Summer, p.2
Summer, page 2
She heard Mace shift as if he really did intend to attack the wounded man, and then she did something that surprised even her. She spread her one free arm—the man on the ground continued to clutch her right arm with a grip so powerful she didn’t think she could have shaken it—over the man, as if to protect him from whatever Mace might have in mind. “No!” she shouted. “He’s hurt bad enough. Leave him alone or help me bring him inside, but don’t be stupid.”
“I’ve got to wonder about your definition of stupid,” Mace said, sounding petulant.
“He’s right, Kerr,” Josh added. “You want to bring some bloody stranger into our house?”
“You guys both missed Sunday school the day they talked about the good Samaritan?” Kerry shot back over her shoulder. “If you don’t want to help me, just get out of the way. He’s losing blood and he can’t stay out here overnight.” She pushed her way deeper into the thick hedge, feeling the branches scratch and tear at her skin like a hundred cats’ claws, snagging her long, fine black hair and the fabric of the white cotton dress shirt that, with snug black pants, was her restaurant uniform. She reached around the stranger’s head with her left hand, hoping she could ease him up out of the hedge. Holding back the worst of the branches with her own body so he wouldn’t suffer any further injury, she found the back of his head and slipped her hand down to support his neck. His hair was long in back, and matted with sticky blood. Never mind the tears, the bloodstains would make her uniform shirt unwearable.
“That’s crazy talk,” Mace complained behind her. She ignored him and drew the man slowly forward.
Josh unleashed another string of colorful profanities, but he knelt beside Kerry and shoved branches out of the way, helping to bring the wounded man out of the hedge. “I guess we need to get the mug out of our bushes anyway.”
“You’re both crazy, then,” Mace opined. Kerry couldn’t see Mace, but from the sound of it, she gathered that he had given up on them both and was on his way back inside. She found herself hoping that it wasn’t to get a baseball bat or to call 911.
What do I care? she wondered. The good Samaritan thing had been a flip response to Mace and Josh’s moaning, but it wasn’t any kind of lifestyle choice she had made. She guessed that, as Josh might say, it meant the reaction she was having in this case was situational. Something about this battered, broken man in their bushes played on her sympathy, and she was unwilling to leave him there or to go against his stated wishes by calling the authorities.
With Josh’s assistance she was able to disentangle the man from the hedge. In the light, the blood on his face was shocking—dark and glistening and obviously fresh. He might have been handsome once, but age and the damage caused by whatever had done this to him had taken care of that. She felt, more than ever, an urgency about getting him inside, getting his bleeding stopped, and trying to prevent shock.
“Can you stand up?” she asked him, not sure if he was even still conscious. But he forced his eyes open again, raised his head, and looked at her with something like kindness. His mouth curled into an agonized smile.
“Not a chance,” he whispered. Then his head drooped, his eyes closed, his muscles went limp. For the first time, his grip on her forearm eased. She touched his neck, felt the pulse there.
“He’s still alive,” she declared. “But he’s deadweight,” Josh said. Josh was, well … “lean” was a polite way to put it. “Scrawny” was more the truth. And the stranger was a big man, probably a little more than six feet tall, weighing a couple hundred pounds. “You think we can carry him?”
Kerry spoke without hesitation, without doubt. “We can carry him.You take his feet.”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Josh said. He used the name that the housemates had applied to Kerry ever since they’d become familiar with her stubborn streak, “Bulldog.”
Hoisting the stranger’s shoulders, she grinned at Josh way down at the other end. “Woof.”
Kerry Profitt’s diary, August 11-12
Just for fun I looked back to see my first impressions of my housemates. Thinking to compare them, I guess, to current impressions.
Just goes to show how wrong you can be sometimes.
“Can you say insufferable?” I had typed about Josh Quinn. “Gay, Goth, vegan, and obnoxiously adamant about all three. If he keeps it up, I’ll be surprised if he survives the summer. Not that he could be ‘voted out’ or whatever. Not that, to push the metaphor to the breaking point and beyond, this is a reality TV show or anything. The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor—they have nothing on the trials and tribs of six genuine strangers trying to get along in a house without cameras, supercool furniture, and a cash prize on the other end.”
There was more, but why cut-and-paste all night when I can simply scan the folder menu and look it up? Suffice to say, his first impression was the kind that almost makes you hope it’ll also be a last impression.
Mace Winston, on the other hand. Then, I wrote: “Hmm … he’s got a body like Michelangelo’s David—not that I’ve seen under the fig leaf, figuratively speaking. But handsome, buff, and he tooled up in this sky blue Lincoln Continental—except for the left rear, I think he said quarter-panel, which is kind of rust colored and clearly taken from a different car. He said he found the whole thing in a desert canyon somewhere in New Mexico, full of bullet holes and snakes, but he cleaned it up and fixed it up and here he is. He really does wear the boots and one of those straw hats and he has squinty, twinkly eyes like Josh Hartnett or Clint Black and somehow it all works for him. I don’t know if there’s a brain in his head. Ask me later if I care.”
But tonight, when the chips, as they say, were down, Mace turned away and Josh came through. Although the heaving and ho-ing would have gone better had it been the other way around, I’m sure.
Okay.
Ms. Harrington, in eleventh-grade speech, used to give us holy hell when we started with “okay” or “umm.” She said it was just a verbal time waster, a way of saying that our thoughts obviously weren’t well enough organized to begin with because if they were, we’d start out by saying what we really wanted to say.
Boy, was she right.
So … okay. Umm …
There’s a man in our living room, passed out on that butt-sprung lump of fabric and wood that passes for a sofa. We managed to stop most of the bleeding, put bandages on the worst cuts, got a couple of blankets (mine, since no one else would volunteer theirs) over him, elevated his feet higher than his head. Near his head there’s a glass of water, in case he wakes up and is thirsty, and he seems to be breathing okay.
He looks like he lost an argument with a wood chipper. I can’t even imagine what happened to him. Hit by a truck that hurled him all the way across our lawn? Picked up by a stray tornado and dropped there?
But he said no doctors, and that’s exactly how many he’s getting. Why? And why did I argue against calling the police? Rebecca woke up just before Scott and Brandy finally came home. I had the same argument with them that I’d had with Mace, although Scott came over to my side pretty quickly and Rebecca, bless her huge hippie heart, lit a candle and dug right in to help with the bandaging. With Josh already allied, that made four against two—Mace and Brandy. Brandy did a lot of huffing noises and is now either sound asleep, or pretending to be, as I laptop this. Is that a verb yet? If not, how soon?
Other good verbs: To delay. To procrastinate. To put off.
Okay.
Of course, what I wanted to do with my summer was to lead a life that might, by some reasonable definition, be normal. As opposed to the life I’ve led for the past, well, lifetime. Summer job, summer friends, maybe a summer boyfriend, even. Just, y’know, normal stuff.
I don’t think this qualifies.
And to be fair, they’re entirely correct (and “they” know who they are). We don’t know who he is—he could be dangerous, a felon, a crazy person. Or even, you know, someone from Lenny Kravitz’s band, although maybe a little senior for that. But, to continue being fair, he’s not the one who said “no cops.” That was, not to put too fine a point on it, me. He just said “no doctors,” and maybe he’s a Christian Scientist or whatever. I was the one who said “no cops,” and I’m still not sure why I did that. But it was the right thing to do.
I hope.
Journaling is supposed to help one figure out one’s own emotions, right? Tap into the unconscious, puzzle out the mysteries therein? Not tonight, Dr. Freud. I don’t know why I trust the old road-kill guy snoozing on the couch. But I do.
Go figure. Go to sleep. Go to hell. Just go. See you tomorrow, if we’re not all murdered in our sleep. Or lack thereof.
More later, I hope.
K.
2
Scott Banner was one of those guys who did lots of things well. Kerry hadn’t known him all that long, but then it didn’t take long to figure that out about him. He got good grades in school, hence the Harvard bit. He worked hard, he could cook and clean quickly and efficiently, which were pluses where Kerry was concerned because that meant fewer household chores that she had to do around the summer house. He played soccer, and he looked fit and trim in the polo shirts, khakis, and Topsiders that he favored, and while Kerry thought he was dressing about twenty years ahead of his age, he somehow managed to pull it off.
His girlfriend Brandy, black, athletic, and as graceful as Kerry was not, appreciated those things about him too, confiding to Kerry that he would make someone a great husband one day, hoping that someone would be her. Kerry thought they made a wonderful couple, occasionally wishing she had someone who matched her as well as Scott and Brandy did each other.
One of the most important things to know about Scott was that he made really excellent coffee. And for those occasions when he wasn’t available, there was a spot called Java Coast in downtown La Jolla, next to an English as a foreign language school that attracted vast numbers of young, available men—all foreign, of course, but Kerry had picked up a few words of Spanish, French, German, and Russian over the summer. The mornings that she worked early or that Scott was otherwise unavailable for barista duties, she allowed herself to splurge on the pricey brews there. All of which went to the fact that, on this particular morning, having slept almost not at all, Kerry had the distinct feeling that there just wasn’t going to be enough coffee in the world to get her through the day. She had developed a serious caffeine habit over the summer. But some days it was more crucial than others.
Today she sniffed the air hopefully, even before she rolled out of the sack. No fragrant aroma of the glorious bean. So Scott was sleeping in, or Brandy had been ticked enough about the way last night’s argument had gone that she had kicked him out of the house or dragged him away for an early breakfast (and accompanied by a stern talking-to).
Or, of course, it meant that the stranger in their living room had in fact been an axe murderer, and all of her housemates were dead.
With that image in her mind, she kicked off the sheets and glanced at herself. Green cotton pajama pants and a tank top provided enough coverage. She padded barefoot across the hardwood floor, pulled the door open. A short hallway led to the living room, and she could smell the man before she saw him. He was still there, and he needed a shower more than ever. But if he had, in fact, murdered the rest of the household, she’d have expected him to smell more like fresh blood—as he had last night—and less like stale sweat.
So all in all, an improvement over where things could have been.
And there had been no nightmares during the night, she realized, which was a bonus. She’d had recurrent nightmares before, but not since the days when she was young enough to comfort herself by hugging the rag-doll clown she’d named BoBo. He was long since put away, though, stored in a trunk in her uncle Marsh’s attic. Approaching the stranger, she found herself wishing for a moment that she had BoBo here with her, giving her courage as he had done when she was a child.
The living room was dimly lit—curtains still drawn, but they were moth-eaten and sunshine leaked through—and nobody was around. Kerry approached the stranger, whose breath was ragged but steady, and looked at his pale, drawn face. He looked different, somehow, than he had the night before. Still gaunt, but his cheeks seemed less sunken, the hollows of his eyes shallower than they had been. It was almost as if, she thought, the night’s sleep had not only allowed him to heal but had made him younger at the same time.
Even so, Rolling Stones young, not Radiohead young. Big difference.
A sound from behind her. Kerry turned. Rebecca, her short-cropped orange hair reaching in every direction at once, stood there in blue fuzzy slippers and a cotton nightgown. Rebecca took a bath every day, never a shower, and she spent a minimum of forty minutes—more often an hour—in the bathroom. Lit candles, put in a bath bomb or bubble bath, something floral. Pampered herself. Kerry admired her dedication even if—in a house with six people and only one bathroom and a half—she often resented the time it took. But a cloud of flowery fragrance usually surrounded Rebecca, as it did now, wafting to Kerry’s nose across the room, providing relief from the stranger’s stench.
Rebecca blinked away sleep. “I stayed up last night,” she said in a quiet voice. “Watching him.”
Kerry felt an unexpected surge of jealousy, as if the strange man sleeping on their couch was her find, not anyone else’s. She knew it made no sense. Just tired, she decided. She hadn’t stayed up watching him. Thinking about him, though. “Did he do anything?”
A shrug. “Just slept. Maybe dreamed some—he moaned a little, and kind of scrunched his face up, you know.”
“How long did you watch him?” Kerry asked, hoping the answer wasn’t long enough to be creepy.
“Just awhile,” Rebecca said, shrugging some more. Kerry had learned that was one of her signature moves. Maybe a sign of low self-esteem, as if to accompany her statements with a shrug meant that they shouldn’t be taken too seriously. “I think he’s getting better.”
Kerry had to agree, though it was absurd to think that just a few hours of sleep would make much difference to a man as wounded as he’d been. Well, she mentally corrected, a few hours of sleep and some basic first aid.
But she had thought the same thing when she first glanced at him. Now, as if disturbed by their soft conversation, the man on the couch groaned and rolled away from them. She waited another few moments, thinking that he might wake up. When he didn’t, she looked at Rebecca and stifled a yawn against the back of her hand. “Let’s make some java, Beck,” she said.
Rebecca happily agreed.
A few hours passed. The day, as they had a tendency to do in San Diego in August, heated up. Kerry put on a green V-neck T-shirt with soft, faded jeans and the red-and-white zigzag sneakers that were even more comfortable than being barefoot, and brought a book into the living room. She sat in the big easy chair that had come with the furnished house, silently turning pages while she watched over her patient. The last thing she wanted was for him to wake up alone, in a strange room, not knowing where he was or who had brought him there. She plugged a freestanding fan over by the doorway, hoping its whir wouldn’t be too loud. The breeze wasn’t exactly cool but at least it moved the air around.
Occasionally one of her housemates—none of whom, as it happened, had been murdered in their sleep—would wander by. When Mace came in he stood with his hands on his hips and cocked his chin toward the sleeping man. “Dude still alive?”
“Seems to be,” Kerry told him. “Disappointed?”
“Surprised, I guess,” Mace answered. “Didn’t think he’d make it to dawn.”
“I guess he’s tougher than he looks,” Kerry observed.
“Seems like.” He shook his head and moseyed on.
When it was time for Kerry to leave for work, she called in sick. It was the first time she had done so all summer, and a pang of guilt caught in her stomach when she hung up the phone. But her boss, Mr. Hofstadter, wouldn’t have understood or accepted the real reason.
Through it all, the man slept. And Kerry wondered about him.
What was his story? How had he wound up in their yard? What had injured him? Was anyone looking for him? These questions, and many more, kept her from concentrating on her book, a paperback chick-lit novel she’d borrowed from Brandy. Her own tastes tended more toward suspense and thrillers, and if there were some exotic locations and romance mixed in, so much the better. But she would read anything she got her hands on, and this one was available.
Every time the man shifted in his sleep, she tensed, thinking he was waking up. The rest of the household went to work. She paced, or sipped a soda, or tried to read, and waited.
Eventually she dozed off in the chair. The book slid to the floor, but that didn’t wake her.
Neither did having a blanket draped over her.
Later, she did open her eyes, startled that they had been closed at all. More startled to see that the man was sitting up on the couch, watching her. On her lap she clutched the blanket that had once covered him.
“You didn’t have to do all this,” he said. His voice was soft and smooth, not the ragged husk of the night before. His eyebrows raised as if to encompass the “all this” to which he referred.
He was definitely younger than he had looked, even that morning. Sleep and recuperation had erased wrinkles, filled furrows. Still years older than her, but maybe not decades. His eyes were steel gray and clear, dancing with a light all their own in the poorly lit room.
She patted at the blanket. “It looks kind of like you’re the one who’s been taking care of me.”
“I owed you,” he said, as if that explained everything.
Or, really, anything.
“All I did was—”
He cut her off. His smile was, she realized, quite enchanting. “All you did was take me in, against the wishes of most of your friends. Clean and dress my wounds. Allow me to sleep, undisturbed, for as long as I needed. Accept without question my desire not to be taken to a doctor. Refuse to call the police. That, I have to say, was more than I could have asked, even if I’d been capable of asking, and I appreciate it.”
