Night Blindness (3 page)

“I don't know. We're meeting with Ryder early tomorrow morning,”

“Who is this Ryder person?” He exhaled.

I fingered a hole in my shorts. My skin went hot when I thought of Ryder stepping into the hallway minutes before. I wondered if Hadley had told Nic about him. During all our hours together at the gallery, I'd told Hadley everything about my life. He knew exactly who Ryder was to me. “He was Will's friend.” A familiar numbing extended into my chest.

“And now he just happens to be your father's doctor?”

“Odd, right?” I tried to keep my voice level. It was odd, so odd that I didn't even know how to talk about it. A few years ago, I'd read in my high school alumni newsletter that Ryder was a neurosurgeon. I'd logged on to Nic's Facebook account, looking for him, but none of the Ryder Andersons was him.

“Isn't he young to be a brain surgeon?”

“Jamie says he graduated early from Harvard Medical and got hired by Yale right away.”

“And Jamie knows it all.” I heard the music go on. Crosby, Stills & Nash's “So Begins the Task” filled the phone.
I must learn to live without you now.
“Get some sleep, sweet lady,” he said, his way of telling me we were done talking. “Call me tomorrow after the appointment.”

“Love you,” I said. And then I held my breath, waiting.

He said what he always did. “Right back at ya, sunshine.”

I put the phone on the armrest. I wasn't sure I could get up and go back into the kitchen. I wished my dad were still awake; he'd know how to make it okay. I glanced up at the second floor. The light in my parents' room was out. I wondered if my father was really sleeping, or if he was lying awake, worrying. I wanted to go up there and lie next to him. I thought maybe if I heard him breathing, if I felt him put his arm around me and say, “Whobaby, I thought you'd never come home,” that scared feeling might go away.

Jamie was wrong. I didn't like to face things head-on. I was terrified of the answers to all those questions that had hounded me while I couldn't sleep on the plane. Was the tumor malignant? When would they operate? Had Ryder thought about me over the years? In the middle of a modeling session, freezing my ass off in some studio, or weaving through the Sangres on my daily run, I would try to guess what Ryder was doing right at that moment, and if, maybe, he was thinking of me. But I knew after thirteen years, he probably wasn't. I never mentioned him when I called, never asked my parents where he was, if they'd heard. And now I knew: He'd been right here all along.

Behind me, the slider opened, and I turned. “Jamie thought you might want these.” Ryder was standing in the doorway, the kitchen light flooding around him, holding a red chenille throw and a cup of tea. His posture was metal rod–straight, stiff, and he looked uncomfortable. He put the wrap around my shoulders and handed me the mug. The tea smelled like peppermint. The night Will died, one of the paramedics had been chewing mint gum. I remembered thinking he was trying to cover something up.

“Where is she?”

He put his hands in his pockets. “Reviewing the contract for Brazil.”

I blew on the drink. “Nothing for you?”

He checked his watch. “I'm on call. I've got to get back to the hospital soon.”

“Oh.” I could smell him again—springtime, starched shirts.

“Sorry for the ambush.” He looked out at the goalposts. “When your mom invited me for dinner”—he glanced at me—“I came because…” His voice trailed off. I watched his Adam's apple move when he swallowed.

“Because what?” I set the tea over the graffiti on the glider.

“Because I thought you might be here.” He took his hands out of his pockets. They looked so strong. “I can't believe she didn't tell you I was coming.”

“You're forgetting the three most important things about Jamie. One.” I held up my middle finger. We both laughed. “Don't show up for dinner without wine.” I put up my index finger. “Two, tell her she's beautiful even if she looks like death on a stick. Two and half, she never looks like death on a stick. And three.” I flicked up my ring finger and felt Ryder's eyes on my wedding band. I quickly tucked my hand under my leg. “You never know what you're going to get with her.”

His pager beeped, but he didn't take it out of his pocket. “You look just the same,” he said. “Except your hair…”

I tugged at it. “Nic likes it long.”
Why did I say that?
“It needs cutting.”

“I heard you eloped.”

I nodded. My face was hot.

He jiggled change in his pocket. “Where?”

“Peloponnese, near Crete.” This was so awkward. “The orchids were in bloom.” I remembered how I hadn't wanted to go. It was early 2002, and I'd been afraid of flying since 9/11, but Nic said getting over fears meant getting back on the horse. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“And now?” Ryder watched me.

Steam rose from my tea. I shrugged. “I don't know.” How was I supposed to tell him about my marriage and my husband? As an undergraduate at UC, I'd sat for Nic—my first time ever modeling. His then studio assistant, whom, I found out later, he'd been sleeping with until he met me, said he'd pay me an enormous amount of money to pose. At dusk, light streaming into his third-floor studio, I'd stood naked in front of the visiting art professor everyone was talking about. Nic was thirty-two years old then, a rising star, fresh from the art scene in Berlin. While he worked, his eyes had been so intent on me, on every part of my body; I'd felt a pulsing need for him, like junkies feel the jones. I'd emerged from his studio a nine-foot angel made of rose Grecian marble. A month later, I dropped out of college to be with him in Santa Fe, but it felt wrong and awkward to tell Ryder all that. “And now is now.”

“Jamie said you're modeling.”

“Just for artists.” I pretended to take a sip of my tea, but I couldn't stand that smell. “Not for print, like her girls.” I tried to think of what to say about myself.
I pose naked for men with chisels and hammers and paint bad self-portraits
. “So,” I said. “A brain surgeon.” It came out sounding sarcastic.

He took the beeper out of his pocket. “That was the hospital,” he said. “I'd better go.”

Move,
I told myself.
Hug him. Make it right.
But I didn't.

“I guess I'll see you at the appointment.” He picked up his hand in a sort of wave.

“Yeah.” I set my mug on top of two sets of initials on the armrest. “See you tomorrow.”

The slider closed behind him. I willed myself not to turn around, in case he was still there, watching me. But as I sat there with the goalposts moaning in the breeze, I could feel him next to me, like it was yesterday, his hot breath, his hands, his mouth on the soft part of my neck below my ear.

I picked up my mug and studied the ring of condensation around the carved heart. In the middle, the initials still read
JR
+
RA. 4ever
.

 

3

Hours later, sunlight dragged me from a dream. I woke with the warmth of sex between my thighs and the leaden feeling of guilt on my chest. The pale yellow walls, piano trophies, and signed play sheets reminded me where I was. The program from Adele Marcus at Symphony Hall still hung above my whitewashed dresser. Will and my mother had been home with strep, and I'd walked in my patent leathers through the starry night with my dad. “I want to be a famous pianist,” I'd told him. He smoothed my curls, frizzy with humidity. “Whobaby, you can be anything you want.”

I slipped on a pair of yoga pants and went downstairs to the dark kitchen, where I made a double espresso. A leather scrapbook was lying in the breakfast nook, and I brought it to the counter. Turning the worn black card stock, I saw my dad at twenty-one in his navy blue suit, blond buzz cut, and clean-shaven face. It was 1973, the year before he got drafted, and he was holding the Heisman trophy. He was the first running back ever to win the coveted award. I took a sip of espresso and turned the page. He was in a muddy uniform, hair wet with sweat, standing next to an NBC newscaster after he'd won his fourth Super Bowl in 1980 with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He had a crooked smile, like he was trying not to laugh. Yellowed newspaper articles chronicled his tenure in the league. The last picture showed him with Chuck Noll the year he'd been named MVP and announced his retirement. When the Steelers finally won another Super Bowl in 2006, I told him I'd come home to celebrate. I never did. When they won it again last year, I didn't even bother to say I'd come back. We both knew I wouldn't.

Tucked in the back of the book was an article about Will being scouted by Notre Dame. His blond hair was curly in the picture, too long. Knowing the scout was coming, he'd promised Jamie he'd get a trim, but he'd overslept and missed the haircut. In the photo, he was wearing a Notre Dame sweatshirt I still had in Santa Fe. He died before his acceptance letter came. Thirteen years of living without him. Almost half my life spent missing him. He seemed about to come out of the picture, pinch the soft skin under my arm, and start singing Garcia's “Jenny Jenkins.”

The week after he died, I'd had a constant pounding in my chest, as though my own heartbeat was taunting me. I'd wake in the morning, remembering with a stark, strange shock that he was gone. One evening, I'd had my hand on the refrigerator handle, although I hadn't been eating, and Springsteen's “Blinded by the Light” was playing. I was trying to remember who had covered it. Manfred Mann came to mind. Then suddenly I remembered Will was dead. The sun had gone down and the kitchen was dark. I couldn't see the stainless steel in front of me. The edge of my vision went black. His death had come back in a physical rush, as though someone had hit me. I must have cried out, because Jamie came running, her high heels clicking across the wood floor. “I can't see,” I told her. “I can't see anything.”

“Come here, baby.” She smelled of expensive perfume and jewelry. It's what got her through, I would think later, making everything beautiful on the outside, even when we were falling apart on the inside.

She wrapped me in a throw and sat me on the couch, then went to the bar and fixed a little glass of brandy for me and a big whiskey for her. The light was going down outside. My father was out with Luke somewhere. She put the snifter in my hand. She'd been giving me sips of brandy forever. If the French could give their children wine with dinner, she'd told me, then she could give me a little Rémy Martin when I was sick. I closed my eyes. I didn't like being in the living room, so close to where it had happened.
Don't think of it,
I kept telling myself.
Don't.

She stroked my hair. The glass was cool. But I didn't drink.

“Mom,” I said.

She kept running her fingers through my curls.

“Mommy,” I said again.

I heard her rings clink against her glass. “Yes, sweetheart?”

Her fingers caught in my hair. The slight tug was soothing, like pressure on a wound. It almost made me not want to talk again, but I said, “It's not Daddy's fault.”

I heard her swallow, could smell the whiskey. “Of course it's not.” She sighed the sentence, as though she'd said it but didn't believe it.

“You can't blame him.” I was trying to say it quickly, before I lost my nerve.

“I don't,” she said, but I'd heard them through their bedroom's thin wall. Jamie had been insisting she'd never wanted Will to play football, though it was she who put his games on the calendar at the beginning of the season, made cakes shaped like footballs, wore his jersey to games.

I opened my eyes. Even though her makeup was perfect and her hair made her appear doll-like, I knew my mother was flawed. She'd been a runway model, married at eighteen to a polo player in Argentina. She met him at a shoot and ran off with him. Her parents showed up in Buenos Aires months later, after she'd lost a baby, and took her home. My dad married her two years after that, and then she had Will ten months later. She sang us Beatles songs at bedtime and let us sleep with her when we had bad dreams. She drank a little too much and flirted with my dad's friends. She was hardworking, ran a modeling agency, taught underfed adolescents how to walk the runway with their hips out and their chins in. Still, she wasn't perfect. If anyone would understand, I remembered thinking, Jamie would.

“That boy from Hopkins didn't do it,” I said carefully.

She was just about to bring her drink to her mouth, when she stopped and glanced at me. If she'd never worn makeup again, my mother still would have been beautiful. She couldn't hide it. She wore beauty and vulnerability in the same haunting way. Patting my hand, she gave a little laugh, like she did when my father called her on a third glass of wine at dinner. “He didn't do it on purpose,” she said. “Will hit his head on the ground when he was tackled.”

“That's not what happened.” My voice sounded robotic.

She put the drink down. “What in the world?”

That same darkness crept into the sides of my eyes, and I thought I might pass out. My chest was fluttering like a bird was stuck in there, trying to escape. “Something happened—”

She leaned in quickly and put her finger to my lips. “Jenny,” she said calmly, but her eyes were moving frantically, searching my face. “Your brother is dead. My Will is gone.” She called him “My Will” as if he were hers alone. “Don't make this about you.” Then in one swift motion, she stood and picked up her glass. I watched her move through the room and do what she did best. She left.

“Whobaby.” I didn't know how long I'd been sitting there with the scrapbook in front of me. Suddenly, I noticed my father standing under the archway between the kitchen and the living room, his sweatpants hanging loosely on his hips like they always did, wearing A Will to Live T-shirt and rubbing his eyes with his bear-paw hands. He'd called me Whobaby since I was a little girl, with no good reason why. But I loved it.