Night Blindness

by Susan Strecker

  I laughed. “Did you think maraschinos are really bright red?” I picked up one. “Here they are, in their natural glory.” I dropped it, stem and all, in my mouth and chewed. Seconds later, I held the stem between my teeth. I’d tied it in a knot.

  “No wonder Ryder is in love with you,” she said.

  I choked on the pit. “I’d better make us a pitcher.”

  I finished making the drinks, handed one to her, then led her through the kitchen door to the deck. When she took a sip, I saw her hands were shaking. She rested her glass on the arm of the glider. I was glad I was on the side where the initials were carved. The Eiffel Tower and the tiny stethoscope on her bracelet dangled off her wrist. “How long have you been sleeping with him?” she asked nonchalantly. I thought for sure bourbon would shoot out of my mouth and I’d cover her perfect white pants with regurgitated alcohol. “You can tell me,” she said. “He’s not my boyfriend anymore.” She rattled ice in her glass. “I got tired of going to bed every night with him, when he so clearly wanted to be with someone else.”

  My mind flashed back to that night in his driveway when I saw her heels in the living room. Since then, I’d been imagining him picking her underwear off his floor, making her dinner, washing the sheets after they’d made a mess the night before. I couldn’t believe anyone would ever leave him.

  “Did you know this was our second go-around?” She set her drink down without waiting for me to answer. “Did he tell you why we broke up the first time?”

  The girl looked just like you. “Not really.” I took another sip.

  She sat stock-still. The tips of her ears were red. “That son of a bitch never told me about you,” she said evenly. “I knew his best friend died when they were kids, but I had to piece it together from there. He never even told me William had a sister.”

  “Will,” I said. “His name was Will.”

  “Whatever.” She waved me off. Her dismissal made me feel invisible. “My point is, for all the stories I heard about Will”—she said his name mockingly—“how the two of them cut off the cat’s whiskers to see if it would bump into things, and how they colored mustaches on their faces with blue permanent marker on Halloween, he—”

  “It was purple,” I said. She looked at me like monkeys might fly out of my ass. “The Sharpie they used—it was purple, and they had to sit for their class pictures with these ridiculous drawn mustaches. Will’s was short and full like Hitler’s, and Ryder’s was a Wild West handlebar.”

  “Exactly,” she said, as if I was her star witness and had just made the case for her. “I’ve heard every story about the two of them, but he never once mentioned you.”

  “He must not have thought it was important.” Was it the same reason I’d never told Nic about Ryder?

  “Oh, that’s bullshit, and you know it. Now that I know who you are, I think”—she finished her drink—“that you two would still be together if not for Will.” She reached for the pitcher.

  So he’d told her. He’d told Dale Novak what we’d done. I swallowed hard to settle my stomach. I watched her fill her empty glass.

  “I get it: It must have been terrible for Ryder to come downstairs in the middle of the night to get a drink and see his best friend having a seizure on the floor.” Seizure? There was no seizure. “But I still don’t know why it broke up the two of you. Every time he told me the story, I felt like he was leaving something out.” Okay, so he didn’t tell her. I filled my glass. “Like there was something about that night he didn’t want me to know.” She glanced at me.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said.

  She shook her head, as if snapping out of a trance. “What was I saying? Oh, when Ryder cheated on me the last time—”

  “He didn’t cheat on you this time,” I said sharply.

  “Yeah.” She sipped her drink. “Sure. Anyway, he said the girl from the conference reminded him of someone he’d never gotten over. I finally figured out that someone was you.” A car door slammed in the distance. “Is that him?” she asked, her voice rising with each word. “Do you two have a date?”

  I shook my head. “That didn’t come from our driveway.”

  “Oh, well, I know he’s off today.” She took a long sip of her drink. When she spoke again, her tone was softer. “Your dad is very sweet.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  She stretched out her legs. “I didn’t know what to expect when I met him,” she said. “I mean, of course I knew who he was; everyone knows him … My dad was a garbage man.” She cleared her throat. “Sanitation worker. Isn’t that funny?” She glanced quickly at me, and I guessed I wasn’t supposed to think it was funny at all. She wiped her hand across her nose. “I’m from Nebraska. My father was so … angry, like someone had forced him into it and there was nothing he could do.” She touched the cherry in her drink. “He could have gone to college, for one.” Dale is from Nebraska? I pictured her shooting out of the womb a grown woman who had lived all her life at Yale. “I knew from the time I was seven I was going to be a doctor. And marry one.” She took the cherry out of her glass and held it up. Her second drink was already half-done. But so was mine. “I used to think Ryder was the whole package. Even after his first…” She looked around the yard again, as if a wooden picnic table and old goalposts would fill in the blank. “Mistake.”

  “He didn’t make a mistake this time.” I sat up straighter, already tired of defending myself for something I hadn’t done. Might as well fuck him, I heard Mandy say, if you’re going to get blamed for it anyway.

  Dale glared at me, still holding that gray cherry in her hand. “You don’t have to gloat. You won, okay?”

  I tucked my knees up and rested my chin on them. “Tell me again why you’re here.” If she’d already broken up with him, why did I get the feeling she was here to pee a circle around him.

  She put the cherry back in her drink and wiped her hand on her linen pants. Drunk, I thought, she’s definitely drunk. Dale grabbed the arm of the glider and started to stand, but she lost her balance and sat heavily. Her cheeks were flushed, and those ironed linen pants were wrinkled. “I should go,” she said, but she didn’t move. “I shouldn’t have had a drink on an empty stomach.”

  “I don’t think you should drive.” I was feeling sort of light-headed myself; everything was a little unfocused. I picked up the pitcher and topped off our drinks. “So you might as well have another.”

  “I’m not used to this,” she said, holding up her glass.

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  One of the bright orange-and-blue birds Jamie liked landed in a tree in front of us. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “I’m just so stupid.” She picked up the cherry again and popped it in her mouth. I liked her much better drunk. “I mean, he must have told me a thousand times that Sterling was like a father to him. And then you showed up in my office with your forty-seven color-coded typed questions.”

  “So?” I said defensively. “I’d think you’d have appreciated that.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that. I thought it was wonderful you were so prepared. Most people can’t even pronounce the names of the diseases I treat. It’s just that I knew right away you were the girl Ryder never got over. And God did I hate you.”

  “I still hate you,” I said quickly.

  We both started laughing.

  “To hatred.” I raised my glass, and we drank.

  “Seriously.” She stretched her arms over her head. “Why on earth would you hate me?”

  “Uh, because you look like you were born in a gym, and you went to UPenn, and you’re an amazing doctor. And the whole time Ryder was telling us that he worked with the best radiation oncologist ever, he referred to you as Dale Novak. He purposely made me think you were a guy. A fat, balding guy.”

  “Well, he failed to tell me that there was a little sister, never mind that she was all grown up and beautiful.”

  I held the bottom of my stained T-shirt. “I look like I should be washing winds
hields at the corner of Chapel and York.”

  “You intimidate the shit out of me.”

  “Me? I didn’t even wash my hair today.” I pulled at my tangled curls.

  “That’s my point. You look good without trying.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ve already established that we hate each other.” Her glass was empty. “Now what?”

  “How about you tell me every annoying habit Ryder has, so I don’t miss him so much.” When she blinked, sunlight caught her eye. There was a sadness there I hadn’t seen before.

  “Sometimes he chews with his mouth open.”

  “Is that the best you can do? I was hoping for a doozy. I mean, I know he steals the covers, but that’s really not enough.”

  I felt my chest tighten. “I haven’t slept in the same bed with him since we were teenagers.” Her eyes narrowed, like she was deciding something. “I swear.” I crossed my heart.

  “Really.” She said it like a statement.

  “Yeah.” I felt exhausted, like I did sometimes when I drank during the day with Hadley at gallery parties. “Really.” The deck needed painting. All of a sudden, I started to cry. It came out of nowhere. Painting the deck was something my dad would have had done at the beginning of summer. He’d call the right people, and they’d take care of it, and the deck would be brand-new again. “I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I was thinking about my dad. I’m just so relieved he’s okay that sometimes I want to bawl.”

  “Oh, Jenny,” she said, and I didn’t correct her. “We’re a fine fucking pair.”

  A fuzziness had settled in my stomach. It made the crying seem okay; it made Dale’s being there seem like the most normal thing in the world. “I think we’d better eat something,” I told her.

  “This is not turning out at all like I thought it would.” She slipped her heels off, and they lay sort of helter-skelter on the deck.

  “What did you think it would be like?”

  “I thought I’d leave really hating you,” she said. “But now I get it.”

  She seemed like an entirely different person as I watched her lean back and close her eyes.

  “Get what?”

  “That you and Ryder are supposed to be together.”

  “I’m married.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “Do you ever wish you could have a do-over?”

  “All the time. But what’s done is done.”

  She emptied the pitcher into our glasses. “The fuck it is.” I startled at her use of a curse word. “I’m still looking for my soul mate. You found yours in high school. Now go get him.”

  31

  When I came downstairs after my drunk midafternoon nap, the house felt stagnant and eerie. Dale’s perfume lingered in the foyer. I was just about to go into the kitchen to get something to eat, when through the living room I saw my father sitting in the leather easy chair in his office, still in his boating clothes. He looked like he was waiting for someone. “Hey,” I said. I leaned against the doorjamb.

  “Come on in here, Whobaby.”

  I noticed then that his face was serious, and I felt my stomach drop. I sat across from him and couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “Where’s Jamie?” I asked. I felt hungover and cotton-mouthed from my surreal lunch with Dale.

  “She ran out to the garden shop.” He fiddled with his glasses for a moment. “Accidents happen, Jensen.”

  I stared at the trophies along the far wall. They were dusty, and I had an overwhelming urge to clean them. It was an inane thought, but it kept me from thinking about the horrible rush in my ears. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm was ringing.

  He leaned forward. “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”

  “I tried telling Mommy.” My voice sounded withered. “Right after.”

  He sucked in a breath. “Aw, Whobaby.” He folded his hands in his lap. They were so familiar, hands I’d known all my life, with that one crooked knuckle and the square, thick fingers. The alarm stopped.

  “You know that kid from Hopkins had a full ride to Notre Dame, like your brother?” He was staring past me, out the window. “Never played ball again.” I understood he was telling me this so I would know someone else shared my guilt. “Ended up at Quinnipiac.”

  And just then, I realized it. “You don’t hate me.”

  “Of course I don’t hate you.”

  I’d told him the truth, and he still loved me. The thought was miraculous.

  “I knew something happened.” He took his glasses off and put them back on. “A dad knows.” His blue eyes were infused with a kind of wisdom I’d never seen before, or maybe I hadn’t noticed. “I tried to find ways to ask before you left for Andover. And on the phone all those Sundays. And whenever we went out to Colorado and Santa Fe. I kept thinking the words in my head, Whobaby, but I never could get them out.” I stared at him. Of course he’d known. How could he not have? “That’s my fault, you see? If I’d only asked what had happened, what had made you so sad, so different, I could have told you what you needed to hear.” He leaned toward me again. “Now you listen to me. You didn’t take Will from us.” My head felt light, strange. “Do you understand? We can’t know what happened. Maybe there’s a God, like Luke says, who turns that big wheel in the sky, and when our time is up, it’s up.” He watched me. “So maybe it doesn’t matter what happened, Whobaby. Do you understand that?”

  I couldn’t answer.

  “Did you mean to do what you did to Will?” His words seemed to echo in the still room. I thought about the question. At first it seemed to make no sense. And then I shook my head. He put his hand behind his ear. “I can’t hear you.”

  “No,” I said. The word sounded tiny.

  “No, what?” He was using his coaching voice, the voice he used to motivate a player.

  “No, I didn’t mean to.”

  “Didn’t mean to what?” I sat there. The words went silent inside me. I couldn’t think how to say them aloud. “Because intent is everything,” he said.

  I nodded mutely. I had never really thought about intent. All those years of guilt and hiding, of shame and self-hatred, I had never stopped to think that it hadn’t ever been my intent to hurt my brother.

  “Sixteen-year-olds get mad at their older brothers, don’t they?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned forward and watched me. “Haven’t younger sisters been pushing older brothers for centuries?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I said softly.

  “Didn’t mean to what?” he asked again, his voice gentler now.

  “I didn’t mean to…” My voice caught. I stumbled over the words, but there was my father, watching me, and I understood that I had to say them out loud. “I didn’t mean to, Daddy, please.” And then I was across the room, on his lap, burying my face in his chest, in his salt and fresh air smell. “I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.” I was crying again, but this time it was harder, a different cry than how I’d cried with Dale.

  He put his arm around me. “That a girl,” he said, nestling me closer. “Get it all out.”

  I was sobbing so hard, I couldn’t see, and he was rocking me, his arms around me. “But I never came home.”

  “That doesn’t matter now.”

  “I just left you here all alone.”

  “It’s okay. You’re here now.” I heard him saying my name, heard him telling me it wasn’t my fault, and I felt thirteen years of unspoken confessions and wordless apologies escape in my tears.

  Sometime after dusk, Jamie came home and sat next to us. I felt her rubbing my back, and I felt my father lift one arm and put it around her. I knew he’d told her, too. And they still loved me.

  I had been forgiven.

  32

  Jamie liked first appointments of the day, so we sped through town at 7:45 A.M. to the Chapel Street Spa. She drove erratically, like she always did, with one foot on the gas and the other
on the brake, weaving in and out of traffic as though a victim to it rather than a driver. “You were right,” she said suddenly. “I was keeping a secret, but not the one you thought.”

  I looked over at her. I had a horrible feeling that she was sick and all those secret phone calls were to a doctor. Her silk blouse slipped down, revealing a skinny collarbone that looked almost breakable. “What is it?”

  She sat up straighter in the driver’s seat. “I’m selling my interest in the agency to Piers. I’m getting out of the modeling industry.” Glancing in the rearview mirror, she dived into the next lane. “I’m going to join the staff of A Will to Live.” She spoke quickly. “All the news about what modeling does to little girls, the anorexia, and the body-dysmorphic issues.” She looked at me. “I’m going to run self-esteem classes. Do you know that sixty percent of girls will quit an activity they love because of the way they look?”

  I wouldn’t have been more surprised if she’d told me she was going to clown college. “Why now?” I tried to keep my voice level so it wouldn’t sound like an accusation.

  “I started thinking about it when your father got sick. I wanted to do something that would let me spend more time with him.” She cut someone off, and the guy honked and flipped her off. But she didn’t notice.

  “Is that what all the secret phone calls and random meetings have been about? Selling your business?” She nodded but didn’t speak. “But he’s in remission now. Are you sure you still want to do it?”

  “Oh yes, now more than ever. Think how great it’ll be for both Daddy and me to be at the foundation.” She put on her blinker but didn’t change lanes. “I can’t get back those wasted years. But I can make sure I spend the next thirty doing the right thing.”

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Oh, Jensen. After Will, I was no mother to you at all. Maybe it’s not too late for me to help some other little girl.”

  “Help her, or turn her into what I never was?”

  “What does that even mean?” She watched me so long, I thought she was going to drive off the road.