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Chapter 8. Simon Fletcher

  So there I was, in front of the door with Simon Fletcher's name on it. I took a deep breath, to recover from my little interlude with Angel and to prepare myself for whatever was going to happen when I met Simon Fletcher, and knocked on the door.

  "Coming." Nice deep voice, then the door opened. The man standing there, smiling pleasantly, was close to my height. He looked about forty, although I often find it hard to judge the age of African-Americans. He was wearing a navy blue business suit, no vest, a not-white shirt—I don't know whether my mom would call it cream or ivory or off-white—and a red-and-navy tie.

  He stuck out his hand. "You're Mitch," he said.

  We shook. He looked into my eyes and held onto my hand and said, "Hold that thought."

  "What?" I said. "What thought?"

  "What you're thinking right now," he answered. He finally let go of my hand and stepped back and ushered me into a living room with pleasant modern furnishings that I barely saw, because on the other side of it were French doors leading to a porch, and beyond the porch I could see trees and beyond that—beyond that was the ocean. I stood there looking at it, trying to get my mind around the fact that I had just taken an elevator to the fourth floor.

  "Please forgive my formality," Simon was saying. "I'd just arrived when Angel phoned, and I'm wearing what I had on. I was planning to put on swim trunks right away, but I thought they were a little too casual for opening the door, and this way we can change at the same time."

  He took my arm and turned me toward a bathroom. "You'll find trunks in there. I'll meet you on the porch." And he headed toward a door off to the right, through which I could see the foot of a bed.

  In the bathroom I found a shelf with several pairs of bright-patterned baggies. I chose the least loud in my size, shades of blue and green in a big tropical leaf pattern, hung my jeans and t-shirt on a convenient hook, and kept my boat shoes on.

  Simon was waiting on the porch. He was barefoot, his trunks were patterned with brilliant red, orange, and yellow flowers, and he was holding two very tall glasses full of ice and a reddish-orange liquid. It was pretty hot outside but not humid, and I could smell the ocean.

  The porch stretched—I was going to say the whole width of the house, because from this side it was a house. The porch was deep enough for a table with straight chairs around it at one end, a swing in the middle, and several comfortably padded lounge chairs with footrests closer to the French doors. The floorboards, the porch railing, the balustrade, and the posts supporting the overhang were all a faded silvery wood that was smooth as silk underfoot. I kicked off my shoes and left them on the porch.

  Simon led me down three steps to the scrubby top of a dune, then down six more steps between the trees to the beach. There was a sort of lean-to against the dune. It was shading two comfortable chaises with a table between them. Simon put the glasses on the table and lay down on one of the chaises with a long sigh of contentment. He gestured toward the other one.

  "Make yourself comfortable," he said. "What I do, see, is I work a whole long day, then when I've seen my last patient and dictated my notes and caught up on some of my paperwork and my reading, I come here.

  "I relax, I have some lunch, I take a nap. Then I'm set for a nice long afternoon here, and then I go back there, have dinner, and go to bed. It's like having a little vacation after work every day."

  "It sounds fantastic," I said. "How do you get the ocean inside your apartment?"

  He laughed out loud and picked up one of the glasses. "Help yourself," he said, gesturing to the other one. "It's just fruit juice and club soda—and a little bit of rum."

  I lifted the glass, which was plastic and lighter than I'd expected, so I almost sloshed some of the liquid over the edge. There was a straw in it. I took a couple of big swallows. It was good, very tart and refreshing.

  "The ocean," Simon went on. "It's—you know about the TSA, right?" At my nod, he continued. "That's how the TSA works. You can—your own room, you can have it the way you want it. Everything's possible here. When I get here from my office, I want hot and tropical and beach and ocean, so that's what I have. Other people have mountains or woods or desert, or even city streets."

  So that was what Angel had meant, when she told me to think about how I'd like to change my room. I didn't have time to give it much thought at that moment, however, because Simon was still talking.

  "I told you to hold the thought, remember? So what were you thinking, what did you think when you first saw me?"

  I took another swallow of the drink. We were both looking out across the turquoise water instead of at each other, and maybe what Simon thought was "a little bit of rum" was really a lot for me, because I told him.

  "I thought you were good-looking. I thought you look like one of those people who are always immaculate, no matter what they have on—who don't ever get wrinkled or have sweat patches under their arms or dribble on their tie. And I thought Angel could have told me that you were black—I mean African-American."

  "Black's okay," he said. "So what was it you wanted to talk about?"

  "There are actually two things. First of all, until just recently, when I thought about college I thought I'd be doing pre-med, that I wanted to be a doctor like my dad. Only now I don't think so, at least not so much, and I don't know what I do want to be, so I don't know how to begin to decide what I want to major in."

  There was a pause.

  "Okay," he said. "That's not it, but okay, it's a valid concern. Only it seems to me that you know how to solve that problem. You think about what you do like, what you enjoy doing, and when you get to college you take some courses in those areas, and you talk to your student adviser or career counselor or whatever they call it. Somebody like that could probably help you better than I can, at least with that problem. So what's the other one, the real one?"

  This time it was me that caused the pause. This Simon seemed pretty perceptive. Did I think I could talk to him? I decided I could. The unreality of the whole situation helped there—I mean, I didn't think I'd really have to worry about running into the guy afterward at the supermarket or something. But could I even talk about what was bugging me? I decided tentatively that I could, but that I'd have to try to sneak up on it.

  I still hadn't said anything when he spoke. "Why don't you start by telling me how you got here?" he suggested. "All I know is that Angel somehow ran across you and your friend and rescued you."

  I could do that. I decided to leave out everything about the lake for the time being and just tell about the accident and Angel.

  "I couldn't have been out for more than a few seconds," I began, "because when I came to, the first thing I heard was the roar of the red pickup coming back fast in reverse to the spot where they had run us off the road."