Whispers and Lies Page 8

  That I was completely out of my mind, I thought, realizing that I hadn’t heard a single word he’d said in the last two minutes. What was the matter with me? Was I so starved for male companionship that a pleasant lunch instantly spawned fantasies of happily ever after? I needed to slow down, calm down, cool down. Before I ruined everything.

  Deliberately, I allowed myself to be distracted by the sight of two boys, maybe five or six years old, in matching bright red bathing suits, tumbling over each other as they rolled, like runaway logs, into the water, before disappearing underneath a succession of increasingly large waves. I looked around the crowded beach. An elderly couple was relaxing under a red-and-white-striped umbrella; a young man was erecting a sand castle with his toddler son; two teenagers carelessly tossed a neon-pink Frisbee back and forth; a middle-aged woman, her large stomach protruding over a tiny bikini bottom, swung her arms with careless abandon as she marched along beside the ocean; a younger woman was soaking up the sun, breast implants proudly pointing toward the cloudless sky. No one was supervising the two boys, I realized, holding my breath as the boys’ heads appeared above the water, only to disappear again under the next big wave.

  “Do you see anyone watching those boys?” I asked Josh, hard pellets of sunshine bouncing off my eyes as I continued scanning the beach.

  Josh’s eyes joined in the search. “I’m sure there’s someone,” he said unconvincingly, as one of the youngsters began waving his arms in the air.

  A fresh wave immediately slapped them down. This wave was immediately followed by a much larger one. A small voice rode the wave to shore. “Help!” the voice cried, wobbling like unsteady knees on a surfboard.

  “Help!” I echoed loudly, motioning frantically to the lifeguard farther down the beach, but he was busy chatting up a teenage girl in a black-and-white string bikini, the girl’s long, lean legs stretching all the way up to her baseball cap. I’ve had nightmares about drowning all my life, maybe because I never learned how to swim. I couldn’t just stand there waiting for disaster to strike. I had to do something. “We have to do something,” I shouted as Josh raced toward the lifeguard.

  “Help! Help!” the small voice pleaded, now joined by a second voice, more plaintive than the first. Their cries skipped along the surface of the water like a stone, only to disappear beneath yet another rush of deadly white foam.

  “Somebody do something!” I shouted at the people around me, but although a small crowd was starting to gather, nobody moved.

  Without further thought, I dropped my purse and shoes to the sand and jumped into the surf after the boys, the cold water reaching between my thighs and whipping my dress around my legs. An unexpected undertow suddenly anchored my legs to the sand, and I struggled to maintain my balance, my hands circling my body like rusty propellers.

  “Help!” the boys continued crying, their heads bobbing like apples in a bucket as I resolutely pushed myself forward, only to feel my legs collapse beneath me like the folding chair I’d been sitting on only moments before.

  “I’m coming,” I called out, the bitter taste of salt washing over my tongue as the ocean spilled into my mouth. “Hang on,” I urged as the ground under my toes suddenly disappeared, as if I’d stepped off a steep cliff, and I fought to keep my head above water. My hands reached blindly for something to grab on to, accidentally smacking against what felt like a rock, but proved to be a small head. Hair curled between my fingers, like seaweed.

  Whether through determination, good fortune, or just plain, dumb luck, I managed to get my hands around first one boy, then the other, and somehow catapulted their kicking frames toward the shore in time for anxious arms to reach them. I heard a series of excited, high-pitched exhortations—“Didn’t I tell you to stay put until I got back? Look at you! You almost drowned!”—and then the water once again wrapped itself around my torso, like a hungry boa constrictor, and carried me back out to sea.

  So this is what it feels like to drown, I remember thinking as the water covered my head like a heavy blanket, sneaking into all my private cavities, an impatient lover who would no longer be denied. “Terry,” the water whispered seductively. Then louder, more insistent. “Terry … Terry.”

  “Terry!”

  The voice exploded in my ear as determined hands reached under my arms to pull me toward the sky. My head burst through the surface of the water like a fist through glass.

  “My God, are you all right?” Strong arms pushed me toward the shore where I collapsed onto my hands and knees.

  Water clung to my eyes, like shards of glass, and I struggled to open them. Slivers of breath escaped my lungs in a series of short, painful spasms.

  “Are you all right?” Josh’s face formed around the edges of the words.

  I nodded, coughed, sucked furiously at the air. “The boys …?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “Thank God.”

  Josh’s fingers pushed the hair out of my eyes, smoothed the water from my cheeks. “You’re a hero, Terry Painter.”

  “I’m an idiot,” I muttered. “I can’t swim.”

  “So I noticed.”

  “You’re not supposed to go in the water without a bathing suit,” a little girl admonished from somewhere beside me.

  I looked down at my once seductive dress, now wrapped around me like a bruised yellow tent. “Look at me,” I wailed. “I look like an overripe banana.”

  Josh laughed. “Good enough to eat,” I thought I heard him say, although in the ensuing commotion I couldn’t be sure. A crowd was gathering. Unfamiliar voices were exclaiming their gratitude; strange hands were patting my back.

  “Way to go!” someone enthused in passing.

  “Are you okay?” a young woman asked, long legs approaching cautiously. I recognized the black-and-white string bikini and the baseball cap, knew she was the girl I’d seen earlier, talking to the lifeguard.

  “I’m fine.” I noted the lifeguard was standing directly behind her, and that he was suitably tall, blond, and muscular. The expression on his bland, bronzed face wavered between gratitude and resentment.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” the girl continued. “Those are my brothers. My mother would have killed me if anything had happened to them.”

  “You should keep a closer eye on them.”

  She nodded, glanced up the beach to where the boys were wrestling in the sand. “Yeah, well, I told them …” Her voice disappeared into a passing breeze. “Anyway, thanks again.” She looked past me at Josh.

  “You interested in a job?” the lifeguard joked uneasily.

  “Just do yours,” I told him, but he was already backing away, and he dismissed my admonishment with a wave of his hand, as if swatting at a pesky insect.

  “My purse!” I said, suddenly remembering I’d dropped it on the shore. “My shoes …”

  “Right here.” Josh lifted them into the air, like a proud fisherman displaying his catch of the day.

  “My God, look at you!” I exclaimed, realizing he was almost as wet as I was.

  “We’re quite a pair,” he said, leaning his face toward mine.

  I held my breath, didn’t move. Was he going to kiss me?

  A clump of hair promptly fell into my eyes, and I brushed it aside impatiently, feeling particles of sand attach themselves to my eyelashes, like globs of errant mascara. Great, I thought, trying to picture myself through his eyes. A regular beauty queen, I could almost hear my mother say.

  “Terry?” a familiar voice asked from miles above my head.

  I looked up, shielded my eyes. Alison loomed between me and the sun like a giant eclipse.

  “Terry?” she said again, crouching down beside me. “My God, I can’t believe it’s you!”

  “Alison! What are you doing here?”

  “I have the day off. What’s going on? Somebody said you saved two little boys from drowning.”

  “She was magnificent,” Josh said proudly.

  “Until I almost drowned m
yself.”

  “My God, are you all right?”

  “She’s magnificent,” Josh repeated, extending his hand toward Alison. “I’m Josh Wylie, by the way.”

  Alison took his hand, shook it vigorously. “Alison Simms.”

  “Alison’s my new tenant,” I qualified.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Alison.”

  “You too.” Almost reluctantly, she relinquished his hand. “So, has Terry invited you over for Thanksgiving yet?”

  “Alison!”

  “Terry’s only the best cook in the whole wide world. You’re not busy, are you?”

  “Well, no, but …”

  “Good. Then it’s settled. Don’t worry, Terry,” Alison cautioned, “I’ll help.”

  I’m not sure exactly what happened after that. I remember wanting to wring Alison’s lovely, swanlike neck. I also wanted to throw my arms around her and jump up and down with joy. At any rate, perhaps sensing my ambivalance, Alison muttered something about meeting with me later to discuss all the necessary details, then made a hasty retreat, disappearing into a swirl of pink sand. Josh drove me to my house, waiting in the car while I ran upstairs, towel-dried my hair, and changed out of my wet clothes. Then he drove me back to work. Neither one of us said anything until he pulled up in front of the hospital. Then we turned simultaneously toward one another.

  “Josh …”

  “Terry …”

  “You don’t have to come to dinner on Thanksgiving.”

  “You don’t have to invite me.”

  “No, I’d love to invite you.”

  “Then I’d love to come.”

  “Really?”

  “Jan’s taking the kids that night, so I have no particular plans.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be anything fancy.…”

  “I don’t need fancy if I have the best cook in the whole wide world.”

  I laughed. “Well, that might be a slight exaggeration.”

  “She’s quite a character, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “A real whirling dervish. Slightly fey, very charming.”

  Charming, fey, I think now. Not the words I would use to describe her.

  What words would you use? I hear Alison whisper slyly in my ear.

  “You’ll explain to my mother why I didn’t come back to see her?” Josh asked, indicating his wet clothes.

  “Can I leave out the part where I almost drowned?”

  Josh laughed. “What time next Thursday?”

  I quickly mulled over everything I had to do to prepare. It had been years since I’d cooked anyone Thanksgiving dinner. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought a turkey. It’s not something you normally buy when you’re cooking for one. “Seven o’clock?”

  “Seven o’clock,” he repeated. “I’m thankful already.”

  I stepped out of the car and skipped up the hospital’s front steps, turning back as I pulled open the door. My hero, I thought, watching Josh drive away, my head pleasantly dizzy with anticipation, the sound of the surf still ringing in my ears.

  EIGHT

  “Okay, so are you ready for your whole new look?”

  Alison, wearing blue shorts, a white halter top, and hot-pink nail polish on her bare toes, stood outside my kitchen door, her arms loaded with an interesting array of bottles and tubes. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked about twelve.

  My own hair was freshly washed, as per her instructions, and wrapped in a white towel that matched my white terry-cloth robe. “What’s all this?” I stepped back to let her inside.

  “Creams, oils, emulsions.” She deposited the various items on my kitchen table and arranged them to her satisfaction. “What’s an emulsion anyway?”

  I thought back to my years at nursing school. “Any colloidal suspension of one liquid in another liquid,” I said, almost by rote, startled by how easily such long-forgotten nuggets resurfaced.

  “Colloidal?”

  “A colloid is a gelatinous substance which when dissolved in a liquid will not diffuse readily through either vegetable or animal membranes.”

  Alison looked at me as if I were some new form of alien species. “Could you try that again?”

  “It’s a liquid preparation that’s the color and consistency of milk,” I said plainly.

  She smiled, lifted a medium-sized glass bottle of white cream into her hands. “That would be this one.”

  “How can you buy products when you don’t know what they are?”

  “Nobody knows what they are. That’s why they cost so much.”

  I laughed, thinking she was probably right. “What else have you got here?”

  “Let’s see. There’s a pore-purifying microbead face wash, and an alpha hydroxy exfoliating peel-off masque—that’s masque spelled with a que, which means it’s really expensive. Then there’s a botanical, gentle facial-buffing cream, another botanical cream with collagen and woodmallow. What’s that? Never mind,” she said in the same breath. “Then we have a soothing eye-contour mask—this one spelled with a k, so it’s probably not as good—a milky refiner, not to be confused with the aforementioned milky emulsion, an oil-free moisturizing lotion, and a tube of concentrated apricot oil. Did you happen to catch my casual use of the word aforementioned?”

  “I did.”

  “Were you impressed?”

  “I was.”

  “Good.” She dug into the right-side pocket of her blue shorts, pulled out several small bottles of nail polish. “Very Cherry and Luscious Lilac. Your choice.” From her left-side pocket emerged cotton balls, emery boards, and assorted tiny implements of torture. Then she reached behind her and extricated a large pair of scissors from her back pocket, waving them before my eyes like a magic wand. “For Madame’s new do.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I wavered, pulling the towel off my head.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything drastic. Just even it up a bit, maybe take an inch off the bottom. You said you have cucumbers?”

  “In the fridge,” I told her, trying to keep up with the conversation.

  “Good. Then what say we get started?”

  What could I do? Alison was so enthusiastic, so confident, so persuasive, I really didn’t have a choice.

  You want to be gorgeous for Thanksgiving, don’t you? I can still hear her ask.

  And the truth was, I did want to be gorgeous for Thanksgiving. I wanted to be drop-dead, knock-’em-down-and-drag-’em-out gorgeous for Thanksgiving. For Josh.

  Not that you aren’t gorgeous already, Alison had quickly amended.

  All week I’d been walking around in a stupid haze, singing along with the radio, humming merrily off-key as I doled out medications, even waving a pleasant “Hello” to Bettye McCoy as she hurried those overgrown furballs past my house. And why? All because some guy I liked had been nice to me.

  No, more than nice.

  Interested.

  Interested in me.

  He’s only using you, I could almost hear my mother say. He’ll break your heart.

  Yes, he probably will, I agreed.

  But I didn’t care. It didn’t matter that Josh was still carrying a torch for his ex-wife, that he had two kids and a dying mother, that a serious involvement was probably the last thing he was looking for. It didn’t matter that we’d had only one real date, a lunch date at that, and that I’d almost drowned during it. What mattered was that he was interested.

  Good enough to eat, he’d said.

  I felt an almost forgotten tingle between my legs.

  What do you really know about this man? my mother asked.

  Not much, I was forced to admit.

  That didn’t matter either. Josh Wylie could have been an ax murderer for all I cared. Sadistic killer or not, he made me feel things I hadn’t felt in years. He resurrected emotions so long and deeply repressed I’d forgotten I had them. At forty, I felt like one of those silly teenage girls you see giggling in the mall with
her friends: And then he said; and then he said. I was fourteen again, in love with Roger Stillman.

  And look what happened there, my mother reminded me.

  “We’ll do your hair first,” Alison was saying now, a comb appearing from out of nowhere to drag the wet tangles of my hair across my ears and forehead. Alison sat me down and knelt in front of me, her palm turning my chin from one side to the other as she studied my face. She smiled, as if privy to my innermost thoughts. Could she see Josh Wylie in the reflection of my eyes?

  I heard the scissors, felt the blades snipping at the air around my head, moving closer. “I’ll clean up later,” she announced as I felt first one tug, then another, and watched in horror as several wet clumps of hair fell to the white tile of the kitchen floor.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned.

  “Close your eyes,” Alison instructed. “Have faith.”

  With my eyes closed, the sound of cutting was even more intense. It was as if those scissors were slicing through all my protective outer layers, snipping away my secrets, sapping my strength. Samson and Delilah, I thought dramatically, taking a series of long, deep breaths, deciding to roll with the punches, go with the flow.

  “I’ll wait till after your facial to blow it dry properly. We can go into the living room now,” she instructed as I stepped over the hair lying across the white tiles, like a small area rug. “Don’t look,” she said as a shudder shook my shoulders. “Have faith. Trust me.”

  I’d already laid a bedsheet across the living room sofa in preparation for my “night at the spa,” as Alison had laughingly referred to it, and now I stood paralyzed in front of it, waiting for Alison to tell me what to do.