Nic was waiting for me to answer. In his untucked oxford and stained jeans, he was still hoping I’d quit taking care of my dad and go to Greece. Of course he thought I’d go. I was the hippie girl who’d dropped out of school for her art professor, dropped her clothes for famous sculptors, dropped everything to fly to Crete and get married on a beach. I looked down at the flying nightingales on both my ankles and wondered how I could make him understand. I had to stay. I needed to find that other, happy girl I’d lost along the way.
17
Nic was in New York, and Mandy and I were in Bottega on Chapel Street. She was trying to cram her feet into a pair of gold kidskin heels that were on sale for three hundred dollars. I zipped a pair of camel boots up my calf and tried not to think about how a baby cow had to live in a box to get the leather that soft. She walked a small circle around me. Her heels hung over the backs. “Can I get away with it?” She clomped to the three-way mirror. I hobbled with her and put my foot up like a flamingo. In my Daisy Duke shorts, the boot made me look like a hooker. “Shit,” she said. “These are so cute. Maybe I can cut off my toes.” We sat side by side on the bench, taking off the shoes. The sandal straps left red marks on the tops of her feet.
“J.J.” She put her arm around me. She smelled powdery, like rose petals ground up and thrown in a bath. “I’ve kept my mouth shut since that day at Liv’s. But I can’t take the suspense. You have two men stupidly in love with you. Will you please just pick one? Or”—she flashed me a full-mouth smile—“I’ll do it for you.”
It was one of those days that even air-conditioned places felt stifling hot. I fanned myself with the top of a shoe box. I was still tired from staying up until 3:00 A.M. the night before with Nic, who’d been begging me to go to Greece. Begging was not something he’d ever done before. “You can come back from Crete whenever you need to,” he’d kept saying. “There are flights all the time.” But I never considered going.
“What about Ryder’s beautiful doctor girlfriend?” I asked Mandy.
“That means nothing.” She lifted the top off a box with grass green five-inch heels inside. Every time I thought of Nico on a plane to Crete, I got a pinched feeling in my chest. “Do you think I can wear these in the Andes next month while I’m photographing mountain lions?”
I wished I were Mandy. She decided she was going to be a photographer after she saw the Frances Benjamin Johnston exhibit at the Met when we were in high school and had never gotten derailed. I, on the other hand, was so far off the track, I couldn’t even see it anymore. I picked up a plum ankle boot. I hadn’t worn anything that expensive since I’d met Nic. I put it on my lap. “Why am I buying boots in July?”
“For Paris,” she said. “Everyone in Paris wears boots year-round.” Mandy had the brilliant idea I was going to fly to France for Philip’s film premier for the weekend. “On me. Just for three days,” she’d said. I could just imagine the conversation with Nic: Sorry I didn’t go to Greece, but I’m just going to jump across the pond to watch Mandy fuck a Frenchman.
“I’m not going to Paris,” I told her.
“We were talking about Ryder,” she said.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Hardly.” She got up and turned to view the sandals from the back. “Girlfriend or no, he’s still in love with you. Even if he’s doing his best impression of a military man, all starched shirts and shiny shoes. I mean, where is the Ryder with the tattoo and the long hair?” The salesclerk came back and squatted down with a few more boxes. Mandy let him help her into a pair of sequined party shoes.
When he’d gone, she walked to the three-way again, turning around in silver sandals. “I never understood why you guys just didn’t fess up to everyone. Will would have come around, and your family would have been thrilled. It’s not too late, you know.”
“Thrilled is an old-lady word,” I told her.
“I’m mature.” She stood back so she had a long view of the sequins. “I look like a Persian concubine.” Only Mandy would know what a Persian concubine looked like.
Bending down, I gathered the cones of tissue paper, slipping them back in the random shoes we’d left on the floor. “We didn’t come clean because Will didn’t want us together.” I had that strange shaky feeling I had gotten at Jamie’s brownstone when I’d been with Luke, the truth bubbling up from a wellspring I didn’t even know was there. Since I’d been home, the urge to tell had been powerful, persistent.
Mandy cocked her hip at me and crinkled her forehead. “What’s wrong, J.J.?” I dropped the tissue paper I was holding. I felt like I was going to cry. “J.J.?”
My voice sounded strange and far away. “It was my fault, Mand.”
She kicked off her heels and picked them up by their straps. “What was?” Behind her, the three-way mirror showed a hundred Mandys at different angles. “What are you talking about?”
I felt the hard ridges of the shoe box dig into my chest. “Will’s accident…” I stopped. Mandy flicked her hair out of her face. Why was I doing this in downtown New Haven, after she’d visited me in Santa Fe and we’d lain in the downstairs hammock, smoking a joint, our legs entangled, Nic in bed, telling each other stories until sunrise. I could have told her then, but I hadn’t ever considered it. “It wasn’t an accident,” I said now.
She sat on the bench next to me. “What wasn’t?” She said it very slowly.
Glancing over her shoulder, I saw the salesclerk in the handbag section, showing a pocketbook to some fat lady. “It was us.” I felt cold. “Ryder and me.”
“What?” She laughed a little. Cello music came out the speakers around us, one of the Mozart sonatas I used to love to play on the piano. “What are you talking about?” I could smell her sweet breath. She never held it against me when I didn’t call. Whenever she picked up the phone, even if we hadn’t talked for six months and she had left messages five different times, she acted like I was the best person in the world. “I’ve missed you J.J.!” she’d say, and I knew I never had to ask forgiveness from her. And then, in the middle of a high-end boutique on Chapel Street on the second Tuesday in July, I told Mandy the whole story.
It happened during the seventh football game of the season, the year I turned sixteen. The night Hamilton played Hopkins, the air smelled like cedar and hickory smoke. Ryder and I were sharing a box of soggy popcorn. My parents were in back of us. It was the fourth quarter. Hamilton was winning thirty-one to seventeen. Will had thrown for 236 yards. He was one play away from breaking the school record. We were stamping our feet on the aluminum bleachers, and it sounded like thunder. An old Queen song was blaring through the loudspeakers. I leaned back against my dad’s legs.
“They’re going to win,” he said. “Why are they pushing him?” My father chewed on the arm of his glasses, intense, like he was when he watched football with Will or spent hours in his office studying film for ESPN. I watched the offensive coordinator hide his face with the clipboard so that the Hopkins’s coach couldn’t read his lips. “What the hell are they doing?” my dad said. “Coach should be setting up an Izzy, not a damn Ozzy. Will’s the quarterback. Just let him throw for one more down.”
I watched Will set up his team for a running play. His blue-and-white uniform was muddy. “I bet he sets up to run, then fakes to pass,” I said to Ryder.
He pretended to brush something off my shoulder and ran his fingers through my hair. “What’ll you bet?” he whispered. But my dad looked over at us, and Ryder let my hair go. It felt thick and heavy down my back.
As the play clock counted down on the scoreboard, I whispered, “I’ll bet you a blow job on the living room couch. Tonight.”
Ryder raised his eyebrows and gave me a huge smile. He was wearing an old Steelers sweatshirt of my father’s, and his hair was long and curly. It was still warm out; he had on the rope huaraches Jamie had brought back from Mexico.
Out on the field, the center hiked the ball to Will, and I watched him dance in place, looking
for an open receiver. My father cupped his hands around his mouth. “Throw it, Will.” The numbers on the scoreboard ticked. I knew the coach didn’t like him handling the ball for more than five seconds, and I watched him jig backward, trying to find a wide receiver.
Then I saw him: Hopkins’s biggest defensive end, a six-foot-six kid who must have weighed three hundred pounds. He plowed through two of Hamilton’s tackles, coming right at Will. Everyone in the stands seemed to stand up at once and yell Will’s name, but the kid came too fast, and just as Will turned, the player leaped off the ground and sailed through the air like a flying stone wall. His helmet landed in the middle of Will’s chest.
The thump of Will’s body hitting the ground with three hundred pounds of muscle and bone on top of him silenced the field. The cheerleaders stopped jumping. The music quit playing. Coaches from both teams threw off their headphones. The kid rolled off Will, clutching his head. Will lay on his back, unmoving. The coaches ran to the line of scrimmage.
Ryder leaped to his feet, cupping his mouth with his hands. “Will,” he yelled. “Will.” His voice echoed against the night sky. Two medics ran over from a waiting ambulance and moved the coaches away. One of them knelt down to unstrap Will’s helmet, and the other pulled out a neck brace. Will’s body was still. Ryder was muttering “No no no,” grabbing at his hair, holding his head in his hands. And then the players formed a circle around Will, their arms stretching across one another’s shoulders like braided rope. Before I could ask him what he was doing, Ryder was taking the bleachers two at a time.
My father’s face was white and still.
“Is he all right?” I asked. He didn’t answer. Jamie had her hand to her mouth, her gaze fixed on the circle of boys around Will. When I turned back, the medics were dragging a gurney across the field. Ryder was running alongside it.
“He’ll be fine,” I heard my father say. “That kid’s tougher than nails.”
I watched them lift the stretcher into the chute and through the double doors of the ambulance.
“Let’s go.” My dad’s voice was gruff. “We’ll follow in the car.” People stepped aside as we came. I watched the ambulance speed off the field, leaving deep tire tracks in the grass.
When we got to the chain-link fence separating the grandstands from the field, Ryder was coming toward us. He reached through and touched my fingers. “He’s conscious. He says his head hurts. But he’s okay.”
* * *
The ER waiting area was packed. The lights were too bright. Ryder and I had to stand while we waited for my parents to come out. Sirens whined outside. There’d been some kind of bus accident, the loudspeaker calling for doctors. People were streaming in and out. The nurse was curt and stressed when I asked about Will.
“What if he’s not all right?” I asked Ryder.
He leaned against the wall, his eyes closed. “He’ll be fine.” His shirt was stained with sweat. “He’s just a show-off.”
I tried to laugh, but nothing came out.
It seemed like a long time before Jamie pushed through doors. I couldn’t read her eyes because they were puffy, her makeup smeared from crying, but when my dad appeared behind her, I knew Will was okay, because the color was back in his face and he was smiling. “He just got out of the MRI machine. He’s getting dressed now.” He put his arm around Jamie. “He has a concussion, but he’s fine. We can leave in a few minutes.”
“A concussion?” I asked.
He cleared his throat. “It’s a brain bruise. Sounds worse than it is.” Jamie put her head on his shoulder. “The doctor said he’ll have to take a week or two off from playing, but that’s it.”
The doors swung open, and Will appeared in a wheelchair with a pretty nurse behind him. He was wearing a plastic hospital bracelet and had a blanket on his lap. “It’s alive,” Ryder said.
Jamie tried to smooth down his hair. “We’re going to sign you out, baby.” She bent down and kissed him. “Thank God you’re okay.”
As soon as they walked away, Will hopped out of the wheelchair. “Man, it’s a zoo back there,” he said. “Ten bucks says I’ll be back to practice by Monday.” He put out his hand to Ryder.
“Never bet against a madman,” Ryder said.
“You scared the shit out of us,” I told him.
Will covered his heart with his hand and let his neck hang as if broken, his eyes rolling in his head. I punched him on the shoulder. It irritated me that we’d all been so worried, the whole school was terrified, Jamie was a mess, my father drove down the highway going a hundred miles an hour, and now he was making jokes. “Quit it,” I told him.
At home, Jamie made Will put a bag of ice on his head, and then he and Ryder went up to his room to do whatever boys did when they hung out, and I stayed in the living room, eating Twizzlers, watching Pretty Woman, and pretending I wasn’t waiting for Ryder to come downstairs. Finally, I heard Will’s television go off.
“You mind if I bail?” I heard Ryder say.
“You going to Hotch’s tomorrow to watch the game?” It was Will’s voice.
“I was thinking about it.”
“I’ll pick you up,” Will said. “We’ll take the convertible.”
“Don’t die on me in your sleep,” Ryder told him.
“Bite me,” I heard Will say back.
Then the door clicked. I’d turned the lights out, and moonlight filtered through the window in the living room. When Ryder reached the foyer, I said his name. He walked over and knelt by the couch. I wrapped my legs around him. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” He kissed me softly. He tasted like M&M’s. I held on to his belt loops and kissed him harder. He pulled away. “What if they wake up?” he whispered, looking at the ceiling. But I couldn’t stop myself. I touched his belt buckle and heard him moan softly; his hand went up my shirt. “Jenny,” he whispered. He was breathing hard. “We can’t.”
Ryder had made me promise we wouldn’t mess around in my house; he was so afraid Will, or my father, would catch us. Our house was his refuge away from his stiff, hard-driving parents, and I knew to lose it would mean to lose everything. “What if Will comes down?” But I was starving for him, and for one dizzying moment, I couldn’t remember why we didn’t want Will to know about us. He was Ryder. Everyone loved him. If Will could have him for a best friend, why couldn’t I have him for a boyfriend?
“Yes, we can.” My voice was edged with defiance. I kept kissing him, and then the chocolate taste was gone, and it was his taste in my mouth. I could taste his neck and throat, his hands, his fingers. I felt him lift me up and lower me onto the couch. I couldn’t breathe; I didn’t want to. He was taking off his T-shirt, and I was kissing his chest. His fingers were undoing my buttons, quickly, frantically, and I was taking off my shirt. I couldn’t get enough of him. I had a flash, a quick white lightning realization that I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. I was tired of being the good girl. His naked body was on top of mine, heavy and hot and hard. Why not? I thought. I’d been thinking that a lot lately, when we were in his backseat, or when he managed to sneak me into his house so his strict parents wouldn’t know. Why shouldn’t we? Some part of me thought if he took away my virginity, he wouldn’t go to college next year and time would stand still. I opened my eyes, the moonlight came across our bodies, and I felt myself moving with him like water, something I couldn’t stop. This would be my first time, here, in the place we said we’d never do it, under this roof, with my brother and my parents sleeping upstairs. Time seemed to fly and melt, and then something hit the wall like a gunshot and the light went on.
Will was standing by the piano, staring down at us. For a moment, no one moved. Ryder and I blinked against the light. Will was wearing blue pajama bottoms and a Hamilton football T-shirt. And then, all at once, Ryder was up, grabbing for his pants, and Will was coming across the living room at him. “You son of a bitch, what the fuck are you doing to my sister?” I knew the look on his face, the one he got before he went ball
istic on the field. “I almost dropped dead tonight—”
“Will—” I was trying desperately to put my shirt back on.
“—and you’re down here nailing my little sister.”
Ryder was backing up, pulling on his jeans. The coffee table was between them. “Hey, c’mon.” He put his hand up to ward off Will. “It’s not what it looks like.”
“Then what the fuck is it?”
“I love her,” Ryder said.
“Yeah?” Will’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah? You love her? The way you loved Caroline Rhodes and Elle Johnstone and Candace McPhee?”
I was trying to get my jeans on. “Will!” I couldn’t believe he was acting as if I were just any other girl. “Stop it.” How dare he come down here and ruin this one thing I had that he didn’t. “Get out,” I heard myself telling him.
He whirled around. “What did you say?” He’d never looked at me like that, a combination of scorn and hatred, as though I’d stolen something from a child. It took the words right out of me. Slowly, he walked toward Ryder.
“She—” Ryder started to say, but Will punched him hard, and Ryder doubled over.
I was up, running at Will. I pushed all my weight at him. “Leave us alone.” His arm went up to fend me off, but he was off-kilter. I watched him stumble back. It wasn’t like Will to lose his balance, and just as he was falling, something in me awakened, something fierce that had been there, maybe, since childhood, since Will was the one everybody loved, the boy wonder, my dad’s favorite, Jamie’s pet. I went for him again, just as he was trying to gain his equilibrium. I pushed him hard, and this time I saw his eyes do something odd, flutter like they were going to roll back. His body twisted at an awkward angle, and he fell backward onto the hearth. He never tried to break his fall with his hands. He lay there unmoving.
Night Blindness Page 15