Night Blindness (15 page)

“Nic?” My pillow was wet with drool, and it hurt to move my head.

He came in the room and glanced from the empty bed to me. And then he looked behind me, at Ryder. “What the hell?” he said quietly.

I pushed myself up, but my head was spinning, and my limbs were suddenly cold. I watched him start to back up. “Gallery Lazelle is this weekend? Oh God, I forgot.” I started to get up, but I felt weighted to the cot. “Stop, please.”

But he kept going, reaching for the door handle, tossing the flowers in the trash. Before he opened it, I saw how he was looking at me. It was the same as when I'd finally told him, two years after we'd been married, that I'd had a brother, a brother named Will, who'd died. He'd looked at me like he had never seen me before.

 

13

“Please,” I said to the skinny attendant in the Plexiglas booth. “My dad was rushed here by ambulance yesterday.” I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview. The bandage on my head had slid down and the threads stuck up like tiny antennae. “I didn't get a ticket when I came in.”

“Honey.” He leaned his scrappy arms on the windowsill. “I sit in this booth nine hours a day, five days a week, people watching.” His T-shirt read,
I USED TO HAVE A HANDLE ON LIFE, BUT IT BROKE.
“And I know you got bigger worries than paying some stupid ticket.” When he smiled, I saw he was missing a bottom tooth. “You're all set.” The digital display flashed a big yellow zero.

This felt like a glorious act of kindness. When I waved, he was already pressing a button on the screen and signaling me on. The yellow gate rose above my car.

I drove the back roads into Milford, then took Merwin Avenue along the beachfront, the radio on high, trying not to think about the expression on Nic's face. I hadn't run after him. I couldn't in those huge hospital clothes, and anyway, my head was throbbing and I was exhausted.
How could I have forgotten he was coming today?
I wondered. After he'd slammed the door, Ryder had lifted up on his elbow. “That was bad,” he'd said.

“I have to go.” I'd scrabbled around on the floor, looking for my clothes. “Damn it, where's Jamie?”

“Don't worry. I'll stay and wait for your dad until she gets here. Just go.” And then Jamie breezed through the door, throwing her Barbour coat over a chair, saying it was raining so hard, the old railroad bridge was already flooding, and Ryder jumped up and sat on the couch, trying to pat down his hair. “Where's Sterling?” she asked.

“Radiology,” Ryder replied.

I was sitting on the side of the cot, holding my head.

She startled when she saw me. “Oh, sweetheart, I just saw Nic. He was in such a rush, I hardly had chance to say hello. What a nice, um”—she smiled briefly and glanced at Ryder—“surprise. I gave Nic my extra house key just in case he wants to go home or…” Her voice trailed off, and no one said anything else until finally she told me I should go home and get some rest. I got up, dressed again in my bloody clothes, and left before she could ask what had happened to my head.

I drove around in the rain for twenty minutes before I parked across the street from Cambridge, Jamie's brownstone. I hadn't been there in years. The elaborately carved doorway and its enormous acanthus leaf brackets still seemed to be collaborating with her need for space, her constant wish to be away from us after Will died.

Since I'd been home, Luke had been urging me to practice there because, he said, it had the best piano. But I had found a thousand reasons not to, avoiding the brownstone at all costs. And then a day ago, before I'd taken my dad in for radiation, Luke had called. “Tomorrow we're going to play that Steinway.” His voice was serious, the way it had been when he took me to lunch at Cuomo's before I left for Andover and told me that the things you run from in life hunt you down, trap you in a lifestyle of running, until your feet forget how to form roots. “Be at Cambridge tomorrow or else.”

I'd been running along the sound when he'd called, and I'd stopped. “Or else what?” I'd watched a butter-colored yawl take down its sails.

“Or else I'm sending you to a great therapist I know.”

I'd given him a scoffing laugh. “And I know how effective
they
are,” I'd said, but something had risen in me, a panicked feeling that maybe Luke did have that much power, that maybe he could make me go.

When we acquired it, the Steinway was worth over $65,000. Before Jamie bought the brownstone, Sylvia Winters, a ninety-year-old opera singer who'd been famous in her day, had owned it. Her kids were happy to sell the piano with the place if we paid a little more. When Luke first saw it, he almost fainted. It was a Model M in a Louis XV scalloped case with ivory keys, and it had been fully restored, new soundboard and bridges, a rebronzed harp, new agrafes, pin locks, strings, tuning pins, hammer shanks and leathers. Luke sent a tuner every six months to work on it, and now my hands were itching to play it, but I'd thought coming here would remind me too much of that time right after Will died. Jamie'd told us she needed the apartment because she thought redoing it would help keep her mind occupied. And, she said, my father and I should be spared her grief.

Trying to avoid the puddles, I walked up the marble steps and worked the key in the lock. Jamie had given me a spare when Luke said he wanted to practice here. The door swung open easily. That white carpeting was as bright as the first time I'd been there. On the wall was that same Victorian mirror, and on my left, a half flight of stairs, leading to the master bedroom. Directly across from me was the piano. Without thinking, I took a muddy step toward it, but then I realized my mistake and pulled off my sandals. I stripped in the middle of the hall and carried my clothes upstairs.

The master bedroom was all white and clean, with a big fluffy bed under a wide window overlooking a brick courtyard. I wished I could lie down on it, but instead I went into the bathroom, also white, turned on the hot water, and peeled the bandage from my head. In the shower, I sat on the marble bench. The water was too hot to sit under, really, but I stayed there all the same, watching my skin get red. I kept thinking of Nic walking in with those flowers, of Ryder's warm body against my back, and then for some reason I thought about the day I'd auditioned for the Vienna Conservatory's summer program. It was the December after Will died, and I hadn't played since before his funeral. I sat at the piano on the stage, in front of Monsieur Mercier and a recruiter from Vienna. “An honor,” he had said, “that I give you because you are, my dear, a rising talent.” His pointy nose and even pointier chin smelled of coffee and curdled cream. He didn't say anything about how I'd missed weeks of lessons.

It had been a chance to go to Vienna for the summer, get a jump on Juilliard. Monsieur Mercier knew the recruiter and though he was mostly auditioning at high schools that focused on the arts, the tall, aging man had agreed to hear me play.

Schubert's Impromptu no. 2 in A-flat had been propped against the stand. It should've been six minutes of sheer beauty, except that, as I sat there, the black notes turned to hieroglyphics. I couldn't fathom what they meant to my hands. Sweat trickled down my belly. Monsieur Mercier cleared his throat. “Jenny, is something wrong?” The auditorium swelled with silence; my hands felt hot on my lap. I knew this was important, my ticket out. I could go to Austria, leave them all: the guilt I felt with Ryder, my cheating mother, my broken father. But then I rose and walked off the stage without saying anything. In the parking lot outside, where the wind cut through my silk wrap, I called Jamie to come get me.

We'd stopped at Cambridge on the way home. She never asked how the audition went, and I stood in her front hall, replaying it again and again in my head, shame rising like a hot blast in my chest. When she went upstairs, I wandered around the living room, arms crossed, taking in the couch, the glass table, the silk lamp shades. I hated that she could form a private life all her own, leaving my father and me marooned in the house where Will had died. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw a note on the counter:
Thanks for everything, darling. You are sensual, amazing, my miracle. Call me, J.
The rage had made it hard to breathe. I'd left, sat waiting for her on the steps outside.

“Let's go,” she'd said breezily when she came out, not asking why I was sitting on the stoop in the freezing cold, not giving me that threshold to a fight. I'd been silent on the way home. The streets were slick with the sleet that had begun to fall, and Jamie hummed beside me, a Christmas carol, so that by the time we reached North Parker, I couldn't keep my mouth shut.

“You know what?” I told her. “You're a bitch.” The words were acidic, and they shattered something between us. A tiny fissure occurred in the humming, before she continued on as though I'd said nothing at all. As she kept driving down North Parker, I felt stunned, almost awed. But when I glanced at her, every muscle in her face was strained, as though she was trying desperately to keep the world at bay. She was blinking, very fast, but even that couldn't stop the tears coursing down her cheeks.

I turned the shower off now and stood in front of her mirror, dripping. I was glad it was steamed up and I couldn't see myself. It didn't escape me that my husband had just run out on me because he thought I was cheating, and here I was, where Jamie had brought her boyfriends.

I saw them once, when I was home from Andover. It was a few days before Easter, and Jamie was walking down the street arm and arm with Julian, one of the agents she worked with in New York, whom we'd known forever, a pretty man with gray eyes and long lashes. He was holding on to her, looking at her like he might devour her top to bottom, and I had ducked into the Yale Art Gallery. Afterwards, I'd gone straight to Luke's. He didn't seem surprised to see me. “Is my mother fucking Julian?”

His expression never changed. “She might be.”

“Does my dad know?”

He watched me for a while, then nodded. “He knows. Come on in, baby girl. Let me fix you a snack.” But I'd left Luke's and gone to Mandy's, where I drank so much rum while her parents were at a party, I threw up.

I took a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from a drawer of clothes Jamie kept there for emergencies only, as if she might get trapped inside the place she had bought to escape. Her shorts were loose in the waist, and I knew I was doing it again, not eating, as though food were an ingratiating, needy friend who offered things I didn't want. It wasn't helping that I ran so much, beating the pavement until those endorphins kicked in.

Downstairs, the retro-style couch curved like a white semicolon in the middle of the room, and above it, hanging on the wall, was a series of photographs of Will and me as toddlers at Three Rivers Stadium. I wore my dad's Steelers Jersey like a dress and Will clutched a football with determination, a glimpse of the player he'd become. Jamie's cameraman had taken them, and they were startlingly lifelike. I pictured how Julian must have felt when he used to come here with Jamie, sitting at the glass table, surrounded by her children and worrying my father might show up and break his face.

My dad must have known about her lover. How could he not? I wondered why he hadn't beaten the shit out of him. “She says she's not like me. She wants to talk about Will all the time. And I can't, Whobaby. It hurts too much,” he told me one night, sitting at the kitchen table after dinner when it was just the two of us. Jamie was at her apartment. She was always there, then. And then he'd cried. He cried so hard, the table shook, and saliva came out his mouth. I stood watching from the kitchen island. I didn't go to him. If I did, it would all be real: Will would really be dead, my mother would really be gone, and my father would slowly be falling apart.

I leafed through the music on the Steinway now. I wanted to play something vicious, something so hard-core and energetic that it would make my fingers burn. I thought of a Candlebox song called “Far Behind.” I wasn't at all sure I could do it without Luke and his metronome clicking off arpeggiated chords.

A key clicked in the lock, and Luke walked through the arched entryway. He stopped when he saw me. He was wearing black sunglasses and a silk sarong with animal prints on it. “Baby girl?” He took off his Ray-Bans. He wore sunglasses, no matter what the weather. “I wasn't sure you'd come.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm here.”

A silver hoop gleamed in his ear. “So you are.” His voice was filled with wonder, and pride. I watched him bend down and unbuckle his leather sandals, lining them neatly against the bright white walls of the foyer. He stared at my muddy footprints. “Get me a dustpan, Jamie'll never let us practice here again if we stain her carpet.”

I went into the kitchen and opened the pantry. When I came out, I gave him a broom. The animals on his sarong were antelopes.

“So.” He watched me kneel down. “Why's my favorite girl on the lam?” He rubbed his nose where the diamond stud usually was. The piercing had left a tiny pockmark in his skin. “I was just at the hospital. We've all been wondering where you raced off to.”

I started brushing up the mud. “Is my dad okay?”

“He's fine. They've got it under control, and I'm glad you aren't rotting from worry in that hospital room. I think my Jensen might be coming back to herself, keeping her appointment with old Luke and all.” He gave me that huge white smile and squatted next to me. “So, you sleeping with Ryder?”

I felt my face heat up. “Jesus Christ, why would you ask me that?”

“Ah, it was Jamie who took the wild guess.”

“Figures.” He held the dustpan down so I could sweep the dirt into it. “She thinks I'd do to Nic what she did to my dad?”

He didn't answer; his brown eyes were steady on mine. “Which was what?” he asked.