Night Blindness (29 page)

I knew I wouldn't be okay if something happened to him. I didn't know what would happen exactly, but I wouldn't make it. I thought I should tell someone this, but I had no one to tell. I leaned against Luke in my wet clothes and felt his chest pushing air in and out of his lungs. For the first time in my whole stupid life, I saw how breathing was a miracle.

A minute later, the door opened. Ryder's face was impermeable as stone. “We're taking him to intensive care,” he said. “His organs are failing.”

*   *   *

By the time they let us into the ICU, it was the middle of the night. Frontage Street was as quiet as I'd ever seen it. There was nothing comforting or quiet about this part of the hospital. Machines and monitors beeped and blinked constantly. Ryder was still in his scrubs, and he stood on the other side of the bed, holding my father's chart. “Medically speaking, we've done everything we can. He's medicated and shouldn't be in any pain. Now it's up to him.” He looked at his watch. “I've got to run upstairs, but I told the nurses to page me if anything happens.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Jamie said.

“Don't thank me yet,” Ryder told her. He squeezed the IV bag. “I haven't done a goddamn thing.”

When he left, I went to my dad. With tubes up his nose, he didn't look like himself. His mouth was slightly open. He was pale, spent, and small. I took his hand. When I was a kid, I used to run my finger over his calluses, pinch them between my nails. “Does that hurt?” I'd ask. “Nope,” he'd say. “Can't hurt me.” Now his palm was smooth and soft. When I kissed him on the cheek, he smelled clean, almost powdery. I could hear Jamie behind me, crying softly. I pushed the hair from his forehead and ran my finger over a scar between his eyebrows. “It's okay,” I told him. “You can go to Will.” I wanted to scream,
Don't die. Don't you fucking die on me.
I felt like I was choking. “Go home to Will if you need to.” I said it as peacefully as I could. Behind me, I heard Luke's voice. “I got Ryder's message that we could come in now. I've been in the chapel,” he said. “I'll give him last rites.”

“Can you do that?” I asked.
He can't die.

“Faith is faith. This will just make his journey a little easier if he has to go.” I watched Luke pull a small prayer book from his back pocket. He stood next to the bed and began speaking in an ancient language. He talked for a long time. Then he leaned close to my father's face and whispered in his ear. He brushed his lips across his mouth. My dad didn't move; he stayed very, very still, while those machines teased us with their maddening monotony, as though everything were just fine.

 

27

After Jamie and Luke had spent hours watching my dad lying unconscious, Ryder convinced them to lie down in the on-call room. Then he'd told the ICU nurses to let me stay with my dad. Just before dawn, I drifted off, cramped at an awful angle on a cold vinyl couch. When I woke, my head felt as if it were nailed to the cushion.

“Jensen?”

I opened my eyes.

“Jensen?”

My heart quit beating. I was almost afraid to look.

“What in God's name are you doing here?”

Slowly, I unfolded myself and turned, to find my father sitting up in bed. His skin was a healthy color, and he was struggling to put his glasses on straight. “Daddy?” I untangled my legs. “But I thought you…” I couldn't finish the sentence because I was crying. “All the doctors said…”

“Aw, Whobaby. Come here.” I ran to him and hugged him. He smelled like medicine and rubbing alcohol, but he also smelled, unmistakably, like my father. “You're not going to get rid of me that easily.” He kissed my head. “Your old man's still kicking.” I watched him finger one of the stickers on his chest where the wires were attached.

“But you were so sick last night.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “And Ryder came and gave you morphine, and—” I didn't know how much I should say.

He patted my hand. “Where's your mother?”

“Stay here.” I grabbed Luke's cell phone from the bedside table. “I'll find her.” I was worried if I let him out of my sight, he'd disappear. “Don't move.”

“Where am I gonna go?” He blew me a kiss.

I almost ran into a black-haired nurse pushing a machine on wheels. “No cell phones in here,” she said.

“My dad's better,” I told her, calling my mother anyway.

The nurse abandoned the machine and ran to the room. “Mr. Reilly,” I heard her say. “Good morning.”

Jamie's ringtone sounded from down the hall. “Mom,” I yelled. She and Luke were walking toward me. “He's back,” I told them, shutting off the phone. “Daddy's back.” Then I saw Ryder come through the double doors at a jog.

Back in the room, we crowded around my dad's bed. “Do you remember anything from last night?” I asked.

“Everything, Whobaby.” He reached up and mussed my hair. “Even the part where you told me I could go…” He hesitated.

“In that case.” I squeezed his fingers. “I have to ask what Luke whispered in your ear.”

“He asked me to telepath where he'd left his keys.”

Luke let out a belly laugh. He was always losing his keys.

“No, really,” I said. “What did he say?”

“He said if it came to it, he'd take care of my girls.”

There was a knock on the door; then it opened. Dr. Waller came in, wearing those same blue rubber clogs. “Welcome back, Mr. Reilly.” He arranged the pens in his lab coat pocket, his big black eyes swimming behind thick glasses.

“Thank you, sir,” my father said.

Dr. Waller stepped into the middle of the room. “Well, I'm fairly certain I know what caused the fever.” We all held our breath. “And”—he smiled—“we can make sure it doesn't happen again.”

Without thinking, I hugged him. He was a head taller than I was, and I ended up kissing his shoulder. I stepped away, a little mortified, but he didn't seem to notice.

“Keppra,” he said, as if I'd never mauled him, “the antiseizure drug.”

I almost jumped up and down. “Is there another one you can put him on? And why now? He's been on it for months.”

“Hold up, Whobaby,” my dad said. “Let the poor man speak.”

“When you got sick last night,” Dr. Waller said, taking the chart from the end of the bed, “Dr. Anderson”—he nodded to Ryder—“upped your morphine for pain control.” He capped his pen. “But to prevent adverse side effects, he took you off everything else. It's common with end-stage patients.”
End stage.
I felt disconnected, weak. “Keppra builds up in a person's system over time.” When he took off his glasses, Waller's eyes appeared minuscule, like a mole's. He cleaned the lenses on his lab coat. “It's the only thing that makes sense. We'll watch you for twenty-four hours, and then, if you're still good, you can be on your way.” Dr. Waller put his glasses back on and his eyes got huge again. “You almost had to die to get cured,” he said. “How's that for irony?” I didn't want him to go. He'd figured something out that none of the other doctors had, not even Ryder.

“So, your scan is clean,” Ryder said after Dr. Waller's clogs made a squishy exit on the floor. “Which means no tumor.” Jamie kissed my father again, and he beamed. “But we should do one more zap with the radiation as planned, just to be sure, and you're going to need some PT. You've been lying in bed so long, your muscles will be weak.”

“As long as I can go home soon.” My dad blew Jamie a kiss. “And, Whobaby, you can finally go back to your life.” He winked at me, and I winked back, but since he'd been in the hospital, I hadn't been thinking about going back to Santa Fe. With Nic out of communication and all my energy focused on my dad, it'd been easy to pretend Santa Fe didn't exist. I felt Ryder's eyes on me. And then the same black-haired nurse from the hallway saved me by coming in. “Party's over,” she said. “We're moving the patient back down to the neuro floor.”

Ryder nodded. “I've got to check in at the office anyway.”

“You're coming to dinner as soon as I get out of this place.” My father was letting the nurse help him up, his legs pale and thin, dangling off the bed. “Luke will cook.”

“A feast for the gods,” Luke said.

Jamie stood up. “I'll help you get settled,” she told my dad.

“I need a shower,” I said. “And I have to charge my phone.”

“Whobaby,” my father said as the nurse helped him into the wheelchair. “I'd like to talk to you.”

I thought of him going through that break in the chain-link fence the night of Will's birthday. My belly went weak. “Okay.”

He settled into the wheelchair, and I watched him close his eyes.

“You have plenty of time to talk, sweetheart.” My mother slid in front of the nurse and took the wheelchair from her. “Now it's time to rest.”

But my dad opened his eyes and searched mine. “Don't forget,” he said. “Soon.” He sounded stern, and he seemed to be speaking only to me.

 

28

When I got back to Colston, there were a ton of messages from Nic on my cell phone and even more on the home phone. He was arriving in New Haven that afternoon. The wall clock in the kitchen said he'd be landing in an hour. I had only a few minutes to shower, change, and call Mandy back. She'd just returned from France. “Come over,” she said when I told her the news about my dad. “We'll celebrate.”

“I can't,” I said. “Nic's on his way.”

She groaned.

“Mandy!”

“Well, it's just that now that your dad's better—I mean, I'm happy and all, of course—but now you'll have to go back to Santa Fe.”

This was the first time I'd thought about it. “Yeah,” I said. “But we'll see each other a lot before I leave.”

“Okay.” She sounded disappointed.

I hung up and got in the Lexus. My hair was still dripping wet. I raced up I-95, going about a hundred miles an hour.

Almost as soon as I parked in the arrivals area, I saw Nic coming toward me. He was tan, and the leather strap of his bag was slipping off his shoulder. Before I could say his name, he was squeezing me into a hug. He smelled like salt and fresh air. I ran my hand down his face. I'd never seen him with a beard.

“No time for shaving.” He grinned. And then he kissed me full and deep on the mouth. When I drew back for air, he said, “We're moving there, J.” He kissed me again, quickly this time, on the forehead. “I got the perfect place. You'll never believe it. A restored monastery with super-high ceilings, the best light, and the most spectacular view of the Ionian Sea.”

A hard stone rose into my throat. “Really?”

“Yeah.” He opened the driver's door, and I handed him the keys. “Wait until you see the pictures. You're going to love it. I tried to send photos from Crete, but the Internet was too slow. How's your old man?”

I got in on the passenger side. Nic always drove when we were together. I glanced at a new brass thumb ring and noticed that his hair was longer. He had that exotic look people got when they'd been abroad. I felt plain next to him, boring. “He's okay now.”

“Now? What happened?”

“It's a long story.”

He glanced at me so long, I thought we were going to get in an accident. “Is he still in the hospital? Do you want to go there?”

“Yes, but not now. Jamie texted a few minutes ago. He's sleeping.”

“How about I take you to lunch, then? You're too skinny.” He reached over, and I felt his fingers find my hand. He squeezed it. “I'm sorry I was MIA, J.”

I didn't say anything to this. “We can go to Penny Lane Pub. It's right around the corner.”

He held my hand while he drove and didn't let go when he shifted. “You look worn-out.”

“I was up all night.”

“But you're still beautiful.”

I didn't want to hear about how pretty I was, especially when I looked like shit. “My father almost died last night. But one of the doctors figured out he was having a bad reaction to his antiseizure meds.”

“But he's okay now?”

“I needed you, Nic.” I watched the traffic behind us in the side-view mirror. “I kept trying to call you.”

“I know, and I'm sorry.” He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. I felt myself go warm. “I'm sorry, sunshine. I would have come right away if I'd known.”

I tried to smile, but something in me felt hard as stone. I kept imagining him and Demetri playing guitar on the beach while I sat in a hospital room getting pale and ugly. It made me want to start a fight and throw things at him. But I kept quiet, and we drove the rest of the way without talking.

Penny Lane Pub used to be a bowling alley. The jukebox was a giant bowling ball and the salt and pepper shakers were little bowling pins. I kept glancing at Nic while we looked at the menu. I didn't know if it was the beard or his tan or how long his hair had gotten, but I felt like I was sitting across from a stranger. He still looked like that sexy sculptor I'd fallen in love with, but something was different.

He folded his menu and reached across the table for my hand. “I missed you, J. Every single day, I‘d wake up wishing you were next to me.”

Before I could answer, a skinny kid with spiked hair, black eyeliner, and bowling shoes recited the specials. I ordered a Swingshot Greek salad and Nic got a King Pin cheeseburger, fries, and a beer.

“Are you glad you went?” I could barely be civil to my husband, whom I hadn't seen in six weeks.

“Very,” he said too easily. “But I missed you like crazy. I'm telling you, Jensen, the view alone will take your breath away.”

I kept my hands on my lap and looked out the window. “Glad you had a good time.” The maples along College Street were starting to turn orange. Summer was ending without my even having realized it.