The Accidental Bodyguard

“What’s your name?”

Her name? Blue lights flickered, and she shook her head and made a low moan.

“Pete said she had amnesia, dummy.”

Pete? Who was Pete?

“You hungry?”

“Maybe…some broth,” she whispered.

Their heads swiveled and they stared at each other in round-eyed consternation as if they’d never heard the word. “Broth?”

“Then water,” she managed weakly.

That started a quarrel over who got to fetch it, each of them wanting to.

For ten long days and longer nights those two wonderful boys had fought many battles over the privilege of nursing her. They had checked medical books out of the library. They had cleaned her wounds and doctored them with medicine from Lucas’s huge marble bathroom. They had painstakingly picked the slivers of glass from the soles of her feet with tweezers, plunking the jagged bits into a metal bowl. They had soaked her feet in pails of hot water, and she could almost walk without limping.

They took turns pretending to be sick themselves so that one of them could stay home from school with her. They had given her the antibiotics they tricked their uncle into prescribing for them. For the first few nights they’d coaxed their father into buying and cooking the few foods she could keep down—chicken broth, Jell-O and boiled vegetables, which they’d smuggled up to her.

At first she’d been too weak and ill to worry about the way her presence in their home had forced them to deceive their father. But as she’d grown stronger and more attached to her lively, affectionate nurses, she blamed herself for their burgeoning talent at duplicity. Nursing her wasn’t the worst of it. They were hard at work on a covert project they called Operation Nanny.

The boys didn’t want Lucas to hire a new nanny. “Because,” as Peppin explained, “we couldn’t fool one of those nosy old bags so easy as Dad. A nanny’d be up here all the time—she’d probably find you the first day.”

Thus, every time Lucas informed the boys of a home interview for a prospective nanny, Peppin, who could mimic Lucas’s voice to a T, phoned the woman and told her the job had been filled.

At first the girl had been too ill and too grateful and too terrified of being thrown out of the house to care, but now she felt stricken that she had become a corrupting influence on their characters.

Although Peppin and Montague bickered incessantly, they could be an incredible team. During the day, when Lucas was at work, the boys gave her the run of his huge house, with its soaring ceilings and skylights and views of Corpus Christi Bay. One wall of his bedroom was made entirely of glass. Sometimes she would step out onto his balcony and let the tangy sea air ruffle her hair.

Sometimes she showered in his pink marble bathroom that had both an immense enclosed shower and a bathtub as big as a small swimming pool. Sometimes she spent a languid hour buried beneath mountains of foamy bubbles in his tub. Sometimes she would pick out old clothes from his abundant closets to wear. Always she would linger in his room, studying his things, running his slim black comb through her hair and brushing her teeth with his yellow toothbrush. She would open his drawers and run her fingertips over his undershirts and cuff links, marveling that one man could have so much of everything. But what she loved best was lying in his bed and hugging his pillow to her stomach and imagining him there beside her, holding her. She gathered flowers from his gardens and arranged them in crystal vases everywhere, taking special pains with those that she left on the white table beside his bed. It pleased her when he picked a pale yellow rose from that vase and pinned it to the black lapel of his three-piece suit one morning before he rushed to his office.

She tried to think of ways to repay him for all that his boys had done for her. The endless stark hallways of his beautiful house had been strewn with everything from rumpled clothes, baseball bats, soccer gear and Rollerblades to newspapers when she’d arrived. Dirty dishes had overflowed from the white-tiled kitchen counters onto the ebony dining room table.

When she’d gotten better, she’d convinced the boys that maybe their father wouldn’t be so anxious to hire a nanny or a housekeeper if he didn’t feel the need for one so strongly. She had made a game of cleaning the house.

While they picked up, she would lie on a couch or a chair, perusing the tattered album that contained black-and-white pictures of Lucas’s childhood in India, wondering why he’d looked so unhappy as a boy. Wondering why the pictures of India especially fascinated her even as she prodded the boys to pick up.

Every time Peppin or Monty touched something, the rule was that they had to put it where it belonged. She began talking them through the preparation of simple meals, using the cans in the pantry and the frozen dinners in the refrigerator, so that Lucas always came home to a hot meal. At first they complained bitterly, but she just laughed and tried to motivate them by telling them they were learning basic survival skills.

Mostly they went along with her projects because she lavished attention on them. She walked with them on the beach, threw horseshoes with them and played games. The only thing she refused to do was to let them lead her into the tunnel that wound from the garage under the house down to the beach. When they had unlocked the doors to that weird, underground passage, and she had smelled the mustiness of the place, she had felt as if the black gloom was pressing in on her and she was being suffocated.

Ghastly minutes had crawled by before the feeling of claustrophobia subsided.

“I can’t go in,” she had whispered, clutching her throat, not understanding her terror as she wrenched her hand free of theirs.

“Why?” they asked excitedly, the beams of their flashlights dancing along the wall.

Suddenly she had some memory of being trapped in a box and knowing she was being buried alive. She remembered coughing as dirt sifted through the cracks of her coffin. She remembered kicking and clawing and screaming when the narrow box was black and silent.

“What’s wrong?” the boys demanded.

Blue lights flickered, and the memory was gone.

“I—I don’t know.” She edged away from them toward the open garage doors and brilliant sunlight. “Let’s go inside the house…and watch a video or something.”

How she ached for them when once more they were safely inside and they showed her their home videos and photograph albums with photos that had been taken of their family before the divorce. There were very few pictures of them. The boys told her that their parents had never had time for them, even when they’d been married. It was worse now, though, since their mother had run off and their father kept threatening to send them to military school.

She began to understand that maybe the reason they doted on her was that she was the first adult who ever enjoyed them and made them feel needed.

She encouraged them to go to their father and talk to him. Foolishly she had caused one quarrel between the father and sons by giving some of Lucas’s and the boys’ clothes to their yardman and his family. After Lucas had caught the poor man in a pair of slacks from one of his custom-made suits from London, he had yelled at the boys for an hour. She had wept for causing all three of them so much pain. But the incident had blown over, and Lucas had bought the slacks back from the man.

She had taken two pictures of Lucas from his albums to keep when she was in the boys’ room alone. One was a photograph of him as a man, the other of him as a boy unhappily perched on top of a huge elephant in India.

Lucas kept a box full of articles about himself in the den. She read them all. Apparently Lucas had a professional reputation for toughness and greed. She read that he never made a move unless it was to his financial advantage, that even the women he dated were always rich—as Joan, his first wife, had been. One reporter had likened his predatory nature to that of a barracuda.

The nights when Lucas was at home were difficult because she felt lonely and isolated in the boys’ closet, clutching the photographs of Lucas. But the worst hours were those when all the lights in the house were off and she fell asleep, only to have nightmares.

Most nights she would slip into an old chambray shirt of Lucas’s. After Peppin shut the louvered closet door for her, she would lie there while either Peppin or Montague read aloud. This week they had been reading a book called Psychic Voyages because she had found Psychic Vampires, their favorite, too terrifying. She would lie half-listening to the weird and yet compelling stories of people who believed they had lived other lives.

Eventually she would fall asleep, and it was never long before the dreams came—vivid, full-color visions that seemed so real and loomed larger than life.

Tonight was worse, maybe because it had stormed.

She was a little girl again, playing in a sun-splashed rose garden beside a vast white mansion with a dark-haired girl. At first they carefully gathered the roses, filling huge baskets with them. Then her dream changed. The sky filled with dark clouds, and the house was a blackened ruin. There was nothing in the baskets but stems and thorns. She was older, and her companion was gone. Suddenly a fanged monster with olive-black eyes sprang into the ruined rose garden and began chasing her. She knew if he caught her, he would lock her in a box and bury her alive. But as she ran, her speed slowed, and his accelerated, until she felt his hot breath on her neck and his hands clawing into her waist and dragging her into a dark cave. At first she was afraid she’d been buried alive. Then suddenly fire was all around her and she was struggling through the thick suffocating smoke, trying to find her way out. The last thing she saw was a dead man’s gray face.

She screamed, a piercing, ear-shattering cry that dragged her back to the lumpy pallet. The louvered door was thrown open instantly, and Peppin’s small compact body crouched over hers. His fingers, which smelled of peanut butter and grape jelly and of other flavors best not identified, pressed her lips.