Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

all.”
    Honor looked at the other woman’s dark indigo eyes, saw the lines of tension and unhappiness around her mouth, and felt even worse.
    Summer waved her fists, caught one of Hannah’s hands, and began gumming it enthusiastically. When she got to the big silver-blue diamond, she settled down to gnaw in earnest.
    “Teething, aren’t you?” Hannah murmured, smiling.
    “Uh-oh, the drool factory is in full cry. Here, you don’t have to put up with that.”
    “Don’t worry. My hands are clean.”
    Honor blinked, then laughed. “I wasn’t worried about that. She cut her first tooth on a fish cosh.”
    “What’s that?”
    “A blunt instrument used to put fish out of their misery as soon as we get them aboard.” Honor smiled and looked hopefully at the other woman. “Do you like to fish? I can’t get Faith out on our boat. Faith is my twin sister.”
    “The only thing I’ve ever ‘fished’ for are oysters, so I don’t know if I like to fish.” Hannah nuzzled Summer’s fine, fiery hair and inhaled the paradoxical scent of a baby—fresh powder and wet diaper. She had skin that made a petal look like sandpaper. Eyes as wise and mischievous as a monkey’s. “The Yanomami tribe we lived with were land people. Monkey hunting, slash-and-burn agriculture, that sort of thing. No fishing. Although some tribes hunted Amazon catfish that were bigger than men.”
    “Yanomami? Are we talking Brazilian rain forests?”
    “Right.” Hannah shifted Summer onto her hip, giving the baby a better grip on her hand, and herself a better grip on the baby. The motions were unconscious. Along with every village girl over the age of five, she had been a baby-sitter for the younger children while the mothers worked in the small, burned-over fields. “From the time I was five years old until I ran off to get married at nineteen, I lived with the Yanomami. My parents were missionaries at the time. My father still is.”
    “If anyone ever took me away from the sea, I’d miss it. Do you miss your rain forest?”
    “No.” The curt reply echoed, making Hannah wince. “I missed the place where I had spent my first five years—Maine and the kaleidoscope of seasons. But there were some good things about the rain forest. The scent of the air at dawn, the flash of butterflies bigger than my hand, the incredible liquid light after a rain, campfires at night, the laughter and mischief of the children . . . ” She nuzzled Summer again. “But I never felt at home there. Not like my parents. I suspect that they loved the rain forest and the Yanomami even more than they loved God. I know that they loved their tribe more than they did me.”
    Honor laughed. Then she realized that the other woman had spoken the simple truth.
    “Mother was forty-four when I was born,” Hannah said calmly. “They had lived among the Yanomami for twenty years. They called me a gift from God, and accepted that they had to leave the rain forest for my first few years. The risk of childbirth and babyhood in Stone Age conditions is just too great. It must have been terribly hard on my parents to leave the land and people they loved. They gave me five years to grow strong before they went back. They were very dutiful parents.”
    “But not to be loved,” Honor protested.
    Hannah shrugged. “Their love and loyalty was unselfish, given to God and humanity rather than to a selfish personal concept of family.” She rubbed her cheek against the sweet, soft baby. “I’m not that generous. I want to love and be loved, to have a family of my own.”
    Summer looked up at Hannah. Archer’s eyes, clear and gray, hints of green, a whisper of blue; another layer of pain growing in Hannah like an oyster creating a pearl, layer after beautiful layer, growing in silence and darkness, waiting . . .
    The shadows in Hannah’s eyes made Honor wish she could go to her, hug her, tell her everything would be all right. Whatever everything was. But Honor was old enough to know that a lot of things didn’t turn out all right. She looked at the clock and stood up quickly.
    “Time to get Summer’s daddy,” she said. “Come with me and meet the monster’s maker.”
    When Honor reached for Summer, the baby frowned, gnawed harder on Hannah’s ring, and clung more tightly to her prize. Hannah laughed.
    “I’ll carry her,” she said to Honor.
    “She weighs a ton.”
    “That’s the nice thing about healthy babies. They’re an armload.”
    Honor coded