Page 9 of Girl in the Water

Even here in Brazil, with his head in the book he was writing, he missed things. While Carmen…

Carmen watched the swimming girls in the river. The strongest-looking jumped on the newcomer, and for a moment, it looked as if she was holding the poor girl under water.Too long. Alarm shot through Carmen, but before she could say something, the skinny girl came up, sputtering.

Had they just been playing? They were too far away to tell.

Carmen shuddered. “There’s something sinister about all this black water.”

“The water is dark from the decomposing organic matter in the swamps. Think of it as dark compost tea. Same reason why the Rio Negro is black,” Phil said with patience.

“I want to talk to one of the girls.”

“How?”

“When they come out tomorrow morning, I’ll swim over.”

She was a strong swimmer, and the Içana wasn’t that fast or wide, just a small tributary of the Rio Negro. She could more than handle the current.

Phil closed the laptop and came to stand behind her, then enfolded her in his arms. “You want to help everyone you meet. You have a beautiful heart, you know that?”

He turned her in his arms and kissed her. And she kissed him back. He had a beautiful heart too. She loved him so much, more than she’d ever thought it was possible to love another person.

She didn’t resist when he tugged her toward the bed, tugged the rubber band from her hair so the dark waves spilled onto her shoulders, or when he laid her down, or when he unwrapped her sarong-style skirt.

They were young and healthy, full of hormones and full of love, so within a minute, they were naked, their limbs entangled. Phil could make her body sing as quickly as he could make her heart sigh.

“I love you,” she whispered as she floated off into pure bliss, her body contracting around his.

“I love you too,” he said, rolling them so she was lying on top of him. He ran a gentle hand down her back.

They kissed, then soon they were making love again.

They didn’t use protection. When she’d been a teenager, she had bone cancer and received chemotherapy, which resulted in infertility.

Phil didn’t know. She couldn’t tell him. Phil wanted a bushel of children. But she wouldn’t be the woman to have them. Eventually, she would have to let him go.

Shewouldlet him go.

But not yet.Not yet.

Later, when she lay in his arms, glowing and spent, she said, “I want to do more than talk to those girls. I want to save them.”

And he said what she knew he would say. “I’ll help.”

She couldn’t stand thinking about the girls in misery just across the river, when here she was, happier than she’d ever been. The girls’ fate seemed incredibly unfair and, more than that, tragic.

Carmen kissed Phil’s cheek and sat up in the bed next to him. “I want to talk to the girl the fat man brought down the river two months ago. I see her standing in her window sometimes, looking upriver. There’s something in the way she stands, in the set of her shoulders, that’s just heartbreaking.”

The skinny, tall girl was definitely the most vulnerable of the bunch.

Phil sat up against the headboard and took Carmen’s hands. “All right. You talk to her. If she says that she’s there against her will, we’ll bring her across the river and hide her. I can take her down to Manaus, find her shelter and maybe a small job at one of the international charities.”

Carmen squeezed his fingers.

They knew another American in Manaus, an older woman, Mrs. Frieseke, who worked for See-Love-Aid. They’d met her at the airport in Rio when they’d arrived in Brazil, had a good chat while they’d all waited for their connecting flight.

“How about the others?” Carmen asked.

She wanted children, desperately, but since she couldn’t have any, she at least wanted to help the needy children of the world. She couldn’t stand seeing a child harmed.