After the Rains (41 page)

“I guess I’d better go too,” Natalie said. “I promised Dad I’d help him
in the clinic this afternoon.” She looked up at him with an inquisitive expression in her eyes. “You’ve really never played Poohsticks before?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t grow up like you did, Natalie.”

She tilted her chin toward him, brows knit in a question.

“I didn’t have parents who read books to me or played games with me.”

“Oh … I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I survived.”

“Yes, but … it must have been difficult.”

“We made our peace before they died,” he told her. “I think my folks did the best they knew how.”

“Were they just … too busy?”

“I suppose that was it. My father traveled a lot, and my mother filled her time with her social clubs and volunteer work. What I didn’t have in their time and attention they made up for in material things. I never lacked for any tangible thing.”

“It’s not the same though, is it?”

He was drawn to the sympathy in Natalie’s eyes like steel to a magnet, and yet it made him uncomfortable. “No, I don’t suppose it is,” he said. “Just … don’t ever take for granted what you have with your father … and with your family back home.”

She gazed up at him, and he felt as though she could read his deepest longings.

“Oh, David,” she said, dropping her head. When she spoke again, her voice quavered. “I
have
taken it for granted. Thank you for reminding me how much I have to be grateful for.”

“My pleasure,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat, anxious to lighten the moment and turn the focus away from himself.

She seemed to sense his desire to change the subject. Smiling softly, she said, “You have to admit, Poohsticks is a lot of fun.”

“It
was
fun,” he said, meaning it. “I’m glad you made me play.”

“I didn’t
make
you.”

“Whatever you say.” He smiled so she’d know he was teasing, but
suddenly it felt too much like flirting. He looked at his watch. “I really need to get back to work.”

“Okay. See you later, David.” She told the children goodbye, jumped the stream, and jogged down the path toward the clinic.

David watched her go while the two halves of his heart warred.

Natalie sat bolt upright on her sleeping mat, her blood racing, her mind in a state of near hysteria. She felt like she was falling, flying through the air. She heard sirens, and then she was falling into a ditch on a cold Kansas night.

“Sara! Sara!”

The sound of her own screams brought her awake, but the sensation of falling remained strong. She flailed her arms, as though to catch herself, but her hands became tangled in the mosquito netting over her head, which only caused her panic to escalate. She put a hand to her chest and felt her heart thumping against it. She forced herself to calm down and disentangled herself from the gauzy fabric.

She looked around. It was dark, but she could make out the shadowy, familiar forms of her table and chairs, the cane bench in the corner. She was in her
utta
in the village, far, far from the scene of the accident. The jungle night was still except for the white-noise
chirr
of the insects, which she scarcely heard anymore.

She lay wide awake now, trying to put the dream from her mind. It had been so long since she’d thought of Sara. She felt guilty at the realization. She lifted the mosquito net, got up, and went to the window. The village slept all around her. She stood at the window and said a quiet prayer for each member of her family before she lay down again. But sleep eluded her.

She reached for the small flashlight that she kept beside her bed. Fumbling in the dim light it provided, she got up again and lit the lantern on the table.

Rubbing her eyes to rid them of the grit of sleep, she reached for the plastic folder where she kept her e-mails. For the few months she’d been
here, she had collected a surprisingly thick sheaf of letters. Many of them were printed on the backs of David’s old word lists or on the blank side of discarded documents from the library in San José. Nothing was wasted here.

She sat down at the table and began to sort through the pile of papers. Pulling out Evan’s most recent post, she read it again, not sure why it suddenly seemed so important to do so.

Dear Natalie,

Hi from Kansas. Hope everything is going good for you there. I got six e-mails from you today, so I’m going to go through them all and try to hit the high points and answer as much as I can before I fall asleep.

Am I still working? Yep. Same boring job at the gas station. At least I haven’t had to work the late shift the past couple of months.

Do I ever see Jon or Nicole? I ran into Jon at a game a couple weeks ago, but Nikki was home studying. Jon said she has a pretty heavy class load this semester, but you probably already knew that. We didn’t talk very long, but it seems like they’re doing great. Jon’s put on some weight. Nikki must be a good cook.

My folks are fine. Dad’s talking about retiring, but Mom’s not crazy about the idea, so I’m not looking for it to happen anytime soon. I think he just likes to get her riled.

You asked about classes. Candace Shaw (remember the redhead I told you about—from our Bible study?) is tutoring me in speech. You know how I’ve dreaded that class, but Candace has really helped me not to be so nervous about getting up in front of people. Anyway, things are going pretty good, but I’m ready to be out of here.

Yes, Evan, I remember Candace Shaw
. He’d only mentioned her half a dozen times in the last few e-mails. She felt a twinge of jealousy and
wondered just how close Evan and Candace were getting to be. They’d made no promises to each other, she reminded herself.

Tears came to her eyes as she thought of what she and Evan had had together. He had come into her life at a time when she desperately needed a friend, a friend who understood what she had gone through with Sara’s death. What they’d had was special. Yet Evan seemed no closer to sharing her interest in Timoné than he’d been when she left Kansas. Still, she was confident that she had been right to come to Timoné. Timoné offered her hope of redeeming her past—a hope that Evan could not offer.

A blanket of oppression came over her as all her guilt paraded by in a bleak procession. That day in the courtroom when she’d been declared guilty. Her days in jail. Daddy. Evan. Sara. Always, everything came back to Sara’s death. She tried to brush the disturbing memories away, but the accusing images came at her like darts, and each one hit its mark, stinging as it pierced her spirit. She grabbed her head and tried to stop the flow of thoughts.
Help me, Father
.

She rose from the chair, blew out the lantern, and went again to the window. What had caused her to be so agitated tonight?
Lord, help me to put these thoughts away. Help me to dwell on things that are true and lovely
, she prayed, remembering a worship chorus they had sung in their open-air sanctuary yesterday. To her surprise, the words in her thoughts as she prayed were the Timoné words.
Quemaso dumé possu, quemaso dumé beleu
. Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely.

She had found ready teachers in the children of the village. Tommi’s young twins, especially, had taken her under their ornery wings. As they followed her through the village, they delighted in labeling everything for her—the birds, the plants, the parts of the
uttas
. The trained linguist in David might laugh at her, studying under seven-year-olds, but the vocabulary of her tutors was at a close enough level to her own that she understood them well.

And, too, it had helped that she’d begun to spend more time with the village women. She was discovering that Timoné was a very expressive language. Hand motions and facial expressions almost seemed to be part and parcel of the dialect. Their innate sign language made it easier for her to
get the gist of what the women were saying. She wondered how David intended to incorporate
that
into his alphabet.

Yet only a few weeks ago she had almost despaired of ever being able to communicate, and now here she was—thinking,
praying
in the Timoné tongue. Granted, she had a long way to go, but she couldn’t wait to tell David. She smiled wryly into the darkness. She almost hated to give him the satisfaction. But perhaps he had been right to force her to use the language. She was learning. Finally.

She lay back down on her sleeping mat and closed her eyes, practicing how she would tell David—in Timoné. There were a few words she would have to fill in with her own sign language, but he would allow her that. She couldn’t wait to see the expression on his face when she told him.

A stab of guilt pierced her at the thought. What about Evan? The physical distance that separated them seemed to reflect a distancing in her heart from him. In truth, she suspected that Evan was experiencing some of the same feelings. Candace Shaw’s name, appearing with regularity in his e-mails, wasn’t the only hint she’d had. More and more, Evan’s letters were filled with talk about his future in the field of physical therapy, the clinic he would set up, the impressive salary he would earn. And though Natalie couldn’t deny feeling a twinge of jealousy each time she read about something he’d done with Candace, or another mention of Evan’s future that didn’t include her, in a way, it was a relief that Evan was not pining away for her. For the longer Natalie was in Timoné, the more she realized that Evan would never be a part of her life here.

That’s because David is here
. The words came as clearly as if someone had spoken them aloud. It startled Natalie. But she knew it was true. She and David still had their moments when they snipped at each other, moments when he acted so strangely she wondered what was wrong with him. But yesterday when he had played Poohsticks with her and the children on the bridge, she had seen a side of him that filled her with delight—and with something else that she could not name. To her great surprise, she was finding that making David Chambers smile had become one of her greatest pleasures. She drifted back to sleep, wondering how, exactly, to deal with that fact.

Thirty–Five

N
athan Camfield’s heart went out to the young boy who sat on the examination table, trying hard to be brave but grimacing in pain. Luis and some older boys had attempted to turn a lard-coated branch into a torch with the fire in the
fogoriomo
, but the hot grease had dripped down the branch and burned his hands.

They were second degree. If Nathan could keep out infection, the boy would probably heal with minor scarring. As Nate dressed the wound, he recalled the searing pain he’d experienced when he had been dreadfully burned over twenty years ago. Now he noticed the scars and striations on his own hands as though he were seeing them anew.

Nate touched the boy’s arm and was trying to reassure him when David Chambers burst into the clinic. The man’s face was red, his forehead adorned with huge beads of perspiration.

“Nate, we’ve got trouble.” He was speaking English.

“What’s happened?” he asked, his hand still resting on the shoulder of his patient. As David explained, Nate continued to bandage the boy’s wounds.

“I was making routine radio checks. I wasn’t getting a response from Conzalez. Finally Meghan came on and said that two small planes had landed on the airstrip there this morning, and there are about a dozen soldiers—Meghan called them guerrillas—milling around the village. They haven’t made any demands other than forbidding them to use the airstrip and the radio, but—”

“How did Meg get through then?”

“I’m not sure, but she was obviously in a hurry to get off the air.”

Nate covered the boy’s dressing with a bandage and gave him brief instructions about keeping it dry, then he prayed for him. “And stay away from the fire,” he scolded, as he sent the lad on his way. “Did Hank and
Meghan want us to try to get to Conzalez?” he asked David when the door had closed behind Luis.

“She didn’t say so. She said something about overhearing something that made her think the guerrillas were waiting for more planes and that we might somehow be involved.”

Nate looked at David. “In Timoné? She didn’t explain?”

David shook his head. “Like I said, it was apparent she was using the radio against their directive.”

“Did you radio Bogotá?”

“Yes, the mission. It was Randall Sanderson I talked to. He thinks we ought to get out at the first chance.”

“I assume that wasn’t an order?” He and Dave had talked many times about their reluctance to abandon Timoné in the event of a paramilitary takeover.

“No,” David said. “And I didn’t speak with anyone higher up. I wanted to talk to you first.”

Nate nodded, thinking. He didn’t like the sound of this. It wasn’t unusual for paramilitary groups to “borrow” a mission airstrip. It had happened once or twice before at Conzalez, and it happened quite frequently at San José del Guaviare—usually without incident, though two mission pilots had been shot and killed at San José a few years ago. Sometimes it was lone rangers posing as paramilitary in order to move drugs. It was hard to know whom to trust. But this had a different feel to it, and it set off an alarm for Nate. Perhaps he was just more sensitive to it all because he had Natalie to think of.