Night Blindness (23 page)

A scare crept up in me, and I suddenly wanted to get past Overlook Drive, to McKinnon, where there were houses, so I started jogging again. The car stayed behind, and I ran faster, my sneakers slapping the wet pavement. Finally, I got up my nerve and glanced back.

It was Luke's Navigator. He drove up and leaned across the console. “Somebody chasing you?”

“Jesus Christ.” I didn't know if I wanted to hug him or hurt him. “You scared me.”

“You're going to drown.” He held up a tray of coffee with a little white bag crammed in the middle. “Get in; you and the coffee are getting cold.”

“Lucibello's is open this early?”

“Yeah. Starflower wanted a chocolate croissant. Even I can't make them as tasty as those Italians.”

The rain picked up, and his wipers slapped faster. I ran in place to keep warm. “Will you make me my favorite egg and cheese sandwich?”

“I'll make you a cooked goose if you'll just come on.”

A crack of thunder sounded to the north, and I ran around the car, squealing, and got in. He called Starflower to say we were on our way. In five minutes, we were sitting in front of his old farmhouse.

I hadn't been to Luke's in a million years. His doormat still said
NICE UNDERWEAR
, and the kitchen smelled of oranges. Starflower was standing at the counter in front of a juicer, her hair tied back in a paisley bandanna.

“Thanks for letting me intrude on your breakfast,” I told her.

She smiled and poured me a glass of orange juice. “This will rehydrate you.” She was wearing some kind of caftan and long dangly earrings. “I started a bath and put lavender mineral salts in to help with your sore quads. I left some sweats on the basin.”

Taking the juice, I closed the bathroom door and peeled off my wet clothes. I wondered how she could possibly know my quads hurt. The small bathroom was filled with steam, and the lavender, good for my muscles or not, smelled great. I studied the purple velour jogging suit. I was pretty sure 1976 wanted it back.

Back in the kitchen, I sat at a chair that had been carved out of a wine barrel, and Luke put an egg sandwich on my plate. “I'm so glad this is one of her eating days,” he said to Starflower, who was cleaning out the juicer.

I stuck out my tongue at him. But when I bit into the sandwich, I almost spit it out. “I think a piece of wrapper got left on the cheese,” I said.

Luke laughed. “That's what soy cheese tastes like.”

I picked it out of my teeth. “They make real cheese, you know.”

“Now you get a feel for what your old man's been going through,” he told me, “following Starflower's curing diet.” I'd forgotten that she was the reason we knew what to feed my father, how to make his system alkaline so it could kick out the disease. “She doesn't let us have any dairy in the house—bad for you. Course”—he winked at her—“she gets to eat a chocolate croissant.”

She threw some orange rinds in the compost bucket. “Don't tell my secrets,” she said. “A girl has to have her indulgences.”

“Thank you for breakfast.” Plastic cheese or not, I was starving, and I wanted them to know how happy I was to be there.

Luke rapped my elbow with his fork. “Are you going to tell Uncle Luke how your old man really is? I only got half a story when I was at Pilot's Point Marina with him last week.”

Starflower dried her hands. “I'm going to get dressed. Kisses to both of you.” At the banister, she stopped and pulled on one of her ringlets. “Don't worry about your mother,” she told me. “She will have forgotten all about your fight by the time you get home today.” Then she disappeared upstairs.

I sat there with my mouth open; Luke put his arm around me. “Isn't she amazing? She's the only person I've ever known who really does see with her third eye.”

I mopped up some yolk with my sandwich and told him my dad had spent Saturday afternoon teaching Sid's eldest grandson how to hike a football. And a few days before that, two of his brothers had road-tripped up from Philly, and they'd gone to the Seafood Shack and then to a drive-in. He didn't get in until two
A.M.
“He gets tired, but he seems happy.” Luke was squinting at me. I sipped my tea. “Except that I know brain tumors can be deadly…”

“You need to knock it off with the negative energy.” He took a croissant from the bag and cut it in two. “The one lesson that keeps smacking me on the head”—he tapped his dreads—“is that anything, and I do mean anything, is possible. A hundred years ago, folks died from chicken pox. Now people are living with one kidney and titanium knees and animal valves in their hearts. It's okay to have hope, Jensen.” He popped a piece of pastry in his mouth.

“But what if—”

He interrupted me. “But what if belief is as strong a medicine as science? People walk across red-hot coals and mothers, even yours”—he lifted my chin so I had to meet his eyes—“pick up cars to save their children. The human body is a goddamn miracle.”

The rain had stopped, and a thin stream of sunlight came through the window and lit up the funky kitchen with its slate countertops and cupola.

“Can I tell you something really awful?” I heard the shower running upstairs and thought how unlike Luke it was to be playing house with a woman. “I love having this time with my dad.”

He laughed his deep baritone laugh. “Since when is that a bad thing?”

“I'm here to take care of him. This was supposed to be hard.”

“That's God's way of fucking with you. There's beauty in the damnedest places. Come here, let me show you something.”

“Are we going out?” I asked. “Because people might mistake me for Jimi Hendrix.”

He laughed again. “Nah, just down the hall.”

He led me to a small room off the den. Beads hung from the jamb and soft sax music was coming from overhead speakers. A couch sat across from an armchair, and bookshelves lined the walls.
The Power of Now; When Things Fall Apart; Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
“My sanctuary,” he said. “Where I sit with people who need a little guidance.” I stood at the threshold. “You don't need to stand there like you got called to the principal's office.”

I sat on the end of the couch. The woven Indian rug felt good under my bare feet. “This isn't really my scene. God and I aren't exactly on speaking terms.”

He settled in the armchair. “Lovers' quarrel?”

The sound of the fountain next to me made me want to take a nap. “I'm waiting for Him to answer a few questions,” I said. “But I don't even know who He is.”

“Ah, what does it matter? Maybe He's a white light or an essence; maybe He's the sun. There's some kind of force out there, and you might as well pray to it, because data proves prayer works.” He had the voice of a good teacher, kind, but not patronizing. “I bet He could handle your questions.”

“I don't think He wants to hear from me,” I told him. “You and my father think I'm some kind of angel, but—”

“God doesn't give a fuck. He still loves me, and you should have seen me and your daddy when we were young and had too much money. We did things you'd think God would have sacrificed us on a stone slab for—drove drunk, took other people's prescription drugs, slept around with groupies, crashed our cars, stayed up until the sun rose, and then did it all again the next night. Anything to help us run away.”

This surprised me. “What was my dad running from?”

“Growing up poor. Both of us. It made us feel like we didn't deserve the money and talent and luck.” I imagined my father and Luke snorting lines of cocaine off a hooker's belly. “Your dad found Jamie, and then they had Will and you, so he quit screwing around. When I was messed up, I couldn't play piano at all, so I quit because of that. It was simple. We found purposes greater than ourselves.”

“So that's what you preach to my parents to make them so…” I couldn't think of the right word. “Okay with this.”

“I don't preach.” He reached out his big hand and patted my knee. “I help people reframe their beliefs, so life doesn't feel so hard. The first thing is to know what you can and can't control.”

“Oh yeah?” His hands were so square and substantial; they'd picked me up and brushed me off as many times as my own parents' had. “What can we control?”

“Well, we can tell the truth.”

The truth.
Ever since I'd told Mandy about Will, I'd been thinking about telling my father, but the
what ifs
were hounding me. What if he hated me? What good would that do? “What if it's too hard?”

“Your mother used to say that.” He got up, lit a candle, and gently waved it like a wand. It smelled like jasmine.

I leaned back on the couch. “What'd you do for her?”

He secured the candle in a holder shaped like a half-moon. “I helped her learn how to comfort herself.” He sat down again. “She was finding comfort in all sorts of things before that.”

“How do you know she's not anymore?”

“Rule number one,” he said, “in action. Can you control Jamie?”

“Hardly.”

He nodded. “Then don't worry about it.”

“It's that simple?”

“Pretty much.”

“Okay, I can't control ‘Why us? Why my dad? Why Will?' So I just shouldn't think about it?”

His mouth turned up like he was going to laugh, but he didn't. “Horrible things happen. We can't know why. And if our faith has to be tested to lead us to believe in something greater than ourselves, so be it.”

I leaned back and let my eyes close. I thought of Will dying, my father in the hospital, Ryder loving someone else. “That's so fucked-up.”

“Can you control whether it's fucked-up or not?”

I didn't say anything. I just thought about my dad standing in the kitchen the night before, drinking a glass of carrot juice. When he put it down, he'd had an orange mustache above his top lip, little boy–style. And I'd been afraid, sitting there across from him, that if I told him what had happened, all his innocence would drain out and he'd never look like a little boy again.

*   *   *

Luke dropped me at home. When I walked through the back door, Jamie was at the breakfast table in her satin robe, studying the pages of a fashion magazine. It was already past noon. “How did this girl get a job?” She held up an ad for Revlon lipstick, as though we hadn't had a fight, which is exactly how she ended fights, just blowing through them as if they'd never happened. The model had one stilettoed foot resting on an ottoman, blowing out candles on a cake with wine-colored lips. The cake reminded me that Will's birthday was the next week. Jamie had planned his parties herself, throwing him bashes at the carousel park down the street, waterskiing parties, beach bashes where Luke cooked lobster over a fire pit. I walked in and took the magazine, studying the underfed teenager before handing it back to her.

“Cankles,” I said, although I probably could have touched my thumb and middle finger around her ankle.

“Exactly,” she said. “I had the perfect girl for this ad, and they chose
her.
”

I walked to the counter and put on some coffee. I was still wearing Starflower's ugly purple sweatsuit, but Jamie hadn't noticed. “Want some?” I held up the pot.

“No, honey. Diuretics dry your skin.” The canary diamond on her hand flashed while she flipped the pages. I wondered if Julian had been intimidated by a piece of jewelry that cost as much as a car. Standing there holding a package of Starbucks dark roast, I blurted out, “Are you sleeping with someone again?”

“Now this girl is flawless.” She held up an ad for mascara, as if she hadn't heard me. A woman with blunt bangs and smoky eyes stared past the camera. “But Elite signed her before I had the chance.”

“Just tell me who he is.” I dumped a scoop of coffee in the maker. “I won't tell Dad.”

She turned the pages like she was mad at them. “I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about.”

I put the measuring cup on the counter. “You're always taking secret calls and running off on vague errands. What am I supposed to think?”

She let out a long breath. “I love you, Jensen, but stay out of this. You don't know what you're talking about.”

“Then tell me.” I wanted to slap her.

“You know what?” She got up and brought her teacup to the counter, putting it down so hard, I thought it might crack. “You're living in the past. That was a very specific period in our lives. Your father and I needed time apart. Grief”—her eyes filled with sudden tears—“is not uniform. Everyone goes through it in their own way. I wanted to talk to Daddy about it, about Will. More than anything else, I wanted … I needed your father to help me live without Will. But he couldn't. I needed to remember Will. And your father just wanted to shut down.” She looked past me at the slider. “Things are different now.” She turned back to the table and flipped the magazine closed.

“Exactly how are things different? Now Daddy just goes along with whatever you feel like doing?”

“Stop it.” She sat in her chair and glared at me. The veins in her neck stood out. “I'm the one who's been here.” Her voice was low and furious. “The one who knew something was wrong, that he wasn't the same. I'm the one who had to live with it. Trying to decide what to do. Not daring to call you because every time I did, it was as if we were some horrible burden on you.” I stood at the counter, not moving. “And now you suddenly decide to come home with your brains and your research, painting in the attic and playing piano with Luke and making me feel like an idiot for who I am.” She picked up the magazine but didn't open it. “I have done the best I can.” She looked up at me. “I am not perfect. Show me one person in the world who knows how to act when their child dies.” She studied me with a hard glare. “I am the one who has been here day in and day out with your father, eating meals with him and brushing my teeth next to him, sleeping in a bed with him night after night, and I have loved that man the best I know how. So don't you dare come here and make me feel bad for how I live. I was the one who was still here when he was ready to talk again. To live again. It was me, Jensen. Not you. You're the one who left. You walked out on our family. Not me.”