Blinded (14 page)

My eyes stayed glued on the cranky old lady until she was all the way down by the wine store. I didn’t want her to think I was getting off the line for her. When she hopped from the curb to jaywalk over toward Ideal Market, I hung up the phone.

Sherry would tell me I was being petty. Maybe she would be right. I can be petty sometimes. Especially with people who flip me the bird when I’m not doing anything but talking on the phone.

A little bubble of gas erupted down in my gut and began a sudden northern migration that would take it directly into belch territory. I could feel it rise. As the capsule crossed the midtorso territory that I now knew-
knew
-to be my heart’s domain, my hand rose involuntarily to my chest. I placed my knuckles on my sternum and pressed gently. It took no more than a second for the gas to rise the entire length of my esophagus.

I did burp, kind of loudly actually. After, I left my hand in place below and between the boobs on my chest that looked just like my dad’s, the man-boobs I’d promised myself I’d never have.

Never.

Well, I had them now.

I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. No pain rose in my chest. It was okay to move my hand away, to slide my big feet.

I stepped away from the phone and got into the long snaking line that led to the counter at Moe’s. What had Alan said I could order? Whole grain? Nonfat cream cheese? Lox?

Damn.

I had man-boobs, a heart artery that looked like a muck-filled galvanized pipe, a wife who hadn’t smiled in my general direction since the summer monsoons had passed us by, and a kid I adored who was a thousand miles away from my hug.

What had Alan asked me?

“Why do you care about this case so much?”

The woman in front of me was ordering nineteen different things nineteen different ways. She wanted an “everything” bagel without sesame seeds. Jalapeño this with white meat turkey that. “You mean you don’t have veggie cream cheese without those orange things in it?… Oh, those are carrots? Ooh, red onions? You don’t have white? Are they bitter?”

She asked for a spelt bagel. What the hell is spelt?

The girl waiting on her had an oblong ring the size of a carabiner through her right eyebrow. She didn’t care a hoot about the woman she was waiting on, or her act. The clerk’s eyes didn’t frown. Her lips didn’t smile. She was going to get minimum wage for the next hour of her life no matter what the hell the idiots on our side of the counter wanted her to do.

I could relate.

The girl shook her head at the spelt question.

I was glad Moe’s didn’t have spelt. I would have been seriously dismayed if Moe’s had spelt.

“Why do you care about this case so much?”

I realized that my left hand was in my parka pocket, and I was twirling something round between my fingers.

The little brown bottle of nitroglycerin.

“Why do you care about this case so much?”

In my life I’ve known maybe five people who could make me think. Alan Gregory is one of them. I’ve grown to appreciate it-his ability to get me going-but I’ve also grown to recognize that it isn’t an altogether comfortable state of affairs for me. Introspection, I mean. I don’t much like Indy racing, but I love NASCAR. Why? Traffic is traffic, but most of the time NASCAR is all left turns. You just drive fast, control your speed, hit the pit, react to the other guys. You don’t always have to prepare for a hairpin, you’re not always slamming on the brakes.

Having Alan as a friend is like driving the damn Grand Prix. Left turn, right turn. Brake, downshift, gas, brake
hard
. It isn’t always fun. Sometimes I just want to drive I-80 through Nebraska. The road goes straight, the car goes straight. And me?

I go straight. No doubt about it, life is best for me when I go straight.

Why do I care about the case so much?

Because she loved the asshole so much, that’s why. Because this Gibbs Storey lady lived all these years with a guy she knew had murdered her friend, and she stayed living with him even after she knew the police were coming after him to throw him in jail.

I wanted to know about love like that. I wanted to know about a marriage like that. I wanted to know about a woman like that. Was it him, or was it her? What made her tick? Was it strength or weakness? Was it confidence or desperation? I had a guess, sure, but I wanted to know.

My Sherry? After my heart attack she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of our house. Out of town. Screw Thanksgiving, screw my rehab, screw whatever this whole thing was doing to Simon. Screw our marriage.

Screw me.

I didn’t understand any of it. I was thinking that Gibbs and Sterling Storey could teach me something.

My turn finally came at the counter at Moe’s. The girl with the piercing raised her eyebrow. The metal ring levitated ominously. It was her way of telling me I was next. Speaking was an inconvenience for her.

“Whole wheat toasted, please. Low-fat cream cheese, lox, and whatever vegetables you got. Lots of them.”

Her eyes didn’t frown. Her lips didn’t smile. She made me my breakfast, wrapped it in white paper, and dropped it in a brown-paper bag as though she’d done it a few thousand times before, thrust it over the counter at me, and looked for the next person in line.

Poppyseed toasted with butter. Smelt on spelt with a schmear. It didn’t make any difference to her.

With one last glance at the girl with the heavy metal in her brow, I paid for my bagel and crammed a buck into the tip jar.

The girl didn’t know it, I thought, but she was auditioning to play the role of somebody’s wife after sixteen years of marriage.

Later, after I picked up a couple of things at Ideal and stopped back for a cup of decaf at Vic’s, I started walking home. I wasn’t ready to go home, really, but I couldn’t think of anything else I could do to avoid it. It was Sunday morning, and I’d gone every place but 7-Eleven that I could think of that was open. Except for church. But I couldn’t do that. Not that the spiritual solace of an hour at church wouldn’t have been welcome. I didn’t go because I didn’t want to see all the familiar faces and hear the litanies of “How’re you feeling?” and “Hey, where’s the family?” And I really, really didn’t want to hear another story about somebody’s relative’s heart attack and how they were dead in a week.

I didn’t want to hear how, oh, lucky I am.

I wasn’t feeling too damn lucky.

The walk wouldn’t take long-it was only a few blocks from North Broadway to the thousand square feet of siding-covered box that we called home-and I could feel the heave-and-ho of my chest as I made the gentle climb. Not chest pain; no pain exploding below my sternum. Not even a little twinge. The heave-ho was just the rise and fall of excess skin and the sway of my fat.

My man-boobs.

In sight of my house I stopped and watched a teenage girl shovel her sidewalk. Her outfit was more appropriate for an early summer day at Boulder Reservoir than the first real day of winter. Shorts. Sweatshirt that said-what? I couldn’t read her sweatshirt from thirty yards.

What was it with kids and clothes? I had to figure that out, had to. Simon was on his way. I had to get there first.

I made the decision to spend my forced medical leave of absence doing two things. I was going to begin to get rid of my man-boobs, and I was going to go looking for Sterling Storey.

I stopped and checked my pulse.

Eighty-four. That was good. Walking up the hill, holding an eighty-four? That was good. My cardiologist would be pleased. Those perfectly svelte physical medicine specialists who ran the rehab program would be pleased.

Or maybe they wouldn’t be pleased. Their mantra seemed to be “I think you can do better, Sam.” I had the sense that if you told them they’d won Powerball, they’d complain that the jackpot was only thirty million.

Sherry would like them. She thought I could do better, too.

What had Alan said to me?
“You have plenty of more important things to worry about.”

He was right. And finding Sterling Storey was going to be my way of worrying about them.

My man-boobs? I’d never laid eyes on the guy, but I was betting that Sterling Storey didn’t have any.

“I’m having some trouble with my leg,” Lauren said.

I’d deduced that already. The walking stick in her right hand was a dead giveaway. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen the thing emerge from the closet, but I couldn’t. I guessed that it had been years. I purchased it for her at a mountain equipment store in Ouray, on the Western Slope, during another health crisis. Or was it Telluride? I couldn’t remember.

I did remember that the circumstances were similar to these and that I’d seen the decline coming. It seemed disease exacerbations always arrived after a drumbeat of warning.

“Come, sit,” I said. I took her by the elbow and led her to a kitchen chair next to Grace’s high chair.

“It feels like it weighs a ton. I’m just dragging it around.” She was talking about her leg.

“Yeah.”

She bowed her head toward Grace and was immediately lost in the vernacular of baby talk that allowed her to reconnect with her daughter and forget about whatever was going on with her myelin sheath. Grace was oblivious to her mother’s malaise, but she was pretty interested in the walking stick. Were she developmentally able to stagger a few steps and simultaneously hold on to an object, I assumed I would see our daughter playing with a toddler-size version of the walking stick before the day was out.

I was examining Lauren for indications of other peripheral neuropathy. Her facial muscles were still unable to coordinate her blinks. Beyond that, my unskilled eyes found nothing anomalous.

“Any other weakness?” I asked. I wanted to hear her talk again, to taste the cadence for evidence of impairment in her speech.

She shook her head.

“Is that the same leg as before? You remember, that trip to help Teresa in Utah?”

“That was the other leg,” she said.

She sounded okay. “Should I call the neurologist?” Lauren’s neurologist, Larry Arbuthnot, liked to be aggressive with steroid treatment in the face of a fresh exacerbation that threatened serious consequences.

“I don’t want to start steroids,” she said.

Yeah, okay.
“I know.”

She actually smiled. “I’m due for interferon today. I’ll take that and see how things develop.”

Ah, yes, interferon.

Lauren’s weekly interferon injection was preventive medicine; it was intended to protect her from waking up to mornings like this one. The IM injection that she plunged into her thigh once a week wasn’t intended as a treatment in the event that a morning like this one occurred anyway. Interferon was a toxic prophylaxis against a rare event, akin, I sometimes mused, to lighting particularly noxious incense in an effort to keep elephants out of the living room.

In the case of interferon, burning the incense usually seemed to be effective, but it was inherently hard to tell. Last time I checked, the living room was devoid of elephants. But then again, it usually was.

Was it the incense?

Answering that question was the rub.

Regardless, interferon wasn’t intended to deal with a rogue elephant that had snuck into our living room anyway. And that’s what we had right now: a rogue elephant in the living room.

“You sure that’s wise?” I tried hard not to say it in a tone that communicated that I thought her strategy unwise. I probably failed.

Lauren was almost totally focused on Grace. If it weren’t for the walking stick she had clamped between her knees, I could have convinced myself that it was any other Sunday morning.

She finally answered me. “No, not at all. I’m not at all sure. Will you bring me half a cup of coffee, please? Maybe some juice.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to take the damn disease she had by the throat and tighten my grip on it until it died.

“Lauren, we’re talking ambulation. It’s a big risk.”

She snapped back, “Don’t you think I know that? I hate steroids. I want to give it a few hours, okay?”

I retrieved her coffee and juice. Her request for a few hours was reasonable. But then, so was my alarm.

Her voice was much, much softer when she said, “Was that Sam before? On the phone?”

“Yeah, there’s a lot that’s going on.” I filled Lauren in on the events that had taken place outside Albany, Georgia, and Sterling Storey’s ironic demise on the Ochlockonee River.

“That’s convenient,” she said, almost devoid of sympathy. Death a time zone away was so much easier on the soul.

“That’s what Sam thinks, too. He said he wants them to render the body.”

She laughed. “I think you mean render
up
the body. Rendering has something to do with separating out fat, doesn’t it? It’s a cooking thing, I think. Adrienne does it to chickens sometimes around the Jewish holidays. Is Sam okay?”

Her laugh warmed my heart. “He’s doing the best he can. He’s so off-balance. The heart attack. His family gone. I don’t think he can really believe that Sherry took Simon away at a time like this.”

Grace seized the moment to toss her spoon across the table. I caught it before it hit the floor. She thought the whole thing was hilarious. If I gave it back to her, I was sure the game would get repeated. Piaget would have given it back. I kept it.

Lauren said, “I can’t either.” Panic crossed her violet eyes in a flash, like the reflection of a lightning bolt in a pane of glass at midnight.

“Nor can I,” I said. I didn’t know if my wife wanted me to say that I wouldn’t leave her, to reassure her that the latest permutation of her illness hadn’t changed a single facet on the surface of my heart, but I feared that the very mention of her vulnerability might make the circumstances too real for her. So all I added was “I can’t believe what’s happened with them.”

I slid the newspaper across the table to her, pointing at the article about Penn Heller’s arrest for possession of cocaine.

She read the headline, gazed up at me, and said, “Really?”

I could have lied and said,
“I don’t know anything more than I just read in the paper.”
But I didn’t. I said, “Apparently.”

She scanned the article quickly. “It sounds like they have him for intent to distribute. That’s not good.”

“What’s this going to do to Jara’s position on the bench? How damaging is it?”

She shrugged.

“Do you know her husband?”

“A little,” Lauren said. “Just a little.”

It was apparent that Lauren wasn’t eager to talk about Jara and Penn Heller.

A few minutes later Lauren hobbled back toward the bedroom with her non-walking stick hand full of the supplies necessary to inject a milliliter of interferon into her thigh. I glanced at the clock. I added two hours. That was when she’d start getting sick from the medicine. I added twenty-four hours more to that. That was when she would stop being sick from the medicine.

A day, every week, deducted from her life in a valiant effort to repel rogue elephants.

I waited until Lauren closed the door behind her before I turned to Grace and said, “It’s too late this time, I’m afraid, Gracie. The elephants are already here.”

Grace tried to say “elephants.” Anyway, I think what she tried to say was “elephants.”

She pointed at the dogs.

Close enough.

I realized that Emily’s paw umbrella needed my attention.