Authors: G.M. Ford
“Spring has sprung” popped out of Ken’s mouth as soon as they rounded the corner. The pair gratefully made small talk all the way back to Ken’s truck. She waved him good-bye and then turned and walked up the front steps, only to find the door locked and her pockets devoid of keys. She rang the doorbell. Nothing. Repeated the process and got the same result. Banged the big brass knocker. Ditto.
“Damn,” she said, retracing her steps down to the sidewalk before turning left, the opposite way, around the north side of the house, A legion of once-golden daffodils, now gone white with age, pushed their pale faces up through the rich brown loam. The centuryold iris plants, running the width of the house, was beginning to bloom.
Paul was closing up the garage. She watched as he locked the side door and pocketed the key, a task with which he could not ordinarily have been trusted. He felt her presence and turned his gaze in her direction.
She gave him a wave and a smile. “Paul,” she called. “The tree looks beautiful.”
In the seventeen years since Helen had come to Harmony House, Paul Hardy was the only resident she’d ever cared for who was totally unresponsive, which perhaps explained her tendency to talk to him as if he understood what she was saying, in spite of the fact that he obviously did not. What else was she going to do? Ignore him? Treat him like he wasn’t there?
Paul pushed his hands deep into his pockets and walked her way, head bent, looking silently down at his own shoes, just like always. His flowing hair had not been cut since the accident, nor had his beard. Another six months, Helen thought with a smile, and he’ll look like one of those rock-and-roll guys from Texas. She moved forward to meet him. Her skin tingled in the rapidly cooling air. She threw a hand onto his shoulder. “You did a great job,” she began. As they crossed the yard, she kept it up . . . about how good the tree looked and what a good job he’d done cleaning up after the job, all the while flicking what she imagined to be sly glances his way, surreptitiously trying to see if Paul understood what she was saying.
As they approached the back stairs, she was saying, “. . . fifty years from now people will be sitting under that tree . . . they’ll . . .”
Suddenly Paul Hardy stopped walking. When Helen turned her eyes his way, she shuddered. The close-set blue eyes no longer looked inward. For the first time in seven years, he met her gaze . . . and in an instant, she knew Ken Suzuki had been right. Whoever this was . . . The thought stopped her. She searched for something to call him and realized her conscious mind had no way of dealing with anyone or anything it couldn’t put a name to . . . especially a big, powerful anyone or anything standing four feet away staring holes in her deeply furrowed forehead.
She brought a shaky hand to her throat. “Paul . . .” she began.
“My name isn’t Paul,” the stranger said.
Helen Willis sat on the edge of the mission-style divan she’d ordered from the Pottery Barn catalog, her face ashen, her breathing shallow, her knees still weak and unresponsive. Only Paul’s great strength had helped her negotiate the back stairs and then the elevator.
Paul stood just inside her room, leaning back against the door, his eyes locked on Helen. “You okay?” he asked finally. The voice sounded as if his throat was lined with leather.
“I . . . why I . . . I don’t know what—” She stopped and sipped at the glass of water Paul had fetched from the sink. The blood was rising so quickly to her head she thought she might faint. She allowed her skirt to fall down between her knees. She brought a hand to her forehead. Felt like she had a fever. She picked up a dog-eared copy of The New Yorker from the adjacent cushion and began to fan herself.
“I had no idea,” she offered finally. “When did you . . . I mean . . .”
He held up a hand and cleared his throat. “As soon as I woke up in the hospital, I knew something was different,” he said.
“What was that?” Helen continued to fan herself.
“I could read. The signs on the wall. The numbers on the screens.”
He massaged his throat and continued. “Took me a couple days to figure out what was so different.”
A chill ran down Helen’s spine. Different was indeed the operant word. And Paul wasn’t merely different than he used to be. Oh no. Brand-new face notwithstanding, this was a whole different person. A stranger, someone about whom she knew nothing. About whom she knew even less than she’d known about the unresponsive, enigmatic Paul Hardy. At least the old Paul had been predictable and not prone to surprises. “But . . .” she began, “you remember your life here.”
“All of it. From the day I came here to the moment the car hit me. I remember how kind you always were to me. How you always made sure I was included in everything.” He smiled. Helen felt her shoulder muscles relax. She exhaled hard and put the magazine back on the cushion. She raised a questioning finger and opened her mouth to speak.
“I bet I can guess what you want to know,” Paul said in a playful tone.
“What?”
“You want to know how come, if I remember all of it, then why didn’t I seem to know what was going on around me? How come I didn’t respond to anything.”
Helen nodded her assent. “Exactly,” she said. He pulled his other hand from his pocket and showed his palms to the ceiling. “I don’t know either. It’s hard to explain. It was like I was there, but I wasn’t . . . like I was . . . I know this sounds weird, but it was like I was working on a problem the whole time. Nothing else meant anything to me except figuring out whatever it was I was trying to figure out.” He knocked on the side of his head. “Nothing else got in or out.”
“And you don’t remember what that was.”
“Strange, huh?”
“What about before you came here?”
“Nothing.”
A nearly imperceptible slant in his eyes suggested he might not be altogether forthcoming. “Nothing at all?” she pressed. He looked away. “A name,” he said.
Helen waited. He folded his arms and looked uncomfortable.
“Wesley Allen Howard,” he finally said.
“That’s all?”
“That’s it,” he said. “One night, about a week after I woke up in the hospital . . . right before I went to sleep, the name just came to me. It’s been in my dreams ever since.”
“And you think that’s who you are?”
“I don’t know. Right now it’s just a name that came to me.”
“That’s all? Just a name?”
He hesitated. “Palm trees,” he said. “When I dream of the name, I dream of palm trees.” He waved a hand slowly in front of his face.
“You know . . . kind of like swaying in the breeze.”
Helen sat back on the couch and smoothed her skirt. “Does anyone else know?”
“Just Shirley,” he said. “I’ve been practicing my talking with her.”
A wide smile cracked his face. “Except Shirley does most of the talking.”
The both laughed. “You should smile more often, Pau—” She stopped herself. “I don’t quite know what to call you anymore.”
He shrugged. “I guess Paul will have to do for now.”
“For the time being, I think we should keep this to ourselves.”
“I think maybe Ken suspects,” he said.
She nodded knowingly. “We talked about it,” Helen admitted.
“You know . . . in your top drawer—” He stopped her, patted the right front pocket of his jeans.
“The money . . .” he said. “I found it.” He sighed. “Nine thousand dollars.”
“It’s what you made working for Ken.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“He always paid you the same thing he was paying the rest of his men. Not a penny less.”
“He’s that kind of guy.” He allowed himself an ironic smile. “I tried to put it in the bank.”
“And?”
“And . . . you have to be somebody to put money in the bank.”
The smile disappeared. “You have to have ID. A Social Security card. A driver’s license. Things like that. Otherwise . . .”—he raised a disgusted hand—“you get to carry cash.”
“You want me to hold it for you?” she asked.
He nodded. “Might as well,” he said, pulling out the wad of bills.
“Take some for yourself,” she said.
He peeled off half a dozen twenties and then handed the rest of the roll to Helen. “I need to know about myself,” he said.
“I can tell you what I know,” Helen offered.
Took all of a minute and a half before she was out of info and a strained silence settled over the room.
Paul broke the spell. “That’s it?”
Helen made a rueful face. “That’s it,” she repeated. Another silence and then he wanted to know, “What’s next?”
She met his intense gaze. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question now, isn’t it?” She sighed and then stared off into space. The sound of raised voices filtered up from below. Helen stiffened and looked first at her wristwatch and then at the door. Ten minutes until dinner. Saturday nights it was Mrs. Forbes cooking until seven-thirty and Mr. Hallanan helping out with the supervision till nine. Unlike some of the others, Mr. Hallanan took no prisoners and could, if necessary, be trusted to handle dinner without her.
“I don’t know what’s next,” she said after a while. His face said it wasn’t the answer he was hoping for.
“What do you want to happen next?” she asked.
“I guess I want to find out who I am.”
This time a full minute of silence passed.
“Let’s think about it,” Helen said. She lifted four fingers to her temple. “This has all happened so fast. I’m just not sure what to do.”
“Me neither,” he said. “But if I knew who I was, I’d at least know where to start looking.”
“Looking for what?”
He thought about it. “For myself, I guess.”
“You’re right here.” She pointed at his boots. He pulled his eyes aside and ran a hand through his long brown hair.
“For who I used to be.” Annoyed, he cut the air with the side of his hand. “For the person I was before I came here.”
“You think he’s still out there somewhere?”
Again her question gave him pause to wonder. “His story’s out there somewhere,” the man she’d known as Paul Hardy said. “Somebody was living a day-to-day life, doing something for a living every day . . . and then what? . . . Seven years ago, he just ups and disappears and nobody notices? . . . Nobody calls the police? Everybody he knows just goes on with their lives and forgets about him?” He looked to Helen.
Her face was as hard as stone. She offered nothing in the way of agreement.
He waited a beat and then nodded, giving himself the validation he’d sought from Helen. “His story’s out there somewhere,” he said with great conviction. “I know it. I can feel it inside of me, and I’m going to find it.”
“And if you find it? What then?”
“Find what?”
“Whatever it is you want to look for.”
He seemed startled by the question. “I don’t know,” he blurted. “I haven’t thought it through that far.”
“Maybe you should.”
The barely audible sounds of voices and falling feet dented the silence.
Helen checked her watch again. “It’s dinnertime.”
Paul stayed where he was. Helen got to her feet and met his intense gaze. “We’ll work it out together,” she said. “We’ll do what’s best for you.”
Apparently that pronouncement was good enough for the stranger. All in one motion, he bumped himself off the inside of the door, turned around, grabbed the knob, and let himself out.
“Paul,” Helen said.
He looked her way.
She walked to the steel door at the far end of her room and pulled out a ring of keys. “Might be best if you took the back stairs,” she said, opening the door.
He nodded his agreement and crossed the room to her side. He stepped into the semidarkness, grabbed the handrail, and disappeared from view. She stood and listened to the sound of his feet descending stairs.
Dinner was meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and baby peas with apple crisp for dessert. It was also uneventful, which was fortunate because if it hadn’t been, Helen probably would have missed whatever it was that went wrong, as her preoccupation with the matter of Paul Hardy was nearly complete . . . what did he say? . . . Wesley Allen Howard?
By 9:40, Helen Willis had locked up the ground floor, turned on the alarm system, and taken the elevator back to her rooms. By ten, she’d changed into her warm-weather nightgown, completed her evening bathroom ritual, and was seated in front of her iMac, her glasses perched at the tip of her nose, her fingers typing. She tried them all: Google, Lycos, Zabasearch, Peoplefinders, All Search Engines, Whitepages, and every other search engine she could find. Who was it said that too much prosperity was bad for people in the same way that too many oats were bad for a horse?
Tolstoy maybe? Anyway . . . Wesley Allen Howard was all over the place. Three . . . four . . . maybe five hundred hits. An hour later all she knew for certain was that finding the right Mr. Howard was going to require a substantial narrowing of the field. Frustrated, she went to bed.
They arrived just after breakfast, rolling onto Arbor Street in a trio of rented Lincoln Town Cars, two black, one silver, eight passengers in all, everybody sporting sunglasses to ward off the morning fog. No loose talk, no slammed doors, all economy of motion and singularity of purpose. First pair out of the cars made its way up the driveway, past Ken Suzuki’s truck; a moment later another quartet split up and melted into the shrubbery on either side of the house, all but the small man, all but one wearing an overcoat and sporting one of those little radio earpieces with the pigtail of wire disappearing beneath the collar.
The exception was the tiny gentleman in the gray summer-weight suit. Nice conservative maroon tie, no sunglasses, no radio in his ear. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and looked distractedly out at the street as the weight lifter standing on his left rang the front bell, waited, and then rang it again. When ringing failed, the big guy tried banging on the big brass door knocker, lifting the ring from the lion’s mouth and slamming down hard. Eunice Ponds opened the door. She was still in her white terrycloth bathrobe and fuzzy blue slippers. “Yeah?” she said. The big guy yanked the door from her hand and pushed it wide open. Eunice let out a yelp. In a flash, Benny the dog came sliding around the corner, his nails scraping for traction on the wood floor. Forty pounds of multicolored mutt began to show his teeth and bark in earnest. The hair on the back of his neck rose up like a mottled cowlick. His nails chattered on the floor as he alternately charged and retreated from the strangers.