“That's plenty of time!” Beans said.
“Does anyone else smell bacon?” Paulie sniffed the air, reminding Beans that he was being a pig again. Beans splashed water in his face, but didn't attack. The mention of bacon had everyone's stomachs growling.
With one last look at the sky, the five climbed out of the stately pool and dripped their way to their piled fatigues. There were no clouds in the sky, no faces to reconstruct in white film, nothing to fill the holes in Ambrose's memory. Unbidden, a face rose in his mind. Fern Taylor, her chin tipped up, her eyes closed, wet eyelashes thick on her freckled cheeks. Her soft pink mouth, bruised and trembling. The way she'd looked after he'd kissed her.
“Have you ever stared at a painting so long that the colors blur and you can't tell what you're looking at anymore? There's no form, face, or shape–just color, just swirls of paint?” Fern spoke again, and Ambrose let his eyes rest on the face that had once filled his memory in a faraway place, a place that most days he would rather forget.
Bailey and Ambrose were silent, finding new faces in the clouds.
“I think people are like that. When you really look at them, you stop seeing a perfect nose or straight teeth. You stop seeing the acne scar or the dimple in the chin. Those things start to blur, and suddenly you see them, the colors, the life inside the shell, and beauty takes on a whole new meaning.” Fern didn't look away from the sky as she talked, and Ambrose let his eyes linger on her profile. She wasn't talking about him. She was just being thoughtful, pondering life's ironies. She was just being Fern.
“It works both ways, though,” Bailey contributed his two cents. “Ugly is as ugly does. Becker's not ugly because of the way he looks. Just like I'm not devastatingly handsome because of the way I look.”
“So true, my floating friend. So true,” Fern said seriously. Ambrose bit his tongue so he wouldn't laugh. They were such dorks. Such an odd little twosome. And he had the sudden urge to cry. Again. He was turning into one of those fifty-year-old women who liked pictures of kittens with inspirational sayings printed on them. The kind of woman who would cry during beer commercials. Fern had turned him into a blubbering mess. And he was crazy about her. And her floating friend too.
“What happened to your face, Brosey?” Bailey inquired cheerfully, switching subjects the way he always did, without warning. Okay, maybe Ambrose wasn't crazy about the floating friend.
“It got blown off,” Ambrose answered curtly.
“Literally? I mean, I want specifics. You had a bunch of surgeries, right? What did they do?”
“The right side of my head was sheered off, including my right ear.”
“Well that's okay, right? I mean that ear had some major cauliflower if I remember right.”
Ambrose chuckled, shaking his head at Bailey's audacity. Cauliflower ear is what happened to wrestlers' ears when they didn't wear their headgear. Ambrose never had cauliflower ear, but he appreciated Bailey's humor.
“This ear is a prosthetic.”
“No way! Let me see!” Bailey bobbed wildly and Ambrose steadied him before he tipped face-first into the drink.
Ambrose pulled the prosthetic ear from the magnets that held it in place, and Fern and Bailey gasped in unison, “Cool!”
Yep. Dorks. But Ambrose couldn't deny that he was relieved by Fern's response. He had given her every reason to run away from him, screaming. The fact that she didn't even flinch eased something in his chest. He inhaled, enjoying the sensation of breathing deeper.
“Is that why your hair won't grow?” It was Fern's turn to be curious.
“Yeah. Too much scar tissue on that side. Too many grafts. There's a steel plate on the side of my head that attaches to my cheekbone and my jaw. The skin on my face was peeled back here and here,” Ambrose indicated the long scars that crisscrossed his cheek. “They were actually able to put it back, but I took a bunch of shrapnel to the face before the bigger piece took the side of my head. The skin they put back was like Swiss cheese and I had shrapnel buried in the soft tissue of my face. That's why the skin is so bumpy and pockmarked. Some of the shrapnel is still working its way out.”
“And your eye?”
“I took a big piece of shrapnel to my eye, too. They saved the eyeball but not my sight.”
“A metal plate in your head? That's pretty intense.” Bailey's eyes were wide.
“Yeah. Just call me The Tin Man,” Ambrose said softly, the memory of nicknames and old pain making it hard to breathe again.
“The Tin Man, huh?” Bailey said. “You are pretty rusty. That double leg yesterday was PA-THETIC.”