Fluke

by David Elliott

“Just great,” I said. “Man, I’m a dope!”

  “How about we call you ‘The Flame?’ Or, how about ‘Sunman?’” she was loving this.

  “’The Flame’ has already been taken, smart ass.”

  She slathered the lotion onto my belly, shocking me momentarily with its coldness. Her hands rubbed it in large circles, and my belly took on a slick, almost wet appearance.

  “I can do that, Sara,” I said. I felt bad that she was taking care of me, again.

  Sara DuBeau: assistant curator for Hazel Beach City Museum of History, primary curator for Adam Fluke.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mister Fluke,” she said, squirting another gooey blob of the gel into her upturned palm. Her hands looked greasy.

  “You always take care of me,” I said, watching her. For a moment, I felt like crying, thinking about it.

  She looked up from my belly and stared at me for a moment.

  “Someone’s got to, Adam. You’d never last otherwise,” she laughed. “You can’t even come in from the sun by yourself.”

  My touching moment ended with her subtle ribbing, and I again felt like my foolish self.

  “I’d probably still be sleeping out there if you hadn’t come for me, you know.”

  “Yeah. Actually, the pain probably would have woken you up by now. You’re probably going to be nice and blistered tomorrow.”

  She was right. Despite the amount of aloe she had applied to my legs, they already looked—and felt—dry again. This would end up ranking in the top two Adam Fluke sunburns of all time. (The worst was the time when I was nineteen and experimented with a lotion that effectively magnified the effects of the sun exponentially, on the recommendation of Sean, who had never actually been sunburned before in his life. This resulted in a horrifying, violet-colored, blister-ridden sunburn that laid me up, naked and feverish, for five days.)

  “I suppose I’ll drive,” she offered, rubbing my chest. “Lay back.”

  I lay back on the bed, feeling the cool fabric of the comforter on my back. The room was nearly silent, aside from the hum of the air conditioner.

  “Drive?”

  “Yes, silly. You’re not going to be able to drive us to Florida with your lobster-like skin.”

  I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at her cautiously.

  “You want to go back to Florida?” I asked.

  “I’m ready to go home now, Adam,” she stopped rubbing and sighed. “This trip has been more than I had bargained for, and I want to just get back to my life.”

  It stuck in my head that she had said “my” life, and not “our” life. I didn’t know whether it was intentional or not, or even if it meant anything, but it made me uncomfortable.

  “Now, lay down, Sunman,” she said, giving me a very gentle shove in the chest.

  “Yeah, you’d better drive,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “I’m already feeling achy from this.”

  ****

  The car was packed up, again. Flukey was in the back seat, seatbelt fastened, staring at us with his shiny black eyes. Sara’s shoes littered the floor. The large aloe vera bottle sat in the passenger seat. Sara had gone in to the front desk to check us out of the room; I had reservations about going to face the old guy with my appearance.

  The sun was beginning to set over Texas, and I was happy that Sara had decided to go home. She had suggested that it might be a little easier on my poor skin if we traveled into the evening, rather than with the hot sun beating on my legs and face the whole way. I was again touched by her gesture, but Sara joked, “I don’t think I could handle you whining the whole way home.”

  She told me about her visit with her mother, which I had stupidly forgotten to ask her about in the room earlier, more concerned with my own whining.

  “It went well,” Sara said, stuffing her makeup into the flowery bag that she carried her various female things in. “She asked me about the pretty young man who was in the room yesterday.”

  “At least someone thinks I’m pretty,” I joked. I wadded up a pair of socks and stuffed them into the duffel bag.

  “I was a little surprised that she remembered anyone being in the room. She normally forgets everything as it happens.”

  “I’m pretty unforgettable, Sara.”

  “Whatever you say, Sunman,” she giggled.

  Now she came out of the office, looking cute in a pair of blue denim hip hugger shorts and a tight brown t-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail that swung around as she half walked, half skipped to the car.

  “Ready, Freddy?” She asked me.

  “Yeppers,” I said, climbing in the passenger side, gingerly, so as to avoid contact with anything. If I had to be sunburned, it was better that it was my front side. I don’t know that I would have made the trip if my backside had been as bad.

  “How’s the skin?” she asked, glancing at the angry red skin of my legs.

  “Not too bad. It's a little dry,” I said, adding, “and a smidgen warm.”

  In reality, it was awful; my skin felt like the cracked ground of the desert--dry and sizzling. It had already begun to itch, and I knew I was going to be miserable in the car, but I tried to avoid whining to Sara any more than absolutely necessary.

  “Well, keep the lotion on it,” she said.

  “I love you, Sara,” I blurted out.

  “I know you do, Adam,” she turned to me and gave me a small kiss on the cheek. She looked down at her hands buckling the seatbelt and said, “I love you, too.”

  She started the engine, and then rooted through the CD wallet she kept in the console. I watched her fingers, nails painted a creamy silver color, as she flipped the plastic pages back and forth. The Sara fingers.

  “What do I want to listen to?” she wondered aloud.

  “Death metal?” I offered; I was Mister Hilarity at the drop of a hat.

  “Noo…”

  “Gangsta rap?”

  “Noo…”

  “Polka?”

  “Ah, here we go,” she said triumphantly. “This will do just fine.”

  She slid a CD into the player before I could tell what it was, pressed the button to skip a few tracks, and dropped the car into gear. We rolled out of the parking lot of the Ramada Inn, in the direction of I-45, when I heard the beginning of “Circle,” by Sarah McLachlan.

  As she hit her turn signal and made her way onto the entrance ramp, Sara DuBeau sang along with Sarah McLachlan:

  “What kind of love is this that keeps me hanging on…despite everything it’s doing to me? What kind of love is this that keeps me hanging on…when it’ll all end in misery?”

  The words stuck in my head, and then we were pointed east, Florida bound. Our adventure to Texas had ended.

  What’s next, I wondered to myself.

  What’s next?

  16.

  I awoke soaking wet, covered in a sheen of sweat that my overly productive glands had left me with. Sometime in the night I had kicked the sheets off of the better part of my body. I groaned and leaned over, straining to see the clock on Sara’s side of the bed. It was almost noon. The biggest surprise, after the initial shock of having slept for 14 hours, was how I felt. You could say I felt like fourteen million bucks, only I would never really know what it was like to feel like even one million dollars. I did feel good, however.

  I thought about getting up, but decided not to just yet. I rolled from the damp sheets on my side of the bed to Sara’s side where it was nice and dry.

  Sara had decided the day prior to this that she would go back in to work today, and I had no memory of her awaking for work and leaving this morning. I had slept right through it. The reason she had given me for not taking the rest of the week off as we had originally planned was that she didn’t want to waste her vacation days. Being as sick as I had been, it had depressed me when she told me that. She had been taking care of me, as per the norm, for the past two days. Sometimes, even a guy in his late twenties, pushing thirty in a few years, l
ikes to be mothered. I stared at the ceiling, lost in my thoughts.

  The past two days had been a feverish haze. Night and day I lay in bed, either shivering from what felt like an arctic temperature or sweating from what seemed to be Saudi Arabian heat. I had just survived a third night of chills, bad dreams, and sickness. All because foolish Adam fell asleep in the sun, I thought. I dropped my gaze from the ceiling to my body. Although it hadn’t been as severe a burn as the other big one in my life, it wasn’t good. There were a few blisters scattered here and there. One in particular on the underside of my right arm had a translucent liquid resting on top of it, hardening into a scab of sorts. Pus. I poked at it with my left hand, the tender skin causing me to wince a little. The rest of my skin looked to be in better shape. I was beginning to resemble a snake shedding its dead skin. There was a multitude, a virtual plethora, of spots on my front-side with dead patches of skin starting to peel off.

  I sighed, knowing all too well that it could have been much worse.

  A vague memory of having spoken with Sara in the middle of the night flitted across my mind. I tried to remember the exact words and whether it had been a dream or not. I remembered having the horrible feeling that Sara told me she was leaving me. In my dream (or was I awake?), I rolled over to Sara, and told her that I didn’t want her to leave me. I blubbered like a baby, unintelligible words coming from my mouth, and grasped for her like a baby might grasp for its mother. I begged her to stay with me, to give us a chance, to look at the promise of our future together. She had just shushed me and told me to go back to sleep.

  Had I dreamed all of that? Had I actually told her those things, or was that the brunt of my dream? I certainly couldn’t remember anything before the entrance of the “Sara’s impending evacuation of Adam” in my dream. I shook my head, trying to remember, and gave up. It just wasn’t happening. I had been too far out of it to recall it with any clarity.

  I rolled back over to my side of the bed, grimacing at the cold, wet feel of the sheets, and grabbed the remote control from the floor. Looking at it, I thought about Sara, again. On top of bringing me soup, sandwiches, and juice…serving me my meals in bed…she had brought in the television from the spare bedroom, and hooked it up on the dresser across the room, so that I could watch it without having to get out of bed. She was so incredibly thoughtful. I rolled across the bed again to get to drier territory, flipped on the TV, and mindlessly began flipping through channels. I skipped through cooking shows, soap operas, sports highlights, infomercials—the vapid wasteland of daytime television. After settling on some Discovery Channel wildlife documentary, I was lost in thought again, remembering the drive back from Texas.

  The sunburn-induced, woozy, sick feeling introduced itself to me gradually through the course of the trip leaving me feeling quite inadequate for much of anything. It took us about twelve hours to make it home, and for that kind of time to pass, there was not nearly enough talking, or any sort of interaction, between Sara and I to consider the trip normal (as normal as it could have been, considering the circumstances). She had seemed quiet and pensive, and her interest in interacting with me seemed as far away as Texas in the rearview. We were within arms’ reach of each other, but we might as well have been in separate cars.

  For my sake, she decided to just pick up food from a drive-through and eat it in the car. She didn’t even talk to me while we ate. I tried to make conversation many times, but the effort wasn’t reciprocated.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive? We could pull over at a rest area, have a quickie, and then I could take over?” I had said, mustering up what I considered a rather witty comment.

  “No. That’s okay, Adam. I don’t think you’re in any condition for driving,” she had replied. “Or for a quickie, either, for that matter.” She had smiled at me, but it didn’t strike me as a genuine Sara smile.

  “I didn’t get sunburned down there,” I told her, pushing further with my joking. She either didn’t notice what I said, or just didn’t feel like responding.

  Another time we were in the left lane, passing a rather nice looking family in a Volvo, when I piped up with, “Maybe I should moon the people in that car,” and I pointed at the Volvo. “My nice, brilliantly white butt, jammed against the window in their direction, might just make their day.”

  “Uh, I don’t think so, Adam,” and then, again, with the forced smile. I wondered if I was just being paranoid. Maybe the sun had gotten to me more than I thought.

  It had felt like I was the only one initiating any kind of conversation at all, and that feeling was a lonely one. I reclined in the seat, carefully avoiding rubbing my sore skin against the interior in any sort of aggressive manner for fear that I might groan, or make a noise that would display my pain. I tried to think of things to say for most of the drive. I watched her while she focused on the road ahead, made lane changes, and lived in her own thoughts over in the driver’s seat. She did speak a few times, without coercion on my part, but it felt strange.

  “I can’t wait to see Killer, again. I hope he’s okay,” she had told me.

  “Well, we did leave Sean in charge of feeding and walking him…” I had responded, joking as always, ever the fool.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she told me, and laughed a little. I wondered if she thought that my seeming inability to take care of myself was something common to the people I hung out with, too. At least this time, the laugh seemed real. That was a positive thing.

  My mind left the journey from Texas to Florida, and returned to the television. There were people in wetsuits swimming amongst schools of fish. One of them reached his hand into a large school of them swimming by, and the entire group changed direction simultaneously away from him. I watched it, amused, as the narrator discussed the territoriality of this particular fish. It was almost one o’clock, and I decided it was time for Snakeman to jump into action again. I jumped out of bed and grabbed up all of the sheets. I figured I would toss them in the washer and take a shower. Clean sheets, clean Adam. Living with Sara I could do this sort of thing easily, since Sara’s townhouse had a washer and drier in a closet off of the kitchen. My meager salary pre-Sara hadn’t afforded me such creature comforts, and I was spoiled, now.

  After depositing our dirty sheets in the wash, I started the coffee pot, and I sat down in the dining nook to have a smoke. I thought about my first night here with Sara, and waxed nostalgic about dropping my pants and sitting down in this very chair that first morning. Since that night, it had become my chair, and the other was always Sara’s. I drew the smoke in deeply, thinking about Sara. I looked around the room at the paintings, the scroll which bore her family name, and the mirror next to it.

  “We look good, right?” Sara had told me that first morning as we stood in front of that mirror, her arms around me. It was true. She was easily one of the most beautiful women that I had the pleasure of setting my eyes upon. I had looked a little beat up that day, which was standard for me the morning after a night of drinking like we had done. I had agreed that we did look good, but it was mostly her. I had graded our appearance using a “Sara curve.” She was gorgeous enough for the both of us.

  Jesus. That seemed so long ago.

  I heard the soothing sound of gurgling from the kitchen and stubbed out my cigarette. The scent of the coffee in my head felt reassuring. Maybe today was going to be a good day. Maybe Sara and I would actually talk about the things that had transpired over this week, because we hadn’t yet. It worried me that we had discovered so much only to come home and behave almost as if we hadn’t made the trip at all. I realize I had been sick, and maybe she was just waiting for me to get better before she brought it up. Or was she waiting for me to bring it up? Did she want to discuss it at all?

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down again. The first sip burned my mouth, but I drank a little more, swallowing it down, enjoying the heat of it in my body. It felt good, as if it were waking me from a deep mental sleep,
and I began to feel crisply aware of my surroundings and my situation, more so than even just moments before. I lit another cigarette and sat silently enjoying both. Something was going to happen that day.

  Something had to. I couldn’t live like this, even as the weakling that I was, without clearing up the cloudiness in my head over our relationship. Were there real problems with us? Or was I just being paranoid? I still felt so insecure about our relationship sometimes that I wondered if it was real or not. It still held a surreal, dreamlike quality to it.

  I mean, what are the odds that I would meet and fall in love with a beautiful woman, and find out that, not only was she molested as a child, but the man who molested her turned out to be my biological father? It was crazy; it was a movie of the week. It wasn’t my life; it was the very definition of my name. It was a fluke.

  On the other hand, maybe there was no problem. The injection of such a glut of drama in my life was bound to have its effect on my normally mundane and pathetically banal way of thinking. One week I was scraping a living from Perry’s Pizza Palace and masturbating to Hustler magazines and internet porn; a few weeks later, my life had turned in to something similar to a soap opera. I didn’t need to be a psychologist to realize that the events could be construed as a bit traumatic, and my feelings and reactions to everything were all trips into uncharted territory.

  So was there a problem, other than what I made up in my head? My habit of questioning everything to death was a curse; my mind simply refused to let me enjoy miracles such as Sara. Anything out of the ordinary turned into psychological warfare inside my head.

  I sighed and accepted that I just wasn’t sure what the next move was. Sara probably wouldn’t be home until almost six, so I had almost five hours to work through my thoughts. Hopefully the answers would come, and everything would be okay.

  I moved into the living room and flipped on the Weather Channel. The forecast scrolling across the bottom of the screen called for a cloudy day over Hazel Beach, and a northerly wind would keep things relatively cool.