Eden Burning by Elizabeth Lowell

ready to go home yet. Instead of arguing about it, she opened her drawing pad and began talking quietly about the land and the bright native birds.
    At first Benny hadn’t responded. Then he had shared a few one-word comments about the birds and plants. After a while she discovered that he had run away from home after his first day of kindergarten and was never going back, because the other children had teased him about his limp.
    Sketching as she talked, Nicole had worked quickly to capture the anger and hurt and intelligence she saw on his thin face as he stood and brooded over the green land falling away at his feet. When she finished drawing, she talked him into walking back down the mountain with her by telling him that she wasn’t quite sure of the trail and needed someone to guide her.
    Benny’s ease with and understanding of the land had astonished her. The child was uncanny in his knowledge and agility. She told him so, pointing out that none of the kids who teased him could have matched his pace on that rough and broken ground.
    By the time she returned Benny to his worried parents, he was thoughtful rather than defiant. When she gave him the sketch of himself standing like a prince on black-lava ramparts, he had been transfixed by the drawing.
    So had his parents. They had also been dismayed to learn that Nicole was still living in a motel, waiting for an apartment she could afford to come up for rent in Hilo. Bobby’s wife took Nicole’s hand and led her to the three unoccupied cottages on the Kamehameha estate. She was told to take her pick of the cottages. Whichever one she wanted was hers for as long as she wanted it.
    Rent? Please, don’t insult your hosts. Can you put a price on a boy’s smile?
    That had been more than three years ago, and nothing had changed. Bobby and his wife refused to discuss rent. Benny smiled a lot. And Nicole fell in love with the spacious, sometimes overgrown grounds of the estate and the tiny cottage that was tucked just up the slope from the beach. Most of the year the cottage was private to the point of isolation, perfect for uninterrupted time to work on her dancing or her sketching.
    Most of the year. But not when school was out. Then the place was alive with the shouts and arguments and laughter of children.
    The sound came to Nicole again, a high cry like the wind rushing through a steep lava canyon.
    “Niiii-colllle! Waaaiiit!”
    Benny’s thin, wiry body catapulted out of the undergrowth. He ran down the path toward her with an uneven gait that was blindingly quick. Sketch pad and pencils were clutched in his right hand.
    “Slow down,” she called out, laughing. “I’m not going anywhere.”
    Barefoot, nut brown, with a flashing smile that rarely failed to soothe Nicole’s impatience at being interrupted, Benny was one of her favorites—though it was hard for her to choose among the island children who gathered around her like clouds around the mountain whenever they spotted her alone.
    “Picnic?” he asked, excitement making his dark eyes shine with life.
    “Not today, honey.”
    His eyes shifted to her sketch pad. “Watch?”
    “Quiet?” she retorted.
    He grinned and said not one word.
    “Good-good,” she said.
    She enjoyed the coded exchanges and meaningful silences that were Benny’s conversation. He acted like there wasn’t enough time in life for him to waste it on anything as ordinary as speech.
    He fell in line behind her on the path. He knew the rules when she was working. The first time he interrupted her was “free.” Sometimes other interruptions might be tolerated, but only if they were very few and the questions he had were about painting or sketching or the plants themselves.
    After that, any interruption had better mean something really urgent, like Kilauea splitting a new seam and pouring liquid fire over the face of the land. If it was anything less important, the chatty child was invited to go talk to the honeycreepers flitting