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“I’m watching Carly,” she called back.
“Lockie’s with her now. She’s dressed. She’ll be fine.”
“No, really …”
“I’m going back to the sand, Dad,” Josh said. He and Callan did one last whooping jump from the ledge together, with legs kicking wildly in the air and arms turning like windmills, then they swam toward the stretch of beach.
“She’ll be fine with the boys,” Callan repeated when he approached Jacinda, as if there’d been no break to the conversation. “She’d have to go in pretty far to get out of her depth here.”
He touched bottom and stood waist-deep, then began to stride toward the beach, the water streaming from his body as he got closer and shallower. He reached Jacinda, his skin glistening and his dark, baggy swim shorts hanging low on his hips. He wasn’t self-conscious about his body, just took it for granted.
Jac didn’t. She saw hard bands and blocks of muscle, a shading from tan to pale halfway down his upper arm, a neat pattern of hair across his chest, and the way the cold and wet made every inch of his skin taut.
Standing calf-deep, he gestured behind him. “See, there’s about six meters of sand all the way along this side, before it starts to shelve down. She’s safe without you. And you’d be safe, too, if you came for a jump off the ledge. It’s so much fun, Jac.”
He used the same tone that some men might reserve for attempting to get a woman into bed, and it was the first time he’d called her Jac, even though she’d asked him to three days ago.
“Mmm …”
That’s not an answer, she realized. I can’t believe I’m even considering this.
“Hey?” he cajoled. “Thinking about it? The rush as you race forward and hit the air? It’s so good. And you have to yell, that’s a requirement. Lockie first did it when he was five. Promise you’ll yell?”
Live a little, said his eyes. There was a contained eagerness coming from him. He was like Carly about to give Mommy a special piece of artwork from preschool. How could you not respond just exactly the way those eyes begged you to?
“Callan, I’m not even promising to—”
“You need a reason to yell in life, sometimes, and this is the best one I know.”
“Yeah?”
I don’t believe this.
I am considering it.
I’m seriously thinking about it.
The yelling idea is incredibly attractive.
Her heart started beating faster. She could smell horse on her body, dust in the air, creek water in Carly’s wet hair. She was eight thousand miles from the place she called home, on six hundred thousand acres of land.
And she was seriously wondering if she might be brave enough to run and jump, while yelling, into a deep, creepy water hole.
Just do it.
“Gotta earn those yabbies.” Callan held out his hand, ready to pull her up. Behind him, Lockie had started putting lumps of meat inside old stocking feet and tying them with string. Under his direction, Josh was searching for good long sticks of eucalyptus to act as fishing poles.
“This is way outside of my comfort zone!” Jacinda warned as Callan’s grip locked with hers.
A moment later, she reached a standing position and they came face-to-face, confronting Jac with something else that was way outside of her comfort zone. His hard, wet body, his slightly quickened breathing, his exhilarated grin. All of it was too close and too real when they stood just inches apart like this.
Feeling it, too, and clearly not liking it, he let her go and told her in an awkward way, “Strip, before you chicken out.”
She was only wearing a T-shirt over her two-piece tank-style animal print swimsuit. She crossed her arms, peeled the T-shirt over her head and dropped it on a patch of dry sand safely distant from the kids’ messy play. She discovered Callan looking over at the kids. His lean, strong neck looked too tight and twisted. It wasn’t a natural angle. He’d been—what?—averting his eyes while she stripped?
In her animal print, she felt like Jane to his Tarzan. But had Tarzan been that much of a gentleman?
“I’m coming as far as the ledge, but I don’t promise to jump,” she said.
His head turned again, back to her, and a frown dropped away, replaced with a twinkle in the depths of those eyes. “We’ll see,” he drawled.
He grabbed her hand and galloped her into the water. Getting deeper in two seconds than she’d gone with Carly in fifteen minutes, she gasped again. He was right, the deeper you went, the colder it got. “Let me go!”
“Swim,” he said, and struck off ahead of her with a powerful stroke.
She followed, terrified. The water felt so different to California pool water or salty ocean. So smooth. Sooo deep. How far down did it go? She had to fight away images of creatures lurking down there.
Before her imagination got out of control, they reached the lower part of the ledge and she hauled herself up onto the warm rock, copying Callan’s fluid movement with a more awkward one of her own. Her body tingled all over and she panted for breath.
“You did great,” he told her. “You’re a good fast swimmer.”
“Only because things were chasing me.”
“Bunyips?”
“Wha-a-at? There is something down there! I knew it! What the heck are bunyips? Oh sheesh, I’ll never get back to the beach, now! I’ll have to go the long way around, over the rocks.”
Which didn’t look easy.
“Don’t panic. Bunyips are mythical. Kind of an Australian version of the Loch Ness monster.”
“You know, Callan, there are people who don’t think the Loch Ness monster is just mythical. I don’t think these things should be dismissed. I’ve read articles about it, and there’s also that in-some-ways-quite-credible urban myth about alligators in the New York—”
He wasn’t listening. He’d somehow gotten hold of her hand again and they were climbing to the higher part of the ledge, over the rough shelves of rock that acted like steps. At the top, he turned away from the water and led her back into the shade of the gorge’s overhanging sides. He had her in a kind of monkey grip now. He was holding her forearm in the circle of his fingers, and she held his forearm the same way. It was so strongly muscled that her fingers went barely halfway around.
“Repeat after me, Jac,” he said. “Bunyips are mythical.”
“Bunyips are mythical. But I have a very powerful imagination, I’m telling you.”
“Okay, louder. Bunyips—are—mythical.”
“Bunyips—are—mythical. And if they’re not, you know how to scare them away, right?”
“Bunyips are mythical. And plus they’re very friendly.”
“Callan …”
“Right, now, let’s go, but this time we’ll yell it. Ready?” He didn’t give her a chance to tell him she wasn’t. Hand in hand, they sprinted forward, with Callan yelling at the top of his lungs. “Bunyips … are …”
Jac joined him on the last word, screaming it, whooping it, as they came to the end of the ledge and hit the air, legs still working wildly, arms flung high but still joined. “Mythical!” The word echoed off the gorge walls, bouncing like a ball, and she heard it come back to them while they were in midflight. Their voices seemed to claim this whole place.
She whooped again.
Felt a surge of utter exhilaration.
Hit the water.
Callan still had her hand. They went down, down into the icy darkness and she kicked frantically to bring herself back up, just as he was doing. She broke the surface gasping and laughing. “Get me out of here! I know there’s a bunyip down there!”
“Wanna do it again?”
“Unnhh,” she whimpered. “Unnhh!”
Do I?
Could I?
“Yes!”
They jumped together four more times, whooping and yelling and laughing, until Lockie complained, “Dad, you’re scaring the yabbies! We haven’t caught a single one.”
“Try for them in that reach of water behind the rocks where it gets muddy,” he called back to his son. “Are we done, Jacinda?”
“I think so,” she said, breathless and starting to shiver.
The contrast between the cold water and the hot sun on the rocks felt wonderful with each jump and climb, but she’d had enough, and Carly must be getting hungry. They were cooking sausages and lamb chops for a midday barbecue, and Callan still had to light the fire. They swam back, side by side, no bunyips in sight, nothing nipping at her toes.
Walking through the shallows, she confessed, “I was so scared, Callan, you have no idea!”
“It’s a healthy kind of scared, though, isn’t it? You push the fear back with yelling, and then you feel great.”
“How would you know? You said you’d been doing it your whole life. You can’t ever have been scared here.”
“I haven’t been scared of here—of the water hole.”
“Or bunyips.”
“Or bunyips.” He paused. “But I’ve been here, scared.” Paused again. “I’ve come here a few times to try and yell it away, and it’s always worked.”
“Scared of what, then, if not the water hole?” She said it before she thought, shouldn’t have needed to ask.
“After Liz died.” His voice went quiet and his body went still, reluctant and stiff. “Scared of—”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You don’t need to spell it out. I understand.”
He gave a short nod. “Yeah, there was nothing unique about it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, but she didn’t show that he’d heard.
“I got given some, you know, brochures at the hospital in Port Augusta,” he said. “Information leaflets. About bereavement. And they had lists of things I might be feeling, and I was. Feeling those things. All of them. It’s stupid. I hated having my whole gutful of emotions put onto a bloody list. There were lists of things you could do about the emotions, too. Ways of getting help, ways to help get yourself through it.”
“But those lists didn’t have yelling and jumping into the water hole?”
“Nope.”
And that was good, Jac understood, so Callan had jumped into the water hole a lot.
She felt privileged, sincerely privileged, that he’d wanted to push her to do it, and very glad that she had. She was pretty sure he didn’t offer the same opportunity for terror and yelling to just anyone. She was very sure he was right to think that she needed it.
Bunyips were mythical.
And Kurt’s power games were a long way away.
“Got one! Got one! Got one!” Josh shrieked out.
About twenty seconds later, Carly screamed, “Mommy, I got one, too!”
“Let Lockie put it in the bucket for you, Carlz,” Callan warned her quickly. “It might nip you with its claw if you touch it. Lockie—?”
“I’m helping her, Dad, it’s okay.”
“Let’s get that fire going.”
He grabbed his towel and dried himself with the vigor of a dog shaking its wet coat, then dragged his T-shirt and jeans over his still-damp body, hauled on his sturdy riding boots and went to work unpacking backpacks and saddlebags, while Jac was slower to cover her damp swimsuit with her clothes. She couldn’t help watching Callan as she dressed.
There was a circle of big river stones in the shade near the creek bank. The remnants of charcoal within it, as well as the blackened sides of the stones themselves, told Jac that the circle was another detail to this place that Callan had known his whole life.
“Want to find some bark and sticks?” he said.
She gathered what he’d asked for, while he broke thicker wood into short lengths with a downward jerk of his foot. He had a fire going within minutes, with water heating in a tin pot that he called a billycan. Out here in the middle of the day, the light was so bright you could barely see the flames, but you could feel the heat and the water was soon steaming.
Jac checked on the yabby tally. The kids had twelve in their red plastic bucket, but the yield seemed to be slowing and interest had waned. “The bait meat’s losing its flavor,” Josh said.
“And yabbies aren’t stupid. They’re on to us,” Lockie decided. “Twelve’ll have to be enough.” He stood up, leaving the bucket behind, and wandered in the direction of the horses.
“They’re our appetizer,” Jac said, without thinking.
“We’re going to eat them?” Carly wailed. “We can’t eat them!”
They were kind of cute, in a large, shrimpy sort of way, Jac conceded, with blue and black and green markings that would turn red and pink when they were cooked. Too cute to eat?
“Nah, it’s okay. They won’t know it’s even happening,” Josh told Carly in a matter-of-fact voice.
“How come they won’t know?” she asked.
Over by the fire, Callan called out, “Lockie, can you grab the tea bags while you’re there?” Lockie was still with the horses, looking for something in a saddlebag.
“Dad drops them into the boiling water and they don’t even have time to feel it. If I was a yabby, I’d way, way rather be eaten by a human than anything else.”
