Greg Iles - Blood Memory

My body tenses. Opening my eyes, I see a dark figure hovering above the water. Slowly, a golden spear separates from the figure and descends toward the surface, directly above me. I shove the rock off my chest and burst up into air and light, sputtering in terror. A tall man stands at the side of the pool, a ten-foot-long net in his hands. He looks more frightened than I.

“I thought you’d drowned!” he cries. Then he blushes and turns away.

I cross my arms over my breasts, only now remembering that I went into the pool in my underwear. “Who are you? Where’s Mrs. Hemmeter?”

“Magnolia House.” He’s still looking away. “The assisted-living home. She sold the house to me. Do you want to put on some clothes?”

I kneel so that the water covers me to my neck. “I’m decent now.”

The man turns around. He has sandy brown hair and blue eyes, and he’s wearing khakis and a blue button-down oxford shirt. Several tongue suppressors protrude from his shirt pocket. He looks to be in his early thirties, and something about him strikes me as familiar.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

He smiles. “Do you?”

I study him but can’t make the connection. “I do. Or I did.”

“I’m Michael Wells.”

“Oh my God! Michael? I didn’t-”

“Didn’t recognize me, I know. I’ve lost eighty pounds in the last two years.”

I survey him from head to toe. It’s difficult to reconcile what I see before me with my memories of high school, but there’s just enough of the old Michael left to recognize. It’s like meeting a man in the real world whom you first encountered as a cancer patient on steroid therapy-bloated and soft then, but now miraculously recovered, healthy and hard.

“My God, you look…well, hot. ”

Michael’s blush returns, redder than before. “Thanks, Cat.”

He was three years ahead of me at St. Stephen’s, then at the University Medical Center in Jackson. “Did you stick with pediatrics?” I ask, searching my mind for details.

He nods. “I was practicing in North Carolina, but St. Catherine’s Hospital came up and recruited me. This town was desperate for more pediatricians.”

“Well, I’m glad you came back. You own this house now?”

“Yep.”

“I used to swim here all the time.”

He smiles. “Mrs. Hemmeter told me.”

“Did she? Well, do you like it? The house, I mean.”

“I do. I like being at the back of the neighborhood. It’s no Malmaison, of course.”

“Be glad it’s not. You don’t want the upkeep on that place.”

“I can imagine. Did you ever live anywhere else in Natchez?”

“No. My dad came back from Vietnam with post-traumatic stress disorder. He couldn’t hold a job, so my mom came home from college, and they moved into one of the slave quarters. I was born four years later. We never left after that.”

“What did your father do before the war?”

“He was a welder.”

“Is that where his sculpting came from?”

“Yes.” I’m surprised Michael remembers that. After two years of wandering the woods and watching television, my dad fired up his welding equipment and began sculpting metal. In the beginning he produced huge, horrid pieces-Asian demons cut from steel and iron-but as time passed, his work mellowed and became quite popular with some collectors.

“Is that a rock down there?” Michael asks, pointing into the water.

“Yes. Your rock. I used it to keep me submerged. I’m a free diver.”

“What’s that?”

“I dive deep in the ocean using only the air in my lungs.”

Michael looks intrigued. “How deep?”

“I’ve been to three hundred and fifty feet.”

“Jesus! I scuba dive a little, and I’ve only been to ninety feet with tanks.”

“I use a weighted sled to help me get down quickly.”

“That’s one extreme sport I’ve never heard of.”

“It’s pretty intense. As solitary as you can be on this planet, I think.”

He squats beside the pool, his eyes filled with curiosity. “Do you like that? Solitude, I mean?”

“Sometimes. Other times I can’t stand to be alone. Literally.”

“I learned to fly five years ago. I’ve got a little Cessna 210 out at the airport. That’s where I get my solitude.”

“Well, there you go. Flying scares me to death. If I got into your Cessna, I’d need a doggie bag in the first two minutes.”

Michael laughs and blushes at the same time. “You’re just trying to save my pride.”

“I’m not. Flying scares me, especially small planes.” I look toward the trees that conceal Malmaison. “Have you met my grandfather yet?”

He smiles in a way that’s hard to read. “The lord of the manor? Yeah. He still comes to the occasional staff meeting at the hospital, even though he’s more of a wheeler-dealer than a surgeon these days, from what I hear.”

“For a lot of years now. By the time he was forty, surgery was just a prestige hobby for him.”

Michael glances toward the woods, as though my grandfather might be watching us. “I saw him out running one day. He didn’t recognize me. I tell you, he’s a tough old man. He’s what, seventy?”

“Seventy-seven.”

“God. He can run me into the ground. And he doesn’t have that old-man jog, either, you know? He runs. ”

“He’s strong.”

“I haven’t seen him much lately. He’s apparently out of town a lot.” Michael bends and dips his hand into the pool. “There’s a rumor that he’s buying up most of downtown Natchez.”

“What?”

“When the paper mill closed, the real estate market here crashed. But then a front company started buying up downtown by the block. Like it’s boom times again. Word is, the front company is really your grandfather.”

I can’t fit this into my frame of reference about my grandfather. “Why would he do that? Where’s the profit in it?”

This time Michael shrugs. “Nobody seems to know. But some people say he has some grand plan to save the city.”

I shake my head. “He’s always done a lot for the town, but that seems a bit crazy, given the local economy.”

“Maybe he knows something we don’t.”

“He always does.”

We look at each other without speaking. Michael doesn’t feel compelled to fill every silence, as some men do. But then this is his property. I’m the interloper.

“You know I didn’t finish med school, right?” I say cautiously.

“I heard.”

“What did you hear?”

He replies in a neutral tone, careful to keep any judgment out of his voice. “Depression. Nervous breakdown. The usual.”

“Nothing else?”

“Something about an affair with an attending physician. Or a professor, something. He flipped out over you and lost his job, you got booted, something like that. I don’t care much about gossip. Everybody’s got a past.”

I smile. “Do you?”

“Sure.” He chuckles softly. “Maybe not as colorful as yours.”

We both laugh.

“I had a terrible crush on you in high school,” he says. “I have to tell you that. I didn’t have the nerve to back then. The most beautiful girl at St. Stephen’s…my God.”

“And now I’m standing in your swimming pool in my underwear. How do I look?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. I’m surprised by the anxiety I feel about his answer. Why do I care so much what a virtual stranger thinks?

“You haven’t changed at all,” Michael says.

“Now I know you’re lying. You should have told me about the crush back then.”

He shakes his head. “Nah. You only dated jocks or bad boys.”

“What were you?”

“The chubby geek. You know that.”

I don’t insult him by arguing. “You seem to have reinvented yourself.”