“Could you get Sid for me?” my father asked, searching the room feverishly. “We were discussing why the flea-flicker play needs to be retired.” He took off his glasses and chewed on the arm. “I know I know why; I just can’t find the words.”
Cold fear exploded in my stomach. Sid had left over an hour ago, and my father had been practicing the flea flicker all his life. “That’s easy.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “It’s too risky. If the defense isn’t tricked into thinking you’re setting up a running play, the quarterback ends up on his ass.”
My dad patted my hand, his eyes searching my face. “You’re my good girl, Jensen.”
Ryder caught my eye, but I didn’t smile.
The party broke up after that. Jamie put my father to bed, and people started filing out. Luke drove Mandy home because Antonio had brought her there in his rental car, and she had no idea where he’d gone. “I think your dad and I might have scared him off,” Luke whispered to me.
To avoid good-byes, I escaped to the kitchen to deal with dirty dishes. I needed to think about something other than the fact that my father was disappearing in front of me, and I’d been hiding out in Santa Fe with Nic. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ryder come through the archway. Taking a dish towel from the oven handle, he stood beside me and dried a serving bowl. “What the fuck was that?” I asked.
He kept drying. “Just part of the disease. He’s going to forget stuff.”
I felt like smashing the plate against the sink. “Stop telling me what you think I want to hear.” I turned off the water.
He quit drying. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I think you’re holding out on us.” I took a paper towel from the roll and dried my hands furiously. “I think he’s sicker than you’re letting on. And maybe Jamie is willing to be in denial.” I wadded up the paper towel and threw it in the trash. “But I’m not.” I had a feeling of pushing a boulder over a deep precipice, but I kept going. “Just like you told me to, I’ve been reading up on this,” I said, “and I know you’re doing something risky.”
He looked as though he were deciding something. “Santa Fe made you hard,” he said. “You know that? You don’t trust anyone.”
“Oh, so all the research is wrong, and you’re right? Every article I’ve read says that resecting the tumor immediately will give him the best chance of survival.”
“You’re reading guidelines, general practices. Most meningiomas aren’t so close to the pneumotaxic center. They usually grow in one of the temporal lobes, just under the dura. Removing those tumors is a cakewalk. Your dad’s is not following the norm. I have to treat his specific illness, not what the disease usually does.” His face was set like stone. “I love that man like a father. You think I’d do anything.” He spit out the words. “Anything, to hurt him?”
Out the kitchen window, I could see the deck, where people had left half-finished beers and cocktail napkins.
“Andrew Benning,” he said. “He’s a neuro in my practice. I encourage all my patients to get second opinions so that when they’re on my operating table, they have one hundred percent faith in me. I would have given you his name before now, but I didn’t think you’d want anyone else.” He threw the dish towel on the counter.
“What do you want me to think? First you tell us that a well-informed patient is the best patient. And then you go rogue with his treatment.” I folded the towel he’d thrown, draped it over the oven handle. “I’m still trying to get used to your being a brain surgeon, to even being back here.”
“I’m not the one who left. And if you’d wanted to find me, all you had to do was look, but you didn’t look, Jensen.” He took a step back. I saw his neck was bright red, like it used to get when he was angry. “You hid out instead.” He looked like he was going to say something more, but then he turned around and I watched him walk out of the kitchen and down the hall. I let myself out onto the deck. Standing at the railing, I half-expected him to come back, to come after me. But eventually I heard a car door shut and an engine start, and I knew he was gone.
Upstairs, the light was off in my parents’ bedroom. Because of the dark, I couldn’t see much beyond the sea of blooming yellow forsythia bordering the fence. The night smelled of the lamb Luke had cooked on the grill. I could feel a headache starting at the base of my neck.
I’d been faking it all night. The only thing that had felt real was when I’d been playing the piano, but just when the groove hit, reality had come crashing back. It was the way life rolled. Maybe I was home, eating chocolate cake and taking drives in convertibles, but my father was sick. He was probably dying. And we needed a second opinion. We needed to talk to someone who would tell us the truth. Because right now, we were all standing in quicksand, and I was the only one who could feel we were sinking.
10
I never called Dr. Andrew Benning for a second opinion. I kept his number on my bureau, but it felt like a sacrilege. And somehow I was too busy. My life took on a rhythm, driving my dad to radiation and spending time with him while Jamie worked, messing up self-portraits in the attic while he napped, running on Hammonasset Beach at dusk with Mandy when she was home from photo shoots, and playing piano with Luke three times a week.
I could now play Islamay, the Oriental fantasy by Balakirev; Gaspard de la Nuit, by Maurice Ravel; a Petrushka transcription by Stravinsky; and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata no. 2, 1913 edition. I also played Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street.” I’d started to learn it as a present for Ryder’s eighteenth birthday, but then I’d left for Andover. I didn’t try “Reverie” again.
My dad’s illness and something about being in Colston made me organized, focused. I was the keeper of his radiation schedule and secretly recorded his headaches and any other strange behavior. I made sure we had an emergency supply of his medicine in the car. While Jamie was at work, I stocked the fridge with the food Luke recommended: organic, gluten-free, high-protein, low-fat. I spent hours at the Yale library researching meningiomas, studying recent dissertations from neuroscientists, and reading about the workings of the medulla and pons. Hadley was a vitamin junkie, and I had him investigating different supplements. Then I figured out which ones would interact with my dad’s meds. I organized it all in a hanging file in the kitchen, beneath the phone books.
Most of what I read, I didn’t share with anyone. I didn’t ask Dale or Ryder about it, but I wanted to know everything about this disease. And doing the research made me feel needed and smart. I had a purpose, and whether it came from guilt or some feral instinct to save my dad, I was still doing some good. In Santa Fe, I was so far from the girl I’d been. I modeled for the people Nic chose for me and gossiped with Hadley about all the galleries downtown closing because the economy was in the toilet. And I went on tour with Nic. But I wasn’t organized like I had been. I’d forget to pull bills out of the wire basket in the kitchen and pay them on time. I never balanced the checkbook or made our bed. I usually had to sift through a pile of laundry to find a pair of socks. Since I did my job naked, it hardly mattered, except when I helped Hadley out at the café.
But here I was different. I was on the ball. I’d been one person, and then I wasn’t. Now I was someone completely different. In Colston, I was back to my old straight-A self, the good girl my father could count on. The Jensen I’d created with Nic, the numb, unfeeling version of myself, was fading.
Despite his brain tumor, which made him forget everyday things and gave him horrible headaches, my dad was in high spirits. Sometimes I caught him in his office, holding his head in his hands, or I’d see him trying desperately to think of a word, but mostly he was up early, knocking on my door, asking what I had planned for the day, saying he wanted to play hooky from the foundation, and asking if I was game.
During those long June days, I sometimes got that feeling I’d had at the Seafood Shack, that everything was okay. Piecing together my favorite Elton John and Ella Fitzgerald songs on the piano, swimming at Shoa
l’s Beach in a black bikini I’d bought in town, I could almost trick myself into believing that life had rewound. I’d never given up a full ride to Juilliard or hitchhiked to San Francisco to see the Dead, never dropped acid or slept with my art teacher, never posed nude for sculptors in Santa Fe or gotten so drunk at the Cowgirl Café I let a bruja tattoo a nightingale on each ankle. That had all been a long, outrageous dream, and now I was back where I belonged.
After the Alfa Romeo, my dad rented two more sports cars, a green Triumph Spitfire and a Porsche Carrera, which we took down the Merritt at 5:00 A.M. all the way to the New York border so he could feel the speed on the straightaways. He wanted to go zip lining, too, but Dale Novak nixed it. He shrugged when she told him. “Well, then let’s buy some water skis for Luke’s Whaler,” he said.
“Dad…”
“What?” he asked innocently.
Instead, we took the Whaler down the Connecticut River, dropped the anchor between Essex and Hadlyme, and Mandy and I swam near Nutt Island while he and Luke fished. The current was so strong, twice Luke had to throw us a line so we could get back to the boat. I was glad we weren’t water-skiing. While we tanned on the bow of Charmer, I thought about Ryder and wondered what he’d been doing. But we were deep into radiation with Dale, and I didn’t have an excuse to call him. He was the surgeon. His part was on hold until after radiation ended.
On an overcast day at the end of the June, when the humid, still air of July was starting to creep in, my dad took me to North Cove Outfitters and bought us matching yellow Wellies. We went clamming like we used to when Will and I were little, filled an old Benjamin Moore bucket to the top, and called Luke on our way home. Jamie was just back from signing a new girl from Moscow, and the four of us spent the night on the deck, eating fresh seafood, drinking Chardonnay, and squirting each other with lemons.
On nights like those, Jamie seemed settled, almost peaceful. She relaxed into the glider with my father, leaning against him, her eyes blinking lazily, not unhappy or restless like she used to get. Sometimes it felt like I’d dreamed that span of time when she had her apartment and a lover on the side. Except I knew her. I still had the clear memory of how she’d been after Will died, spending nights at the brownstone with God knows who. As though strangers could take away her hurt better than her own family, or what was left of it.
“I interviewed that list of acupuncturists you gave us,” I said. Luke and I were sitting on the railing, watching fireflies. “And if you’re willing to be a pincushion,” I told my dad, “I think they can help your headaches.”
“Give this girl a task, and she gets it done yesterday,” he said.
I smiled at him and wriggled my nose. But being home again, being a gold-star student, clamming, driving fast cars, and dozing on the Whaler couldn’t change what my hours of research on the Internet and in the Yale Medical Library had told me. A meningioma was still a brain tumor. We couldn’t lose our vigilance; we couldn’t turn our backs on it, not even for a second. I’d read everything I could find on my father’s condition, could recite statistics to anyone who asked, and there were still plenty of people with meningiomas who didn’t survive.
11
“What color do you think the freaky receptionist’s fingernails will be today?” I turned in to the hospital parking garage, and the Lexus’s headlights went on without my having to push any buttons. I wasn’t used to a car that gave me directions, warmed my ass, and created playlists on the stereo. I felt like I was driving a servant. I missed Sabrina, the ’87 Saab convertible I’d inherited from Hadley, with the crank windows and cloth seats. It’d been six weeks since I’d put the top down and driven fast through those desert mountains, past tabletop mesas and the edges of the Rio Grande, Dave Matthews blaring.
My father didn’t answer. When I glanced over, he was groping at the air, his mouth open, his tongue resting on his bottom lip. I’d seen that look in his eyes a million times before when he was going through playbooks or watching film, concentrating, as if he could just think hard enough, he’d understand.
When I turned in to the parking space, he surprised me by reaching over and touching my face, tracing it the way a blind person might, running his fingers over my jaw as though to conjure missing words. Cold prickled my spine. I turned off the ignition. “I’m Jensen,” I said. “Remember? Rhymes with Benson. Your high school football coach.” The books I’d read had suggested making up games to help him remember the things we never thought he’d forget. Our street, North Parker, sounded a little like fourth quarter. When he couldn’t think of a word, I’d quote his favorite TV show, “‘Mnemonics for five hundred, Alex.’”
He waved at me as though I were being silly. “Of course,” he said. Instantly normal again, as though nothing had happened, he unclipped his seat belt.
I pulled my leather backpack off the seat. “Hang on a sec,” I said, opening my notebook.
“Are you ever going to tell me what you write in that thing?” He leaned across the console.
“Just stuff I don’t want to forget.” He seemed satisfied with my half-truth, and I waited for him to climb out of the car. When his door closed, I scribbled June 30th—forgot my name again. It was the third time in six days.
In Dale’s office, we stood at the front desk, waiting for the receptionist who’d checked us in five days a week for the last three weeks. “Name?” she asked.
Really? “Sterling Reilly,” I told her as patiently as I could.
She ran a Smurf-colored fingernail down an appointment book. “Oh, there you are,” she said cheerily. “You get the day off. Dr. Novak had an emergency and said your treatment can wait until tomorrow.” The phone rang, and she slid the partition closed.
I glanced at the wall clock. “She could have called.”
My dad hooked his arm through mine. “Do you know what this means?” He winked at me. “Caller’s Island.”
“Oh jeez,” I groaned.
“Come on, you loved it as a kid.”
We stepped into the elevator, and I pushed the button. “That was before I realized their roller coasters are held up by a couple of rusty nails.”
My dad loved Caller’s Island, a tiny amusement park near Taft Airport, with rattling rides and paint-chipped carousel horses. Right up until Will died, the four of us, plus Ryder, would pile in the car for the forty-minute trip east, where we ate cotton candy and rode the looping roller coasters. Weathered carnies conned us into playing games we never won, promising oversize stuffed animals if we could just pop the balloon with an old dart.
My dad was staring up at the elevator numbers like a little boy. I felt bad for him. Dale had said no to spending too much time at the foundation during radiation, and I was forever telling him he couldn’t drink a beer or eat a cookie and that waterskiing was out of the question. Jamie worked so much that I’d had to turn into the bad cop, the unfun parent.
“Okay,” I said.
His face split into a grin.
“Just this once,” I told him, even though I thought it was a terrible idea.
* * *
We stood in front of the wooden roller coaster, Caller’s Island’s main attraction. There had been an accident on I-95, and it had taken us a hellish hour to go six exits. I’d forgotten my sunglasses, and I had to put my hand up like a visor and squint. Looming past the ticket booth stood the double-loop roller coaster, its paint now faded to the color of the sky. “Are you sure about this? Dale said you should be taking it easy.”
He stood with his back to the sun, trying to block it from my eyes. He’d insisted we get fried dough with powdered sugar, and he had a telltale trail of it down his front. “I didn’t hear you telling me to be careful when we were flying around Hamburg Cove last weekend.” I set my fried dough on a picnic table next to the carousel and sat down. He sat next to me. “And don’t go getting a guilty conscience and fess up to Luke about our treats today.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. TLA was crudely etched into the table next to t
wo pairs of initials. True love always. Trouble lies ahead.
He balanced his sunglasses on his forehead. “Come on, be my good girl, go on the roller coaster with your old man.”
A man and his German shepherd service dog sat at the table next to us. My father had no idea how not good I was. The dog stretched out and laid its head on the man’s foot. “Doesn’t he remind you of Bailey?” My dad nodded at the dog.
“Bailey?”
“Our old dog. The one Will begged us to adopt from the shelter.”
“Dad,” I said, my heart racing, “we’ve never had a dog. Jamie’s allergic.”
He took off his glasses and stuck the arm in his ear. “Goddamn.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I guess my excuse for getting you home is acting up.”
I looked at the squint lines around his eyes and the twitch in his bottom lip. A swarm of families went by, toddlers in strollers, kids holding giant pretzels. After they passed, I asked, “Are you worried? Does it make you scared?”
He waved away a yellow jacket buzzing around my uneaten fry bread. “Everything’s a trade-off. When I entered the draft, I wanted to play for the 49ers or the Raiders, get as far away from Philly as I could. But the Steelers picked me up. I was pissed off at the time, but if I’d gone to San Fran or Oakland, I never would’ve met Luke. His college roommate was our backup punter. My last year playing, Luke introduced me to your mom at a VIP party before the Super Bowl. Everything happens for a reason, Whobaby. And don’t you ever forget it.”
I stared down at the yellow jackets circling my food. After we’d buried Will, the priest had said the same thing, and I’d stayed there under the granddaddy maple, trying to think of a good reason why I was in the Edgehill Cemetery, putting flowers on my brother’s casket. Finally, Ryder had taken my hand and led me away, holding me against him so I wouldn’t fall. We didn’t care anymore who saw us together. It was Will who had forbidden it, and after he died, it hardly mattered.
Night Blindness Page 9