The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(100)
“You said you’d stay with me if I needed you,” she reproached him, nevertheless, because she was selfish.
“You don’t need me now,” he said cheerfully. “You’ve got yourself, and your strength, and you have Lupe.”
“I know. Yet I do not like this parting, and besides, there’s something you’re not saying, and I hate it when people keep secrets.”
He took off his hat, and his easy mirth was spoiled as he gave her a wry smile. “I think it’s no secret,” he said, but his voice was low. “I need a little distance from you. Those two paces I told you about? They’re more like an inch now. Perhaps I’ll gain a measure of perspective, perhaps not. I’d like to try.”
As if to punctuate his words he took a couple of steps toward her, and she did not move away, but she did not come closer, either. There was no tremor of her lashes; she regarded him straightforwardly, as she always had. The silence between them had a weight to it.
“If I said I loved you, then you would stay, wouldn’t you?” she muttered at last.
Again he smiled his wry smile. “Then I wouldn’t love you, for you’d be dishonest and I’d know it.”
“I never wished to drive you away.”
“You aren’t. Not truly. Don’t apologize.”
She felt sad, but she stood straight and dignified, extending her hand. “Whatever may happen, I will stay in touch with the lawyer and forward my address. Should you wish to find us, you can turn to him. Look for us at journey’s end. Whether something changes or nothing at all, look for us. I’ll make an offering for you, so that you may find your way back.”
He shook her hand and smiled. Then he placed his hat back on his head and grabbed his small suitcase. “Good luck to you, Carlota, on your own journey,” he said.
She closed the door behind him, not waiting for the calesa to take off, and walked back inside, contemplating the floor. Lupe came out into the courtyard and stood next to her.
“Montgomery’s gone,” Carlota said.
“I know. He was waiting to say goodbye to you. He didn’t want to look like he was waiting, but he doesn’t have a gambler’s bone in his body. You can tell anything he’s thinking by staring at his face,” Lupe said with a shrug. “At poker he is terrible and probably not any good at any other game of chance. Cachito beat him more than once, you know? I’m not sure he can play chess, either.”
“Yes, well, maybe he shouldn’t play cards if that’s the case.”
“You will miss him.”
“Yes,” Carlota said simply.
Because he was dear to her, if not in the way he wished, then in other ways. But Carlota wouldn’t lie and distort reality, she wouldn’t cheapen her heart with half-truths. He wouldn’t want it, either, he’d said so. She would speak no shallow promises.
“Don’t cry, now, Carlota. You’re a sentimental ninny, sometimes.”
“Hush, I’m not going to!”
She held Lupe’s hand, her sister’s hand, and leaned her head against her shoulder, smiling.
“It’ll be fine. We’ll meet him again. When we find the others, when Cachito and everyone else is reunited with us. We’ll meet then,” Carlota said.
She pictured it, crystal clear, the house in a secluded spot, away from prying eyes and curious questions. In the southeast, near mountains, by the bend of a river or the ocean. She wasn’t sure of the exact spot, but she could smell the flowers and the dew and the leaves in young trees. They’d be safe and the world would be good, and the house would be filled with the laughter of her family and the people she cherished most.
They were out there, the others, and they’d find their way back to her. The tide comes out, but then returns. They would be reunited.
She thought of the jokes Cachito would tell and how Lupe would roll her eyes at her when Carlota became sentimental and wept for joy. She heard the voices of all of them, engaged in animated conversation.
In the chapel where they prayed she had spotted an Eden without flaw and knew that there need be no bitterness in God’s creation. The heaven they would build would be theirs and not built by a man.
The heaven they’d build would be true. For she had hope and she had faith, and as she clutched her sister’s hand, she had, most of all, love.
She pictured the dusty road that led to the house. It would be perfectly visible from her window, from her room, which would be bathed golden and soft each day by the sun’s rays.
Until one morning, when the weather was fair and the birds sang in the trees, there’d come a single rider down that road. He’d move without haste, and she would walk slowly to the gates of the house and wait there, patient, until he reined his horse and dismounted.
Then she’d smile and she’d say: welcome home.
Afterword
THE DAUGHTER OF DOCTOR MOREAU is loosely inspired by the novel The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells. That book tells the story of a shipwrecked man who discovers an island inhabited by strange creatures that have been operated on as part of Dr. Moreau’s vivisection experiments. Vivisection was a controversial practice in the late nineteenth century, and Moreau seeks to discover the “extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape” by literally changing animals into men.