The heat of the sun finally made her uncomfortable enough to think of getting back into the water. Stella came paddling to the beach and came walking ashore, carrying the light foam board under her arm.
Stella limped badly. She had been Leila’s friend for years. Leila had realized in the very beginning with this strange, shy girl that any kind of special consideration made her become remote. So she had treated her as if there was no handicap. And, indeed, there was far less of one than Stella believed. Leila knew the history of it. It had been a difficult delivery. The nerves of the left leg had been damaged. By the time the specialists had achieved a sufficient regeneration to give her the use of it, the leg was smaller around and shorter than the other leg, and it would never be very strong. Both legs were pretty, slender, shapely. They did not match. That was all. Her figure was very good. She had a delicate and sensitive face, lovely eyes which seldom looked directly at anyone. She had a dark, brooding look, and only the very few who knew her as well as Leila knew the quickness of the hidden humor, the taste for the absurd.
Only once on the cruise had Leila made an effort to comfort Stel. Carolyn, one night at dinner, had been exceptionally, cleverly vicious. She talked about bringing “poor Stel” out of herself. She seemed incapable of saying her name without adding the “poor,” and she would jump to Stel’s assistance when she least needed it. Leila awoke in the night in the cabin she shared with Stel to hear the smothered sound of weeping. So she had stepped over to the adjoining bunk and slid in with her and held her. Stel had been rigid at first, and then had softened and clung and wept herself out. It had made Stel strange toward her for the next few days, but then they had found their way back to the casual warmth they knew best.
Stel dropped the board and sat on it and said, “Madame the Queen is really winging it today.”
“Whatever it is, if somebody could bottle it, you could use it to destroy empires. Your father ought to give her a good thumping.”
She made a face. “He’d rather thump on Roger. My dear daddy made his own bed like they say. I guess the daughter-daddy bit clouds my vision, but he acts so damned — goaty about her. She keeps him on the hook. She makes his hands shake. Years married and still it goes on. He’s scared to thump her, Leila. She wouldn’t let him near her for a year. Anyway, thank God Garry’s got the sense to steer clear of her.”
“It’s Garry now? Gracious me!”
“Oh, come on! He’s a nice guy, Leila. A really truly nice guy. And this cruise is rough on him and his wife. I’m glad they’re getting paid well at least. A happy ship. Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of arsenic. Honest, I’m sorry I dragged you along, but I think if you hadn’t been along, I’d have jumped overboard a long time ago.”
“Oh sure. You know, for a guy who’s supposed to have been captaining for years, Staniker seems sort of keyed up and twitchy to me.”
“Darling, the Kayd family does that to everyone. It’s our proudest boast.” She paused. “I guess what really gets me is what Carrie does to daddy. He is so strong in every other way. And she keeps him groveling around whenever she feels like it. She keeps putting the knife in me to see if she can get a rise out of him. When he doesn’t do a thing to get her off my back, then I resent him. And when he crushes poor Rog, I resent him more. I know what she’s doing. She’s cutting us loose from him. Uncontested possession. Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing. This is the last cruise of the Kayd family. As a happy united little group at least. Rog can keep taking it if he wants to. Leila, maybe we ought to jump ship in Nassau and fly back home.”
“Mean it?”
“Mmmm. I don’t know. It’s nice to think about.”
Leila sighed. “There’s not enough cruise left to make it worthwhile to stir up the fuss. Let’s stiff it out, kid. Let’s show ’em we’re tough. Honey, I have to get into that water before I begin to smoke.”
In the late afternoon of that day at Allen’s Cay, with Bix and Staniker still not back, Carolyn napping, Stella reading in the shade of a tarp Roger had rigged over a part of the cockpit deck, Leila swam ashore again and wandered, looking for shells. She came upon Roger standing in the shallows and casting out over the reef where Stel had paddled before lunch, using light spinning gear. When she asked him if he was having any luck, he lifted a stringer of gaudy fish out of the shallows and said, “Mary Jane’ll know which of these can go in the pot.”
Fifty feet further along the shore she came upon big and curious animal tracks and called to Rog in an excited voice. He came hurrying and looked and said, “Hey now! Garry said there might be some on this cay. Iguana. This groove is where his tail drags. Let’s see where he went.”
“But those feet look pretty big. Don’t they bite?”
“Garry said they’re timid unless you corner them and try to grab them. He said there used to be thousands and thousands up and down the Exumas. But they’re delicious. Like chicken.”
“Lizard steaks? Gaaah!”
“Come on.”
They followed the track for several hundred yards, losing them in the rocks then picking them up again in a sandy patch further along. At last they lost them for good. He had driven a driftwood sliver into the arch of his foot, in the middle of the sole. He sat on a flat stone, and she knelt and picked carefully at it with thumbnail and fingernail until at last she got a firm grip on it and pulled it free. She held it up in triumph and said, “You will walk again!”
He laughed. His teeth looked very white in the saddle brown of his lean face. Of all aboard he was the only one to take a tan as deep as Staniker’s. He had dark hair, like Stella’s, and the same mobile sensitivity of feature, the same hint of vulnerability. Yet he was unflawed in any physical way, slender, muscular, moving with sureness and precision and grace, except when he had to perform any task when his father was watching him. He wore pale blue briefs, a ragged hat from the Nassau straw market.
They were in a cleft in the rocks, with a sand floor, with walls rising eight sheer feet behind him. It was like a small room which had been cut in half diagonally, looking south across the blue of the depths, turquoise of shallows.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, and his smile faded away. He looked at her in a way which made her aware of the skimpiness of her one-piece suit, cut to a deep oval in back almost to the base of her spine.
She rose with a bright smile and said, “Ol’ Iguana is probably back there chomping up your fish, Rog.” As she turned away he caught her, hands on her waist, pulling her back, burying his face in her hair.
“Knock it off, Roger. Please.”
“Leila, Leila, Leila.”
“I mean it! Stop it right now.”
He turned her swiftly and tried to put his mouth on hers. She wiggled and twisted and pushed at him. It was all so stupid and unexpected and ridiculous. When struggling seemed to only excite him more, she decided to go dead. She took a deep breath and let it out. She let her arms hang. Except for keeping her lips tightly compressed, she went limp. He would give up in a moment. Her eyes were closed. His hand clasped the back of her neck, his arm against her back holding her tightly against him. He slid his other hand down inside the low back of her suit and, fingers splayed wide, hand cupping her bottom, pulled her against the hardness of himself. The sun came red through her eyelids. He smelled of sun-flesh, wind, salt and maleness. She felt a dreaminess, an inner turning, a loosening of her mouth, a yearning for Jonathan’s body so wretchingly vivid she felt as if her heart had been torn loose. As she put her hands lightly on his shoulders, pressing herself into him, with coughing catch of breath, suddenly all the textures were wrong, and in shame and fright she plunged free of him, stumbling in the sand, to come to her feet and find herself trapped in the corner of the V. He prowled toward her, hands low, his face as blind as the stones around them.