Night Blindness

by Susan Strecker

  It had been a chance to go to Vienna for the summer, get a jump on Juilliard. Monsieur Mercier knew the recruiter and though he was mostly auditioning at high schools that focused on the arts, the tall, aging man had agreed to hear me play.

  Schubert’s Impromptu no. 2 in A-flat had been propped against the stand. It should’ve been six minutes of sheer beauty, except that, as I sat there, the black notes turned to hieroglyphics. I couldn’t fathom what they meant to my hands. Sweat trickled down my belly. Monsieur Mercier cleared his throat. “Jenny, is something wrong?” The auditorium swelled with silence; my hands felt hot on my lap. I knew this was important, my ticket out. I could go to Austria, leave them all: the guilt I felt with Ryder, my cheating mother, my broken father. But then I rose and walked off the stage without saying anything. In the parking lot outside, where the wind cut through my silk wrap, I called Jamie to come get me.

  We’d stopped at Cambridge on the way home. She never asked how the audition went, and I stood in her front hall, replaying it again and again in my head, shame rising like a hot blast in my chest. When she went upstairs, I wandered around the living room, arms crossed, taking in the couch, the glass table, the silk lamp shades. I hated that she could form a private life all her own, leaving my father and me marooned in the house where Will had died. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw a note on the counter: Thanks for everything, darling. You are sensual, amazing, my miracle. Call me, J. The rage had made it hard to breathe. I’d left, sat waiting for her on the steps outside.

  “Let’s go,” she’d said breezily when she came out, not asking why I was sitting on the stoop in the freezing cold, not giving me that threshold to a fight. I’d been silent on the way home. The streets were slick with the sleet that had begun to fall, and Jamie hummed beside me, a Christmas carol, so that by the time we reached North Parker, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

  “You know what?” I told her. “You’re a bitch.” The words were acidic, and they shattered something between us. A tiny fissure occurred in the humming, before she continued on as though I’d said nothing at all. As she kept driving down North Parker, I felt stunned, almost awed. But when I glanced at her, every muscle in her face was strained, as though she was trying desperately to keep the world at bay. She was blinking, very fast, but even that couldn’t stop the tears coursing down her cheeks.

  I turned the shower off now and stood in front of her mirror, dripping. I was glad it was steamed up and I couldn’t see myself. It didn’t escape me that my husband had just run out on me because he thought I was cheating, and here I was, where Jamie had brought her boyfriends.

  I saw them once, when I was home from Andover. It was a few days before Easter, and Jamie was walking down the street arm and arm with Julian, one of the agents she worked with in New York, whom we’d known forever, a pretty man with gray eyes and long lashes. He was holding on to her, looking at her like he might devour her top to bottom, and I had ducked into the Yale Art Gallery. Afterwards, I’d gone straight to Luke’s. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “Is my mother fucking Julian?”

  His expression never changed. “She might be.”

  “Does my dad know?”

  He watched me for a while, then nodded. “He knows. Come on in, baby girl. Let me fix you a snack.” But I’d left Luke’s and gone to Mandy’s, where I drank so much rum while her parents were at a party, I threw up.

  I took a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from a drawer of clothes Jamie kept there for emergencies only, as if she might get trapped inside the place she had bought to escape. Her shorts were loose in the waist, and I knew I was doing it again, not eating, as though food were an ingratiating, needy friend who offered things I didn’t want. It wasn’t helping that I ran so much, beating the pavement until those endorphins kicked in.

  Downstairs, the retro-style couch curved like a white semicolon in the middle of the room, and above it, hanging on the wall, was a series of photographs of Will and me as toddlers at Three Rivers Stadium. I wore my dad’s Steelers Jersey like a dress and Will clutched a football with determination, a glimpse of the player he’d become. Jamie’s cameraman had taken them, and they were startlingly lifelike. I pictured how Julian must have felt when he used to come here with Jamie, sitting at the glass table, surrounded by her children and worrying my father might show up and break his face.

  My dad must have known about her lover. How could he not? I wondered why he hadn’t beaten the shit out of him. “She says she’s not like me. She wants to talk about Will all the time. And I can’t, Whobaby. It hurts too much,” he told me one night, sitting at the kitchen table after dinner when it was just the two of us. Jamie was at her apartment. She was always there, then. And then he’d cried. He cried so hard, the table shook, and saliva came out his mouth. I stood watching from the kitchen island. I didn’t go to him. If I did, it would all be real: Will would really be dead, my mother would really be gone, and my father would slowly be falling apart.

  I leafed through the music on the Steinway now. I wanted to play something vicious, something so hard-core and energetic that it would make my fingers burn. I thought of a Candlebox song called “Far Behind.” I wasn’t at all sure I could do it without Luke and his metronome clicking off arpeggiated chords.

  A key clicked in the lock, and Luke walked through the arched entryway. He stopped when he saw me. He was wearing black sunglasses and a silk sarong with animal prints on it. “Baby girl?” He took off his Ray-Bans. He wore sunglasses, no matter what the weather. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”

  A silver hoop gleamed in his ear. “So you are.” His voice was filled with wonder, and pride. I watched him bend down and unbuckle his leather sandals, lining them neatly against the bright white walls of the foyer. He stared at my muddy footprints. “Get me a dustpan, Jamie’ll never let us practice here again if we stain her carpet.”

  I went into the kitchen and opened the pantry. When I came out, I gave him a broom. The animals on his sarong were antelopes.

  “So.” He watched me kneel down. “Why’s my favorite girl on the lam?” He rubbed his nose where the diamond stud usually was. The piercing had left a tiny pockmark in his skin. “I was just at the hospital. We’ve all been wondering where you raced off to.”

  I started brushing up the mud. “Is my dad okay?”

  “He’s fine. They’ve got it under control, and I’m glad you aren’t rotting from worry in that hospital room. I think my Jensen might be coming back to herself, keeping her appointment with old Luke and all.” He gave me that huge white smile and squatted next to me. “So, you sleeping with Ryder?”

  I felt my face heat up. “Jesus Christ, why would you ask me that?”

  “Ah, it was Jamie who took the wild guess.”

  “Figures.” He held the dustpan down so I could sweep the dirt into it. “She thinks I’d do to Nic what she did to my dad?”

  He didn’t answer; his brown eyes were steady on mine. “Which was what?” he asked.

  I quit brushing the dirt and stared at him. “She hid out here, saying she wanted to spare us her grief, and then she fucked Julian and God knows who else and—”

  “And maybe it was a relief to your daddy.” He stared at me with those steady eyes. “Maybe he didn’t want to share his grief, either. Maybe he wanted to know someone was taking care of your mother.”

  “She should have been there for him.” But I remembered what my dad had said about Jamie’s wanting to talk about Will and his not being able to yet.

  “Aw, baby girl, that’s the bitch of losing someone you love. It’s different for everyone.”

  The counselor at Andover had said the same thing. Then she’d rattled off a statistic I still remembered. Seventy-five percent of couples don’t stay together after they lose a child.

  “Well.” I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. “I’m not sleeping with Ryder, okay?” I threw down the brush and sat on my butt. The mud w
asn’t dry yet, and I was making the carpet worse.

  Luke sat on the step above me and put his hands between his knees. “Tell your old uncle what’s up.” He said it slowly, testing each word.

  I hugged myself, suddenly cold. “Daddy’s really okay?”

  He nodded. “He’s going to be just fine.”

  “I was so scared,” I told him. “He was just sitting there at Caller’s Island, and then his eyes rolled back and his mouth was open and…” I shook my head trying to clear it of that terrible image. “And then the ticket guy called an ambulance, shouting questions at me, and I was answering them, but I was thinking, you know, Uncle Luke, I was thinking how many things I haven’t told my father that I need to tell him.”

  “What do you need to say?” he asked quietly.

  I thought of my dad in the hospital bed, his eyelids fluttering, thought of him running helter-skelter down that hallway, calling for a lost dog we never had. “Everything is my fault,” I said. That numbness started in my feet and rose.

  Luke got off the steps and sat on the floor with me, holding my hands tightly in his. His cell phone rang, but he didn’t answer it. I could smell his musk scent. We sat there in the foyer, rain pinging against the windows. My head throbbed. If I could tell Luke about the night Will died, he might be able to help me explain it to my dad, help me repair everything I’d broken.

  “What’s eating you alive, baby girl?” He squeezed my hands. “Tell your old uncle Luke.”

  He’d been asking me that since I left for Andover. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. The words were coming up, a breaking wave. I took a shaking breath. “That night. The night that—” But I felt a cold fist in my stomach. I thought of Jamie on the couch when I’d tried to tell her, when she hadn’t listened. And then it was gone: that one second I thought I could tell the truth. Trying to get it back was like swimming from the bottom of the ocean with a boulder tied to my ankle. I just wanted to be gone. “I have to go,” I said. The apartment smelled wrong, and all those pictures, the dirty white rug, Luke and me with a dustpan in front of us, thirteen years of lying to everyone I loved.

  “Hey, hey, not so fast.” Luke was reaching for my elbow, but I was already on my feet. “What’s going on?”

  I whirled around, snatching away my arm. “You want me to tell you what’s going on?” I asked. “I fucked everything up; that’s what’s going on.”

  And then I opened the door and ran down the steps and across the street barefoot, not looking out for traffic. When I made it to the other side, I slid into that slippery leather seat and pulled out fast. Without stopping at the red light, I turned right and raced down Ferry Street, past the harbor, to Island Avenue and back onto the main road. It was getting dark, my eyes were having a hard time adjusting, and the rain was coming down hard, the onslaught of headlights blinding me. I saw the domes of black umbrellas where people were standing in front of Willoghby’s, waiting for a table. Legion merged with Route 1, and I headed to Plains Creek. I needed to talk about it, and the only person I could talk to was Ryder. I called him, first his cell, but it was off, and then his house, which went to voice mail.

  The rain was coming down so hard, my wipers couldn’t slap it back fast enough. I raced through yellow lights, the speedometer hitting seventy. The wind tossed leaves and branches across the windshield. I needed him to hold me. I needed the old Ryder, not the doctor, but the one with the number 18 tattooed on his arm, the one who never wore a collar, even to prom, the one who hit Whiffle balls to the neighborhood kids and who kissed me in the library carrels when we should have been studying. The voice in the car was telling me my seat belt was off. “Shut up,” I yelled at it. I pushed redial over and over. Maybe the wind had knocked out his service. Half a lifetime ago, I never would have called before going to his house.

  I turned onto McKinnon Avenue, a couple of streets over from North Parker; it led to the ocean. My father had said Ryder had kept his parents’ house when they retired to Sarasota. The road smelled of privet hedges; the trees arched from the rain and made a canopy over the car. I was squinting in the dark. I was fifteen again, holding his hand over the gearshift, while he sang “Sugar Magnolia” to me, fresh with our secret, the first one, the one that seemed so benign now: that Will should never know about us.

  A black BMW sedan was parked on the street in front of his house. Ryder never would have driven a car like that when we were young. He had falling-apart MGs with Dead stickers on the back. Pulling into his driveway, I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. My face was streaked with tears and the black-and-blue bruise on my forehead had traveled to my eye. But there was nothing I could do about it, so I opened the car door and stepped into the pouring rain, running across the lawn and up his front steps.

  The porch was dark, but a light was on in the front hall, and I knocked on the oak door. My clothes were soaked through. I knocked again, harder. Cupping my hand around my eyes, I peered in the window. A standing lamp near the fireplace lit up the room’s new muted earth tones. He’d put in French doors leading to the terrace. The floor was covered in a Persian carpet I’d never seen before.

  And then I noticed them. In front of the green sectional, thrown off carelessly, one of them at an odd angle to the other, was a pair of red heels. I stood there, trying to make sense of them. Maybe his parents were visiting and those were his mom’s. But no one’s mother would wear shoes like that. Plus, his parents were older. His mother must have been seventy-five by now. The stairs were dark, and the fact that he was with someone dawned on me like ice exploding in my gut. I turned my back against the door. I felt a strange light-headedness, a feeling that this wasn’t really happening. A car drove by and put on its blinker. I had to get out of there before someone saw me waiting on his stoop, wet and pathetic. I ran down the steps, trying to jump over puddles. As I passed the BMW, I saw the license plate: NOVKMD. I thought of Dale Novak in the emergency room. Those red pumps.

  I slammed my door, and a light went on upstairs. I put the car in reverse and backed out as fast as I could. Hot humiliation burned my face. Ryder’d let me think Dale was a man, he’d wanted so badly to know what we thought of her, and the two of them were always walking down the hall together, as if they’d come from the same place. I wanted to go back, to bang on the front door and scream at him that he’d lied, that I hated him. I’d been home for almost two months, and he hadn’t told me there was someone else. Some sick perversion kicked in, and I wanted, more than ever, or maybe now I was just admitting it to myself, to be the one upstairs with him.

  At the light on the corner of Water and Reardon, I scrolled through my phone list to call Mandy, but while it was ringing, I remembered she was off somewhere, chronicling the lives of hedgehogs or some small animal that immediately ditched its mate as soon as it found a more attractive one. “Monogamy is so unnatural, even rodents know it,” she’d said as I lay on her bed, watching her toss hiking boots and sunscreen into the same rolling suitcase she’d taken to college. “Oops, sorry, J.J.” I was sensitive about my mother and Julian, even now. “I’m right, though. Aren’t I?” Yeah, Mandy was righter than she knew.

  I hadn’t driven at night since high school, and now I tried to navigate as best I could, keeping my eyes on the immediate lines of the road. Where was the Ryder I had grown up with? The one with the rusted-out convertible who loved the Dead and surfed the Watch Hill waves in hurricane season—sure he wanted to be a pediatrician, even though he hardly ever cracked a book and he didn’t like people who took themselves too seriously, like Dale. I was about to call Hadley, when I realized he would probably tell one of the sculptors or gallery hags, who would tell someone else, who would eventually tell Nic. I threw my phone in the seat. Fucking Ryder. The light changed, and I turned right, toward home.

  14

  By the time I got back to North Parker, the house was dark. I went through the back slider, wiping my feet so that Jamie wouldn’t bitch at me for tracking in mud, and hea
ded upstairs. I wondered where Nic had gone, and I had a horrible feeling he might have gotten on a plane. I thought of calling Hadley and making up an excuse, just so I could talk to someone. But I wouldn’t be able to hide the truth from him. Plus, I didn’t think Hadley was good at real live feelings. He was good at parties, at sex talk, and making me laugh, but I didn’t know if he could handle the whole truth. And he definitely wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself.

  I stripped in the hallway, tossing Jamie’s clothes in the wicker hamper. I was sticky and cold from the rain, and I wanted to take another shower. Standing under the hot water, I let my head hang like a rag doll, trying not to think of those red shoes in Ryder’s living room.

  When I turned off the water and stepped out, Nic was leaning against the bathroom counter. I caught my breath. “You scared me.”

  He gave me a half smile. “You finally made it home.” He was wearing a rumpled, clay-stained oxford shirt, and he smelled of pot.

  I reached for a raspberry bath towel, but he grabbed it first and held it up for me to step into it. “I didn’t think anyone was home. How did you get here?”

  He put his arms around me. “Taxi.” I remembered how my father used to wrap me in a towel when I got out of the pool as a kid. “I was on the upstairs deck.”

  The deck off Will’s room. We didn’t do that. We didn’t go in there—ever. There was something both annoying and comforting about Nic’s not knowing this. I checked my forehead in the mirror. The bruise had spread across my right eye.

  Nic watched my reflection. I thought he’d ask about my face, but he said, “I see you’ve redecorated your bedroom.”

  I squeezed water out of my hair into the sink. “I thought the INXS posters were a little outdated.”

  “The butterfly comforter’s gone, too.”

  “How do you even remember that?”

  “I remember everything about you.” He caught my eye in the mirror.