A nother side of Kyle that Carla saw was his exceptional thoughtfulness, which never seemed put on but to come from the center of his soul…
Her parents both had had to be confined to a retirement center months before she won her Oscar, and so they couldn’t be in the audience at the ceremonies that night. She had arranged for a videotape of the ceremonies and a few days later visited her parents at the center, but Alzheimer’s disease’s relentless march had speeded up a bit, and no one could be certain how much her mother understood about what was going on around her. As for her father, caring for his beloved had proved too demanding, bringing on him a stroke that left most of his body paralyzed.
Kyle and she had visited them for the first time just two weeks ago, and Carla would never forget what one of the nurses had told her.
“Treat him good!” the heavyset woman whispered to her while Kyle was in the men’s room.
“Kyle?” Carla replied. “I wouldn’t do otherwise.”
“He’s a treasure.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s something like when we bring in animals now and then.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is a bond that develops almost immediately, it never seems to fail. Cats especially are a real blessing to these people, you know. Something in a cat, a sensitivity that is just beautiful to witness. The elderly, even the ones worst off, seem to come out of some kind of inner world for the few minutes that they can hold those warm, purring bodies.”
“What does this have to do with Kyle?”
“It’s in him, too, that ability to connect with people. I’ve never seen anything like that. What a doctor he would make! This friend of yours is special. I’ve watched him. He seems to ease the pain of anyone whose hand he holds. I think he does repair their emotions. This lasts only as long as he is with me, but, then, it may be a continuous process, and this is just an awfully important first step.”
The nurse stopped speaking. Smiling, she added, “What it must be like to have him hold you in his arms. He must be a passionate man.”
Carla agreed that he was.
“You are real lucky,” the nurse remarked.
“It’s not luck,” Carla told her honestly. “It’s God opening up his heart and mine to one another.”
“But you might never have met him. That’s luck, the fact that you did, right?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s pure and simple—an answer to a prayer for Kyle and for me. I was lonely. So was he. We felt that way before we ever met one another.”
The nurse nodded as she smiled strangely, and then went about her duties elsewhere in the center.
Carla had lost track of Kyle, but assumed he would be with her parents.
She was right.
He was kneeling in front of her mother’s wheelchair.
Normally, looking impossibly thin-faced, frail, not much more than a living skeleton, Rosemary Gearhart would not have been able to pay any attention to him or anyone else unless she was in a comparatively and increasingly rare lucid moment, but there was no way to predict when this would happen.
But, for Kyle, it would prove different. Every time he subsequently visited her, she would react like she did on that first occasion.
As Carla stood in the doorway, her mother was reaching up to touch Kyle’s smooth cheek.
“Where’s the beard?” she said.
He chuckled agreeably as he told her, “I just don’t have a coarse beard, ma’am.”
Her fingers touched his strong chin.
“Nice,” she said knowingly.
Kyle was surprised at the way she talked, and delighted that she was responding as well as she did.
“Why, thank you, Miss Gearhart!” he told her.
She touched his lips next.
“Are you a good kisser?” she asked abruptly.
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
Carla saw a chance to enter the little tableau.
“He is a very good kisser, Mother,” she said, smiling broadly, while Kyle blushed a very deep red.
Her mother looked up at her and, then, in an instant, the blankness that was part of Alzheimer’s returned, as though her comprehension, to the extent that she could grasp anything at all, was now trained on a scene beyond that one, a scene that only she could visualize.
That would not be Kyle’s only visit.
Over the coming weeks, he would return to the center half a dozen times. Carla did not have to ask him to join her.
“Are you going to visit your folks this evening?” he would say.
“Yes, I am,” she replied. “You’ve got my schedule down pat, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
During the other visits, Kyle seemed to be in demand all over the center, with an astonishing number of requests for a little of his time before he left. Gradually the visits began to last longer.
Carla could not have been more pleased because she was privileged to witness another side of Kyle’s personality that only confirmed what she felt about him.
She would never forget what he told her on the way back to her house that first time, after she asked him about her mother and the other residents at the center.
“What was it like?” she spoke.
“Strange at first,” he said.
“How do you mean strange?”
“I am usually a little shy being that close to strangers. Onstage, it’s not difficult for me at all. The audience is a sea of faces and they all blend together.”
“You can say that again!” Carla echoed his reaction.
“After all, I am not one-on-one with any of them. But today, I must have spent time with at least a dozen folks, aging men and women who needed me a lot more than anyone in any audience has.”
“At the start, it was awkward for you back there.”
“It’s the shyness I mentioned. But that passed soon enough.”
“I’m really sorry that I subjected you to all that, Kyle, and without much warning.”
“Oh, no, Carla, it was fine. I was enjoying myself but then, at some point, it went beyond ordinary enjoyment.”
“And became—” Carla prompted him.
He paused, recalling how he felt, the expressions on pale, wrinkled, liver-mark-splotched faces.
“I thought of what it would be like when my own parents reach that stage in their lives,” he said. “Could I help them in some way also?”
“You were saying that the way you felt went beyond carnal enjoyment as such.”
Kyle leaned over and kissed the tip of her nose.
“Something spiritual,” he said, “my soul touching theirs.”
She rubbed her arm.
“That sounds wonderful but—”
“Eerie?”
“Exactly the word I would have used!”
“I agree with you. But it was pure and beautiful, not dark and