Been awhile since I got back to this but the story seems to want to move now. :)

Ed talks about foxhole confessions and the answer to a question. But does anyone ever know their own mind? Kit isn't too sure.

 
Chapter 8

Lying there, thinking about things, of course I fell asleep again. When I woke the second time, dawn had painted the mountaintop pink and the digital clock read 6:15. I'd slept all night in my clothes, wrapped in the bedspread. I had to get up and take care of things so I stripped off and took a shower too.

A huge shower stall and no worries about running out of hot water were real luxuries to me. I did as little thinking about what Ed and I had talked about as I could.

I dried my hair with the blowdryer in the bathroom; a big clunky one supplied by the hotel. Too ugly for anyone to want to steal it, I figured, but the wiring went right into the wall and not into a regular plug.

I got dressed in another version of the shorts and polo shirt I'd worn yesterday, this set both in shades of blue. For a moment, I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to see what Ed--and even Jay--had apparently seen but I just looked like myself, a perfectly ordinary 18-year-old boy. A boy with somewhat shaggy light brown hair, and grey eyes that sometimes looked blue but not some imaginary girl who didn't really exist.

Okay, so I wasn't super-masculine looking. I hadn't started shaving regularly yet so I looked a bit younger than my real age. At five-foot-eight, I stood only four inches taller than Alison, Mom or Karen. A bit shorter than most guys but tall for a girl. I didn't have a big nose or a square chin, no prominent Adam's apple or eyebrow ridges. Those might happen to me later, though; at eighteen, I wasn't really done growing.

It made me feel weird to consider what I might look like dressed the way Ed wanted to see me. I couldn't really imagine it except sort of Alison with lighter hair... Weird is not the right word but I can't think of a better one.

When I opened the door of the bedroom I saw Ed sitting at the wide, low table in front of the couch. He had the TV on and he had apparently ordered coffee and breakfast from room service. "There's eggs, cinnamon rolls, ham, OJ, coffee?" he said, smiling at me and motioning toward a covered tray. "Did you sleep well?"

"I slept all right, I guess," I said. Breakfast smelled good so I sat beside him on the couch and uncovered my tray.

"Good. I never sleep that well the first night in a new bed." He smiled at me and so many wild things went through my mind that I almost forgot about the breakfast.

We ate quietly after that, watching the TV. The local weather girl told us that it would be another scorcher, not exactly news in the Springs on an August morning.

Ed picked up the remote and clicked the TV off after we had eaten as much as we wanted. The trays still held more food, it sort of bothered me to see it go to waste.

"I asked you something last night," Ed said.

I tensed.

"Have you thought about it?"

"Yeah. I still...I'm not sure, Ed."

He nodded and sipped more coffee.

"You said no one has to know?" I asked after we had both been quiet for an unreasonable length of time.

"No one back home, no one you don't tell."

"Well, I still don't know," I said.

"You can't think any of your family would love you any less if they knew?" he asked.

"No," I admitted. "But I sure wouldn't want my Dad to hear about it."

"Your father may never come out of that coma, you know that, Kit." He gave my shoulder a reassurring squeeze with one of his big, rope-scarred hands. "But do you think either of your parents would want you to be unhappy?"

I shook my head. "Unhappy?"

"I asked you that last night, too," he said. "Are you happy, Kit?"

I had a lot of reasons to be happy, I thought--my family, friends, Mom, Jay, even Ed. I think I made a face.

"You are unhappy, Kit, aren't you? Unhappy that your life isn't going the way you want it to but you don't know exactly what it is you want to happen?"

"Uh, something like that, I guess," I admitted. "Isn't that just part of being a teenager?"

He grinned. "Part of it. But there's more, isn't there?" He let his hand drop to his side and looked at me calmly.

"I don't know. If there is, I'm not sure what it might be?"

He shook his head, "I thought I recognized that unhappiness, Kit. You smiled and you laughed, you were kind and considerate but you were always unhappy even when you had every reason to be happy. I saw it in your eyes when you thought no one was looking."

I thought about the other things he had told me, like imagining me as a girl. This didn't sound crazy in the same way but how much time had he been spending watching me? Ed the stalker.

"People could have lots of reasons for a secret unhappiness, but I thought I had seen your particular variety before. I thought I recognized it."

I made a noise. This wasn't going anywhere I could predict. I got up and moved the breakfast trays onto the cart room service had left by the door.

He stood and went to the window, apparently examining the mountain. He spoke without turning around at first. "Back in the early fifties, I was in the service. The Army, in Korea. We had a guy, not much like you at all, most ways...." He paused. "His name was Roy, big strapping kid with red hair, always ready to get drunk or into a fight or something. Really macho, though I'd never heard that word then, we called it gung-ho. Or John Wayne. He was really John Wayne. Except he always looked unhappy."

I sat down again, on the wide couch with the colorful stripes of red and green and blue. Some part of my mind noted that my clothes did not clash with the colors of the upholstery. Noticing that I had noticed bothered me. I tried to focus on Ed so as not to think too much about thinking.

He sat on the edge of one of the chairs and continued his story. "Our unit got overrun, cutoff and we were separated into little groups; Roy and I were together, hiding in a foxhole that we dug inside a bomb crater. We both thought we were goners, scared shitless, literally in my case." He grinned and I looked embarrassed when I realized what he meant.

"I told him about the girl I intended to marry if I got out of there, I was just eighteen and you know, she was already married and moved away when I got home; never saw her again." Another grin, rueful this time. "Then Roy did the bravest thing I ever saw, he told me the truth about himself."

"What?" I asked when Ed didn't immediately continue.

"He told that he would have done anything--made a deal with the devil--to be a woman."

I don't know what I did then, probably just blinked.

"This was a year or two before anyone ever heard of Christine Jorgenson, no one thought there was anyway to change your sex. So Roy had no hope. He was a big, raw-built country boy, anyway, would have made a powerful ugly woman. But that was what he wanted."

I swallowed, feeling the pain of saying such a thing, knowing how much it must have hurt.

"I thought I was sharing a foxhole with a crazy man, or at the very least a queer," Ed continued. "That's what we called gay back then, queer, it was an insult and meant to be one. I asked him, why was he telling me this? Roy said he had to tell someone before he died and that he thought the odds of us both getting out of that foxhole alive were pretty piss-damn poor."

The vulgarity startled me, I realized Ed was probably quoting.

He went on. "I had to admit that I thought he might be right. I asked him, wasn't he afraid I might tell, if we did both get out? Or even if only I did? He said, it didn't matter, he had to tell someone and this looked like the last chance he was going to get." Ed stopped talking, looking at someone or something I couldn't see.

I fidgeted while Ed stared at nothing for what seemed like a long time. "You got out," I said finally. "What happened to Roy?"

Ed sighed. "We both got out, 'copters came and chased the...North Koreans away. But we never mentioned what we had talked about again. Six weeks later, Roy was killed by a sniper while we were shifting the unit. He took a lot of silly chances and one of them finally soured on him. He wasn't the only friend I lost over there." He looked at me and grinned a sad grin that looked like it must hurt.

"I--I don't think I'm like your friend Roy, Ed?" I said.

He laughed. "Maybe not. But, Kit, I'm a rich old man, now a very rich old man, and I want to help you be what you want to be. How can I help you, Kit?"

"I--I don't know?"

He nodded. "Okay, while we're trying to find that out, would you be willing to humor an old man?"

"Okay," I said, surprising myself more than I did him.

His bushy eyebrows went up.

"Okay, Ed. I'll do it. But--I really don't know how? I just know I'd end up looking...." I hadn't really known that I had decided to go along with Ed's fantasy. And now, the problems looked pretty bad. "I don't want to look ridiculous," I finished.

Ed grinned. "You won't. Believe me, you won't. I've got a friend who can give you a hand with this."

"Someone else who will know?"

"Well, yes. But she can keep a secret--and she doesn't live in Whitewater Canyon."

"Where?"

"San Jacinto," he said. "Not that far but there's the little matter of a mountain in the way. Anna Maria can help you, she owns a beauty salon. She knows a lot about this sort of thing." He grinned at me.

"What do you mean? She knows..."

"I'll let her tell you," he said. "But she's married to a cousin of Juanita's. Hell, Juanita has enough cousins around here, she's related to nearly all the chicanos and half the gringos in two counties." He laughed.

I closed my eyes. This was going to happen. Ed was going to have someone, this Anna Maria, dress me as a girl, probably do my hair and nails and makeup. My bones seemed to have turned to melting ice and my flesh to half-set gelatin. I could still back out, I could change my mind. I think I went into a kind of mental lockup, trying to figure out why I had agreed to this and why the idea of backing out made me feel cold and alone.

"Kit? Kit?" Ed called to me.

"Yes?" I answered, opening my eyes.

"Maybe we'd better stop talking about this right now? You looked like you were going to faint." He looked concerned and sympathetic.

"I'm okay," I said, not really fooling either of us. "But maybe, maybe I need to just think about this for a while?" I fidgeted, partly just to be moving. Some of my muscles felt sore and that seemed very strange.

Ed watched me calmly for a moment and his eyes seemed very soft. That bothered me so I looked away. "We could talk about something else?" he suggested. "We should probably decide where we're going to live for the next year. Though, I do want to do some traveling."

"Uh. That's got to be your decision, Ed," I said.

"Sure," he agreed. "But I do want your input. When we travel, we can stay in places like this but I'd like to have a homebase, some place to come back to."

"This is a nice place, almost like an apartment," I said. I looked around, admiring the decor again, trying to distract myself.

Ed grinned. "This is actually a corporate timeshare suite for one of the big ranching outfits, I'm just borrowing it. Luck it was empty when I called and I've got friends even richer than me. Even with thirty millions, I'm still jes' a small green frog in some puddles." He held his fingers an inch or so apart.

We both laughed and for a moment I forgot what we had been talking about. Ed could lay on the cowboy charm deep enough you'd need a shovel to get past it.

He went on, describing what he wanted in a more permanent place. "Not too far from the ranch and your family, so we can visit easily if we want to. But nowhere so hot and dusty, I think I'd like to live near the ocean for a while."

We talked about that for a bit, neither of us wanted to live in the smog of L.A. but being close to a city would have advantages. "Del Mar, San Clemente, somewhere along the coast there," Ed said.

"It sounds great." I couldn't imagine it; I'd grown up in the Canyon where water was something that came out of a tap and filled your glass. I'd seen the ocean of course but it had never really been real for me like the mountains and deserts were.

"We'll look for apartments or condos down there later in the week, Kit. I'd like to be right on the beach if we can find a nice place."

I started to mention how expensive that would be but stopped myself. Ed would have enough money that no beachside apartment was likely to be so much as to really matter. So, I just smiled and said, "That could be a lot of fun."

He gave me another cowboy grin. "Feeling better?"

I nodded.

"Maybe we could go for a little drive?" he suggested.

"All right." I took a deep breath and the room did not explode.