binoculars. Then she gasped in amazement. “Look—near the papaya tree. A pair of them!”
Brant raised his binoculars. Two more doves were pecking at the earth, their white markings clearly visible. Peg and May sighed with deep satisfaction, Natalie adjusted her zoom lens for a picture and Rowan said exultantly, “This is one of the rarest birds of the whole trip and we’ve seen three of them! I can’t believe it.”
Instead of staring at the doves, Brant stared at Rowan. Her cheeks were flushed, her face alight with pleasure; she used to look that way when he’d walked in the door after a three-week absence, he thought painfully. Or after they’d made love.
She glanced up, caught his fixed gaze on her and narrowed her eyes, closing him out; her chin was raised, her damp curls like tiny flames. Steve snapped, “Hurry up and put the scope on them, Rowan.”
Rowan gave a tiny start. “Sorry,” she said, and lowered the tripod.
Don’t you talk to my wife like that.
His own words, which had been entirely instinctive, played themselves in Brant’s head like one of Rowan’s tapes. She wasn’t his wife. Not anymore. And why should it matter to him how a jerk like Steve behaved? Furious with himself, he raised his glasses and watched the two doves work their way along a clump of bushes.
Then Peg said, “A pair of blue-black grassquits at the edge of the sugarcane,” and everyone’s binoculars, with the exception of Brant’s, swiveled to the left.
“How beautiful,” May sighed.
“This is the only island we’ll see them,” Peg added.
“Take a look in the scope, Karen,” Rowan offered.
They all lined up for a turn. Brant was last “All I can see is sugarcane,” he said.
Quickly Rowan edged him aside, adjusting the black levers. Her left hand was bare of rings, he saw with a nasty flick of pain, as if a knife had scored his bare skin. “There they are, they’d moved,” she said, and backed away.
Into his vision leaped a small glossy bird and its much duller mate. A pair, he thought numbly, and suddenly wished with all his heart that he was back in his condo in Toronto, or striding along the bustling streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s capital city. Anything would be better than having Rowan so close and yet so unutterably far away.
They tramped back to the van, adding several other birds to the list on the way, all of whose names Brant forgot as soon as they were mentioned. He couldn’t sit beside Rowan; she was in the front with the driver. He took the jump seat next to Peg and tried to listen to the tale of habitat destruction that had made the dove such a rarity.
They drove north next, to the rain forests in the center of the island, where dutifully Brant took note of hummingbirds, tanagers, swifts, flycatchers and more bananaquits. Not even the sight of a troop of Mona monkeys cavorting in a bamboo grove could raise his spirits. His mood was more allied to the thunderclouds hovering on the horizon, a mood as black-hearted as the black-feathered and omnipresent grackles.
When they reached some picnic tables by a murky lake, Rowan busied herself laying out paper plates and cutlery, producing drinks and a delicious pasta salad from a cooler, as well as crusty rolls, fruit and cookies out of various bags. She did all this with a cheerful efficiency that grated on Brant’s nerves. How could she be so happy when he felt like the pits? How could she joke with a macho idiot like Steve?
He sat a little apart from the rest of the group, feeding a fair bit of his lunch to a stray dog that hovered nearby. He had considerable fellow feeling for it; however, Rowan wasn’t into throwing him anything, not even the smallest of scraps. To her he was just one more member of the group; she’d make sure he saw the birds and got fed and that was where her responsibility ended.
He felt like a little kid exiled from the playground. He felt like a grown man with a lump in his gut bigger than a crusty roll and ten times less digestible. He fed the last of his roll to the dog and buried his nose in the bird book, trying to sort out bananaquits from grassquits.
Their next destination was a mangrove swamp at the northern tip of the island. Although it had stopped raining, the sweep of beach and the crash of waves seemed to increase Brant’s sense of alienation.
Rowan glanced around. “The trail circling the swamp is at the far end of those palm trees.”
“I’m going to wait here,” Brant said. “I can see the van, so I’ll know when you get back.”
“Suit yourself,” she said with an indifferent shrug.
May protested, “But you might miss the egrets.”
“Or the stilts,” Peg said.
“I’m going for a swim,” Brant said firmly.
May brightened. “Maybe you’ll see a tropic bird.”
He didn’t know a tropic bird from a gull; but he didn’t tell her that. “Maybe I will.”
“I wish you’d told us this morning we’d be at a beach, Rowan,” Natalie said crossly. “I’d love a swim.”
“You came here to photograph birds,” Steve announced, and grabbed her by the wrist. She glared at him and he glared right back.
“We’d better go,” Rowan said quickly. “Once we’ve trekked around the swamp we have a long drive home.”
Brant had put on his trunks under his jeans that morning; he left his gear with the driver of the van, shucked off his clothes and ran into the water, feeling the waves seize him in their rough embrace. He swam back and forth in the surf as fast as he could, blanking from his mind everything but the salt sting of the sea and the pull of his muscles. When he finally looked up, the group was trailing along the beach toward him.
He hauled himself out of the waves, picked up his clothes from the sand and swiped at his face with his towel. Rowan was first in line. He jogged over to her, draping his towel over his shoulder. “Did I miss the rarest egret in the world?”
Midafternoon had always been the low point of the day for Rowan; and the sight of Brant running across the sand toward her in the briefest of swim trunks wasn’t calculated to improve her mood. She said coldly, staring straight ahead, “There was a white-tailed tropic bird flying right over your head.”
“No kidding.”
She hated the mockery in his voice, hated his closeness even more. Then his elbow bumped her arm. “Sorry,” he said.
He wasn’t sorry; she knew darn well he’d done it on purpose. But Peg and May were right behind her and she couldn’t possibly let loose the flood of words that was crowding her tongue. She bit her lip, her eyes skidding sideways of their own accord. The sunlight was glinting on the water that trickled down Brant’s ribs and through the dark hair that curled on his chest. His belly was as flat as a board, corded with muscle; she didn’t dare look lower.
To her infinite relief a night heron flew over the trees. Grabbing her binoculars, Rowan blanked from her mind the image of Brant’s sleek shoulders and taut ribs. He meant nothing to her now. Nothing. She had to hold to that thought or she’d be sunk.
The yellow-crowned night heron was
