Wild Heart by Patricia Gaffney Page B

There was no sign of his famous book. Perhaps he'd hidden it.
    The only other object on the table was a cigar box. She opened it without thinking, and saw that his cache of treasures had grown more sophisticated since the days of bottle-caps and bright pieces of cloth. Now he had the wooden bird call Philip had whittled for him one day on the beach; a folded picture of two deer, a buck and a doe, obviously torn from a newspaper—Sydney remembered the article, something about wildlife conservation in the Sunday feature section a week ago. Had he made friends with deer when he lived in the wild? If so, these photographs must be a reminder of that, a comfort. She smiled when she saw that he'd saved one of Sam's drawings of her, one of the slightly less primitive-looking ones, with her name carefully printed at the bottom. The last object was a folded white handkerchief, and it wasn't until she turned it over and saw the monogram, SWD, that she realized it was hers.
    Michael had saved her picture and her handkerchief.
    The queerest feeling came over her as she quietly closed the box of treasures and put it back in the precise spot in which she'd found it. She had a sense of excitement and dread, anticipation and . . . something else, almost like fear. Not that it was any revelation that Michael thought about her. When they were together there was always awareness, and interest carefully controlled, on both sides. But these small, worthless keepsakes solidified the attraction, didn't they? Took it out of the much more comfortable realm of—at least for her—the abstract. In a way, they changed everything.
    She went outside, calling his name again. No answer. Could he have run away? The presence of his belongings had reassured her before, but suddenly they didn't. Why would he take them? He wouldn't—he would just go, just walk away.
    "Michael!"
    No answer except the soft lap of waves and the chirp of crickets in the grass. Oh, God, she thought, what if he's gonet She should've listened to Charles. This was bound to happen, how stupid she had been—
    "Michael!"
    "Sydney?"
    She saw him at the edge of the pine woods. He ran toward her at the same time she hurried down the two shallow steps to meet him. He ought not to run, she thought; he was still weak from his wound.
    "What's happened?" he said in a quiet voice when he reached her, his eyes darting everywhere, searching for danger. "What's wrong?"
    "Nothing, nothing. I didn't know where you were, . that's all." Her heart was pounding, but not from exertion. She felt weak with relief. "What's that?" she said, so he wouldn't guess what she'd been thinking. He had something green and filthy around his bad hand. His bandage was gone! "What is that?"
    "I think it's called moss."
    She stared at him, slack-jawed. "Oh, Michael, no. No, you can't put that on there, you can't. It could fester, become infected. Don't you see, you could lose your hand! Come inside"—she pulled on his arm—"and let me clean it. Get rid of that." She plucked the damp, nasty clump of green stuff—it was moss—off his hand and threw it on the ground and pulled him the rest of the way into the house.
    Luckily Dr. Cox had stitched the wound closed, so Michael's home remedy hadn't had time to do any harm. The bullet had torn through the flesh between his thumb and first finger, breaking only one small bone. Dr. Cox had wrapped a medicine plaster around his hand to keep it immobile, but somehow he had managed to unwrap it.
    "What were you thinking of?" she scolded while she soaked his hand in a basin of cold water, gently spreading soap over the closed wound with her fingertips. The sharp black stitches felt strange against the smoothness of his skin; they must feel even stranger to him. "Does this hurt?"
    "Yes."
    Always honest. "I'm sorry. I'm almost done." She glanced at him and saw that he was watching her face instead of her ministering hands. His unblinking regard made her clumsy and oddly