Night Blindness (6 page)

“He's been coming by the house for a while.”

A faint ringing sounded in my ears. “How long?”

He didn't answer for a minute. I switched gears, gaining speed on the straightaway, waiting for him to tell me to slow down. “Long time,” he finally said. “Almost five years.”

Madison's historic neighborhoods passed in a blur. I'd been in Berlin five years ago, installing Nico's exhibit, “Nightingale,” in a new museum there. “Why didn't you tell me?” I could hear the hurt in my voice.

He shifted in his seat. “Your mother and I didn't want to upset you.” A cold, horrible feeling washed over me that maybe Ryder had confessed what we'd done. “I know how hard it was for you after Will. They were so much alike. I worried you wouldn't want to see him.” He stared out his window.

He was right. I might have half-hoped Ryder would come to the farmhouse all those summer nights and during Christmas breaks, but I would have been scared out of my mind if he had. He knew me only as the girl who didn't drink, never broke curfew. He'd have been mortified to see what I'd turned into. I downshifted, slowing for traffic around Hammonasset Beach.

“He asked about you.” He tapped his fingers on the window. “I told him you were married, happy, still my best girl.” He put his hat on backward, and he could have been Will, twenty years from now, if he'd lived. “Painting up a storm, about to be the next Georgia O'Keeffe out there in Santa Fe.”

Above us a banner waved on the I-95 overpass:
WELCOME HOME SERGEANT KINNEY, WE MISSED YOU!
I thought of some soldier making his way home from Iraq to this idyllic town, I thought of Ryder at my parents' kitchen table, hearing I was happily married, and I felt like I might scream.

“Aw, Whobaby.” My dad put his hand over mine on the gearshift. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you. It's just been nice having him around. Your mother's gone so much, and it's like…” His voice faded. But I knew what he was going to say:
like having part of Will back again.

We drove along the coast, past beach houses, churches, and harbors, my father's palm over my hand the whole time. It was good of Ryder to come by. They needed that. Ryder had been like a second son to my father. He and Will had worshiped my dad. Ryder's own parents were too old, too stiff to be any fun, and he'd spent most of his time at our house. The three of us were always together. He wasn't great at football like Will, but he loved playing in the backyard while I kept score and made lemonade.

It was my fault, I knew. They needed
someone
to visit them. At Andover, I'd made it home for holidays. But after I went to UCB, I'd been terrible at keeping in touch. I'd been home maybe six times since I graduated. I tried to make up for it by sending my parents presents I knew they'd love. I'd scour antique shops and flea markets when I was on tour with Nic. In Venice, I'd found a candid, never published photograph of Dorian Leigh, the original supermodel. And last year in Cheltenham, England, I'd come across a leather football helmet worn by Bill Hewitt, one of the best NFL players of the 1930s.

When I got married, even those Sunday conversations we'd made a habit of in boarding school stopped. I hated those calls. It sounded like my dad's voice had lost its backbone, and it made me feel like the plates of the earth were shifting beneath me. He'd tell me how long it had been since he'd seen Will, recalling the number of days, as though keeping track might bring him back. Inane things ran through my mind while we talked: Will had left his history homework in my room that day; he'd asked me whether I thought Eileen Williams would go to homecoming with him. He and Ryder finally showed me how to drive a stick; they'd taught me all the words to the Stones' “Sympathy for the Devil.”
I miss his laugh,
I'd wanted to say while I sat on my narrow bed at Andover. But I just hung on the phone, trying to keep up my end of the conversation and sifting through that shoe box I dragged with me wherever I went. In it were Will's high school ring, which he'd left on the sill in the kitchen; ticket stubs from an Oasis concert he and Ryder and I had gone to; the dried daisies they'd swiped from the neighbor's yard on my fifteenth birthday; notes he'd tacked on my door:
J—Mandy called. Call that crazy girl baaaaack! Jenny—I took the VW to Titer's bash. Get your ass over there! Meet R and me at Breakneck if Jamie'll let you have the car. Waterskiing!
The shoe box also held the condom—the one Ryder and I had never used. As the paramedics were strapping Will to the backboard, I saw its silver corner under the couch and slipped it in my pocket.

It was grounding, sorting through that shoe box while we talked, breathing the musty smell of my closet, like a bizarre time capsule. Almost everything in it was a piece of history from the three of us. I'd taken it with me to college in Colorado, but after I'd moved in with Nic, it'd gotten lost.

I didn't want to let go of my grief. Without it, I would have disappeared. Sometimes, going through my days, I'd forget about Will for a moment, and then feel a sharp panic when he'd come back to me. I deserved to remember what I'd done every second of every day. So, when I still woke at night to the weight of what Ryder and I did, and the physical pressure of remembering made me gasp for air, something in me didn't mind so much. It made me know I was alive.

“Earth to Whobaby,” my dad said now.

I squeezed his hand. “I'm here, Daddy.”

We were stopped at a red light again near the Westbrook town line, his skin sun-kissed from the drive. “Thinking, thinking, my bright shining star, always thinking.” He beamed over at me as if that tumor weren't ticking away like a clock. My dad still thought I was the straight-A student I'd been before Will died, when he used to pin my report cards on the refrigerator next to newspaper clippings about Will. “My Whobaby's going to be somebody someday,” he used to say. “You watch.”

I wondered what he thought when my Andover and UCB report cards arrived. In prep school and then in college, I sat for hours in a hidden carrel in the library, a little stoned, trying to read about the French Revolution or the astronomy of Copernicus. I usually found myself at Hanky's bar, shooting pool, or, later, in Nic's studio, listening to Van Morrison and trying to get that self-portrait to be somebody else. What Ryder and I had done, Will's death, eclipsed every other thing that came after it.

We'd driven all the back roads and were almost to the Baldwin Bridge when my dad asked if I was hungry. I felt flushed from wind and sun, and the constant drone of the road had made me sleepy. I didn't care if we stopped for lunch or if I ever ate again. I wanted desperately to go back in time, to spend every weekend of my life riding around like this with him. I wanted to keep driving forever.

 

6

“I can't believe you're here.” Mandy looked even more beautiful than she had when we were teenagers, her blond hair swept up in a loose twist. I couldn't believe I was there, either, sitting across from her at Liv's, a lily of the valley bouquet between us, the diamond pendant around her neck throwing rainbows all over the restaurant. “How's my second papa doing?” Mandy never held it against me that I rarely called or e-mailed and almost never came back to visit.

“He's okay.” I felt like crying. Liv's was noisy for late afternoon in the middle of the week, and no one would have noticed if I had cried, but there was no reason to. “Overwhelmingly favorable odds,” Ryder had said. It was great news, my dad's prognosis, but I knew no matter how many little red cars my father borrowed for us, I still couldn't make myself believe it. “They think radiation will get it.” Mandy put her hand over mine. I studied her big hoop earrings, I remembered now she'd bought them at the plaza when she'd come to Santa Fe.

Her eyes filled with tears. “Damn.” She picked up her napkin and dabbed at them. “Of course he'll be fine, right?” The end of her nose was bright red, like it was when she cried. “It's just he's larger than life, you know?” She shook her head. “I'm such a cow. You're supposed to be crying on my shoulder, not the other way around.” I loved her for crying. I loved that she could traipse through the rain forests of Ecuador with baby anacondas draped around her like scarves, photographing for
National Geographic
and having one-night stands with award-winning cameramen, and still come to lunch with me, hold my hand, and cry about my father.

Just like Mandy, she kept right on talking, filling the space between us before it could turn to silence. “I already look fatally ugly, and now I have to cry on top of it.” She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “In the past thirty-six hours, I've been on a riverboat, a rickshaw thing pulled by some hairy animal with horns, two planes, and a town car from Bradley driven by a guy who farted the whole way, and well…” She put her fingers to her lips. “I
need
a mojito.” She whistled at a cute waiter across the room.

“Mand, he's not a dog,” I whispered.

She gave him a flirty smile. “It's so good to see you, J.J.”

Everything Mandy had wanted to do, like cut class to get high or give blow jobs to the boys at the neighboring Catholic school, I'd been hesitant about, and she'd started every sentence with, “Jesus, Jenny, it's only a joint.” Or “Jesus, Jenny, it's just a cock in your mouth.” Eventually, she started calling me J.J., a constant reminder of how uncool I was compared to her. That all changed after Will died, and then I was the first one to drop acid, run off to boarding school in the middle of the academic year, and quit college to be with my art professor.

“What can I get you lovely ladies today?” The waiter's words came out lazily. I thought of Nic, except this guy probably wasn't old enough to drink.

Mandy touched his hand. “We'll have a couple of mojitos, please, D.J.,” she said, reading his name tag. “And why don't you order one for yourself.”

His cheeks colored. “Ma'am, we're not allowed to drink on the job.”

She leaned forward. Her green silk shirt brought out the emerald color of her eyes. “How long are we going to have to sit here and drink until your shift ends?”

He glanced at a silver clock above the bar. “Um, about two hours. Do you want anything to eat?”

“We need a little time to decide,” I said.

He walked away, swaggering, as if he knew we were watching. “Every time I come here, I want to snog that boy,” Mandy told me. She checked her reflection in her knife and then raised her eyes to me and whispered, “I need need need to hear about Ryder.” Her eyes were bright, like when we were teenagers and she suggested we play strip poker with the neighborhood boys. “And Nic.” She said his name like an afterthought. “But mostly Ryder. Is he still in love with you?”

“Mand.” I sipped my water. “That was a long time ago.”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “That doesn't matter. I know you better than anyone, and I know you have something to tell me.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay, I'm going to talk, but you can't ask any questions.”

She scrunched up her nose. “Why?”

“Because I'm not ready to answer them.”

“Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

“Promise?”

“Scout's fucking honor.”

“He's Ryder, but he's not. He's all serious now, with a buzz cut and monogrammed oxford shirts. He hasn't even shaken my hand since I've been back.”

She let out the breath she'd been holding. “That's what you had to tell me?”

D.J. came back and put our drinks down. He hesitated before leaving, as though wanting Mandy's attention, but she plucked a mint sprig out of her glass and waited for me to speak. I realized too late that I was going to have to drink a lot to handle the smell of mint. “And?” she said when he left.

“I can't stop thinking about him.” I spoke quickly so I wouldn't quit talking. “I don't know if he hates me or loves me or what, but I feel like I'm fifteen all over again.” Mandy was the only one who'd known how crazy in love Ryder and I had been, and now she looked like she was going to explode. She took a huge sip of her drink and started to speak, but I said, “You promised.”

“Okay, fine. It's just that—” She stirred her cocktail with her pointer finger.

“What?” My stomach felt weak. I didn't know if it was from the mint, hunger, or finally talking about Ryder.

“I always knew he'd be the one to make you come home.” She whispered it, like she didn't know if she really wanted to say it.

“Mandy, my dad has a brain tumor.”

“Oh, I know that. I just, well … he'll make you stay.”

“Subject change, subject change.” My hands were sweaty from what I'd told her. “I'm serious. I want to talk about something else. Tell me about the married filmmaker.”

“Hmm, Philip Philip Philip. I finally met his wife. She found me in his address book. We met while I was in Paris on a layover.”

D.J. appeared again. “How's the first round, ladies?”

“Almost as delicious as you,” Mandy told him.

“We need menus,” I said.

We watched him weave between the round tables. “That boy is edible,” she said.

“Wifey?” I prompted.

“We went back to their place to talk.” She ran her finger around the rim of her glass, then licked it. “Philip was home when we got there. So…”

I stared at her. “You didn't?”

She emptied her drink. “I hadn't had a threesome since you came to visit me at Columbia.” She flashed her pretty teeth at me.

“What was that guy's name?”

“Timmy. Whenever I see him in the city, he tells me how sexy you were when you played the piano at that cigar bar. Remember we sang ‘Born to Run'?”