by Willow Rose
“That’s the plan.”
“You’re going to be a doctor like the old man?”
“Yes. I thought I might be able to do something with kids, maybe be a pediatrician or something. Work in a hospital with seriously ill children. Something like that.” I couldn’t say I had enjoyed the first three years of med school in Denmark; it had been a lot of hard work. Luckily for me, I had my photographic memory to help me out. That made it a lot easier, but I still didn't enjoy it much. The only thing that helped me through was the thought of being able to one day cure someone like my mother. Maybe save someone from death so their kid wouldn't lose them and go through what I had gone through.
Heather smiled and it made me feel uncomfortable. Like she didn’t believe me. Like she thought I was only saying that to impress her. I wasn’t. That was the only way I could ever become a doctor. That was the only way I could stand the thought of ending up in the same profession as my father. I knew he wanted me to take over his practice but that wasn't until he retired. Until then I was going to travel helping people in need around the globe or help sick children.
“That’s what everybody says in the beginning,” she said still wearing that smirky smile that I didn’t care for. “Everybody wants to save the world. Then they realize how much money they can make from doing other stuff and they throw all their ideals overboard. At least that is what my dad usually says.”
“Is that why he is an eye surgeon? Because that is where the money is?” I asked.
“Is there any other reason? All he does all day is remove cataracts from old people’s eyes so they can see better and don’t need their glasses for reading or driving around in their big cars. He doesn’t even have any contact with the patients at the clinic. The nurses prep them for him and all he has to do is show up for surgery and do his thing. It takes him about five minutes to do it and it costs the patient twenty-five hundred dollars. He can do about four patients an hour. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he makes a lot of money.”
That was a lot of money, I thought to myself. My own dad was just an ordinary physician with a private practice and he made decent money, enough for us to live a rich life in Denmark. Enough to make me among the wealthiest kids in high school. Enough for my dad to be able to buy me a year at the University of Florida. Money had never been a concern to me. In that way I was still spoiled.
“So do you know how to play that thing or do you just carry it around to impress the ladies?” she asked, pointing at my acoustic guitar. I had taken it out of the case and put it in the corner of the room.
My beloved guitar. My only friend when I was lonely. I picked it up and sat on the bed. I started playing gently one of my latest love songs and started singing. The laments of my guitar was soon inflamed with love and broken promises. Heather listened while tilting her head. She got the look in her eyes that I knew too well. The look women always got when I started playing. They simply loved it. It was the oldest trick in the book, but it worked every time. I closed my eyes and let the words and the notes float out of me. I had played that thing ever since my mother died. It had been hers. Like me, she was a lover of music and literature. She used to play the very same guitar for me at night or even sometimes in the afternoon when she thought we were getting too serious and needed a song to lighten the air. She hated when the air was heavy in the house, as she called it. She used music for everything. Whenever I needed to be cheered up. Whenever my dad got too serious and talked too much politics during dinner, she would suddenly leave the table and grab the guitar and start playing. “We need a song,” she would say, and that would always make my dad laugh. He never could hit the notes right but he always used to sing along with all his heart. Needless to say he never sang again after my mother’s death. But I did. I picked up the guitar a couple of days after her funeral and just started playing it. I soon learned I had inherited my mother’s great musical skills. She could pick up any instrument and begin to play. So could I. And I could do it by ear. I had never taken any lessons nor had a teacher. I just knew how somehow. When I had just started playing I had been too shy to let anyone hear my songs or even my playing, but throughout high school I realized that people liked to hear me play and sing, and little by little I had gotten used to it. I still felt like I bared my soul, but that was what gave it its authenticity. That was what people enjoyed so very much about my music.
When I was done, Heather clapped her hands. “Wow. That was really good.”
“I do my best,” I answered with a timid smile. Heather was definitely an interesting girl, I thought. But I also sensed that I had to be very careful with her. Heather was the type who was used to getting things her way and that could become a problem eventually. I didn’t want to get into any trouble and break the trust of the nice people that had taken me into their home. I had to keep her at a distance.
“Just don’t play that thing in front of my parents,” she continued. “My dad thinks any music besides classical is for the poor and black.”
Heather got up from the bed and walked towards the door. “See you at dinner later,” she said. “You are going to the club with us, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then we can pick up the guitar a little later. I have some friends that I’m hanging out with. Maybe you want to join us? They would love to hear you sing like that. We will probably just drive to the park and sit by the water and smoke a little, if you know what I mean?”
I nodded. “I know. And I would love to, thank you.”
Chapter 3
It didn’t seem to get any colder even after the sun had set. I had watched it from my room in awe of how wonderful Mother Nature was that she could paint such colors in the sky. As I stepped outside the house in my new set of clothes that I had changed into, I felt the warm humid air hit my face like the air from a hairdryer. It was a strange feeling, one that I had never encountered before in my cold country, and I found that I really liked it. I enjoyed the heavy balmy air that surrounded me. But yet again I came to realize that I was wearing too warm clothes.
Soon Heather joined me in the driveway where we waited for her mother to bring out the car. As expected, she looked gorgeous walking out of the heavy wooden front doors. Aristocratic and elegant in her short black dress. Seldom had I met anyone so confident and graceful. She wore a thin little bracelet with white pearls around her right ankle. It added glamour to her movements when she walked towards me. She smiled while her hair moved in the evening sea breeze that brought the smell of salt to us from the ocean not far away. I was getting anxious to get to the beach as I smelled and sensed the ocean air. Back home I had picked up wind-surfing while still in high school and for years that had been all that was on my mind from the moment I woke up. How were the waves? How was the wind today? Some days I would skip classes just to go to the coast and get in the water while the wind was still strong enough. The problem was the water was always cold in Denmark so I had to wear a suit. That wouldn’t be a problem here.
“So, Pretty-Boy. Are you ready to meet the high and mighty doctor?” Heather grinned.
I nodded. I was actually looking forward to finally meeting him. I had heard a lot of great things about him from my dad. He had a huge name in medical circles and was highly esteemed for his research. “One of the best eye surgeons in the states, if not the best,” my dad had told me. So it is easy to say that I was expecting a great man.
“You don’t say much, do you?” she suddenly asked.
I lifted my head and gave her a smile. In her high heels she looked tall, but still small compared to me. I had that Scandinavian big, tall and strong look. Along with my blue eyes and blond hair, I always reminded people of our ancestors the Vikings.
“I guess I am the quiet type,” I answered.
It was the truth. I was known to be a dreamer who never spoke much. It wasn’t like something that I had decided to be. And it wasn’t because I was too shy or had low self-esteem or something. It just happened
as I grew older and especially after my mother’s death. I never had much to say, mainly I think it was because I wasn’t that interested in what people normally talked about. I would say my opinion if I felt like it, but most of the times I simply didn’t have one. Not on the subjects people discussed. If someone started talking about music, books or surfing, then it was a completely different matter. You could say that I just didn’t do small-talk. I simply wasn’t good at it. It felt so meaningless to be talking about something so inconsequential. Some people thought I was just trying to be this mysterious guy, but it really was just who I was.
An awkward silence fell upon us and made me feel a little uncomfortable. “Well, then I will just have to do the talking,” she finally said breaking the silence.
I forced another smile in order to try and break the awkwardness. As I looked at her I noticed that she didn’t seem to sense it at all. She was probably used to people being a little intimidated by her. By both her looks and her name.
I hadn’t given much thought about the houses surrounding the Kirk residence before that moment, but as I looked at Heather my eyes felt strangely drawn towards their neighbor’s house behind her. It was a much older mansion than the rest of the neighborhood, set on a corner lot and built in a classic style you could find in places like Spain or southern France. It had rows of white fluted columns on the front, a majestic staircase leading to the front door in oak and enormous windows. The garden had topiaries, deep wells of flowers, a smooth and perfect lawn, jets of water, grapes hanging from the trees and several statues of beautiful mythological women that looked like they were dancing in a circle of some sort. I don’t know what it was about it that drew my interest so deeply, if it was that low almost humming music coming from it, but it felt like my very soul knew this place from somewhere.
I tried to shake the feeling because it seemed so weird and I didn’t believe in things like that. Yet the place seemed still familiar like something from a dream that suddenly appeared in front of me.
“Who lives in the house on the corner?” I asked.
“That’s nobody. At least not anyone you’d want to be seen with,” she said.
Still with my eyes fixed on the mansion, I kept wondering why it felt like I knew the house. Could I have seen it in a movie or a TV show or something? “Why? Why wouldn’t I like to be seen with them?”
Heather scoffed. “They are strange people. Only women live in that house. Three generations of women, but no husbands.”
“Has there never been a husband?”
“The girl’s dad used to live there until some years ago. Then suddenly he disappeared. One day he just wasn’t there anymore. No one knew where he was. People say that he ran away in the middle of the night. That their witchcraft drove him away, that he couldn’t stand to live with that deviltry and black magic in the house. I say they killed him. Murdered him in the middle of the night or with some kind of poison in his food. They probably buried him somewhere in that garden or fed him to their cats.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because strange things happen in there, I tell you. Strange people come to their door and they take them in. They live with them for weeks and even months.”
“What kind of people?” I asked still without taking my eyes of the house.
“All kinds of people. Musicians, poets people who call themselves spiritual, weird people like that. They are a disgrace to the entire neighborhood. Turning this place into some sort of hippie-camp like we are still in the sixties. Mother and Papa sure aren’t happy about them. But what can you do? They own the house. It has been with them for generations. I think they are witches who kill their husbands after they have given them their children, so they can go and have sex with other people. They probably have orgies in there,” she laughed.
“I don’t believe in stuff like that,” I said.
“What? That they might have killed their husbands?”
“No. The part about the witches, supernatural stuff and being all spiritual and that. I think it is ridiculous. Superstitious, really.”
“Oh. Me, too. Growing up in a family where science is king will kill all of that, right? I bet your dad never believed in anything either.”
“That’s right.”
He didn’t. But not for the same reasons as Heather's dad. Not because he had studied the human body and science for years and concluded that there was nothing spiritual or supernatural in our world. It was because he had chosen not to believe in anything. Because he simply couldn’t believe that there could be more to this world when he had lost his wife in this meaningless way. And I had quickly adapted this way of thinking. There was nothing more to life and death than what we could see with our own eyes. Life had no higher meaning and death was just the end of the road.
I turned my head and looked at Heather. I didn’t want to stare at the house any longer. I didn’t want to feel drawn towards it. It was haunting and I didn’t like that feeling to take root inside of me. I was afraid I might lose control over it. Over myself. Though I didn’t seem to be, I was in fact a very controlling person. Especially with my emotions. I liked to be in charge of them. I never allowed myself to get caught up in them. I had learned that they were deceitful and not to be trusted. In that way I had sort of a split personality. I could get really emotional when it came to my guitar and the music, but never at other times. I simply wouldn’t let it happen. If I ever came close to feeling anything for another person, especially a girl, I would run in the opposite direction as fast as I could and never look back. I was scared, and all I knew was if I was in control, if I didn’t lose my power, then I was alright. Of course I was heading for disaster trying to keep myself and my feelings in a cage like that, but I didn’t know that back then. How could I? How could I have foreseen what was about to happen to me? What an emotional wreck I was about to become feeling for the first time like I was completely lost to the greatest emotion of them all?
“There is Mother,” Heather said and started walking while the black Mercedes approached us. I opened the door for her and she got in. As we drove away I took one last glimpse of the house on the corner. It was almost dark now and in the lights from the street I could have sworn I saw a little girl in the garden in front of the house. She was wearing a long white dress and was staring at me.
The Yacht Club where we were meeting Dr. Kirk was located below the lighthouse on Anastasia Island. The clubhouse, on the shore of Salt Run, was only minutes away from the beauty of historical downtown St. Augustine that we passed through on our way. I only got a small sense of it, since it had gotten almost dark outside, but Heather promised me that she would take me to see everything the area had to offer in the coming days.
“Don’t forget, Chris has to be in Jacksonville for registration on Thursday,” Mrs. Kirk said. “After that he will be very busy with school work. Med school is tough and requires all his attention. You’ll have to leave all your sightseeing to the weekends and holidays.”
From inside the club were beautiful views of the inlet and the Conch Island dunes. Even in the dark you could sense the views and the lights. As we arrived, two waiters jumped in front of us as had they expected us and they showed us to our table located at a huge window from where I imagined that the view during daytime had to be spectacular. We sat and started to look at the menus when someone approached the table and everybody got to their feet. It was Dr. Kirk, a strong-looking and handsome man who didn’t look the age of almost fifty that I had been told he was. He was slim and well built, like a man who works out a lot. On our way there Heather had told me that her father had just started training for double triathlons. I had heard of people doing a normal triathlon, the completion of three continuous and sequential endurance events, involving swimming, running and cycling in immediate succession over various distances. But double triathlons meant he ran, bicycled and swam twice as long. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed. I really was. And he was in an excellent shape.
You could tell just by looking at him. He had a fierce face that was intimidating and made everybody seem insignificant next to him.
“Dr. Kirk,” his wife saluted him while he kissed her on the cheek. “This is Chris, the young man that will be staying with us.”
His steel eyes turned and looked at me. I felt like I shrunk a few inches. Then he reached out and shook my hand in a firm grip. “Nice to meet you, son.”
“Nice to meet you too, sir.”
“Let’s eat,” he said and everybody sat down.
As the dinner progressed I couldn’t help but notice how no one seemed to look at the doctor or seemed to even dare speak to him. All the waiters bowed and talked with hoarse almost whispering voices as if they didn’t have the courage to speak loudly when near him. Even his wife sat in silence as she ate elegantly and sipped her wine, closing her eyes. No one spoke but the doctor. He talked non-stop about everything and nothing. About the politicians in Florida that had made stupid decisions, about doctors that didn’t know what they were doing, about the Orly airport attack in Paris last month that had left eight dead and fifty-five injured, about hurricane Alicia that had hit the Texas coast. About how the world was going mad and nobody seemed to care. I soon realized this was the way they were together, that this was a normal family dinner. The doctor spoke and the rest of the family listened. No one ever said anything because they couldn’t get a word in and even if they did he wouldn’t hear it. They seemed almost afraid of interrupting him in the midst of his important messages. He had gotten so used to talking without ever being interrupted that sometimes he didn’t even make any sense. But no one stopped him or told him, because they no longer listened to his words. And it wasn’t just his family who did this. Dr. Kirk was such a respected man that no one ever dared to talk in his presence. They only listened and only spoke if spoken to.
“So what’s your sport, young man?” he all of a sudden said directing his question to me.