Outsiders. Part 20

"I was a very independent kid. I didn't mind at all." She took Laurie's hand and squeezed it. "Really."

"You stayed with a bunch of missionaries?"

"Yeah. It was fun. I didn't speak the local language, so I couldn't be in a regular cla.s.s, but I sat in on math cla.s.s. It was cool to go to a real school."

"You'd never been to school?"

"Nope. I was home schooled, but my parents didn't follow a curriculum or anything. They just taught me things as they came up."

"Wow. That's remarkable. Did you go to college?"

"Oh, no. I don't even have a high school diploma. My parents were in their anti-government period when I was in my teens, and they didn't conform with any of the rules for home education. I think they feel bad about it now, but I guess I could talk my way into a college if I wanted to go. But I've never felt the need."

"Now that's remarkable." She looked at Taj's placid expression. "Come on, you've got to admit that's rare."

"Yeah, I guess it is. I didn't generally care that I'd never been to school, but I definitely wanted to stay in the missionary school, especially when I met Rebecca, the daughter of the people who ran the mission." Laurie could see her eyes twinkle even in the very faint light of the moon. "I was in love in no time at all."

"Cool. Coming out stories. My favorite thing. Did this girl feel the same way?"

"Yep. Only problem was that she wasn't a girl. She was twenty-two."

"And you were fourteen?" Laurie squawked. "That's a crime!"

"Yeah, I suppose it was. But she was no older than I was emotionally. She'd lived in Botswana her whole life and the only books she read were religious. They didn't have TV, and they didn't go to the movies or anything. They were very simple people."

"Still..."

"Yeah, my parents were none too happy. They came to get me after about seven or eight months, and I immediately told them that I'd fallen in love. I honestly had no idea that it would upset them."

"Oh, you poor naive thing. What were they most upset about?"

"The age difference. Definitely the age difference. They packed me up and we left the next day. We went all the way to North Korea, with me crying the whole time. I'm still sure that was a wild goose chase." She chuckled softly. "I was very dramatic about being separated from Rebecca, but they held their ground. It wasn't until I was older that I realized they were only trying to protect me. We had a tough month or two in North Korea, then we went to Burma which had its own challenges." She smiled, then added, "Do you know Burma?"

"No, I'm not sure I could find it on a map. Why's it tough?"

"It's a kingdom and the royal family was pretty much in charge in those days. It was hard to get in and even harder to interact with ordinary Burmese. We wasted a whole year there and never got enough material for a book. But that's when I started really pursuing my interest in photography, so it wasn't a total waste. When all you have is a camera and hours to kill, you can get pretty good at composing pictures."

"Were you being held against your will?"

"No, we wanted to be there. At least, my parents did. I wanted to be in Botswana with Rebecca. The authorities just kept us wrapped up in red tape for months on end. They want you to go with an official tour group, but we didn't want to do that. As I said, my parents were in a very confrontational mood in those days, and they were as hardheaded as the Burmese authorities were. I just wanted to go somewhere. I almost died of boredom."

"d.a.m.n. That sounds horrible. Especially for a fourteen-year-old."

"It wasn't too bad. Of course, that's from my perspective today. I'm sure I felt different about it then."

"You seem very...tranquil. You have an inner peace that I find appealing."

"Maybe it's from being in India for so many years. I find Indians more accepting of their circ.u.mstances than most. At least the people in the areas we worked in were. The people in the cities might be different."

"Are you Indian?"

"I have an Indian pa.s.sport and an Indian name, but my ethnicity is"-she paused-"complicated. I'm a mongrel, to be honest. I met a guy who worked for a firm that did DNA typing, and he tested me. I had just about everything-except for South Asian. So, even though I can pa.s.s for and have an Indian name, that's one of the things I'm not." She gave Laurie a happy grin. "I've got some genes from Bedouin people. Maybe that's why I need to move around."

"Whatever you are, it's a very nice combo." Laurie put her hand on Taj's bare arm. "You have the most amazing skin tone. It's truly beautiful."

"I like my color. I'm much darker than either of my parents. My mom's father is from Puerto Rico and we think he's African, Taino, and a little Spanish. I think my skin got a good dose of the African genes."

"It's lovely." She gently stroked her skin, amazed at its softness. "This is the smoothest skin I've ever felt."

"Thanks." Taj's dark eyes followed Laurie's hand, avidly watching it move across her skin. "The woman I had the long-distance relations.h.i.+p with was Scottish. She was as pale as milk. I loved the way our skin looked when we were lying next to one another. We hardly looked like the same type of animal."

"Do you miss her?" Laurie asked, extending her touch to Taj's shoulder, then down to her hand.

"Sure. We got along really well and we were very attracted to each other. But she couldn't stand to be in the same place more than two weeks. It was exhausting."

"Two weeks is too fast a pace for you?"

"Yeah. Much too fast. She came from a small town in the north of Scotland, and she'd been itching to leave since she was a girl. I figure she'll need twenty years to get that out of her system."

"It sounds like it's leaving your system."

"I think it's starting to." Taj laughed softly. "I don't want to be too settled, of course. I could never stay in one place permanently. But I'd love to have a home base. Somewhere that I could keep things and know that they'd be there when I got back." Her eyes grew unfocused. "Somewhere I could have a nice bed and a comfortable chair to read in." She met Laurie's eyes and said, "I've never had that. Everything we own travels with us."

"How many bags do you have when you move someplace new?"

"Not that many. I have a lot more stuff than my parents do. I probably fill three crates, including my photography gear. My dad could get everything he owns into a backpack." She laughed. "He usually has two pair of pants, one pair of shorts, three T-s.h.i.+rts and two regular s.h.i.+rts. He wraps that in a rain poncho, sticks it into a backpack and he's ready to go."

"No coat?"

"Nope. They stay in the tropics now. It's never below twelve degrees. Centigrade," she added, when Laurie's eyes widened briefly.

"You didn't mention underwear."

Taj laughed again. "He wears it, but he usually buys a couple of pair when he gets to where he's going. He wears his shoes until they fall apart, then gets whatever the local people are wearing. It wouldn't bother him to go without, either. He's the simplest man you'll ever meet."

"I feel like I know your parents from their writing. I'd give anything to be like they are-real writers."

"You're not a real writer? Why not?"

"I'm a hack," she said, sounding disgusted. "I crank a book out in a month."

"Why do you write if you're not proud of what you do?"

She looked so ingenuous that Laurie could feel tears of shame come to her eyes. "I'm good at it. I make a nice living from it, and I like plotting the books out. That part is a lot of fun. But doing the actual writing has gotten so formulaic." She practically moaned the last sentence.

"Then make it less formulaic."

"I can't. My publisher wants me to keep repeating the formula until sales fall off. Which they are definitely not doing," she added, chuckling. "I convinced them to let me do another series, but now I'm stuck doing three different formulas. I've got my original series, the one I write under my own name. That's set in the current day."

"That seems most logical."

"Not for mysteries. I got smart and put my next one in the seventies, which allows me to write without having cell phones and computers and all of the things that make mysteries easier to solve."

Taj's eyes twinkled with interest. "Very smart. I've never considered how technology would make it harder to write a tight plot."

"It can, but it can also help. My latest is in two thousand forty, which lets me make up all of the stuff I want."

"That's pretty clever."

"Yeah, it kept me interested for a couple of years. But I really want to try to write something more...literary."

Taj rolled onto her belly, her head propped up by her braced hands. "Then do that."

"I guess I should."

"I used my sharp powers of observation to discern that you're not crazy about your agent. What does she think?"

Giggling, Laurie said, "I really showed some fantastic attributes today, didn't I?" She shook her head ruefully. "She wants me to chug them out and never call her."

"That's not uncommon."

"I know. I just wish she'd help me try to find my voice." She shrugged. "I guess that's unfair of me to expect. That's not what her interest is. I'd need an agent that can sell what I'd like to write."

"Let me introduce you to our agent. He's great at finding homes for books that won't ever be in the airport kiosks."

With a smile slowly blooming, Laurie nodded. "I'd love that. But I still need to put out new mysteries to earn a good living. Literary fiction doesn't sell."

"Then live with less. You could cut back."

"Yeah, I guess I could, but my father...kinda depends on me."

"Oh." Concern colored Taj's expression. "Is he ill?"

"No, he's fine. He's just...my aunt says he's a user, but he says he's never gotten a break."

"Who's right?"

"My aunt." She sighed and lay down, looking up into the amazingly clear night. "Look at the stars! I've never, ever seen this many stars!"

Taj looked, not mentioning that there were places in Africa where the sky was nearly white from the vast number of visible stars. "It's nice. Tell me more about your dad."

"Well, he's always asking me for money, and I tend to give it to him. My aunt, his sister by the way, says he's always been a mooch and that I'm only rewarding him for his bad behavior."

"I'm glad I'm an only child. I'd hate to have my sister say that about me."

"Yeah, me too. There's no love lost there. But my aunt's been like a second mother to me."

"Your mom...?"

"Died when I was twelve. Blood poisoning."

"What? That's a pretty third-world cause of death. What happened?"

"We didn't have health insurance and she didn't go to the ER until it was too late."

Taj flinched in sympathy. "That's horrible. Just horrible."

"It was," she agreed, her voice soft and shaky. "I blame my dad for not providing for us, but I blame her too. She married him," she added, disgust in her tone.

"That sounds very hard." Taj reached over and took Laurie's hand, chafing it gently. "My parents had their faults, but I always knew they'd protect me. It must make the world a scary place when you don't have that."

Laurie turned her head just enough to let Taj see that her eyes were bright with tears. "The world was a scary place for me. We moved all the time, and each time was worse. Eventually, I stopped even trying to make friends."

"How did you learn to be so friendly? So easy with people? You interacted with your fans as though you didn't have any barriers at all. You seemed really genuine." Taj had been tenderly stroking the skin on the back of Laurie's hand. Her eyes seemed so focused on making out all of the details of that single piece of her body in the dim light that Laurie felt freer to talk about her feelings. It was always easier for her when she didn't have to look another person in the eye.

"Thanks for saying that. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but I came out of my sh.e.l.l when I started writing. Having that vent allowed me to start being who I guess I really am." She smiled sadly. "The person I would have been a lot sooner if I'd had a more stable home."

Continuing to gaze and play with Laurie's hand, Taj said, "Sometimes I play around trying to figure out who I would be if I'd been born to a couple of regular stay-at-home people in Chicago or Minneapolis or someplace normal." She let out a low chuckle. "It's impossible. There are so many factors that go into making each of us unique that it's folly to try to add or remove a variable."

Laurie had a sudden need to see Taj's beautiful eyes. She gently touched her cheek and their eyes met. "You don't speak like a woman who didn't graduate from high school."

Grinning, Taj said, "I don't know if that's a compliment for me or an indictment of formal schooling."

"I think the latter. Your parents did a good job."

"Thanks. I'm pretty happy with my education. The only thing I know nothing about is popular culture. I've seen a lot of television, but most of it has been overseas."

"Did you ever own a television?"

Taj laughed. "No. Not by a long shot. But just about everybody else on earth has one and when we'd stay with other people we'd sometimes watch."

"So if I talk about The Sopranos or Seinfeld, you don't know what I'm talking about?"

"I've seen an episode or two of Seinfeld. My uncle really likes it and I think it's on once or twice a day when I'm at their house. I'm aware of The Sopranos, but only from reading references to it." She looked thoughtful for a few moments. "It's kind of like hearing about a very close friend's family. You know a lot of things about them, but you couldn't necessarily pick them out in a crowd. That's how I feel about most popular television shows. As for the less popular ones, they never cross my radar."

"But I bet you know a zillion things about a bunch of different countries. I think I'd trade my TV trivia knowledge for some of yours."

Taj's eyes shone brightly even though only the starlight and the glow from the traffic on West Side Highway provided illumination. "You don't have to trade away your knowledge. If you want some of mine all you have to do is travel and keep your eyes and ears open."

Laurie's smile betrayed her embarra.s.sment. "You probably won't believe this, but Canada is the only foreign country I've been to."

Taj didn't look particularly surprised. "That's not uncommon. When I tell people that I'm American quite often they ask me why I bother coming to their country. People often say that they'd never leave America if they could only get here."

"I'm very interested in other countries and other peoples, but I've always found it satisfied me to read about them. I have to travel around the country for book tours at least once a year. I honestly hate every day I'm away from home." She rolled her eyes. "You must think I'm a real rube."

"Not a bit. I'm a firm believer in doing what makes you happy. Now, if you were unhappy being at home, I'd think you were selling yourself short. But if you like it, no one has the right to tell you to live differently."

"I like the way you think. My friends are always telling me that I don't know what I'm missing by not traveling."