
The next morning Lydia announced that Christmas was four days away.
Sitting outside the hut, the group looked at her. Hank had been showing Theodore how to tie knots in a line they would be using to fish. Annabelle was tethered to Margaret while she tried to scrape burned breakfast from a skillet. And Lydia was playing with a clocklike contraption with sand and water vials, a maze, and a pulley. It made strange sounds—gurgles, the hiss of falling sand, and a chink-chink sound when one of the cog wheels turned. She had brought the gadget out of Muddy’s bottle for entertainment.
“I figured out what it is,” Lydia announced. “It’s a timepiece.” She pointed to a wheel with levers. “Look.”
Hank went over to her. Theodore tagged behind.
“Right there are the hours.” Lydia looked up. “And here are the numbers from one to thirty-one. See? They spin around the numbers of one through twelve.”
Hank looked at it for a minute, then looked at her, amazed. “She’s right. According to this, it’s December twenty-first.”
“Four days till Christmas?” Theodore began to jump up and down. “That means Santa’s coming!”
Margaret shot a quick and knowing look at Hank.
“Santa Claus is coming!” Theodore frowned down at his bare feet. “We need stockings.” He was quiet for a second, then asked, “Does Santa come if there are no stockings?”
With that question, Margaret looked at Hank. He played the coward and stepped back a few steps.
She looked down at Theodore, her mind still seeing his teary face from the evening before. She had tried to make him understand that Hank hadn’t been trying to hurt him. But little boys didn’t understand complicated moods the way adults did.
For children, things were either black or white. Luckily, though, children were resilient, too. They seemed to bounce back quickly when something new caught their eye. Something like a promise by Hank to take Theodore fishing today and now something as exciting as Christmas.
She slid her arm over Theodore’s shoulders. “I think I remember seeing some woolen stockings in one of the trunks.”
“You did?”
She nodded, then picked up Annabelle. “Come along.” She held out a hand to Lydia. “Let’s go look.”
Later that afternoon, Hank reached around Theodore’s small shoulders and pulled the fishing line higher. “Let me show you how to do this.” He looked down at the kid and winked. “It’s easier to catch a fish with a long pole. The current pulls at this string.”“But you caught a bunch of fish this way.”
The kid always had an argument. “Only because I didn’t take the time to make a fishing pole.”
A second later they got a strike.
The kid squealed like a pig and started jumping up and down. Hank grabbed the line and wrapped it around his wrist. It was a helluva good-sized fish. He dropped his hands so the line was in front of the kid. “Pull!”
And they did. A few minutes later they had a large grouper flopping in the sand.
The kid was still hopping up and down while Hank pulled the hook out and added it to the other two perch he’d caught.
The kid looked at it. “What is it?”
“A grouper.”
“It’s a big one, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, kid. You did good.”
Suddenly, without warning, the ki
d flung his arms around Hank’s neck and hugged him. It caught Hank completely off guard. He just knelt there, his arms hanging at his sides with Theodore clinging to his neck.
Very slowly Hank rested his palms on the kid’s bony little back.
“Thank you, Hank. I’m gonna make you the bestest Christmas present! You wait and see!”
“Christmas present?” he repeated, then he stared at the kid.
“Yeah! Smitty says we’ll make each other Christmas presents. Can I go tell ’em ’bout my fish? My grouper?”
“Sure, kid. Go on.”
Theodore took off running down the beach toward the others.
Christmas presents, he thought. Hell. There was something he hadn’t thought about in years. Long minutes passed while he pretended to be fishing. He wasn’t fishing. He was thinking.
Smitty had the children on the beach gathering shells for something. Probably gifts, he thought, the kid’s words eating at him.
He heard their laughter. It was clear and shining, as bright as their faces, like dawn coming through the night. The children’s cheeks were fresh and rosy. Lydia held out her skirt filled with seashells and other treasures while Theodore made them stop and look at everything he found. Annabelle toddled next to Smitty, who sat in the sand like a child rather than an attorney. She dug and talked about their treasures with as much excitement as the kids.
And he sat there, not caring much about anything but watching them. A moment when time held no importance. When nothing else mattered.
After a while he turned and looked at the Pacific. It was the same. The same rolling dunes and flat, wet shoreline spread in a crescent before him. The same coconut palms waved in the constant breeze. The same waves washed up on the shoreline. The same birds flew in the sky.
But somehow he knew things had changed. He didn’t feel the same. And he wasn’t certain if he liked that or not.
He knew the moment when Smitty looked at him. He could feel her look, as warm and fresh as the trade wind that brushed his face. He turned just as she got up. She said something to Lydia who nodded and took the baby. Smitty walked toward him with that long-legged, hip-swaying walk of a woman, the walk that made him want to be behind her, watching.
