Return to Tomorrow by Marisa Carroll

Author:Marisa Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 1990-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

IT WAS ALMOST THE LAST quiet moment they had. The baby truly did cry a great deal. He immediately threw up the goat’s milk they tried to feed him from a bottle that Ahnle had stored in her yaam. He objected to the shape of the plastic nipple on the bottle, refused the powdered milk they tried next and only barely tolerated the rice gruel they finally spooned into his mouth.

During the night he was colicky and wakeful. Ahnle and Rachel took turns pacing the floor, rocking him in their arms. More than once Rachel caught the girl staring down at the baby with a puzzled look in her eyes, and she knew that Ahnle hadn’t been prepared to see a year-old toddler in the place of the infant that had been taken from her.

“A child should know its own mother,” she whispered, cuddling the fussy little boy against her breast, as daylight began to lighten the sky above the hills.

“Give him time,” Rachel said comfortingly. “We must leave now. We have a long walk ahead of us.” Outside the hut their guide, Nouvak, a boy barely into his teens, was waiting for them. He carried a small leather pouch and a vintage rifle, nothing else. He walked ahead of the women.

“Everything will be right when we are back in the camp.” Ahnle settled the baby in a sling over her shoulder, his weight resting on her hip. “We will start a new life, Domha and I.”

The trip back went wrong almost from the moment the village was out of sight. It started to rain, a steady, soaking rain that seemed as if it had gotten lost from the rest of the monsoon and only now caught up. Nouvak seemed oblivious to the discomfort, even offering to carry one of the shoulder bags when they had gone far enough to ensure no one from the village would see him doing woman’s work. But it was still slow going.

The baby cried himself into exhausted sleep late in the afternoon and only woke long enough to take a bottle of powdered milk and rice gruel, as they sat around their small, smoky fire that night. Far off in the jungle a tiger roared. Although no night hunters came near their camp, Nouvak slept with his hand on the gun and Rachel didn’t sleep at all.

They were going too slowly. There was too much distance to be made up if they were to arrive near the abandoned fishing village before the next night. Rachel roused them in the still, misty darkness of predawn and they walked all day with only two short halts to feed the child.

They almost made it, but an hour past the waterfall where they’d camped their first night in the jungle, Ahnle stepped on a loose stone and landed painfully on her knee as she twisted to protect the baby. It slowed them down and even though they walked an hour after nightfall, until their young guide refused to go farther along the steep, dangerous path above the stream, Rachel knew it was not far enough.

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