Angels Unaware

out loud. Luca was a comic sight to behold. All afternoon, he’d been preening in front of the mirror admiring himself. But even as I laughed, I was afraid for him. He was foreign and too naive to appreciate the enemy he had made that night, an enemy who would be exquisitely patient, and all the more dangerous for it. I was afraid for myself, too, given the circumstances in which I’d last seen Aaron. But this was my big chance to torture Luca, and I wasn’t about to let it slip away.
“If you’d only minded your own damn business, like Caroline told you, none of this would have happened, you know. Now I might be willing to go everywhere with you and protect you—for a fee. A pantywaist like yourself needs—”
Luca glared at me, eyes burning with all the passion of insulted manhood, and for once I shut up.
We didn’t speak to each other for a week after that, and might never have spoken another word to each other ever again, if not for Luca’s getting so sick and almost dying on us.
At first, I thought his coming down with measles was hysterical, it being a little kid’s disease. But when his fever started to climb and he became delirious, I started to get scared that he really might die. As far as could be told, he had not come from hearty stock—his father having dropped dead without much provocation. What if Luca up and followed suit? I worried. That possibility kept me vigilant and sometimes, when he was too quiet, I’d stick a hand mirror under his nose to make sure he was still breathing.
No one was allowed in the sick room but me. The girls had had the chicken pox but not measles, and Jewel and I couldn’t remember if she’d had them or not. I had never had measles or chicken pox or anything else but my strange imperviousness to any kind of illness was just one more of my virtues that wasn’t obvious,so I nursed him by myself. That was the way I wanted it. I couldn’t have stood for anyone else to take care of him.
Often, when he was out of his head with fever, he would call for his dead mother. It made me uncomfortable to hear a boy nearly full grown to a man calling, “Mama, Mama!” just like a child, and I squirmed whenever I heard it and was embarrassed for him.
Maybe he thought I was his mother because once he reached out and grabbed a hold of my skirt. At first, I tried to shake him off, but it seemed to calm him to have a hold of it, and when I’d satisfied myself that he truly was out of his head, I let his hand stay and didn’t even flinch when his arms reached out to encircle my waist. I was never sure how, but sometimes my own arms reached out to touch his hair. It was nice hair, dark and thick as rope. Then my fingers strayed down to his neck. His skin was warm to my touch, warm with fever, and smooth and golden. The sun had tanned him, and the color had not faded with fall. I felt my own skin grow warmer, felt the blood in my face come to the surface. It was a strange sensation for me, and I wondered if I could possibly be getting measles too.
It was then he started rambling again and I wished he could be delirious in English so I could understand. What was he thinking in his feverish brain? Certainly not of me. Of Caroline maybe. Or Jolene or Cathleen Haddock. But never of me.
His long black lashes cast shadows on his cheekbones. The hard work he had done around the inn had left his shoulders broad and his arms heavily muscled. I stared at the veins in his forearms, thinking how vulnerable a man could look when you focused on his veins.
In sleep, his lips were slightly parted, revealing very white teeth. I stared at his hands, long fingered and fine. Mine were calloused, the nails broken, and the knuckles knobby. It seemed that something was changing between us as he slept and I kept watch over him, but I had no frame of reference then to reason what it could possibly be.
On a morning days later, he was strangely still, with none of the earlier thrashing and moaning. The delirium had left him, and I was afraid that life was going with it. Looking down at him, hoping for a sign, I was taken aback when his eyes opened suddenly.
He smiled weakly, dark circles rimming his eyes, the bones of his face more prominent for the weight he’d lost, and when he spoke, his words were labored. “You are worried,” he whispered.
I turned my back to him quickly, dunking a cloth in the basin by the bureau. “So you’re back,” I said, returning to his bedside to slap the cool rag on his forehead.
“Why are you worried, Darcy? Were you afraid that I would die?” he said with a bashful kind of sweetness.
“Sure, I was. Do you think I wanted to have to go to the expense of burying you? Having to help with your father’s funeral was bad enough.”
His eyes closed, so I didn’t have to turn away this time. There was no need. Things were back to the way they had been before. “Don’t go back to sleep just yet. I’ve got to wash you first.”
“Wash me?” His eyes widened.
“Yessir. I’ve been washing you all week.”
The expression on his face told me that it was the first time he realized that underneath the covers, he was naked. He drew the sheet up over his bare chest.
“Oh, don’t be silly. I’ve seen every inch of you, and I didn’t find anything unusual.”
He clutched the sheet, and as if to turn the tables on me, he began to look at my chest. “Why don’t you