Kathleen Creighton - Secret Agent Sam

“It did,” Hal corrected her gently, with a dubious wag of his head. “We can’t be sure it’s still intact.”

“Well, then, we’ll just have to put our trust in the Lord,” Esther said, and Cory saw her throw Sam a broad wink, and Sam smile wryly back at her. “After he sent these lovely people to bring us home I don’t think he’s going to let us down now, do you? After you, my love-lead on!”

Still wagging his head, Hal shouldered the larger cooking-pot bundle his wife handed him and set off through the dripping undergrowth, following a trail that remained invisible, at least to Cory. Esther fell in behind him, looking much like a terrier dogging the heels of a Great Dane. After a quick, almost involuntary-seeming glance at Cory, Sam followed her.

Tony moved up beside Cory and paused to rearrange the bags and cases that festooned the upper half of his body. “What is this, ‘After you, Alfonse’?” he said with a nod toward the others, who were already disappearing in the heavy undergrowth.

Cory gave a dry laugh without much humor in it. “Something like that. Can I give you a hand with some of that stuff?”

“Naw, that’s okay, I got it.” He took off the bandana that covered his head and mopped at his face and neck.

Cory gave an exaggerated start. “Whoa-I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with hair before.” Tony’s normally shiny head was now sporting a furring of dark hair. “Looking a bit scruffy, there, buddy.”

“Like you’ve got room to talk,” Tony scoffed, baring his teeth in a wide grin and pointedly rubbing the sparse black hairs adorning his chin and upper lip. “That’s the thing about us Injuns-no whiskers to worry about.”

“Injun, hah,” Cory said as he ran a hand over the half inch or so of beard on his own face. “What are you, maybe a quarter? You just like an excuse because you can’t grow a beard.”

“Excuse! What do I need an excuse for? Beards are a pain, man. Couple more days and you’re gonna start looking like the reverend, up there. Not me.”

“Yeah,” Cory said ruefully, “I am starting to feel a little like Robinson Crusoe. Probably don’t smell too good, either.”

Tony snorted. “Me, either.” But his eyes followed Sam as she ducked in and out of the banana trees up ahead. He lowered his voice and remarked, “Seems like some of us are holding up better than others.”

Cory grunted a reply, not wanting to notice the way Sam’s hair curled dark and damp on the back of her neck, or how her wet T-shirt clung to the smooth, fluid muscles of her back. Not wanting to acknowledge the gnawing ache in his groin whenever he looked at her, or the bigger, less well-defined ache higher up, in the vicinity of his heart.

“Something goin’ on between the two of you?” Tony asked in the same muttered undertone.

Cory lifted a shoulder. “Don’t know what you mean. I already told you-”

“Hey, I’m not deaf and blind, man.”

“Look, I told you, that was in the past.” Cory paused, exhaled and muttered, “And I’m beginning to realize she’s not the same person I knew then.”

Tony threw him a fierce bright glance. “Who the hell is? Look, man, you two have something beautiful going-sparks, some kind of connection. Don’t tell me you don’t-even an emotional doofus like me can see it. So, maybe you blew it once. You got a second chance now. Don’t blow this again, man.”

“What are you, Dr. Phil all of a sudden? Since when are you such a big fan of monogamous happy-ever-after relationships? Anyway,” Cory said, stiffening himself against hope and a strange wild despair, “that’s not my call to make. She’s made her choices.”

“Oh, right,” said Tony, “so it’s all her fault.” Cory threw him a dirty look and got one in return. “When I was a kid? Any time any of us kids got in an argument or a fight-and with eleven of us there were a lot of fights-Mama used to say it takes two to make a quarrel, and she’d take us by the scruff of the neck and she’d march us into a corner and make us sit there together until we’d ‘kissed and made up,’ was the way she put it.” He paused, and Cory felt the stab of his fierce golden eyes, all the sharper, maybe, for being those of his closest friend. When Tony went on, though, it was in a gentler tone. “All I’m sayin’, man, is you two need to get in a quiet place and talk this out.”

Cory made a scoffing noise, but his heart wasn’t in it. He hoped he was still mature enough to acknowledge when someone was right.

After a moment Tony shrugged and said, “Okay, so she did something that knocked you for a loop. Now maybe you know how she feels.”

Again Cory snapped him an angry look, but this time the one Tony returned was somber, maybe even a little sad. “Just think about it, man,” he said softly, then quickened his step and moved on ahead of him.

Left alone with his thoughts, Cory was in wretched company. Think about it? What is there to think about? The woman I love, the woman I wanted to marry and have children with, is a field agent-an undercover operative-a spy-for the CIA! At least he was pretty sure it would be the CIA. Or some agency even more secret he’d never heard of. How was he supposed to deal with that?

“Now you know how she feels…”

Wait a minute, he protested silently, this is different. It’s different. And anyway, I’ve told her everything. Everything I remember…

Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled, gradually coming closer. Thunder rumbled now, too, inside his head…Thumping, pounding, banging, angry and insistent, growing louder…coming closer.

He slammed shut the doors of memory, shuttered the windows and braced himself against them, breathing hard and shaking, his skin grown clammy and cold.

There was still some daylight left when they came to the hunter’s hut, little more than a bamboo cave in a mountain of jungle greenery. While Esther and Sam banged on the bamboo walls with sticks to chase away any rats and mice already in residence, not to mention snakes that might have come to dine on them, Cory and Tony helped Hal cut banana leaves to fortify the roof, using the knife from Esther’s bundle. They managed to get settled in before the rain came again.

They ate a supper of some fruit they’d picked on the way, though it didn’t do much to satisfy Sam’s hunger; she was thoroughly sick of fruit, and starting to hallucinate cheeseburgers.

Then they sat huddled, listening to the rain drumming on the freshly cut leaves above their heads, smelling the cool damp fragrances of earth and growing things, and Sam thought of the first people, crouched in caves and jungle shelters not much different than this one…wondered whether they’d felt this same loneliness and isolation, and whether they, too, had been thankful for the warmth and vibrancy of other human bodies close by in the darkness, their comforting presence felt even without touching.

The rain passed quickly and the moon came out. Sam watched it slip through the cracks in the bamboo walls and paint uneven stripes across the sleeping Lundquists, lying curled together, front to back, like spoons. And she felt the sense of loneliness and isolation inside her deepen into bottomless sadness.

I remember that, she thought. I remember what it’s like to feel so close to someone that he seems like only another part of me, his smell as natural to me as the air I’ve grown accustomed to breathing every day, and as essential. His warmth like sunshine on my skin. I remember the first time I felt like that…it seems like yesterday…

I’m in a boat out on the lake at dusk, sitting with my back against Cory’s chest, and his arms are around me and his long legs drawn up alongside mine. I feel his chin resting on the top of my head, and sometimes I feel his warm breath as he touches his lips to my hair. Shivers go through me, then, and I turn my head to his shoulder and breathe him in…his smell reminding me of clean sheets right off my grandmama’s clothesline, and I recall the way as a little girl I used to like to bury my face in that sweet freshness, and I wish I could do that now, to him. Right now, with Cory, I feel the way I did then, a child in my grandmama’s house…safe, secure, loved. I feel like I’m home.

The evening star is bright in the darkening sky, and far across the water I can see my mom and dad standing on the dock, twined together so they look like one person. I know that my dad has found his way home, too, and a great wave of emotion rushes through me, happiness so intense it makes tears come to my eyes. Everything I’ve ever wished for is right here, mine, like this wonderful gift I’ve been given, and everything I want for my life from now on seems within my grasp.

How did I get so far from there? Sam thought as she gazed at the sleeping Lundquists, her eyes dry now, burning with a sense of loss and loneliness too great for tears. So far from home. For the first time she truly understood the depths of her father’s despair when he’d feared he might never again find that place where he belonged.

Cory was that place for me; I knew it even then. How did I let that go? Yes, I wanted more…there were so many things I wanted to do, places to go, possibilities to explore…was that wrong? I always thought he’d be there for me to come home to…my place of belonging, where I would always feel safe and welcome and loved.

Was I wrong to want so much?

Would I have given up my dreams of becoming a pilot, and later this chance to make a difference in the world, if I’d known what it would cost me?

Why must choosing one cost me the other? Why should I have to sacrifice half of myself?

It’s not fair, dammit, she thought, stirring angrily in the silver-dappled darkness. She drew up her knees and wrapped her arms tightly around them, rested her forehead on her knees and squeezed her eyes shut, hugging herself against a chill too deep to reach.