Page 4 of Strangers She Knows

I am.

I am!

Any woman who caught a bullet with her head and was lucky enough to wake up afterward, and then, years later, successfully survive the surgery to remove said bullet, is glad for all the good things in life.

But while I was spending five hours a day with a physical therapist, my daughter was growing up without me, and my husband, Max, wouldn’t talk to me about anything that might worry me, and that means anything of substance. Honestly, everything was about me—I heard you took your first step today. Your manual dexterity is improving by leaps and bounds…on the left hand. Your hair is growing out and you don’t look like a cracked Chia Pet troll anymore!

Okay, that last one was me. No one said I looked like a Chia Pet troll, cracked or otherwise. But when they shave your head and slice through the skull, and the swelling extends over half your face, it’s not a pretty sight. Not that I’m vain, but…

Okay, I guess I am.

As I recovered, my hair grew in white, so I dyed the tips a brilliant green. My mother-in-law said I looked like a healthy lawn. Now I change the color seasonally, and not merely to irk Verona, although that is an added benefit. At Christmas, I dye my hair stained-glass-window red, in the autumn, pumpkin-spice orange, in February, purple because…why not? I had to re-dye the springtime daffodil yellow. I love daffodils, but the yellow turned my complexion sallow.

After a mere month in the hospital, two months in a rehab home, another two weeks in the hospital to fix a cracked hip (I got impatient and tried to get up on my own), a return to the rehab home, working, working, working, and finally discovering I had problems that would never be fixed and memory quirks that were downright scary…I got to go home, to Yearning Sands Resort.

Meanwhile, my Aunt Cora had died in a memory care center, I’d missed so much of my little girl’s life she was barely a little girl anymore and my married life had faltered at the altar.

Turns out, that was the least of my worries. Our worries.

I’m Kellen Adams, and the fun had barely begun.

3

Yearning Sands Resort

Washington’s Pacific Coast

This Spring

Rae Di Luca stacked up her Level Three lesson books, opened the piano bench and put them away. She got out the Adult Course Level 1A book, opened it to “Silver Bells,” and put it on the music rack. “Mom, you have to practice.”

Kellen didn’t look up from her book. “I know.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When are you going to do it?”

“I’m at the good part. Let me finish this chapter.”

“No, you have to practicenow. You know it helps with your finger dexterity.”

When had their roles reversed, Kellen wondered? When had ten-year-old Rae become the sensible adult and Kellen become the balky child?

Oh yeah. When she had the brain surgery, her right hand refused to regain its former abilities, and the physical therapist suggested learning the piano. But there was a reason Kellen hadn’t learned to play the piano earlier in her life. She loved music—and she had no musical talent. That, added to the terrible atrophy that afflicted her fingers, made her lessons and practices an unsurpassed agony…for everyone.

She looked up, saw Rae standing, poised between coaxing and impatience, and the Rolodex in Kellen’s punctured, operated-on and much-abused brain clicked in:

RAE DI LUCA:

FEMALE, 10YO, 5'0", 95LBS. KELLEN’S DAUGHTER. HER MIRACLE. IN TRANSITION: GIRL TO WOMAN, BLOND HAIR TO BROWN, BROWN EYES LIGHTENING TO HAZEL. LONG LEGS; GAWKY. SKIN A COMBINATION OF HER ITALIAN HERITAGE FROM HER FATHER AND THE NATIVE AMERICAN BLOOD FROM KELLEN; FIRST PIMPLE ON HER CHIN. NEVER TEMPERAMENTAL. KIND, STRONG, INDEPENDENT.

Kellen loved this kid. The feeling was more than human. It was feral, too, and Kellen would do anything to protect Rae from threat—and had. “I know. I’m coming. It’s so much more fun to listen to you play than practice myself. You’re good and I’m…awful.”

“I’m notgood. I’m just better thanyou.” Rae came over and wrapped her arms around Kellen’s neck, hugged her and laughed. “But Luna is better than you.”

“Don’t talk to me about that dog. She howls every time I sit down at the piano. Sometimes she doesn’t even wait until I start playing. The traitor.” Kellen glared at the dog, and once again her brain—which had developed this ability after that shot to the head—sorted through the files of identity cards to read:

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