Night Blindness (19 page)

“It's a fifteen-hour plane ride.”

“We've been planning this all year, J. I've been waiting for you to bring it up,” he said. “Every phone call, I tried not to push you, but I assumed we'd still go.” I'd been foolish to think he would put off this trip. Nic never dropped anything. “It's the perfect time to buy a house there; with their financial crisis, real estate is rock bottom. It'd be stupid to cancel, and I want you to come. You've been gone a long time, J.”

This was the point in our arguments where I usually got quiet and swallowed what I wanted to say because Nic was so sure of what he wanted that he made me believe I wanted it, too. Those crooked goalposts seemed to be watching us. I could hear Luke talking and Jamie laughing. She was saying she wanted to rinse off, and my father was telling her to use the outdoor shower, promising Luke wouldn't peek. Our silence felt like a tight wire.

“I thought he was almost done with treatment,” he finally said.

“Halfway…”

“Jamie and Luke are here. He has a ton of friends.”

A pulse was beating in my neck. “So you want me to leave him?” I could hardly believe this.

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't have to.”

He held his breath. He always held his breath when he was deciding what to say. I waited for the soft hiss that meant he was letting it out. “I talked to Luke when you were at the library this morning. And he said they still think your dad will fully recover, that he'd be fine if you left for a few weeks.” I didn't move.

“If you're going to take the summer off, why do we have to go to Greece? Can't you be here with me?”

“What are you staying here for?” He sounded exasperated, as if he were trying to show me that one plus one equaled two and I just wasn't getting it. “What would we do here? Live in your childhood bedroom? Sort your father's pills? Follow Ryder around?”

Those were mean words. We didn't fight like this. He stood and went to the window. “What the hell are you holding on to here? Twenty-nine-year-olds do not come home and live with their parents. Especially not if they're married.”

I wanted to throw the doorstop at him. It was a heavy wrought-iron cricket that someone had given my dad at the tumor party. It was supposed to bring good luck. “Oh yeah,” I said to him. “And only the weak hold on to things from their past.” I kept my eyes on the cricket. “Isn't that what you always say? But since I never, ever come home, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. My father has a fucking brain tumor. I'm not here for fun.”

Nic paced from the marble fireplace to the door and back again. “You're the one with the boxes of letters you won't throw away and the dreams you won't tell me about.” I wondered if I'd ever said Ryder's name out loud during those dreams.

“Well, what about
your
family, Nic? You want to move to Greece. Isn't that holding on to the past? You're so quick to want me to move across the world to be with your family, but you've never given mine a chance.”

He stopped where he was in front of the door, his green eyes on mine. “I don't belong here,” he said, his voice flat. “Your fancy house and your model mother and football father and that brother who walked on water.”

Fuck you,
I wanted to scream. I tried to numb out when rage hit. It had been harder to do since I'd been home. Everything was welling up, the guilt, the sadness. Why didn't I want to leave? Why wasn't I trying to escape to Greece? I stared at the paint on his jeans. In Santa Fe, everything was easier. We wandered through our days without fighting; we slept and fucked and went to parties. I didn't play piano anymore and I took off my clothes for sculptors. It was easy to keep everything stamped down, hidden. “What happened to us?” I whispered.

He turned his back on me and held on to the door jamb. “I don't know. Something's different.”

I was silent. I was afraid he would turn around and touch me if I said anything tender, and I didn't want that.

“I know your father's sick.” He sat in the wing chair, his hands on the armrests. “But you're treading water. And something keeps dragging you down.” His shirt was untucked, and I could see his hard brown stomach through the open fabric. I had the quick, visceral thought that another woman would love him better.

The summer I started middle school, I got caught in the waves on Martha's Vineyard; an undertow sucked me sideways along the coast. Whenever I tried to surface, it would pull me back and flip me over, until I didn't know whether I was faceup or facedown. Finally, I stopped struggling, stopped feeling the sting of salt in my throat, the pressure of water in my lungs. I didn't think about trying to get air. I was struck by the blue of the water, the tiny ground shells moving around me. Later, I learned drowning survivors say the moments before they lost consciousness were the most peaceful of their lives.

It was Will who saved me. He got to me before the lifeguard. That night, he told me my body had been limp, tangled around him like seaweed, and he'd been scared. Sometimes in Santa Fe, I lay awake while Nic slept, thinking about that day. If Will hadn't gotten to me before I drowned, he'd still be alive.

Jamie appeared in the doorway, wearing a white linen cover-up. Her hair was wet, and I knew she'd used the outdoor shower. “You don't know what you kids are missing,” she said. “I'm making old-fashioneds. Come and get them.”

As I watched her walk away, I realized that I finally did know what I was missing: waterskiing off of Luke's Boston Whaler, sailing that old Sunfish my father bought me when I was twelve, sleeping under the Christmas tree because I loved the smell of pine, sledding down Barker's Hill on the Radio Flyer, pretending my hairbrush was a microphone and singing Beach Boys tunes, banging songs out on the piano while Luke played the tambourine. I was missing my childhood. And now that my father was sick, I was trying to bring it back.

Nic was waiting for me to answer. In his untucked oxford and stained jeans, he was still hoping I'd quit taking care of my dad and go to Greece. Of course he thought I'd go. I was the hippie girl who'd dropped out of school for her art professor, dropped her clothes for famous sculptors, dropped everything to fly to Crete and get married on a beach. I looked down at the flying nightingales on both my ankles and wondered how I could make him understand. I had to stay. I needed to find that other, happy girl I'd lost along the way.

 

17

Nic was in New York, and Mandy and I were in Bottega on Chapel Street. She was trying to cram her feet into a pair of gold kidskin heels that were on sale for three hundred dollars. I zipped a pair of camel boots up my calf and tried not to think about how a baby cow had to live in a box to get the leather that soft. She walked a small circle around me. Her heels hung over the backs. “Can I get away with it?” She clomped to the three-way mirror. I hobbled with her and put my foot up like a flamingo. In my Daisy Duke shorts, the boot made me look like a hooker. “Shit,” she said. “These are so cute. Maybe I can cut off my toes.” We sat side by side on the bench, taking off the shoes. The sandal straps left red marks on the tops of her feet.

“J.J.” She put her arm around me. She smelled powdery, like rose petals ground up and thrown in a bath. “I've kept my mouth shut since that day at Liv's. But I can't take the suspense. You have two men stupidly in love with you. Will you please just pick one? Or”—she flashed me a full-mouth smile—“I'll do it for you.”

It was one of those days that even air-conditioned places felt stifling hot. I fanned myself with the top of a shoe box. I was still tired from staying up until 3:00
A.M.
the night before with Nic, who'd been begging me to go to Greece. Begging was not something he'd ever done before. “You can come back from Crete whenever you need to,” he'd kept saying. “There are flights all the time.” But I never considered going.

“What about Ryder's beautiful doctor girlfriend?” I asked Mandy.

“That means nothing.” She lifted the top off a box with grass green five-inch heels inside. Every time I thought of Nico on a plane to Crete, I got a pinched feeling in my chest. “Do you think I can wear these in the Andes next month while I'm photographing mountain lions?”

I wished I were Mandy. She decided she was going to be a photographer after she saw the Frances Benjamin Johnston exhibit at the Met when we were in high school and had never gotten derailed. I, on the other hand, was so far off the track, I couldn't even see it anymore. I picked up a plum ankle boot. I hadn't worn anything that expensive since I'd met Nic. I put it on my lap. “Why am I buying boots in July?”

“For Paris,” she said. “Everyone in Paris wears boots year-round.” Mandy had the brilliant idea I was going to fly to France for Philip's film premier for the weekend. “On me. Just for three days,” she'd said. I could just imagine the conversation with Nic:
Sorry I didn't go to Greece, but I'm just going to jump across the pond to watch Mandy fuck a Frenchman.

“I'm not going to Paris,” I told her.

“We were talking about Ryder,” she said.

“There's nothing to talk about.”

“Hardly.” She got up and turned to view the sandals from the back. “Girlfriend or no, he's still in love with you. Even if he's doing his best impression of a military man, all starched shirts and shiny shoes. I mean, where is the Ryder with the tattoo and the long hair?” The salesclerk came back and squatted down with a few more boxes. Mandy let him help her into a pair of sequined party shoes.

When he'd gone, she walked to the three-way again, turning around in silver sandals. “I never understood why you guys just didn't fess up to everyone. Will would have come around, and your family would have been thrilled. It's not too late, you know.”

“
Thrilled
is an old-lady word,” I told her.

“I'm mature.” She stood back so she had a long view of the sequins. “I look like a Persian concubine.” Only Mandy would know what a Persian concubine looked like.

Bending down, I gathered the cones of tissue paper, slipping them back in the random shoes we'd left on the floor. “We didn't come clean because Will didn't want us together.” I had that strange shaky feeling I had gotten at Jamie's brownstone when I'd been with Luke, the truth bubbling up from a wellspring I didn't even know was there. Since I'd been home, the urge to tell had been powerful, persistent.

Mandy cocked her hip at me and crinkled her forehead. “What's wrong, J.J.?” I dropped the tissue paper I was holding. I felt like I was going to cry. “J.J.?”

My voice sounded strange and far away. “It was my fault, Mand.”

She kicked off her heels and picked them up by their straps. “What was?” Behind her, the three-way mirror showed a hundred Mandys at different angles. “What are you talking about?”

I felt the hard ridges of the shoe box dig into my chest. “Will's accident…” I stopped. Mandy flicked her hair out of her face. Why was I doing this in downtown New Haven, after she'd visited me in Santa Fe and we'd lain in the downstairs hammock, smoking a joint, our legs entangled, Nic in bed, telling each other stories until sunrise. I could have told her then, but I hadn't ever considered it. “It wasn't an accident,” I said now.

She sat on the bench next to me. “What wasn't?” She said it very slowly.

Glancing over her shoulder, I saw the salesclerk in the handbag section, showing a pocketbook to some fat lady. “It was us.” I felt cold. “Ryder and me.”

“What?” She laughed a little. Cello music came out the speakers around us, one of the Mozart sonatas I used to love to play on the piano. “What are you talking about?” I could smell her sweet breath. She never held it against me when I didn't call. Whenever she picked up the phone, even if we hadn't talked for six months and she had left messages five different times, she acted like I was the best person in the world. “I've missed you J.J.!” she'd say, and I knew I never had to ask forgiveness from her. And then, in the middle of a high-end boutique on Chapel Street on the second Tuesday in July, I told Mandy the whole story.

It happened during the seventh football game of the season, the year I turned sixteen. The night Hamilton played Hopkins, the air smelled like cedar and hickory smoke. Ryder and I were sharing a box of soggy popcorn. My parents were in back of us. It was the fourth quarter. Hamilton was winning thirty-one to seventeen. Will had thrown for 236 yards. He was one play away from breaking the school record. We were stamping our feet on the aluminum bleachers, and it sounded like thunder. An old Queen song was blaring through the loudspeakers. I leaned back against my dad's legs.

“They're going to win,” he said. “Why are they pushing him?” My father chewed on the arm of his glasses, intense, like he was when he watched football with Will or spent hours in his office studying film for ESPN. I watched the offensive coordinator hide his face with the clipboard so that the Hopkins's coach couldn't read his lips. “What the hell are they doing?” my dad said. “Coach should be setting up an Izzy, not a damn Ozzy. Will's the quarterback. Just let him throw for one more down.”

I watched Will set up his team for a running play. His blue-and-white uniform was muddy. “I bet he sets up to run, then fakes to pass,” I said to Ryder.

He pretended to brush something off my shoulder and ran his fingers through my hair. “What'll you bet?” he whispered. But my dad looked over at us, and Ryder let my hair go. It felt thick and heavy down my back.

As the play clock counted down on the scoreboard, I whispered, “I'll bet you a blow job on the living room couch. Tonight.”

Ryder raised his eyebrows and gave me a huge smile. He was wearing an old Steelers sweatshirt of my father's, and his hair was long and curly. It was still warm out; he had on the rope huaraches Jamie had brought back from Mexico.