A Gentle Rain (5 page)

"I stuttered."

"No one will remember the stutter, my dear. They'll remember your devotion and your eloquence."

"You really believe I did justice to Mother and Dad?"

"Yes. I saw a side of you I've never seen before. Passion. Conviction. Fearlessness. Why are you backsliding into uncertainty now?"

"I don't fit in here. These people aren't my `tribe.' That's not their fault. I'm going back to Dos Rios. I'm a librarian and a cultural observer. An efficient manager and a wonderful organizer. I can help the preserve's researchers with various projects, write reports, cross-index all their books-"

"They're perfectly able to manage without you."

"Oh?" I arched a brow. "Who else can turn rice, bananas, collards and cassava root into an incredible meatless dish?"

"Kara."

"I'm not going to blossom into a charismatic activist like Mother. I'm not going to be an eloquent leader like Dad. But I can make a heckuva sprout salad."

"You made a promise to save a place-and its people-in your parents' honor."

"I meant it. I'm thinking I could set up a second refuge. Acquire some large tracts of the rainforest in Peru."

"That's simply a matter of spending money. Kara, the key to your promise at the memorial service is this: You. You have to find your own place, your own tribe. You have to take risks. Get out of your comfort zone. That's what your parents always tried to tell you.

"They raised you to accept and appreciate and protect ways of life very different from your own. You've never applied that wonderful lesson to the world outside the rainforest. You have to care. You have to step into a world unlike your own. Anything less is just an academic exercise and a pretentious use of your inheritance."

"Pretentious? I'd love to be pretentious." I stood. "Look at me." I indicated my blue-jeaned, sweatered self. "I can't even manage to be semi-pretentious."

"Now, really, Kara. How one looks has nothing to do with how one is."

"Sedge, there's something I need to tell you. When I scattered Mother and Dad's ashes in the rainforest, as they always said they wanted, I saved a little-" I lifted a delicate gold locket from my necklace-"to keep here."

"Perfectly appropriate. Makes more sense than keeping their ashes in an urn on the mantel. I've never understood that custom."

"This necklace isn't just a sentimental keepsake. I have this strange, despairing need to be certain Mother and Dad really are part of me. That's why I'm wearing this locket." I held out my hands, searching thin air. "It's as if... as if I've always felt orphaned."

He took my hand. "My dear, I assure you. You have always been loved. And you have always been a Whittenbrook. And you always tivill be." He sighed and rose to his feet. "It's a cold night. I'll get you a brandy. No more of these morbid thoughts."

I stood there thinking. What if I don't tivant to be a Whittenbrook, anymore?

I couldn't sleep at all, that night. I didn't sleep much, anyway. I had nightmares about the crash site, and often woke up in a cold sweat. I thought I'd never sleep soundly again.

At four a.m. I sat cross-legged on the steel floor of Mother and Dad's walls-in safe, a vault built in what had once been The Brook's cellar. The steel floor was cushioned by a hand-woven Peruvian rug. I was dressed in organic cotton pajamas and an alpaca sweater. I recognized the contrast and the irony.

Trays of jewelry surrounded me; millions in fine gems and precious metals were at my fingertips, some of them important Whittenbrook heirlooms, others mere baubles given by friends, family, royalty, state leaders and captains of industry.

Uncle William stored his share of the ancestral loot elsewhere. My parents had rarely mentioned their personal hoard, which they'd intended to donate to museums or charities. I planned to pick out only a few mementoes. Then Sedge's staff could disperse the rest as Mother and Dad had wanted.

I pulled my father's boyhood stamp collection from a lock box in the wall. I leafed through a collection of handwritten notes he'd received from philatelist pen pals in the late 1940s when Dad was a young teen. I never thought of my parents as older than average, but they were both over forty when I was born in the mid-1970s.

So here were Dad's World War Two era pen pals: Churchill, Truman and Eisenhower. Oh, and here was one from a distant cousin of Dad's. That handsome war hero from Massachusetts. Jack Kennedy.

I put the letters down and sat there numbly. I had a prized childhood collection, too, which I'd carefully itemized, catalogued and stored at Dos Rios. But my collection consisted of posters, telenova videotapes and fan magazines featuring Latin American wrestlers. Lucadores.

Dad had collected stamps with Churchill.

I'd collected pictures of masked, bare-chested, tights-wearing wrestlers.

I got to my feet again and staggered to a wall. Another lock box protruded slightly from its berth. I pulled it out, set it on a small table, then poked a master key into its lock. I expected another stamp collection. Instead I lifted out a slender manila folder with a yellowing label across the top.

CONFIDENTIAL DOCUMENT REGARDING KARA

I frowned. My parents had kept no secrets from me. None, certainly, that need be locked in a vault. I flipped the folder open.

I stood there for a long time, weaving slightly in place as I read and re-read my birth certificate. I tried to convince myself it was some joke, or hoax, or mistake. Jane Austen, however, reminded me that instincts speak far louder than turgid rationalizations.

As she said: Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am r qht, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?

These papers and their meaning were real.

Slowly my legs folded, and I sat down on the cold steel floor.

Charles and Elizabeth Dos Rios Preserve, Brazil 1974

Haggard and red-eyed, Charles Whittenbrook waited beside a Jeep in the warm, foggy rain. He watched dully as a pilot landed a small plane on the refuge's airstrip. Sedge had traveled for more than twenty-four hours straight to arrive this quickly in the remotest region of western Brazil. He took Charles in a deep hug, despite the soft rain falling on their bare heads. "How is she? And how are you?"

"We are in complete despair," Charles said simply. "And filled with self- loathing."

Elizabeth sat in a wicker chair on the screened porch of the preserve's main house. Wrapped in a blanket woven by the women of a local tribe, a blanket they had given her and Charles in honor of the coming baby, she gazed in stark misery, unblinking, into the dense, primordial forest.

Her auburn hair hung in unbrushed clumps around her pale cheeks. She held a Beatrix Potter book in one hand. She had bought all the classic children's books in anticipation, and every day for months she had read aloud to the child growing in her womb.

"It was a miscarriage, my dear," Sedge said gently, sitting across from her in a stiff chair cushioned in Carnivale colors. "It could have happened under the safest circumstances. Neither you nor Charles is to blame."

"A seven months' fetus is not a miscarriage. It is a baby. And it would have lived, had we not been so convinced we ourselves are immortal."

"My dear ..."

"I am forty-one years old. I am a scientist. I know the risks at my age. How could I have been so reckless? There was no need for Charles and me to visit that village personally. We could have sent help for the sick people there. But no, there we were, bumping along on horseback. I should have known better, Sedge. I killed my baby."

Charles, standing beside her chair, clamped a hand on her shoulder in comfort and rebuke. "No, we are both responsible. I should have known better, too. I encouraged you to go. I ... God help me, I thought, `This is a tale we'll tell our child. How we took her with us on these missions, these humanitarian efforts.' God help me."

He cried quietly, still clasping Elizabeth's shoulder. She lifted one shaking hand to cover his, and shut her eyes. "Sedge, our child is buried in the forest. Buried in the forest. We were two days from here. We had no choice. We dug a grave on the edge of the salt lick where thousands of magnificent birds gather. An extraordinary place."

Charles got himself under control. "We intend to leave the grave where it is. No debate. That's our choice. Only we know where our child's body rests. But Father will insist on a memorial service in Connecticut. I won't deny him that honor. Nor will I deny him the right to tell me how my ideals and my foolishness have destroyed his grandchild. That's precisely what I'm telling myself."

Sedge stood. "You called me here because you trust me."

"Because you are more like a brother to me than a paid advisor."

Sedge accepted the praise without reaction. "Ifyou do trust me, then take my advice. Do not tell anyone you lost this baby." Charles and Elizabeth stared at him. He went on, "Your father will never forgive you. He will be livid, and he will be vicious. You will be punished in a manner spectacularly favored by Whittenbrooks."

"For God's sake, Sedge, I couldn't care less about losing my inheritance."

Elizabeth moaned. "We hardly need my father-in-law's fortune to continue-"

"Think of the consequences. William will get the lion's share, with the rest scattered to dilettante cousins, and they'll buy up more companies and build more Whittenbrook mansions, and the money shall go to no good purpose except the furthering of Whittenbrook acquisitions."

"We're not going to lie just to guarantee my inheritance!"

"Do you or do you not wish to `save the planet' as you are always putting it? Do you or do you not wish to be doting parents to a lovely child?"

Sedge frowned down at Elizabeth, whose hand had formed a fist on the Beatrix Potter book. "More than anything," she confirmed. "But I doubt we'll get pregnant again. The odds are against it. We had so much trouble this time."

"Do you want a child to whom you can leave your legacy? Some wonderful son or daughter who will be raised with your vision, your hope for this soggy old planet, your dreams? Who will receive a fair share of the Whittenbrook wealth and carry on your philanthropic use of it? Charles, do you?"

Charles fought with himself silently, then nodded.

Sedge sighed. "Then stay here for the next two months and tell everyone back in the States that your pregnancy is progressing beautifully. I'll report that the two of you were glowing pictures of expectant parenthood during my visit here, and-" he paused, studying them for any signs of weakening resolve-"over the next two months I will find you a newborn baby to call your own. I promise you, no one will ever know the child wasn't born here."

Charles and Elizabeth stiffened in shock. "Let us discuss it," Charles finally said. Sedge nodded and left the porch.

Sedge waited nearly an hour without word. He made a gourmand's grimace as he sipped strong Brazilian coffee among the colorful tiles and rustic woods ofthe preserve's aviary. Dozens ofinjured or orphaned macaws and parrots eyed him from soaring perches.

A fledgling macaw, one of the hyacinths, fluttered down and sat on his coffee hand. The electric-blue youngster was no more than a foot tall, then. "Oi," the bird said. Even its Portuguese accent was perfect. A native Brazilian.

"Hello to you, in return," Sedge said. "You must be the amazing Mr. Darcy, about whom I've heard so much."

"Oi."

"Speak the Queen's English, not Brazilian Portuguese, you."

"Oi."

"All right, then. Oi."

Charles and Elizabeth entered the room. "We want a baby," Charles said.

Sedge nodded his approval. "You'll give some unwanted child a wonderful new life."

Elizabeth's throat worked. "Our baby was a girl, Sedge. With ..." she raised a tired hand to her hair. "Red hair. Like mine." Her voice broke. Charles put an arm around her. She leaned against him.

"A newborn girl with red hair it is, then," Sedge promised. "I shall find the best."

Kara

The present

"I should have known they'd save the birth certificate," Sedge said wearily. "I urged them to destroy it, and they swore to me that they would."