Daniel’s face was pained. “That was the only part of what he told you that was true,” he said.
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“He said he didn’t hurt anybody with it.”
“He hurts people with it,” Daniel said.
She closed her eyes. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything. It scares me the things I told myself. But I would have told myself almost anything, because I wanted to believe him.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to be with you.”
THEY WENT DOWN to the sand to put their feet in the surf. It was dark, but the moon was full and bright. The water was calm and practically calling out to them, and Daniel really wanted to go for a swim. He sensed she did, too, but he felt awkward about making the suggestion. He could strip down to his boxers, but she just had that housekeeper dress and very possibly nothing under it.
Thinking of that, he thought of the way her body looked in it, and then he thought of the way her body looked under it. And then he pictured her unzipping it to go into the water, and then he realized it would no longer be a good idea to strip down to his boxer shorts. He sat there tangled up in his own awkwardness, and the most he could finally do was reach out and hold her hand.
“What happened to you?” she asked, looking at his arm where his sleeve had bunched up.
“What do you mean?”
“These scars.”
“It’s nothing.” He put his sleeve down again.
She lifted it up again. “It doesn’t look like nothing.”
To his astonishment, she bent her head and kissed the burn marks, each of the three, slowly and deliberately. He stared at her. As much as he’d wanted her lips on him, he wished she would leave that part alone.
“I had a tough set of foster parents,” he said quickly. “The mother was a smoker with a bad temper.”
She looked horrified. “Your mother did this to you?”
“She wasn’t my mother. She was just the woman I lived with when I was a kid.” His voice was so dismissive it was rude, but he couldn’t help it.
“Who was your mother, then?”
“The woman who gave birth to me was a heroin addict. I haven’t seen her since I was little. I was too young to really remember her.” He sounded impassive, and he was.
She kissed his arm again. She was sadder about it than he was, and he wished he could make her see.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said to her. “I’ve been through worse. I didn’t care about her. She might have thought she could hurt me, but she couldn’t.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “How can you say that? How can you say it doesn’t matter? You were a child, and she hurt you. She burned your skin and left scars. Of course it matters. That’s why you hide them.”
He shook his head, suddenly irritated. “I don’t hide them.”
“You do! I don’t care how many times you’ve lived or what you remember, it still hurts. It does matter.”
“Not the way you think.” He felt angry at her. This was not what he wanted to talk about, and he wished she would stop. “I’m different from you, Sophia. That’s the thing. I’m different from everybody. You don’t get that.”
“Oh, I get it, all right.” Her eyebrows came down. “And by the way, I am Lucy. I am right here, and I am Lucy. You are you, and you are not as different as you think. You are this man right here.” She held his arm with two hands. “With this skin and these scars on your arm and your fucked-up mom. That is who we are.”
“You’re wrong.” He glared at her. “We’re more than that.”
She looked mad, and that was fine, he told himself. He would rather she be mad than sympathetic. She provoked him, and he hated her in that moment, but he hated himself most. God, maybe she would run away again. Maybe he’d blown it again. Maybe for a lifetime. Maybe for all lifetimes. It wasn’t meant to work with them, was it? He didn’t know if he could try anymore.
She stared at him for a long time. She was tough when she wanted to be. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he half expected she was going to start shaking him, but she didn’t. She leaned in very close until he could feel her warmth. He felt shaken, and he couldn’t breathe right.
“You know what, Daniel?”
He held his breath. “What?”
This was where she said good-bye and walked out. He didn’t know where she would go, but he felt sure that’s what was coming. He hoped at least she would let him help her get somewhere safe.
“If it doesn’t matter, then this doesn’t matter.” She turned her head to the side and put her mouth to the hollow at the base of his neck and kissed him long and slow. He could feel the moisture. He could feel her tongue.
He was too shocked to respond. He was frozen. He didn’t know what to do. His body was suddenly a mass of throbbing nerves, and his brain didn’t even work.
She pulled away and looked him right in the eyes as she began to unbutton his shirt. In astonishment he watched her as if it were happening to someone else. She pulled the shirt off his shoulders and left it in a pile on the sand behind him. He was breathing hard, but he didn’t dare move.
“If that doesn’t matter, then this doesn’t matter.” She leaned down to his chest and kissed it.
His hands were clenched. He drew in a sharp breath.
“And this doesn’t matter.” She slid her hands around to his back and came up to kiss him on the lips. She kissed him hard, and in a rush like a tide he kissed her back. He didn’t think about anything. He kissed her with all he had, because he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t hold back if he tried. His hands were making their hungry way around her hips when she pulled away from him.
She held him away and looked at him, and his whole big, stupid body just hurt. He physically could not stand to be apart from her any longer. Once started, there was too much to feel. He couldn’t help that, either. He was drowning.
Her eyes were unflinching on him, but they were filled with tears. “Does that not matter?”
She was going to cry, he realized. She was going to cry for him, and he didn’t want her to.
He closed his eyes.
“Daniel, tell me. Does it not matter? Because if it doesn’t, I’ll stop.”
He didn’t want to open his eyes. He felt a tear escape under his eyelid. He couldn’t lie to her. He never had, and he couldn’t now. “Don’t stop.” His voice was barely a whisper.
“Why not?”
He felt as though he would die if he couldn’t touch her. “Because it matters.”
When she kissed him again he was crying, too, for the good and the bad. They were down on the sand, a wet blur of kissing and tears. He didn’t try to make sense of it anymore. He didn’t try to organize it or record it for the long future. This was what he had. It not only mattered, it mattered the most. He kissed her with everything, because loving a person was all you could do.
HE DIDN’T KNOW how long they’d been kissing in the dark sand or the things he said to her. There was nothing that separated him from her anymore. At some point, without really thinking, he lifted her from the sand in his arms. He wasn’t thinking, he just let his body do. He was long past fighting it anymore. It was a strong body, and it lifted her with ease and walked her into the house and into the bedroom. It parted the mosquito netting and put her on the bed.
Time lost its meaning. The regular sequences he kept such careful track of were gone. If anything, the circle of his long existence clicked back to the start and made him new again.
He unzipped her housekeeper smock with aching tenderness and found her naked under there with a burst of unexpected wonder, even though he knew that’s how she would be. He felt as though he’d never seen a woman’s body before, and when he put his hands on her, he felt as though he’d never touched anyone before. He discovered every part of her with his fingers and his mouth as though it was new. He went up every so often to kiss her wet face and look at her eyes and ma
ke sure she was still with him. She gave him everything unstintingly.
“I love you,” he whispered to her, and if he’d ever said it before, he couldn’t remember.
After he’d found every part of her, she wound her legs around him and pulled him inside. She clung to him. She held his neck and kissed him damply and fiercely.
He could lose himself in her forever, he thought. He might never come out. She was right here, and she was Lucy. He was this man in this skin, and that was all. Lucy was right. That was all they were.
At last he came and came and came inside her. It was just raw senses. It was a moment big enough to scatter all memory of before and after. Maybe he wouldn’t get to keep it, and that was the thing that always scared him most. But he felt a delirious joy in setting his burdened mind free. He let it all go. The rest of the world and all record of everything that had ever happened to him. He pressed his sweaty body along her beautiful, sweet skin. He curled around her, and he was as raw and new as if he had just been born.
JOLUTA, MEXICO, 2009
SHE WOKE TO a sound. Not his breathing or occasional sighing, which she incorporated pleasurably into sleep, but a sound she wasn’t sure of. Regretfully and carefully she unwound them, his leg back to him, her arm back to her. He’d gotten up to pee a little while before and had put on his boxer shorts.
There was a faint light of dawn making its way into the room. She crept quietly out of bed. She found the housekeeping smock in a ball on the floor and pulled it on, zipping slowly so she wouldn’t wake him up. She turned to the window. She could barely make out the leaves of a mango tree. She stood, alert.
She heard something again from the same direction. It was probably a bird or some other little animal. The landscape was tropical and busy around here. She walked along the edge of the room toward the window, trying to tune her eyes to the dull light.
“Daniel!” She screamed his name before she had time to think it. There was something there. She couldn’t make out a face, but she was almost certain she could make out the shape of something in the half-open window. She tried to make sense of it. Was it a gun?
Several things happened at once and without any perceptible order. He sat up at the sound of her voice. She ran toward him as fast and as hard as she could to push him out of the way. The gun fired and she screamed and Daniel was suddenly on his feet shouting.
She didn’t know what was happening. He was holding her and yelling like crazy. She saw blood, and she was scared that he was shot. He pulled her off the bed and carried her out of the bedroom to the big room. She heard another shot behind them. She was crying. “Are you hurt? Are you okay? Did it hit you?” She wasn’t sure what she was saying and what she was just thinking.
He was running through the house, out of the house, onto the beach. He was running with her across the sand, and she heard a third shot. They were going to die. Where could they go? They couldn’t go back to the house. They were easy targets on the wide-open beach. Ahead of them was only water.
There was blood on his chest. Oh, God, was he hurt?
He ran with her down to the surf and pulled her into the water with him. It wasn’t until she was trying to swim that she realized she could barely move her arm. Distantly, she heard another shot. “Take a big breath,” he ordered her. They went under together and he pulled her along and she swam as best she could. It dawned on her that her shoulder hurt. Had she injured it somehow? He was swimming so powerfully for the two of them, it made her think he couldn’t be badly wounded. He pulled her up for a breath and then down again.
When they came up for the next breath she saw the floating dock right in front of them. This is what we would do if we were on vacation, she reminded herself incongruously. He swam her around to the other side, pushed her onto it, and quickly scrambled up behind her.
She was aching for breath. She put a hand to her shoulder. She saw the figure on the beach with the gun. Joaquim was what Daniel called him.
She felt Daniel’s arm supporting her, his other hand unzipping her smock. He pulled it gingerly over her shoulder, and it hurt. He was taking off her dress, and they were both going to die at any moment, and she felt oddly calm about it all.
“We’ll be easy to kill out here,” she said, trying to catch her breath.
“If he wanted to kill us, he would.” He was studying her shoulder, and she realized for the first time that she was the one who was bleeding.
The gun was trained on them. “You think he doesn’t?”
“I think he would have already if he was in any hurry to.”
“Did I get shot?” she asked incredulously.
“Your shoulder caught the edge of a bullet that was not intended for you. You jumped right in front of it, my girl, and scared the shit out of me.” She couldn’t believe he was smiling at her, but he was. “There’s a deep scrape but not a bullet. We got lucky there.”
“Who was it intended for?” She cast another wary eye at Joaquim and his pistol on the beach.
“It was intended to intimidate us and get control of us but not to hurt you. Joaquim might not have minded shooting me, but it would have been an anticlimax. He wants to put me at his mercy. That’s the kind of person he is. He wants to do to me what I did to him—to take you away from me and have me know that you are in the world, but I can’t have you. He probably thinks you still belong to him. I’m not saying he won’t shoot me or both of us as a last resort, but it’s not what he wants to do.”
“Why not?”
“Because then he loses us again. He’s got us in this life but not the next. He can remember, but he can’t recognize souls.”
“He can’t?”
“No. He couldn’t in the past, anyway.”
“You can?”
“Not perfectly but yes.”
“So then what’s going to happen now?”
“I don’t know, and neither does he. When he brought you here I think he probably hoped that I would show up, but he didn’t expect me to succeed in running away with you. I am almost sure this was not in his plans. He knows we have no options right now, but neither does he. Besides shooting us both dead, all he can do is stand there and wait to see what we do. He can’t leave us and get a boat. We’d be gone by then. He can’t swim in after us.”
“So what do we do?”
“For now, it’s a stalemate. We’re all going to wait.”
“We are?”
“Unless you have a different idea.”
“I’ll get to work on that,” she said. She realized he was pulling at the bottom of her smock, and she sat up. “Is this really the moment for that?”
He laughed. “I wish it were.” He was examining her hem. “Listen, I know you haven’t got a lot to work with, clothes-wise, but do you mind if I rip off the bottom couple of inches? I want to tie up your shoulder.” He gestured to his wet boxers. “I’ve got even less to spare.”
“I think we should use yours,” she said.
“All right, then,” he said. He stood up and started to strip, and she couldn’t help but admire his beautiful body up and down.
She was not in her right mind. She’d been too drunk with happiness to sober up properly. She suspected he felt the same. The world wasn’t big enough to contain the magnitude of what had happened between them last night. There was no way it was big enough to contain this, too. She didn’t want to sober up.
“Stop. I’m kidding. You can rip my dress. We don’t want to be totally naked out here.”
“Don’t we?”
“Not with our audience.”
He expertly tore the bottom few inches straight around the hem. He snuck a peek under it. “You are driving me insane in this thing.”
She laughed. “It’s not the outfit I would have picked for our reunion, but I admit it’s easy to get in and out of.” She couldn’t quite believe that they were still lusting after each other.
He carefully and expertly bandaged her shoulder to stop the bleeding.
&nb
sp; “You seem like you know what you’re doing.”
“I’m a doctor. Did I mention that?”
“No, you are not.”
“Yes, I am. A few times over.”
“You’re too young.”
“I’d been to medical school already. I skipped ahead a bit.”
“A bit? A lot.”
“Okay, a lot.”
“Do you work in a hospital?”
“Yes.” He tied off the bandage, kissed her breast, pulled her smock back into place, and zipped her up. “You’ll be fine, ma’am.”
“Another scar for my collection.”
“You have many bullet wounds?”
“I mean the kind you gather over lifetimes, that stay with you after you die. Like this one, right?” She pointed to her upper arm.
He tipped his head. “How do you know about that?”
“From Constance.”
“How do you know about Constance?”
“I was Constance.”
“I know, but how do you know that?”
“I read a letter she wrote to me.”
He glanced briefly at Joaquim on the beach and back at her. “And how did you do that?”
“I went to Hastonbury Hall in England and found it in her old bedroom.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “You are kidding me. I don’t know what to say.”
It was fun, having this to tell him. “Remember the hypnotist I told you about? I did a regression under hypnosis and went right back to Constance. She was desperate that I find her note. And she’s been badgering me and making me remember things ever since.”
“Unbelievable.”
“She is.”
“I was wrong, you know.”
“About what?”
“When you were Constance I told you your memory was only ordinary. Now I see I underestimated you.”
“Because that girl would not leave me alone. She would not be happy until I got with you.”
Daniel laughed. “Is she happy now?”
Lucy laughed, and she also felt as though she was going to cry. “She’s very happy now.”