Summer, page 3
Kerry blinked a couple of times. “Weren’t you, like, unconscious for most of that?”
“Yes,” he said, flashing her that grin again. She felt it down to her toes. She hadn’t noticed what a handsome man he was—or, more accurately, how it had been obscured by the apparent years with which his pain and exhaustion had saddled him. “But not unaware. Thank you for everything.”
As he spoke he made to rise from the couch, pushing off with his right hand. But he hadn’t even reached his full height when his legs buckled, and he flopped back down. He tossed her a sheepish smile that dimpled his cheeks. “I guess I’m not as strong as I thought.”
Kerry rushed to his side to help him, dropping the blanket to the floor. “You shouldn’t even be awake, much less trying to stand,” she insisted. He was already sitting by the time she reached him, so she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She stood there a few moments, feeling embarrassed, then simply sat down beside him as if that had been her plan all along.
Graciously he ignored her awkwardness and extended a hand. “My name is Daniel Blessing,” he said.
She took his hand in her own. His was large, engulfing hers, and as warm as if he’d been holding a cup of hot tea. Holding it felt comfortable, like being hugged by an old friend. After a few moments she realized he was waiting for her to let go, to say her own name, or both. She couldn’t understand why she was so flustered around this man.
Except maybe because he should be dead, she thought. Or at the very least, still comatose. And years older.
There was something very strange going on here. Part of her wanted to know what it was, but a bigger part—the dominant part, she realized—wondered why she wasn’t more concerned about why she trusted him, almost instinctively. Why she had brought him into the house and dismissed the concerns of housemates who didn’t want to leave her alone with him.
“Kerry,” she managed at last. “I’m Kerry Profitt.”
“Yes,” he said, as if that name meant something to him. Though, obviously, it couldn’t have. His voice and his manner were both, Kerry thought, oddly formal. “Yes, of course. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Kerry.”
“You too … Daniel,” she replied. She had almost called him “Mr. Blessing,” something about his age and that strange formality making her feel like she ought to treat him as she would a friend of her aunt Betty and uncle Marsh. She regarded his handsome face again: high forehead; intense, heavy-lidded gray eyes; a straight nose that she might have considered large on a different face but that here seemed somehow fitting. His lips were thin but quick to smile. When he did smile, his whole face took part, cheeks creasing, eyes crinkling, dimples at the edges of his mouth carving themselves into his skin. His jawline was pronounced but firm, his chin square. Thick brown hair, which could’ve used an encounter with water and shampoo, swept away from his brow, covering his ears, flowing over the collar of the Deftones T-shirt they’d borrowed from Mace when his own torn and blood-soaked shirt had to be cut from his damaged body. Impossibly he looked even closer to her age than he had when she’d suddenly awoken—within a decade of her, she guessed now, or not much more.
“You have questions,” he said. He tried to stand again, stopped mid-rise to wince and grasp at his ribs where his worst injury had been, an open gash that looked like he’d been attacked with a meat cleaver. His skin blanched, eyes compressing against the evident pain. But he composed himself and pushed through it.
“Well, yeah, Sherlock.”
“I wish I could answer them for you, Kerry. Really, I do. But if I did—well, you saw what I looked like when you brought me in, right?”
She had hardly stopped remembering. His body was lean, with the stringy musculature of someone who worked hard rather than worked out, and yardstick-wide shoulders and a deep chest—but after last night, bruised and shredded, as if he’d made a dozen laps in a demolition derby, only without a car. “Yeah, I saw.”
He nodded gravely. “If I answered your questions, then you’d be at risk for the same. And, I suspect, you’d have a harder time surviving it than I did.”
“So this is, what, a regular thing for you?” she asked, surprised at his use of the present tense.
He showed that grin again. “Not to this extent, no. And I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘regular.’ But it has happened before and likely will again. I’d rather you didn’t get mixed up in it, so that’s all I’ll say about that.” He walked away from the couch, away from her—stiff-legged, clearly sore, but still, considering the shape he had been in, miraculous. “If you don’t mind,” he called over his shoulder, “I’m starving. Okay if I raid the kitchen?”
Kerry Profitt’s diary, August 13
He’s gone.
I can’t quite sort out how I feel about it. Night before last I risked the wrath of my homies—and maybe our lives—playing Florence Nightingale to a stranger who could have been just what Mace and Brandy were sure he was—a random drunk who’d been bounced off somebody’s fender. But once he woke up, once the years fell away from him and he started to speak, it didn’t take long to see that he was not that. Still, mega-mystery man.
But we talked and eventually the others came home from work—where, they lied, I had been sorely missed—and Daniel Blessing seemed to draw energy from them. He became enchanting: witty, interesting, the kind of conversationalist to whom you could apply the term “sparkling” without being too off base. Even those who had distrusted him the most had been charmed.
Did he tell us anything about himself other than his name? He did not. And that name is probably as fake as the phone number Rebecca gives out to the tourists who hit on her at work (aside, in case I didn’t mention it: While Rebecca considers herself a few pounds overweight, what she is is zaftig. She hides it with the hunching and the baggies, but the powers at Seaside picked her—being the only one of us over twenty-one—to be a cocktail waitress in their oh-so-cleverly named bar, the Schooner. Part of the cocktail waitressing involves wearing a uniform that, while not as desperately provocative as they probably were ten or twenty years ago, is still, let’s just say … snug. And short-ish. So the aforementioned hitting on? Happens a lot).
So no personal details from (possibly) Mr. Blessing. But he was informed and erudite, able to discuss books and movies and modern music, as well as the state of the world (about which he’s not much impressed), environmental and social issues, and even, much to Josh’s amazement, film noir of the thirties and forties. By the time people dragged themselves away from the kitchen table to go to bed, he had won them all over. I’m only guessing, but I think Josh may have fallen a little bit in love.
He may not even have been alone in that.
But then, this morning. Not just early-ish, but genuinely early. The kind of early where your eyelids are sort of glued together and the clock’s face swims just out of focus. He taps on my door a couple of times, then lets himself in before I can mumble incoherently. He kneels—kneels!—beside the bed, takes my hand, kisses it once, says, “Thank you, Kerry Profitt. Thank you so much, for all you’ve done,” and then he stands up and walks out.
I fumbled out of bed, but I heard the front door close before I reached the entrance to my room, and when I hit the street, he was gone. Out of sight. Maybe there was a car waiting for him, though I didn’t see or hear one. Maybe one of those big mythological birds picked him up. Or a UFO.
Gone.
I only knew him for a day. And knew may be too strong a word, since I know so little about him even now.
So why does it feel like there’s a vast emptiness in the house?
Anyone?
3
I’m worried about Kerry,” Brandy confided. She and Scott were both at work—she as a front-desk clerkat the resort, and Scott as a groundskeeper. A couple of times a shift, they made a point of crossing paths, usually “Why?” Scott wondered. He carried a broom and a long-handled dustpan in his left when she was on a short break from the desk. With the run of the property, his schedule was less restrictive than hers. And as a groundskeepers whose clothing could frequently be grass-stained or otherwise soiled, him visiting her at the desk was frowned upon. Now they wandered the paved pathways that led from the room complexes down to the tennis courts and pool and the wide sandy beach beyond.
“Why?” Scott wondered. He carried a broom and a long-handled dustpan in his left fist; the fingers of his right hand were twined with Brandy s darker ones.
“It’s been, what, four days since that guy left. Daniel?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Scott agreed, not quite getting what she was leading to. But that was the thing about Brandy—directness was not her strong point. She would walk all the way around an issue before she’d step right up to it. “What about it?”
“She’s been kind of, I don’t know, mopey. Ever since.”
“Brandy, she hardly knew the guy She wanted to play nursemaid, she did, he got better. End of story.”
Her grasp tightened on his fingers, and he saw the fire flash in her eyes that always told him when he’d said the wrong thing. It was not an unfamiliar event, but it was never a pleasant one either.
“It should be,” she insisted. “But it’s not, and that’s the problem. Haven’t you seen her? I don’t know if she’s laughed once since he left. This is Kerry we’re talking about. Girl loves to laugh. But instead she’s been acting like her dog died.”
Scott knew he was treading dangerous ground. Brandy, a psych major, was perfectly content to psychoanalyze anyone who fell onto her radar screen. Scott preferred life a little closer to the surface of things, where motives and rationales were not examined so closely. And he admired Kerry’s surface a great deal. She was absolutely gorgeous—he’d thought that the moment he’d met her, and hadn’t stopped since. Long, silken hair of purest jet, big emerald eyes, a lean body that was not as athletic as Brandy’s or as curvaceous as Rebecca’s, but still feminine and attractive. He’d been with Brandy for three years, and loved her completely. But that didn’t mean he didn’t think once in a while about what it would be like to be with Kerry, who was almost Brandy’s exact opposite, physically.
“You’re right, I guess,” he ventured, shaking off the mental image of Kerry to focus on Brandy “Maybe seeing him on the couch like that, taking care of him, reminded her of her mom. When she had to take care of her for so long.”
Brandy nodded. He’d scored one. “There you go, Scotty,” she said, her tone congratulatory. She stopped, released his hand and faced him, moving into lecture mode. Behind her, the Pacific surged up onto the beach, then slipped back into itself in an unending, slightly irregular rhythm. “What defined Kerry for years? Being her moms nurse and caretaker. Then what happened to her? Her mom died anyway, and she had to move in with an aunt and uncle she can barely stand. Now she’s got a nice insurance setdement, but she’s working anyway, trying to supplement the money with income from a summer job. She’s looking to redefine herself in some other role, but when that guy fell into her lap, almost literally, it took her back to the same place she had been, emotionally, with her mom. And when he left too … well, that brought back a lot of feelings, most of them the bad kind.”
“Do you have a suggestion?” Scott asked. He readily admitted that he was nuts about Brandy. She was smart and beautiful and very caring, so what was not to like? But when she got like this, sometimes he felt antsy, eggshellwalking.
The first time he’d introduced her to his brother Steve—six years older, married with a kid of his own—Steve had taken him aside and said in a conspiratorial tone, “She’s great, Scott. Doesn’t seem like someone who puts up with idiots.”
“She doesn’t,” Scott had confirmed.
“Then I have one piece of advice, bro. Don’t be an idiot.”
Brandy’s little brother DJ had been less subtle. “You ever hurt my sister,” he said with a sinister smile, “I won’t have to do jack. That girl’ll have you for breakfast and pick her teeth with your bones.”
All things considered, eggshells didn’t seem so bad.
“She’s got to work through it her own way,” Brandy prescribed, drawing Scott back to the current situation. “All we can do is be as supportive as we can, let her talk it out if she wants. Show her we care about her, but not that we want to meddle.”
If amateur psychiatry wasn’t meddling, Scott wasn’t sure what was. But he kept that opinion to himself. Anyway, there was a stretch of lawn that needed mowing, and Brandy’s break was over as was his own. He agreed with her, kissed her good-bye, and went back to work.
• • •
With so many new faces to look at every day, Kerry found herself looking forward to getting acquainted with the resort’s regulars—those who stayed for a week or so and ate in the restaurant several times instead of availing themselves of La Jolla’s many other fine dining opportunities. Some she got to know, on the most superficial of levels, as people on vacation who sometimes had a tendency to talk about their lives—family members, pets they left behind, the old neighborhood back in Lincoln or Tempe or Fort Wayne. Others kept their own confidences, and sometimes Kerry entertained herself by making up her own stories about them, giving them colorful, mysterious histories and reasons for visiting southern California.
Some of these fictions she had e-mailed to her best friend Jessica Tait, who had moved to Florida the year before. Lately Jessica had seemed more and more distant, as if her new life and friends were drawing her away from the bond they’d shared. Kerry mourned the change; losing her mother had been bad enough, losing her best friend on top of it was heartwrenching. The way she’d grown up had left her with precious few friends anyway, and she valued the ones she had.
Tonight one of the diners in her section was a woman she’d seen several times recently—not for days in a row, as was typical with vacationers who came to the resort, but spread out over many weeks. This was unusual, but not unheard of. Sometimes local residents decided they liked the kitchen’s offerings. Carolyn Massey, the chef, had, after all, trained at Le Cordon Bleu in France, and then had a stint under Alice Waters in her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Parusse, before taking over the resort’s kitchen. Her meals were always delicious and frequently adventurous.
This guest, though, Kerry noticed partly because the woman always dined alone, and partly because, while she was unfailingly pleasant and polite, there was an air about her that made Kerry believe that she was terribly sad. She was a beautiful woman, with skin so soft and smooth it could have been freshly poured from a bottle, and hair that reminded Kerry of a ray of golden afternoon sunlight shining down on fresh straw. Upon closer inspection, the color of her shoulder-blade-length hair spanned a spectrum, from platinum white to a dark auburn, and the overall effect was lovely. Her features could have belonged to fairy tale royalty, or to the Hollywood kind: wide-set, sparkling blue eyes, a refined yet expressive brow, a nose that was petite but was not so small it was an afterthought. Her lips were full and finely sculpted, and the determined set of her jaw implied that she was no pushover.
In Kerry’s mind, the woman was a widow whose wealthy husband had died tragically young. She had tried to put his death behind her, to carry on with her life, but everywhere she went, simple things reminded her of the joy they had felt in their few years together. A song on the radio, a particular vintage of wine, even the cries of gulls on the beach, could bring an unexpected tear to her eye. Nonetheless, she made herself go out, eat in restaurants, drink that wine, listen to the radio, walk on the beach at sunset, intent on enjoying her heartbreaking memories as if he were still there beside her.
Sometimes Kerry added an extra twist to the woman’s tale. She was a spy, and her husband had been killed in the line of duty. Or she was an international jewel thief, and he wasn’t dead at all but simply doing a long stretch in a prison in Monaco or Majorca. She came to La Jolla because she wasn’t wanted for anything in California—yet.
The woman’s beauty was ageless, which inspired Kerry to even greater flights of fancy. She could have been in her midtwenties, her late forties, or any place in between. Her outfit was just as timeless—a loose-fitting white silk top that suggested rather than revealed her figure, a tan jacket, also silk, and matching pants with half-inch heels, no doubt some Italian brand that Kerry could pronounce no better than she could afford. There were hints of lines at the edges of her eyes and mouth that would, with the years, deepen and most likely make her even more lovely. She would carry her years and experiences well, Kerry believed.
After dinner the woman lingered over a cup of coffee. She exchanged pleasantries from time to time, but whenever Kerry tried to engage her in conversation, she expertly steered away from any personal topics. Just adds to her mystery, Kerry thought with some satisfaction.
When she went into the kitchen to pick up an order for the next table over, a party of five who had come in late after what looked like a scorching day on the beach—lobster-red foreheads, shoulders, and arms that would be painful and peeling before long—the last person she expected to see was Daniel Blessing.
But there he was, hovering near the open back door like an unwanted houseguest who wouldn’t quite leave. When he saw Kerry, his lips parted in a sudden smile. This time, she noted, it didn’t engage his eyes. She smiled back and arched a quizzical eyebrow his way.
“Daniel?” she said, surprised. “What are you doing here?” The cooks, bus staff, and dishwashers all ignored him, as if by prior arrangement. But Kerry had been out in the dining room for several minutes, and he could have had time to slip each one a twenty for all she knew.
He came toward her, unmistakable urgency in his step, and took her by the arm. His grip was so firm it hurt. She tried to pull away, but he held on. “Kerry,” he whispered. “I hoped that you’d be safe, that helping me wouldn’t put you in danger. I was wrong. You’ve got to leave here, right now.”
