Night Blindness (24 page)

We stood in the kitchen with the hot, still air around us. I saw then the faint lines around her eyes, the draw on the sides of her mouth. I saw that my mother would also die someday. I thought of what Luke had said that day in her apartment. That maybe her seeking shelter somewhere else, with someone else, made it easier for both of my parents. And now, after listening to her talk, I realized my dad had hurt her, too. “I'm sorry,” I said.

She nodded curtly. And then she picked up her breakfast plate and set it in the sink. “Nic called from Greece early this morning,” she said in an entirely different voice. “Apparently, he couldn't get you on your cell. He's going to some remote island and isn't sure when he'll be able to call again.” She took her gardening gloves from the counter and opened the slider. I watched her walk out onto the deck. She closed the slider and stood with her back to me. She was past middle age, a woman who had worked hard and been married a long time. And I felt something I'd never really felt for Jamie. I felt respect.

 

20

After the rain, a heat wave hit, and even in my skimpy sundress and flip-flops, I felt as if I were going to melt. Hot air hung above the driveway and the low-tide marshes smelled like they were cooking. It was Friday night, and my parents were on a double date with Starflower and Luke. Mandy was in the darkroom. If my father hadn't had a brain tumor, and Nic hadn't gone to Greece, I'd be in Santa Fe, meeting him and Hadley at Hapa on the square for sushi. “Raw fish,” Hadley used to tell us, “should only be used for bait.” But we'd convinced him. And it had become a Friday-night ritual. When I called Hadley to say hey, he told me he was in Sedona at the opening of a fusion restaurant. “They just put ecstasy in my drink. Wish me luck.” I felt so far away from him, for a minute I wanted to cry.

I waited for the garage door to open and then backed out. It would be dark soon, and I knew I shouldn't be driving. But I hated being alone in the house. If I painted in the attic, sometimes I was okay, but lately it had been too hot to paint. Since the summer began, I'd started four more self-portraits and finished none. I took a left out of our road, then two rights toward New Haven. When my parents went out, I usually drove to Jamie's brownstone and banged out music I hadn't played in years. Those lessons with Luke were reminding me how to get my groove back.

There were three ways I could get to Route 1 and avoid Hamilton. It was so hard to pass the school where Will, Ryder, and I had been inseparable. Lately, I'd been going by it anyway, as though testing myself. Now I found myself drawn to it, rolling down the sloping driveway, past the academic buildings, to the athletic fields. I could feel them, those steel bleachers, that empty field. Just as I was almost past the parking lot, Ryder's ringtone sounded in my purse. It was the Velvet Underground song he used to sing to me when we were kids.

I pulled over. “Hey,” I said.

“Are you avoiding me?”

“It's not like you've been calling me.” I put the car in park, and the breeze coming through the window stopped. Sweat gathered between my breasts.

“But you're mad, aren't you?”

There was no point in bullshitting him. “I don't want to talk about it on the phone.” I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.

“Where are you?”

“Hamilton Field.”

He was quiet for a moment, then said, “I'll be there in five.” He hung up.

I watched the backlight on my cell go dark and then drove into the empty parking lot. I hadn't seen Ryder since he'd stopped by during that Fourth of July picnic. Radiation had gotten back on track without any problems, and there'd been no reason to see him. Except I thought about him all the time and wondered why, if he'd been coming to my parents' house for years, he hadn't been stopping by since I'd been home.

I surprised myself by getting out of the car and walking toward the football field. That familiar melancholy hit me sideways. I felt it settling in my solar plexus, making me vaguely sick. The field was dotted with dandelions and buttercups, and the yard lines were faded. I opened the little gate and walked in. Then I sat on the first bleacher and waited. I thought about how I'd finally told Mandy and wondered if Ryder had ever told anyone.

It didn't take him long. I heard his car crunching the gravel, his door slammed, and I turned and watched him come through the gate. He bent down and picked a buttercup. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and his short hair was damp. He sat next to me. He smelled good and clean. He held the flower under my chin. “Yup,” he said. He was tanner than the last time I'd seen him. “She likes butter.”

“I love butter.” I took the flower from him, picked the petals off one by one. His arm was cool against mine. Neither of us said anything for a while. The tree frogs had started in, and two low-flying bats circled the field. “Are you engaged?” I asked. His flip-flops were leather; it was comforting to see him in something other than expensive loafers. “To Dale?”

He took a breath in. “We were once.”

I saw her car in your driveway,
I wanted to say,
her shoes in your living room. I had to imagine her in your bed.
“She's wearing a ring,” I said, remembering the one she'd had on at the library. A dog was barking frantically in the distance.

“We're dating again,” he said. “She wants to get married.”

“You were with her before?” I thought of those red heels. “And then broke up?”

He stared across the field at the tree line. “I cheated on her.”

That shocked me. Even though girls had loved him, Ryder had been so loyal. “Who was it?”

“Some girl at a conference.” He pulled at a fraying bit of leather on his flip-flop. “I was getting a name badge, and she was across the room. The place was packed. She had your same hair, and she was wearing a dress like you wear, sort of swingy at the bottom.” He shrugged. “And she had the same shoulder blades, a little too thin, muscular.” He was speaking in an odd monotone. “I'd thought I'd seen you a million times, but this time…” He ran his fingers through his hair. It was a tiny bit longer and curling with the humidity. “I got out of line. She was standing like you do, too, with her hip out, holding her hair up. And then she turned around.” He quit talking.

I tore the petals off the flower. “And you were with her?”

“She was just a girl in my bed in the morning.” He said it in that same dry, cold voice he used to tell us medical information.

“How'd Dale find out?”

“I told her.” He sounded surprised I had asked. “It was easier than pretending there wasn't something missing.”

“She took you back?”

He nodded.

“When?”

“The first night you got here.” I remembered the tea he'd brought to the deck, our initials on the arm of the glider. “I operated on one of her patients last year, and she died that night. She had two little boys. Dale was a mess.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“She was just crying. Really sad—”

“No,” I told him. “What happened to the mother?”

I knew the answer before he said it, the way he turned to me but stared over my shoulder at the trees. “Brain tumor.”

A siren sounded in the distance. I thought of my parents out with Luke and Starflower and tried to gauge which way the ambulance was headed. “Do you love her?” I asked.

He reached down between the bleachers and picked a dead dandelion. “Not as much as I loved you, if that's what you're asking.”

“Loved?”

“Stop it.” He tossed the weed onto the field. “You're married.”

The scoreboard said
HAVE A GREA SUMMER
; the
t
had fallen off. “Nic's in Greece.” I said it so quietly, I didn't know if he'd heard me. Lately, I'd had the strange feeling I'd invented Nic.

“Without you?” His hands rested on the knees of his jeans. They seemed so mature, like someone's father's hands.

“He's house hunting. We're supposed to move there.” Sprinklers went on in the field. I felt a fine spray mist my legs. It felt good. “We've been talking about it for years.” I pulled my hair off my neck.

He glanced at me. “Is that what you want?”

It'd been so long since anyone had asked me that. “No.” He nodded as though that were the most normal thing in the world.

“Is it nice?” I asked. “Living in your parents' house?”

“Yeah, but sometimes I'm embarrassed as hell about it.” His voice was relaxed, and he grinned.

“Why?”

His shoulder brushed mine. “I don't know. When they left, we rented it out for a while because I thought it was lame wanting to move back to Colston. But I couldn't stand having someone else living in it. And then I got the job at Yale. But when I was renovating, I had this fucked-up feeling I was trying to redo something about my past.” He squinted at me.

My breathing went screwy. He was so close, all I would have had to do was lean in and our lips would have touched. That was what I remembered most about him, how soft his lips were. “I want to see the inside of it.” The sprinklers stuttered and turned. I could feel the heat from him. Everything in me pulsed. I needed him to kiss me.

“I don't care if you're married,” he said quietly. “I don't give a shit about him.”

I stared at the collar of his shirt, the curly hairs.
Did losing Will fuck up your life?
I wanted to ask.
Do you even know who you are now?
The sprinklers shut off, and the night went eerily quiet. Out in the field, again, was that circle of football players; I could see the ambulance, the stretcher, a younger Ryder running beside it. I didn't want to feel guilty anymore.

“It's always been you.” His voice was almost a whisper.

A breeze kicked up, and I saw now that thunderheads had gathered to the north. I pressed myself into him, put my head against his clean white shirt, and listened to his steady heartbeat. “We need to tell my parents,” I said. “We have to tell them about Will.”

I felt his hand go up to my neck. It felt good. “Now?” How many times had he tried to get me to tell before I went to Andover? “Your dad still has a couple more weeks of radiation.” I felt his lips on my head. He touched my waist. It was crazy, how hard my heart was beating. “I don't think we should do anything now that could set him back.” I could hear the doctor in his voice. I hated it.

The wind picked up. I could feel other hot, sticky places where my sweat had dried.
If I could only take off my clothes and lie in the grass with him,
I thought. “My life hasn't made sense since that night,” I whispered. I buried my face in his neck. He smelled like my childhood, like summer and hope. “I lost everything,” I told him. “And I want it back.”

 

21

My dad and I waited until the carousel closed for the night before walking the block to the park. I carried the picnic basket, heavy with sparkling water and crab salad sandwiches. Will would have been thirty-one today. Thirteen years of silently singing “Happy Birthday” to him, thirteen years of thinking about this place, of remembering the cherry red carousel horse and the smell of steamed lobster in the barbecue pit, waterskiing off Luke's boat, setting off illegal fireworks.

We walked across the parking lot. The blacktop had sprouted weeds, and beer cans littered the grass. My dad slipped through a break in the chain link, and I followed. We walked down the overgrown grassy slope to the beach. The horses watched us, mid-gallop, their eyes open, bits in their mouths. They seemed smaller than they had when we were kids, chipped and worn.

On Will's seventeenth birthday, I'd ridden the cherry red horse while Ryder watched me from the pier. Our plan had been for me to sneak out after the party ended, he'd be waiting for me, and we'd come back, climb the seventy-four stone steps to the lighthouse, and lay his sleeping bag down in the tower. But Will had wanted Ryder to stay and watch
King Kong
when we got home, and Ryder and I had sat there, separated by Will, who never fell asleep. Finally, I'd drifted off on the sectional with the mad thought that Will had known our plan, and ruined it.

My dad spread out the checkerboard blanket. His hair had thinned a bit around the radiation site. “Do you come here every year?” I almost didn't want to know.

“Try to,” he said. He rested on his knees, the water lapping against the beach. “Last year, there were a bunch of kids horsing around.” He smoothed one of the blanket's corners. “So I just stayed in the car.”

I thought about being in Santa Fe with Nic, not telling him it was Will's birthday. Not calling home. I watched the tide come in and retreat. The air had been still and thick like this that last year, and I could still see Will standing on the yellow horse's back, going around on the carousel, balancing like a rodeo star while Jamie shrieked from the side. Later, he'd sung “Happy Birthday” to himself when Jamie brought out the cake, his arm around Ryder, a little drunk on Gosling's and ginger beer. They'd been eating Life Savers like crazy, trying to hide it from our parents. He'd laid his head on Jamie's shoulder after he'd blown the candles out. “If my wish comes true, I'm going big-time.”

She knew he was drunk—she must have—but she just kissed him on the head. “Of course you are, sweetheart,” she'd said.

I hadn't wanted to come to the park, but my father told me Jamie couldn't bear to be here, and I didn't want him to be alone. He'd been acting odd lately, forgetting things, falling asleep at the dinner table, not being able to keep his head up when we watched movies at night.

“The sunsets here are spectacular,” he said, shaking the sand off his flip-flops. But we'd come too late for the sunset, and the sky over the harbor was clouding over, already losing its deep magentas to dark violets and maroons. I looked out at the breakwater, where they said ships used to get tangled in the rocks before the lighthouse was built. “You're a good girl, coming here with your old man.” He'd said that a bunch of times already, and it made me feel guiltier.