Night Blindness (32 page)

I couldn't answer.

“Did you mean to do what you did to Will?” His words seemed to echo in the still room. I thought about the question. At first it seemed to make no sense. And then I shook my head. He put his hand behind his ear. “I can't hear you.”

“No,” I said. The word sounded tiny.

“No, what?” He was using his coaching voice, the voice he used to motivate a player.

“No, I didn't mean to.”

“Didn't mean to what?” I sat there. The words went silent inside me. I couldn't think how to say them aloud. “Because intent is everything,” he said.

I nodded mutely. I had never really thought about intent. All those years of guilt and hiding, of shame and self-hatred, I had never stopped to think that it hadn't ever been my intent to hurt my brother.

“Sixteen-year-olds get mad at their older brothers, don't they?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Yes.”

He leaned forward and watched me. “Haven't younger sisters been pushing older brothers for centuries?”

“I didn't mean to,” I said softly.

“Didn't mean to what?” he asked again, his voice gentler now.

“I didn't mean to…” My voice caught. I stumbled over the words, but there was my father, watching me, and I understood that I had to say them out loud. “I didn't mean to, Daddy, please.” And then I was across the room, on his lap, burying my face in his chest, in his salt and fresh air smell. “I didn't mean to,” I said. “I didn't mean to.” I was crying again, but this time it was harder, a different cry than how I'd cried with Dale.

He put his arm around me. “That a girl,” he said, nestling me closer. “Get it all out.”

I was sobbing so hard, I couldn't see, and he was rocking me, his arms around me. “But I never came home.”

“That doesn't matter now.”

“I just left you here all alone.”

“It's okay. You're here now.” I heard him saying my name, heard him telling me it wasn't my fault, and I felt thirteen years of unspoken confessions and wordless apologies escape in my tears.

Sometime after dusk, Jamie came home and sat next to us. I felt her rubbing my back, and I felt my father lift one arm and put it around her. I knew he'd told her, too. And they still loved me.

I had been forgiven.

 

32

Jamie liked first appointments of the day, so we sped through town at 7:45
A.M.
to the Chapel Street Spa. She drove erratically, like she always did, with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake, weaving in and out of traffic as though a victim to it rather than a driver. “You were right,” she said suddenly. “I was keeping a secret, but not the one you thought.”

I looked over at her. I had a horrible feeling that she was sick and all those secret phone calls were to a doctor. Her silk blouse slipped down, revealing a skinny collarbone that looked almost breakable. “What is it?”

She sat up straighter in the driver's seat. “I'm selling my interest in the agency to Piers. I'm getting out of the modeling industry.” Glancing in the rearview mirror, she dived into the next lane. “I'm going to join the staff of A Will to Live.” She spoke quickly. “All the news about what modeling does to little girls, the anorexia, and the body-dysmorphic issues.” She looked at me. “I'm going to run self-esteem classes. Do you know that sixty percent of girls will quit an activity they love because of the way they look?”

I wouldn't have been more surprised if she'd told me she was going to clown college. “Why now?” I tried to keep my voice level so it wouldn't sound like an accusation.

“I started thinking about it when your father got sick. I wanted to do something that would let me spend more time with him.” She cut someone off, and the guy honked and flipped her off. But she didn't notice.

“Is that what all the secret phone calls and random meetings have been about? Selling your business?” She nodded but didn't speak. “But he's in remission now. Are you sure you still want to do it?”

“Oh yes, now more than ever. Think how great it'll be for both Daddy and me to be at the foundation.” She put on her blinker but didn't change lanes. “I can't get back those wasted years. But I can make sure I spend the next thirty doing the right thing.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Oh, Jensen. After Will, I was no mother to you at all. Maybe it's not too late for me to help some other little girl.”

“Help her, or turn her into what I never was?”

“What does that even mean?” She watched me so long, I thought she was going to drive off the road.

I shrugged. “Forget it.”

She stopped at the end of an exit ramp. “No, tell me.”

I picked at a ragged fingernail. Behind us, someone revved their engine and Jamie accelerated. But she never took her eyes off me. “I guess I never felt pretty enough for you. Good enough.”

“Is that what you think?” Her voice was faint. “I could have signed you in a heartbeat; of course I could have. You were a beautiful child, you photographed so well, but, you were … too good to be like me. You were so smart. Your father and I used to marvel that you were our child. There you were, playing Bach at eight. I'd never heard Bach before, and you were offered all these gifted programs.”

“Then why'd you let me live my entire life feeling like I was too fat, too ugly, too much of a nobody to be one of your girls?” I turned to her, and this close, I could finally see the beginning of silver hairs in her part.

“You always acted like you wanted nothing to do with modeling.” She turned left onto State Street. “I felt like it was all so stupid to you, so … provincial, or…” Her eyes had filled with tears. “I'm so sorry, Jensen. I never meant to make you feel that way.”

“How could you have known? I never told you. I just trotted around with Will and Ryder, pretending I didn't care.”

She wiped her eyes. I thought of her sitting in board meetings with my dad and Sid and all the others at the foundation. She'd had me at twenty-three, she was only fifty-two. She could do this. “You'll be great at A Will to Live,” I told her.

“Do you think so?” She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve.

She was smiling. It wasn't the smile she used for models and photographers and her friends at the agency. It was a true Jamie smile, one I'd seen in pictures of her as a little girl, when the world hadn't shown her yet that she needed smoke and mirrors and her beauty to get by.

*   *   *

The spa was nearly empty except for Mandy, who was waiting for us in the reception area. As soon as we got in the door, Jamie took off to the facial rooms. Mandy and I sat in the pedicure chairs. I wanted to tell her right away about Jamie and A Will to Live. But she'd been overly giggly on the phone, and it wasn't because I told her about my afternoon with Dale.

“Okay,” I said. “Spill it.”

“Let's play the guessing game.” She unzipped her ankle boots. “I'm thinking of a boy.”

“Did you kiss him?”

“Of course.”

Mandy kissed everybody. “Is he from Hamilton?” There were two glasses of seltzer with cucumber slices floating in them on the table between our chairs. And our footbaths were filled with hot water and lavender oil.

“Kind of.”

“Did you sleep with him?” My manicurist picked up my foot and began scrubbing it with a loofah; it felt so good, I wanted to cry.

“Nope.”

Of all the people Mandy had kissed in high school, I remembered only two she hadn't slept with: One was a hot bad boy senior who sold pot, but Will and Ryder threatened to kill him if he touched her. The second was her physics tutor senior year. He went to Yale, and Mandy had said he was tall, skinny, and walked like a colt that hadn't grown into its legs. He'd kissed her once and then told her he just wanted to be friends. “He says I'm too young,” she'd said, sobbing into the phone after he left every Tuesday night. When he went off to Japan for a semester abroad, she never heard from him again, and she about had a nervous breakdown. It was so weird that she'd fallen for the geeky science tutor. But Mandy was into brains.

“Where on earth did you find Freddie Frederickson after all these years?”

She stared at me, her mouth hanging open. “How the hell did you know?”

I smiled. “I can read your mind.”

“He saw my Andes layout in
National Geographic
and Googled me.”

“Let me guess. He grew out of his gangliness, ditched his glasses, and has the body of a linebacker?”

She leaned back and closed her eyes. “He's a professor at Wesleyan, writing a book on how air travel could be improved if planes were shaped more like birds.”

“That sounds about right for Freddie.” The lady's hands on my feet felt like little miracles.

“He goes by Fred now,” she said defensively. “And teaching is the last of the noble professions, in case you've forgotten.”

Was Mandy going goody goody on me? “I thought that was prostitution,” I said, trying to lighten her up.

“That's the oldest.” She smiled. “Anyway, he's already coauthor of a book about”—she pursed her lips like she was bragging, which she was—“how ancient cave drawings prove the wheel, or at least the concept of it, was invented about half a million years before anyone thought.”

“Oh my God, Mandy.” I sipped the sparkling water. “You like him.”

“He smelled exactly the same and still has that adorable little stutter. And want to hear the best part?” She reached across and grabbed my fingers. “He wants kids.”

I tried to swallow back my bite of jealousy. In all the years we'd been friends, I'd never seen her like this. “You still haven't slept with him?”

“Nope.” Mandy slept with everyone on the first date, even if it wasn't a date. “But I kissed him, and it was delicious.”

“Huh,” I said, holding up the darkest of the three polishes I'd picked out.

“He wears rimless glasses now, very understated. And he
is
broader. He does martial arts, some kind of sword fighting or fencing.”

“That is so dorky,” I said.

“Okay, he's still pretty dorky. But he's so freaking sweet.” And then her cell rang. “It Had to Be You” played. She squealed, holding up her phone so I could see Freddie with his slicked-back hair and V-necked sweater. I thought about Nic, waiting for me in Santa Fe, and the babies I'd never have.

“That's his custom ringtone?” I asked. “Oh sister, you're a goner.”

“Hey there,” she said in a voice I'd never heard her use before.

I flipped open a fashion magazine. The taste of jealousy was acidic in my mouth. Mandy wouldn't miss me at all when I went back to Santa Fe, because soon she'd be fucking Freddie and getting pregnant. I glanced at her. She was smiling like she was in a great daydream. I'd felt like that before, so many years ago that it was becoming less like a memory and more like a dream. Ryder had made me feel that way.

Jamie came out with green stuff all over her face.

“Mandy has a boyfriend,” I told her. “And she's bringing him to my going away dinner.”

Mandy tossed her phone in her bag. “I am?”

“You're talking about having babies with this guy. Don't you think we need to vet him first?”

“Oh, absolutely,” my mother said. “Jensen has to meet him before she leaves.”

Mandy clapped her hands excitedly. “You'll love him.” She frowned. “But I hate that you're leaving. I'm just going to pretend you are NOT going anywhere.”

I held two bottles of polish up to the light. I'd been pretending the same thing. But I was scheduled to start modeling again for three studios the following week, and Nic was planning a welcome-home party for me at the loft. I thought of my birthday party the night before I'd left; it felt like a lifetime ago.

“Brazilian?” A hunky man with an accent came from behind the curtain. “Someone wanted a Brazilian.”

Mandy waved her hand in the air. “I'll come back for the polish,” she told the woman doing her pedicure. “Isn't he hot?” she whispered to me.

We watched her disappear to the back. Only Mandy would let a guy to do her Brazilian. Jamie watched the woman filling her footbath with water. “Oh, sweetheart.” She drew in a quick, hard breath. “I hope I'm making the right decision about selling the agency.” I saw some cream had gotten on the collar of the robe they'd given her. Without makeup, her eyes were tiny and vulnerable. She watched the woman putting lavender oil in the water. “Anyway, we're all going to miss you. I've gotten so used to having you here. But you'll only be a short plane ride away.”

I hadn't told my parents about Greece. “By Christmas,” Nic kept saying on the phone. “We'll be there by Christmas.” And then: “Why so quiet, J.?” I kept telling him, “I'm tired. Really, really tired.”

“Even still, New Mexico feels so far away,” Jamie said. “And to think I used to worry that you'd wind up with Ryder.”

A flutter spread through my stomach. “You worried about that?”

“Well…” She hesitated. She had on what she called her “mommy clothes,” a velour zip-up and matching yoga pants. I would have looked like a Wal-Mart ad. She was glamorous without trying. “I used to worry you wouldn't get out and see the world. All those years you followed your brother and Ryder around, and they just adored you. I'd watch you climbing trees and making forts with them and then”—the tiny dark-haired woman scrubbed her feet hard—“you got beautiful, that long hair and those sapphire eyes. I saw the way Ryder looked at you. He couldn't help it.” Her smile was faint, apologetic. “You'd come through the kitchen door, claiming you'd been at the library, but I could see it in your eyes, those flushed cheeks. I knew what was happening. Your father and I used to talk about it and—”