Night Blindness (16 page)

I quit brushing the dirt and stared at him. “She hid out here, saying she wanted to spare us her grief, and then she fucked Julian and God knows who else and—”

“And maybe it was a relief to your daddy.” He stared at me with those steady eyes. “Maybe he didn't want to share his grief, either. Maybe he wanted to know someone was taking care of your mother.”

“She should have been there for him.” But I remembered what my dad had said about Jamie's wanting to talk about Will and his not being able to yet.

“Aw, baby girl, that's the bitch of losing someone you love. It's different for everyone.”

The counselor at Andover had said the same thing. Then she'd rattled off a statistic I still remembered. Seventy-five percent of couples don't stay together after they lose a child.

“Well.” I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. “I'm not sleeping with Ryder, okay?” I threw down the brush and sat on my butt. The mud wasn't dry yet, and I was making the carpet worse.

Luke sat on the step above me and put his hands between his knees. “Tell your old uncle what's up.” He said it slowly, testing each word.

I hugged myself, suddenly cold. “Daddy's really okay?”

He nodded. “He's going to be just fine.”

“I was so scared,” I told him. “He was just sitting there at Caller's Island, and then his eyes rolled back and his mouth was open and…” I shook my head trying to clear it of that terrible image. “And then the ticket guy called an ambulance, shouting questions at me, and I was answering them, but I was thinking, you know, Uncle Luke, I was thinking how many things I haven't told my father that I need to tell him.”

“What do you need to say?” he asked quietly.

I thought of my dad in the hospital bed, his eyelids fluttering, thought of him running helter-skelter down that hallway, calling for a lost dog we never had. “Everything is my fault,” I said. That numbness started in my feet and rose.

Luke got off the steps and sat on the floor with me, holding my hands tightly in his. His cell phone rang, but he didn't answer it. I could smell his musk scent. We sat there in the foyer, rain pinging against the windows. My head throbbed. If I could tell Luke about the night Will died, he might be able to help me explain it to my dad, help me repair everything I'd broken.

“What's eating you alive, baby girl?” He squeezed my hands. “Tell your old uncle Luke.”

He'd been asking me that since I left for Andover. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. The words were coming up, a breaking wave. I took a shaking breath. “That night. The night that—” But I felt a cold fist in my stomach. I thought of Jamie on the couch when I'd tried to tell her, when she hadn't listened. And then it was gone: that one second I thought I could tell the truth. Trying to get it back was like swimming from the bottom of the ocean with a boulder tied to my ankle. I just wanted to be gone. “I have to go,” I said. The apartment smelled wrong, and all those pictures, the dirty white rug, Luke and me with a dustpan in front of us, thirteen years of lying to everyone I loved.

“Hey, hey, not so fast.” Luke was reaching for my elbow, but I was already on my feet. “What's going on?”

I whirled around, snatching away my arm. “You want me to tell you what's going on?” I asked. “I fucked everything up; that's what's going on.”

And then I opened the door and ran down the steps and across the street barefoot, not looking out for traffic. When I made it to the other side, I slid into that slippery leather seat and pulled out fast. Without stopping at the red light, I turned right and raced down Ferry Street, past the harbor, to Island Avenue and back onto the main road. It was getting dark, my eyes were having a hard time adjusting, and the rain was coming down hard, the onslaught of headlights blinding me. I saw the domes of black umbrellas where people were standing in front of Willoghby's, waiting for a table. Legion merged with Route 1, and I headed to Plains Creek. I needed to talk about it, and the only person I could talk to was Ryder. I called him, first his cell, but it was off, and then his house, which went to voice mail.

The rain was coming down so hard, my wipers couldn't slap it back fast enough. I raced through yellow lights, the speedometer hitting seventy. The wind tossed leaves and branches across the windshield. I needed him to hold me. I needed the old Ryder, not the doctor, but the one with the number 18 tattooed on his arm, the one who never wore a collar, even to prom, the one who hit Whiffle balls to the neighborhood kids and who kissed me in the library carrels when we should have been studying. The voice in the car was telling me my seat belt was off. “Shut up,” I yelled at it. I pushed redial over and over. Maybe the wind had knocked out his service. Half a lifetime ago, I never would have called before going to his house.

I turned onto McKinnon Avenue, a couple of streets over from North Parker; it led to the ocean. My father had said Ryder had kept his parents' house when they retired to Sarasota. The road smelled of privet hedges; the trees arched from the rain and made a canopy over the car. I was squinting in the dark. I was fifteen again, holding his hand over the gearshift, while he sang “Sugar Magnolia” to me, fresh with our secret, the first one, the one that seemed so benign now: that Will should never know about us.

A black BMW sedan was parked on the street in front of his house. Ryder never would have driven a car like that when we were young. He had falling-apart MGs with Dead stickers on the back. Pulling into his driveway, I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. My face was streaked with tears and the black-and-blue bruise on my forehead had traveled to my eye. But there was nothing I could do about it, so I opened the car door and stepped into the pouring rain, running across the lawn and up his front steps.

The porch was dark, but a light was on in the front hall, and I knocked on the oak door. My clothes were soaked through. I knocked again, harder. Cupping my hand around my eyes, I peered in the window. A standing lamp near the fireplace lit up the room's new muted earth tones. He'd put in French doors leading to the terrace. The floor was covered in a Persian carpet I'd never seen before.

And then I noticed them. In front of the green sectional, thrown off carelessly, one of them at an odd angle to the other, was a pair of red heels. I stood there, trying to make sense of them. Maybe his parents were visiting and those were his mom's. But no one's mother would wear shoes like that. Plus, his parents were older. His mother must have been seventy-five by now. The stairs were dark, and the fact that he was with someone dawned on me like ice exploding in my gut. I turned my back against the door. I felt a strange light-headedness, a feeling that this wasn't really happening. A car drove by and put on its blinker. I had to get out of there before someone saw me waiting on his stoop, wet and pathetic. I ran down the steps, trying to jump over puddles. As I passed the BMW, I saw the license plate:
NOVKMD
. I thought of Dale Novak in the emergency room. Those red pumps.

I slammed my door, and a light went on upstairs. I put the car in reverse and backed out as fast as I could. Hot humiliation burned my face. Ryder'd let me think Dale was a man, he'd wanted so badly to know what we thought of her, and the two of them were always walking down the hall together, as if they'd come from the same place. I wanted to go back, to bang on the front door and scream at him that he'd lied, that I hated him. I'd been home for almost two months, and he hadn't told me there was someone else. Some sick perversion kicked in, and I wanted, more than ever, or maybe now I was just admitting it to myself, to be the one upstairs with him.

At the light on the corner of Water and Reardon, I scrolled through my phone list to call Mandy, but while it was ringing, I remembered she was off somewhere, chronicling the lives of hedgehogs or some small animal that immediately ditched its mate as soon as it found a more attractive one. “Monogamy is so unnatural, even rodents know it,” she'd said as I lay on her bed, watching her toss hiking boots and sunscreen into the same rolling suitcase she'd taken to college. “Oops, sorry, J.J.” I was sensitive about my mother and Julian, even now. “I'm right, though. Aren't I?” Yeah, Mandy was righter than she knew.

I hadn't driven at night since high school, and now I tried to navigate as best I could, keeping my eyes on the immediate lines of the road. Where was the Ryder I had grown up with? The one with the rusted-out convertible who loved the Dead and surfed the Watch Hill waves in hurricane season—sure he wanted to be a pediatrician, even though he hardly ever cracked a book and he didn't like people who took themselves too seriously, like Dale. I was about to call Hadley, when I realized he would probably tell one of the sculptors or gallery hags, who would tell someone else, who would eventually tell Nic. I threw my phone in the seat
. Fucking Ryder.
The light changed, and I turned right, toward home.

 

14

By the time I got back to North Parker, the house was dark. I went through the back slider, wiping my feet so that Jamie wouldn't bitch at me for tracking in mud, and headed upstairs. I wondered where Nic had gone, and I had a horrible feeling he might have gotten on a plane. I thought of calling Hadley and making up an excuse, just so I could talk to someone. But I wouldn't be able to hide the truth from him. Plus, I didn't think Hadley was good at real live feelings. He was good at parties, at sex talk, and making me laugh, but I didn't know if he could handle the whole truth. And he definitely wouldn't be able to keep it to himself.

I stripped in the hallway, tossing Jamie's clothes in the wicker hamper. I was sticky and cold from the rain, and I wanted to take another shower. Standing under the hot water, I let my head hang like a rag doll, trying not to think of those red shoes in Ryder's living room.

When I turned off the water and stepped out, Nic was leaning against the bathroom counter. I caught my breath. “You scared me.”

He gave me a half smile. “You finally made it home.” He was wearing a rumpled, clay-stained oxford shirt, and he smelled of pot.

I reached for a raspberry bath towel, but he grabbed it first and held it up for me to step into it. “I didn't think anyone was home. How did you get here?”

He put his arms around me. “Taxi.” I remembered how my father used to wrap me in a towel when I got out of the pool as a kid. “I was on the upstairs deck.”

The deck off Will's room. We didn't do that. We didn't go in there—ever. There was something both annoying and comforting about Nic's not knowing this. I checked my forehead in the mirror. The bruise had spread across my right eye.

Nic watched my reflection. I thought he'd ask about my face, but he said, “I see you've redecorated your bedroom.”

I squeezed water out of my hair into the sink. “I thought the INXS posters were a little outdated.”

“The butterfly comforter's gone, too.”

“How do you even remember that?”

“I remember everything about you.” He caught my eye in the mirror.

I watched him. His goatee needed a trim, and he looked thinner, tired. He reached around me and opened the towel. The water hadn't dried on my body, and I felt instantly chilled. Turning me around, he took me by the hips and kissed me. I held on to his thick hair. “It took me a long time to find you, J.” His green eyes were turning gray while we stood there. “That day I saw you coming across the quad, even before I knew who you were, even before I thought of asking you to model for me, I knew you were going to change my world.”

I studied his mouth. It was that same beautiful burgundy. When he pulled me to him, my stitches throbbed. “I forgot you were coming today. And then my dad passed out at the roller coaster. And it's been so crazy…”

He picked up my hand and kissed the fingertips. “I've missed you.”

“What you think you saw doesn't exist,” I said.

He turned my palm over and kissed the soft middle. “Then you won't care if I kick his ass, just for the hell of it.”

I watched him kiss my wrist. “Well, nothing happened, but you were the one who said we should have an open marriage.”

He gave a short laugh. He was still holding my hand. “That was a long time ago, J. Before we were even married.”

I could feel a fight rising in me. I knew it was about the red shoes. I faced the mirror and picked up my hairbrush. He leaned against the wall. I could see him in the mirror, watching me under those heavy lids. “You know you are the only one, whatever I said in the beginning.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Do I?”

He rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

“See?” I whirled around, with the hairbrush raised. “You can be jealous, but I can't.”

He had that knowing smirk on his face. I put the brush down and started for the door. But before I could turn the knob, he grabbed my waist and put his lips on my ear. I could feel his warm, soft mouth on my throat. “I'm crazy without you.” He kissed my neck. “I don't care about Ryder or who slept on that fucking cot.”

Sex was the best antidote. We could just fuck it out, instead of trying to fight it out. Ryder had moved on, and so had I. “He's like a brother to me,” I said while he kissed me. “You know that, right?”

But even as Nic picked me up like a bride and carried me to my childhood bed, even as he placed me down and threw that crimson towel aside, I knew I was lying.

*   *   *

I was flipping through the Yellow Pages for take-out menus when Luke came through the slider in tight, shimmery pants, carrying a gigantic picnic basket. “Well hellfire,” he said to Nic. “He exists.”

“How you doing?” Nic went around the island. “It's been a while.”

Luke nodded. “Too long.” He put the basket on the counter, shook Nic's hand and patted his back. “You taking good care of my girl?” He came over and hugged me.