“Never mind,” Fire said, as he tried to turn his mind in on itself like a Roman villa. He lowered his lids and listened to his breathing, and judged the saltiness of his mouth by running his tongue over his palate. Soon Zachy’s voice was beaten into the droning world outside his head—from which another voice was calling.

“Hello,” the voice said in a tone both timid and insistent. “Hello, can you hear me?”

And he opened his eyes to see Sylvia standing there in a black cotton dress with a flouncy hem, holding a pocketbook against her breasts like a schoolgirl clasping a three-ring binder. For a moment he wasn’t sure if he knew her. Her hair was longer now, tumbling to her shoulders in waves and curls from a part in the middle of her head. Unsure of how he felt, he made a simple declaration. “I didn’t know you were here.”

chapter eighteen

She didn’t answer immediately. She just stood there, leaning back on one leg, using her body weight to keep it from shaking. The melancholy in his voice was making her want to hold him, but he seemed to her so different now. Mischief no longer danced across his brows.

“How are you?” she asked.

He raised his palms and shrugged. Through the neck of his open shirt his collarbone dipped and rose, and she noticed that he was thinner. His skin was tighter around his mouth and his cheekbones seemed higher, making his face appear impregnable. Tears, she thought, could never breach those high embankments.

“It’s so sad about Ian, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

She had been standing at the edge of the crowd when he arrived, and had watched him from a distance as he talked first with I-nelik and then his father, both of whom she knew by instinct. Twice when he stood on the edge of the common it seemed as if he’d looked at her, but fearful that she wouldn’t know what to say, she’d merged into the shifting crowd. She had arrived on the island the day before, using a provision in her airline ticket to stop over en route to St. Lucia, where Diego had arranged for her to stay in a villa with a view of Les Pitons, the twin volcanic plugs that overlook the languid village of Soufrière. There she planned to rest and regroup and write for a month. She’d landed in Montego Bay and taken a commuter plane a hundred and twenty miles across the island’s hilly spine, landing at an airfield that was obviously a pasture till the pilot told her different. As they came in low across the turquoise water she half-expected the plane to sprout pontoons and skim to a halt on the rippling waves, through which she made out schools of fish. Panicking as the nose went down, she closed her eyes and squeezed her knees, and in a moment of suspended weight and expectations she found herself imagining that she wasn’t going to a funeral, but rather to spend a month with her lover, who’d be waiting for her in that shed with the funky turret—the terminal, she soon realized—with one arm outstretched to take her bags, the other to pull her close, and his warm lips wet and slightly ajar to taste her tongue with decorum, delaying the release until they were alone. So when she didn’t see him, she cried, and she kept on crying during the forty-minute drive along the coast to her hotel. In her room she thought of him as she lay beneath the netting in the four-poster bed, wondering as she gazed at the redwood rafters if he, her lover, loved her still—believing no, but hoping yes, regretting now the choices that she’d made.