Night Blindness

by Susan Strecker

  “So, you’re not going to be the one treating him?” I asked.

  “I’m a surgeon, Jenny. I operate. Dr. Novak will be in charge of radiating the affected area. When that treatment has been completed, we’ll do another MRI and then—”

  “I know. Then you’ll decide if surgery is necessary.” I felt like I’d been slapped. “But basically we’ll be working with Novak?”

  “Don’t worry. Dale is the best there is. Sterling”—he looked at my dad—“you’ll be in great hands. And I’ll be here the whole time. We’ll get through this together.”

  The room fell silent.

  My dad shifted in his seat to face me. “Well, sweetheart, your mother and I have to head to Peter Doherty’s office. We should leave now if we’re going to drop you at home first.”

  “Attorney Doherty? Why?” I asked.

  He put his glasses back on. “Just routine … stuff.”

  Routine? What could possibly be routine now? And then it hit me: his will. He was settling his estate.

  * * *

  “What in the world did Ryder look like?” Hadley asked. His South African accent sounded even more pronounced, which probably meant he’d had too much wine the night before.

  I stood in the foyer, not wanting to enter the living room. Familiar, I wanted to tell Hadley. So familiar that I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. But instead I said, “He looks like a Brooks Brothers ad. All ironed shirts and monogrammed cuffs, the poster boy for grown-ups.” Sunlight was streaming through the windows, lighting up the dark wood of the piano.

  “Well, love, we are grown-ups now, aren’t we?” The phone was all echoey because he had me on speaker while he flipped through proofs.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Too grown-up to work with kids, I thought.

  “That’s the problem with these boys—they don’t stay eighteen forever.” I wished I were there, lounging on the velvet couch in Hadley’s West Palace gallery, drinking a latte from the Cowgirl Café while he tried to find the hottest up-and-coming photographer. “Is he married or gay, and what in heaven’s name has he been doing since he was curled around your tiny finger?”

  “He’s not wearing a ring. You didn’t tell Nico, did you?”

  “These lips are sealed. I mean in terms of talking; otherwise, love, they’re wide open. Oh, I have to go.” He sounded fluttery. “His royal highness is calling, and if I don’t jack him off with phone sex, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “You haven’t broken up with him yet? It’s so unlike you to hold on to the clingy ones.”

  “Send me the Brooks Brothers boy, and I just might. Ta-ta.” The line went dead.

  I held my phone in my hand and studied the hearth, remembering Jamie on her knees with a bucket and a sponge, a week after Will died, though there never was a stain. She’d been talking to herself. I hadn’t tried to hear what she was saying. I’d backed away, frightened to see my mother like that, her hair falling limply around her face. A few days later, I came home and found shiny black marble had replaced the flagstone hearth. All these years later, no one had ever asked why she had it replaced.

  Now I thought I should go upstairs, put on a pair of shorts, and run the seven-mile loop along the beach out toward Luke’s, run away this sick feeling that was coming over me. Or I should put the stereo on loud, smoke the weed I’d stupidly stuffed in my suitcase, and set up the art supplies I’d packed, so I could start painting again.

  But I walked into the living room and sat at the piano. My father had bought it for me when I was six years old, after I’d played “Joy to the World” by ear at Sid’s Christmas party. Everyone in the room had gone quiet, and my dad and Luke had crowded around me, asking where I’d learned it. I told them I’d heard it on the radio.

  Luke had sat next to me. “Can you do it again?” I remembered feeling scared, not sure if I had done something good or bad. He watched my hands as I played. Everyone applauded. He asked what other songs I knew. I told him whatever I heard on the record player.

  The piano smelled like lemon furniture polish. Claude Debussy’s “Reverie” was still propped on the music stand, the notes trailing across the page. I could hear it as I read the lines, could feel the way the piece spoke, a dramatic rise and fall, as though two people were slipping over each other. I had never played it for anyone. I’d sat in front of the keys at Will’s funeral and stared at the pages until someone—my father, I think—led me away.

  I thought of those pianos I used to pass in the music building at the University of Colorado on my way back from modeling for Nic. They sat in single rooms, waiting, obedient and patient, and I used to feel as though I’d betrayed every one of them. At the same time, I’d felt an incredible, almost visceral pull that reminded me what it was like to fall in love.

  I hadn’t played this piano in more than a decade. The keys were slick beneath my fingertips. Closing my eyes, I waited for muscle memory to take over. If I could play something, anything, maybe I could break that thick glass that separated me from my feelings. I pressed a few keys, but they were singular sounds in the quiet room, and “Reverie” was nowhere to be found. I opened my eyes and reached to bring the top down.

  “She exists,” I heard a voice say. Luke was watching me, rings on every finger, dreadlocks down to his elbows, smiling his big white smile.

  “There you are,” I said.

  “Where else would I be, baby girl? That guest bedroom drugged me.” He ran his hand over his dreads. “I slept till about thirty minutes ago, when your father called to whip up a surprise for his best girl.” He took up the whole room when he crossed it.

  “What is it?”

  He put his huge arms around me. “I ain’t telling his secrets, but it’s shiny and red.” He lifted me up, twirling me around, so the living room was a blur. Finally, he set me down, and we sat on the bench. I was laughing.

  “You eating out there in the high desert?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, it’s all going down your hollow leg.” He lifted the back-fall. “I didn’t know you’d started playing again.”

  “I haven’t.” I leaned against his shoulder. “You heard me; I lost it.” He smelled like musk.

  “You’re trying too hard.” He rested his hand on mine and placed it on the keys. I snapped it away.

  “I don’t remember ‘Reverie,’ Uncle Luke.”

  He tapped my chest below my collarbone. “Your brain might not, but your body does. It’s in there somewhere.” He used to call me his “prodigy,” his “rising star,” and I had that sinking feeling, as he put my hand down and I pressed haltingly on the keys, that I’d disappointed him.

  “Close your eyes,” he said. The first verse came out stilted; then the grandfather clock struck twelve, and I remembered the second verse was in the same key as those chimes. At the beginning, my fingers felt stiff, cramped, but after that first refrain, they started moving, like water. I wasn’t sure where they were on the keys, only that I was hitting the right ones.

  And then I was the vibration of hammer hitting string; I was existing both inside and outside myself. My body leaned into the music. I heard the two voices, their melancholy so beautiful, it made me want to cry. The crescendo of the song came, and I played drunkenly, my fingers moving furiously. The playing loosened something in me that had been mashed down, way down, and I could breathe. The secret choking in my chest was, for one brilliant, beautiful moment, gone. And then my fingers tripped over the keys, they missed a note, and I stopped. My hands wouldn’t play anymore.

  Luke put his arm around me. We didn’t speak for a long time. Finally, he said, “Why’d you quit?”

  Outside, a breeze made the weeping willow appear to be dancing, slowly, sadly. I didn’t answer. I felt that thing shutting down inside me again, that slanting edge that built itself instantly when someone asked questions. Luke took his arm away and fingered the keys lightly, pushing against me a little. He was playing an old Harry Chapin song. His hand
made silver bracelets glinted in the sunlight. “You’re afraid,” he said while he played. He’d segued to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are afraid. You’re afraid to feel anything.” It was like this with Luke; he skipped the small talk and went deep.

  I watched his fingers running effortlessly over the keys. I wanted that again. I used to play in my sleep, in my dreams. “How do you know that?”

  “I can read your spirit.” He transitioned to “Yesterday.”

  “I’m not afraid to feel something,” I said. The sun glinted against his thumb ring. “I’m afraid because I don’t.”

  He was playing a different version, slower than the original, more melancholy. “How long are you staying?”

  I’d like to see if we can radiate the area daily for eight weeks. “Two months,” I said.

  “I know this is a lot to throw at you a day into it,” he said over the music, “but you’ve got a choice to make here. Either tell your old uncle what you’ve been locking up so tight all these years or I’m going to make you play it out.” I watched his hands, felt the fireplace behind me. I heard Will’s voice coming out of the dark: What the fuck are you doing to my sister? “Things left to boil too long,” Luke said now, “always combust.”

  5

  Three days later, I was driving my father around in a red 1966 Alfa Romeo 1600 Spider Duetto he’d borrowed. It was supposedly the one they’d used in The Graduate, my favorite movie. My hands held that shiny wooden steering wheel while the radio played an oldies station out of New Haven. He sat next to me, his wheat-colored hair blowing with the wind. It was just like him to call up a gazillion people he’d known since his football days until he found this car. After Will died, he’d bought a ’57 Porsche 356, and whenever I came home from Andover, he’d knock on my door. “Wanna go for a drive, Whobaby?” Hungover, not really wanting to see anyone, I’d realize on those quiet rides how far I’d slipped from the honor roll, piano star girl, so far that my father probably had a hard time recognizing me, barefoot, my wild hair wrapped in woven string, tiny bells on my ankles, smelling of pot.

  It was a warm day, warm enough that I was wearing a red sundress I’d found in my closet and flip-flops I’d bought at the Colston drugstore the day before. It was incredibly humid, so green compared to the high desert, my eyes could barely get used to it. In the passenger’s seat, my dad sat smiling, tapping his fingers on the window in time to the music. I thought it was unfair when sick people looked healthy, like God was playing a trick. Not wanting to break our sweet silence to ask where we were going, I just drove the roads along Long Island Sound. I had the feeling I used to get as a kid, that just being near my father made me lucky. The forsythia and crocuses were blooming, the gammagrass was blowing sideways in the wind, and the air smelled of lilacs and salt. I drove north on Route 1 past antique shops and boutiques, lush marshes and sea-worn boats, places we’d water-skied as kids, docks where Mandy and I had set up portable radios and gotten tan, summer ice-cream stands, and the beach where Will had worked as a lifeguard the summer he was fifteen. We also passed the farmhouse where I’d gone to parties when I was home from Andover, the eyes of my old classmates telling me they were sorry but also glad it wasn’t their brother. We did cocaine off the butcher-block table and drank tequila out of dummy-locked liquor cabinets. I secretly hoped Ryder would come home from Yale and show up at those parties. But he never did. Instead, I would end up kissing some boy I didn’t care about, giving him a fake number, and then sleeping at Mandy’s until three the next day.

  “How was it?” my father asked. We were stopped at a red light in Madison, and he took off his cap to smooth his hair. “Seeing Ryder again.”

  “Weird.” I watched a group of high school kids sprawled on the town green. One of the boys was on his stomach next to a girl on her back. The night before, I’d been rummaging through Jamie’s desk in the living room, looking for a pad of paper, when I found a manila envelope. A stack of Mother’s Day cards was inside. I recognized Ryder’s handwriting right away. He’d sent one every year since Will had died. My hands were shaking when I shoved them back in the desk.

  “His parents retired and moved to Florida,” my dad said. “Did he tell you that?”

  “No.” It made sense. His mother had been forty-three when she had him. His father was even older. They’d shared an obstetrics practice.

  “Damn good at what he does,” my dad was saying. The light changed, and he put his hat back on.

  When we were zooming down Route 1 again, I asked, “How long have you been back in touch with him?” I hadn’t known I would ask it, but it came back to me now how familiar he’d been with the kitchen, the way he’d brought me tea, and how he’d been with my parents in his office—the intimacy the three of them shared.

  “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.