The Paper Swan(58)

When he was done, Damian threaded a cord through the shells and tied the ends. He held it up before the fire. The necklace glowed in the golden light, frail and ethereal.

“Here.” He gave it to me.

Damian had never made a seashell necklace for anyone except MaMaLu. Suddenly, I realized what he was doing. He was saying sorry. He was making up for the necklace he had thrown overboard, the necklace that had taken his mother away from him.

Have you ever held a life in your hand? He had dropped the locket in my hand and closed my fingers around it. Here, feel it.

I’d thought he was nuts, but my mother’s necklace had cost his mother’s life. And yet, here he was, giving me a memory of his mother to make up for taking away mine.

“She was my mother too,” I said. “MaMaLu was the only mother I knew.”

Huge, heavy sobs ripped through me. I reached for him, wrapping my arms around him, wanting to share this pain, this grief. Had anyone held him when she died? Had anyone comforted him? He stiffened, but let me cry. I cried for him. I cried for MaMaLu. I cried for our mothers who were gone, and for all the years we’d lost in between.

When I was done, I realized that he was holding me just as tight as I was holding him. I felt like Damian was starting to thread his way through all the broken, battered, beautiful pieces of himself, back to me, back to us, and I held him tighter.





SLEEPING NEXT TO DAMIAN WITHOUT touching him was torture, and not in a romantic or sexual way. I felt like a part of me that had been cast away had floated back, and I wanted to hold it, hug it, keep it from slipping away. I knew it would freak Damian out, so I suppressed the urge, although I may have accidentally, in my sleep, draped an occasional arm around him. For those few seconds, I allowed myself the luxury of re-acquaintance, the warmth of his skin, the realness of my long-lost best friend lying beside me. Then Damian would slowly pick up my hand and return it to my side. I had a feeling he knew it was a ruse. After all, I had stuck tenaciously to my side of the bed on the boat, my body as stiff and straight as a board, lest any part of me touch any part of him. And now I was all arms and legs. I knew he knew, and that made me smile, because he inched away, and I inched closer, until he was perched at the edge of the bed, and the only thing that kept him from falling was the mosquito netting tucked under the bed.

Whether I stuck to my side or invaded his, Damian was up at the crack of dawn. Not surprisingly, he looked after the cooking, although he left me chores without saying a word: a broom and a mop, standing square in the center of the kitchen, laundry detergent sitting on a stack of towels, a toilet brush dangling from the bathroom doorway. I fumbled through my tasks, but if Damian noticed that I mopped before I swept or that the towels were now a weird shade of pink, he didn’t say anything.

He brought in all my shopping bags from the boat, and although my sequin skirt wasn’t exactly toilet scrubbing gear, I caught him checking out my sparkly ass. I trailed him all day in that skirt, a cropped top, and the shell necklace he’d given me. I had pretty much been stuck to Damian’s side the whole time he was recovering, so it was my first real look at the island. It was just a few square miles around, hemmed in by a white, sandy beach on one side, and lush, tropical forest on the other. The little house was nestled in between, under the shade of tall trees. The front faced mirror-calm waters, protected by a coral reef, and the back opened up to palm groves, papaya trees, and shrubs with thick, glossy leaves.

It was obvious that Damian knew the island like the back of his hand. He knew where to find small, red bananas with a texture so creamy that they tasted like thick, sweet custard, with a hint of raspberry. He knew where the sun hit, at what time, and where the coolest breezes came off the ocean.

“Do you come here often?” I asked, as he checked on the generator. It seemed like the place was pretty self-sufficient. A generator, tanks to collect and process rain water, propane to heat up the water we used for cleaning and bathing.

“It was home for a while,” he replied.

“You mean when you and Rafael were hiding, after the incident with El Charro?”

“How do you know about El Charro?”

“Rafael told me.”

It didn’t seem to bother him. He was who he was, with no pretense about his past or the things he had done.

“Does anyone know you’re out here? I mean, whose property is this?” I asked.

“It’s mine now,” he said. “No one else had much use for it. It’s too small for tourism, too much beach for farming, too remote for fishermen.”