VII.

     For several minutes she stood in the path uncertainly, watching a veil of rain drifting toward her from the distance. She’d said she wanted to stay, so Aaron had drawn her a crude map with a few landmarks, then he and Alana had headed back without her. On impulse, she turned now and began to make her way, terrace by terrace, straight up the hill. When she couldn’t find the stone steps that connected tier to tier, she climbed the walls, chafing her hands in her hurry, and, as she went, a strange elation caught her up and bore her, like a wave, on its crest. The wind rose, whipping her hair across her eyes and mouth, stinging. Prickly brush snagged her clothes and tore at her bare ankles, drawing blood. She saw the red droplets strung along scratch lines like red beaded anklets, but she clambered on.

      At last the rain began to fall in big, splatting drops. She reached a sharp jut of rock like the prow of a ship, and though the footing was precarious, she stepped out onto it. The rain was pummeling her now, yet she stood there, face upturned, as wind- and water-battered as a carved figurehead, and threw up her arms to the sky with a rush of pure joy. She felt herself immortalized then, wedded to that place and moment, her face like the marble visage in a fountain, splashed forever by the rain.

                                                                               …

     When she reached the shelter and stooped in the doorway, Eben greeted her pleasantly, without a flicker of surprise. He’d built a fire, and the hut felt as warm as toast. With an almost courtly solicitude, he propped her shoes near the fire to dry and draped a blanket over her. Soon she was damply snug beneath it. Together they stared at the fire for a long time. She only glanced at him once, noticing the coarse black bristles in his nostrils. With his disheveled hair and firelit eyes, he looked like some gently mad mystic.

     She realized then that she was hesitating to speak because she was afraid of startling him away, like some chary animal, with her first word. Or worse, that she might wound him with some thoughtless remark, he seemed so fragile and unfathomable. He’s like something wild, she thought, a deer, an antelope…or, no, an okapi, a creature she’d read about as a child, so reclusive it wasn’t discovered till this century in the depths of the African rain forest.

     At last she ventured, “This reminds me of the shelters I used to build as a child out of a card table and blankets.”

     “In a garden?” he asked after a pause.

     “Yes,” she answered, surprising herself, for it hadn’t been, but the idea pleased her.

     Gradually, cautiously, she began to chat about herself, as Alana did with Aaron, talking enough for both of them, but the things she said she chose carefully, turning them over in her mind first, like prudent gifts she was selecting for a stranger. He sat quietly, his head cocked in a listening attitude, his eyes on the fire, nodding and occasionally smiling. Between glances at him she realized that he looked markedly different from his brother to her now. How could she, she wondered, have ever seen them as identical? With more practiced eyes, she saw the nuances of feature and expression she’d overlooked before.

     Eventually he asked her a question or two, naïve and topical, about the place she came from, so she dared—between long silences—to ask him a few too. He considered each one a long time, and when he spoke, his lips trembled and his eyelids half-closed with the effort. In brief, garbled rushes of words, he told her his story, the story Alana had never heard. He and Aaron had grown up in India, playing in the streets with the native children, and developed their speech as a way of excluding grown-ups. Their father was English, their mother Spanish. When they were teenagers, their parents had taken them back to England, where they had worked as models until her death.

     “What was your mother like?” Seely asked.

     “She was…gentle,” he answered.

     By now the rain had subsided, so when Eben went out briefly, she stripped down to her bra, holding her damp sweater over the fire, rocking it from side to side to dry. By the time he got back, she was lying with her legs extended diagonally over the fire, her toes precariously gripping a sooty rock at the back of the hearth, drying the back of her jeans. “Would you like to go for a walk?” he asked formally. As they emerged from the shelter, she stuck her arm impulsively under his nose. “I smell like a smoked pork chop!” she exclaimed—before it occurred to her with chagrin that he might be a vegetarian.

     They walked around the hill, she in her wool blanket and he in a gunny cloak with the hood pulled over his head, looking more than ever like a shepherd of antiquity. The hills receded in graduated shades of gray while the setting sun, not too fiercely bright to look at now, shifted down behind strips of cloud that streamed like banners across the horizon.

     “Is that the ocean?” she asked suddenly, pointing at a blue haze beyond the hills, though it was in the wrong direction.

     When he nodded, she realized for the first time that they were on a peninsula.

     “Aren’t you cold?” she asked, pulling her blanket more tightly around her. He shook his head. It crossed her mind briefly that she should leave, should have left already, if she was going to find her way back before dark, but she brushed the thought aside.

     As they strolled back around the slope, he repeatedly stopped to watch the narrowing rim of the sun. “It’s a wonderful evening, isn’t it?” he said finally.