Florida Heatwave by Michael Lister Read Free Book Online Page A

You’re a retired guidance counselor who’s been spending long hours alone in your room. You’ve cut yourself off from the world and it’s made you spooky and off-balance.”
    “Spooky?”
    She peered at him with a touch of dread as if his body might be disintegrating before her.
    “Yes,” Candace said. “I’ll stand by that. Spooky.”
    He left Candace a note. He told her that he loved her. But he had to do this. He felt compelled. She’d hate him. She’d never forgive him. She might not be here when he got back. But Johnny Fellows had jumped from the ledge where he’d stood for decades alongside Myra and he was falling weightless through the immeasurable air—nowhere to go but down.
    Lila’s house was hot pink. Vivid and glowing beside her neighbors’ whites and beiges. Gaudy bougainvillea cascaded over her front porch, and the blooms of an ancient jacaranda sent a flurry of blue snow across her patio. The bungalow was old Spanish with a view down an alley to the Pacific, a block away.
    Johnny parked his rental car at the curb, switched off the engine and sat for a while trying to remember who he was.
    He was, he had come to understand, his father’s son, the drab and spiritless man Johnny had never even tried to get to know. He was in involuntary lockstep with him, following the breadcrumbs to a holy grail programmed into his blood. He was on a quest to confront the woman who’d stoked his inner fires and stoked his father’s as well. The woman who had undermined his marriage in ways both subtle and profound.
    Is that why he was here, to save his life with Candace? To dispel Myra’s spell? To break the hold her nakedness had on him? To set himself free?
    Or had he come with some dim yearning to seduce her? To charm her to her bed and draw aside her clothes and view the body, that thick nest of hair that had obsessed him so, to curl his fingers through its snarls, to take a fistful of it, to bury his face in its coils, its musk, to draw into his lungs the atoms of her hidden realm? Was he still an undeveloped eight years old? Was he still trapped in the basement, in the darkroom, still dizzy and insane from inhaling the glue, and the pans of harsh chemicals?
    A woman was tapping on his window.
    She stood in the street. Her hair was short and graying, but he recognized her eyebrows, still thick and dark, her cheekbones, her bold chin, her wide-set eyes. The flaunting, aristocratic look.
    He rolled the window down.
    “Johnny?”
    “Yes.”
    She wore jeans and a loose white shirt with green vines embroidered across her heavy breasts. On the vines were small red buds, hundreds of them, tight, unopened buds.
    She held out a padded mail envelope. No label, the flap sealed.
    “This is for you.”
    Johnny took it from her and lay it in his lap.
    “It’s everything we did,” she said. “Arnold and I. It’s all there. That’s the sum total of everything that happened.”
    “I want to talk to you.”
    She shook her head and her smile was grave and final.
    “Just for a few minutes,” Johnny said. “Talk with me, please.”
    “Go home to Candace. Work harder.”
    “Candace? How do you know Candace?”
    She looked off toward the beach.
    Candace had called her. Found her on the Caller ID, spoken to Lila.
    “What did you tell my wife? What did you say?”
    “It’s all in there. Everything I could possibly tell you is in the envelope. That’s all there is, all that happened between your father and me. Now go.”
    Johnny sat at the gate, waiting for the red-eye flight back home. The envelope lay in his lap unopened. He watched the people in the lounge area. He listened to the announcements. He watched the passengers flow around him with the slow ungainly silkiness of underwater performers.
    He made it home by nine AM. Her car was gone. Candace might be at school. She might have gone home to stay with her parents.
    Johnny walked inside. He checked her closet. He checked the kitchen and the luggage cabinet.