“Have you eaten anything?”
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
He checked his watch. “How about a shower, then?”
Mandy sat on the other side of me. “Good idea.”
“No,” I said too loudly. “If I shower, you’ll make me get dressed. And if I get dressed—”
“You’ll have to go to the funeral,” Nic said. “Where is everyone?”
I thought about my dad in the funeral home, pumped up with embalming fluid, dressed in the same suit he’d worn to Luke’s birthday party the night he found out he had a brain tumor. I closed my eyes again. My exhaustion felt palpable, cement running through my blood.
“Jamie and Luke went for a drive,” Mandy told him. She was staring at the ceiling, probably trying to think of what to say next. “To the cemetery,” she whispered.
“I can hear you,” I said, and we all laughed a little.
“What about … Ryder?” he asked.
“He went home to get his suit. He’ll be back in a little while,” Mandy told him.
The coroner had told us my father hadn’t suffered. I wondered if she told everyone that. She said the disease and radiation had weakened his heart, and that it’d given out. But he’d gone quickly and without pain. “I feel sick,” I said now.
“Let’s get you in the shower,” Nic said.
“Can I just sit here for a few more minutes?”
“Unfortunately,” Mandy said, taking my arm, “we don’t really have a few more minutes.”
They hoisted me up, and together the three of us shuffled to the hallway. I think they knew that if they quit holding on to me, I’d fall down.
We’d made it to the stairs, when the doorbell rang. “Can you take her?” Mandy asked.
“Easy does it,” Nic told me, guiding me up the staircase.
“Sid,” Mandy said below us. “Please come in.”
“Quick,” Nic whispered, “before he tells us he’s in line behind Walt Disney for the cryogenic machine.”
“How do you remember that?”
We got to my room and he sat on my bed. “Sunshine,” he said, and I saw the corners of his mouth fall a little, “I remember everything about you.”
“Nico,” I held on to his arm, “I can’t do this.”
He kissed my fingers. “Wait here.” He went across the hall and into the bathroom. And I looked down at my bedside table, where the legal papers were spread out. I’d sat in Attorney Doherty’s office hours before my dad died. It had only been three days ago, but it seemed like months, and he’d told me that in legal terms a divorce was actually called a “petition of dissolution.” It had sounded so benign, so affable and doable.
I heard Nic turn on the shower in the bathroom. He was so good in a crisis. If the world fell apart, Nic would have it under control. “It’s that white church,” Mandy told someone on the phone downstairs, probably Freddie, “on the green.”
The lawyer was an older man and his bow tie had been slightly crooked. He had drawn up the papers for me, and I had felt elated, a little empty, but light. I’d bought myself a silver bracelet from a sidewalk stand on my way home, but then I had given it to a homeless woman on Chapel Street.
But now, panic had set in. I wanted to get in the car with Nic, or on a plane, and I wanted him to take me back out west, to the loft on Iron Works Road.
I picked up a Mickey Mouse pen from the bedside table. My dad had given it to me with a matching diary when I was ten. The diary had a lock and key. The memory of it brought a rush of grief. When Nic came back into my room, I was curled up on my bed, holding Bear to my chest. “Hey,” he sat next to me, “you all right?”
“I really can’t do this.”
“I found a clean towel, and the shower’s running.”
I touched the hard line of his jaw. “I’m so sorry.”
He watched me, that half smile playing on his face. “For what?”
“Everything. This summer. Greece.”
But Nico touched his fingers to my lips. “No sorrys. We’ve got to get you showered and dressed. We’ll talk about everything else later.”
But I think I already know, I wanted to tell him. I sat across from a little man in a bow tie. Nico took my hands and pulled me to sitting. “Arms up,” he said. Like a parent, he slipped off my T-shirt, and I sat there, bare-chested. As he slipped off my shorts, I thought how he was like an eclipse; he had the power to erase everything. He was a hole I could fall into. I wanted him to look at me; I wanted him to put his hands on my breasts. I wanted him to kiss me. It would take away the funeral. None of this would exist. He slipped his arms under mine and eased me up so that I was standing, naked, in front of him. “Okay.” His voice was hoarse. “Let’s get you in the shower.”
But neither of us moved. His eyes had that lazy look, and next to the black shirt, they appeared navy blue, and I saw him taking me to bed that first night so many years ago in Boulder, how I’d let myself be led as a shadow is led. I hadn’t needed to think. This, I remembered thinking as he’d kissed my neck, my shoulders, is what power looks like. This black-haired man.
“Nic,” I whispered. His breath was coming hard. I could hear Mandy downstairs talking to Sid. Jamie and Luke were probably putting Hershey’s Kisses on Will’s headstone so he’d know they’d been there. Ryder would be back soon with his clothes. I touched Nic’s lips with my fingertips. When he kissed me, I could feel that drowning sensation starting to take over. Memory fell back. His mouth was on my neck, his hands on the small of my back. And then I heard Will’s voice, as if he were in the room. All ye, all ye! Come home, be free! Something he used to yell out when we were playing hide-and-seek as kids and he couldn’t find me. I opened my eyes. I saw again my childhood room, the piano awards on the walls, Bear. And the grief about my father arrived suddenly and acutely, like a breaking wave out on Ocean View Beach, where Will, Ryder, and I used to try to surf. “If you hold sadness off,” Luke had told me when we were practicing piano one afternoon, “it comes back a thousandfold and eats you up inside. You got to feel it, put it in those ivory keys.” I quit kissing Nic and held my hand to his chest. He was watching me, waiting.
Behind us, the sun was bathing the goalposts in light. And I stepped back, away from him. Then I turned and walked across the hall. Nic followed me. He sat waiting for me on the closed toilet seat with a fresh towel while I showered behind the wavy glass.
36
When we stepped into the church’s foyer, the organ started playing Mendelssohn’s “On Wings of Song.” Hazy sunlight filtered through the church’s windows, and as we neared the parish hall door, I saw that the congregation was packed to standing room only. It smelled of heat and perfume, and across the nave, the casket shined. “I want to go home,” I told Jamie, but she must not have heard me. She just kept walking forward on those high, high heels, her updo flawless and her perfectly tailored black suit belying her unending grief.
As we walked, people made way for us, I felt Nic’s hand on my back, and I kept my fingers on Jamie’s arm, trying not to look at anyone. But, my eyes kept traveling to familiar faces: staff members from A Will to Live, coaches my dad had been buddies with, ESPN commentators, a whole pew of his brothers, Mandy’s parents, all our neighbors from North Parker, and a few boys from Hamilton who had played football with Will. They were all dressed up now and had receding hairlines. I wondered for the millionth time what Will would have looked like if he’d lived.
Before I turned into the pew, I glanced back. I thought maybe somehow I’d see Hadley, miraculously back from Europe. Instead, I saw Dr. Griffith, and this time I was almost positive it was him, that sickle-shaped scar bright in the church light. Then he ducked into a row and I lost sight of him.
Starflower, Fred, Mandy, and Ryder were in the second pew already. I felt solitary and small, sitting on that long wooden bench between Nic and Jamie. Her hand was fragile in mine.
The organ finished “On Wings of Song,” and I looked at that
solid-cherry casket Luke and my mother had picked out a few days before. The program read, Sterling Will Reilly: Father of Jensen Reilly Ledakis and Will James Reilly, deceased. I folded it in half. I hadn’t slept, and I had that wavy, disassociated feeling that I might pass out.
Just when the silence became deafening, Luke came from behind the altar and stood at the pulpit dressed in a simple white robe. “It’s often said that when someone dies from cancer,” he began, “they’ve lost the battle. In my friend Sterling Reilly’s case, I disagree.” A honey-colored Steinway sat behind him near the choir stalls. “He fought the good fight for four months.” The piano was on wheels. It seemed odd for a church to have a piano when there was already an organ. “And when he went gently into the night last Thursday, it wasn’t because he’d been beaten, but because he had done what he needed to do in this world: He enriched lives; he taught us and encouraged us; he showed us how to love unconditionally.” Luke stared out at the congregation. “Perhaps you feel you have lost a friend, a colleague, a coach, a mentor.” He caught my eye. “Perhaps you have lost the one person who said you could do anything. Who never doubted you, but gave you wings to go anywhere and do anything.” The congregation shifted. I heard people crying. “You have not lost,” he said. “You have gained by knowing him. He is with us still.”
And then he began singing “Amazing Grace.” He sang it a cappella and the words rang out, filling the church. Jamie collapsed beside me. I slipped my fingers through hers and she put her head on my shoulder and cried.
The rest of the service was a blur. I was there, but I wasn’t. Sid told stories about A Will to Live and how many kids’ lives my dad had touched. My father’s old Steelers coach talked about his sportsmanship and the positive psychology of his game; someone who worked with him at ESPN read a tribute he’d started writing when he found out my dad was sick. I knew later I would want to remember everything they said; I would want to go over and over it. Here were the people who had known my father best, talking about what kind of man he was, but my mind was slipping around. And then no one else was speaking. Luke was stepping back to the pulpit to talk about the reception at the foundation following the burial. Before he was finished, I felt myself rise. “Jensen,” Jamie said. “What on earth—” We had agreed not to speak, that it was too emotional, but without knowing quite what I was doing, I went past her and into the aisle. Luke and I locked eyes. “I had it rolled in for you, baby girl,” he said when I reached the altar, “just for you.”
I sat at the piano, running my fingers over the keys. The church fell silent, and I pretended Luke and I were alone in Woolsey Hall. My fingers found the notes. I felt my feet move to the pedals. And then I began to play, slowly at first, hesitantly, until, after the first few notes, I was playing with my eyes closed, the song flowing through my fingers as though for thirteen years I’d never stopped playing. I played the song I hadn’t been able to play at Will’s funeral: “Reverie.” It lasted five and a half minutes. And for 330 seconds, I was absolutely positive my father was with me.
37
I woke to thunder rumbling over the house. Lying in bed with my eyes closed, it took a minute to remember the endless stream of people at the reception at A Will to Live. At some point during the evening, I’d realized Jamie wasn’t next to me, and I’d found her in the rec room, shoes kicked off, suit jacket flung over a rocking horse, playing Ping-Pong with some kids from the foundation.
Outside my window, storm clouds were moving across a nickel-colored sky. And I wondered how long Nic had been out of bed; it was rare for him to get up first. And then I saw those papers on my bedside table, spread out in a fan—the petition of dissolution. I knew, in the same way I knew when the phone was going to ring or that rain was coming, that he had seen them.
The world felt drained of color. I threw a sweatshirt over my tank top and wandered downstairs. Luke was at the sink, washing dishes. My mom was drinking coffee at the kitchen table, her pale yellow robe pulled tightly around her, her hair back in a messy ponytail. Grief had stripped her face of color, and in shades of alabaster, she was more beautiful than I’d ever seen her.
“Hi, sleepyhead,” she said.
I sat across from her, and she reached over to squeeze my fingers. Her hands felt more substantial today, and she managed a little smile.
“Beautiful playing yesterday,” Luke said. He set an espresso in front of me.
“Oh, sweetheart.” My mother’s eyes filled with tears. “I wish you father could have seen you. He always loved watching you play the piano.” Luke went back to washing dishes. “You know, I always thought he’d live forever.”
Luke laughed a little. “He had that way about him, didn’t he?”
“I remember when we met, he seemed too good to be true.” Jamie let go of my hand and pushed a stray hair out of her eyes. “And when it lasted day after day, it just seemed like a miracle to me.”
“We were lucky we had him for as long as we did.” Luke turned off the water and started drying.
The coffee tasted good. Everything Luke made tasted two hundred times better than whatever anyone else made.
Jamie was still looking at me. “It’s official. The agency is all Piers’s.”
I was about to take another sip of my coffee, but I stopped. “Wow, I guess you were serious.”
Luke was grinning.
“It was time.” My mother smiled. “Farewell to the anorexics.”
“And to crazy cameramen,” Luke added. “Your mother’s quite the businesswoman. A Will to Live won’t know what hit them.”
I realized this was true.
Nic had slipped in and was standing in the doorway in his jeans and a rumpled T-shirt. My mother glanced at him. “Darling, you’re not going to steal her away too soon, are you?”
He watched me, his expression unreadable. And I knew. He must have seen the papers. They were right there on the table. He couldn’t have missed them.
“I need to shower,” I said quietly.
I stood in the hot water, trying to think of what to say to Nic, but instead I found myself thinking back to those moments after we’d all filed out of the church.
“Mand,” I’d said on our way out. “Can you grab the guest book, please?”
She’d been signaling to the driver, trying to get him to clear a path for us. “Don’t worry about it, J.J. I’m sure someone will bring it over to the house later.”
“No.” I had touched her arm. “I need it now. Please.”
She was gone and back before we’d reached the limo. “I got it.”
We’d sat in the backseat, with Nic, Ryder, Luke, and my mother across from us. The book had been cool in my hands. I flipped through the pages while we moved slowly behind the hearse.
“Is she okay?” I heard my mother say.
I kept going through the pages, but there were so many names.
“Who are you looking for?” Nic asked.
“The guy who ran down the steps as we were leaving. I saw him when we first got there. It was creepy, like he was waiting for me.”
Mandy poked me in the side. “We were all waiting for you.” I ignored her and kept searching. “Do you know him?” Her words were slow and measured, as if she were talking to a child.
“Yeah, I think so.”
A few minutes later, we pulled through the gates of the cemetery. The driver opened the door and bright sunlight poured in, but I kept flipping through the guest book.
“Jensen.” I barely heard Nic’s voice. “We’re here. You have to get out.”
He slipped out of the limo and everyone followed. Ryder was about to slide out, when I finally found what I was looking for. “It was him,” I said.
Ryder was still sitting there. “Who?”
“Ron Griffith. I thought that’s who it was.”
“The doctor?” His face had gone white. We walked to the grave site in silence.
I shut off the shower now, toweled off and threw on the same jeans and swe
ater I’d changed into after everyone left the night before.
When I got downstairs, Jamie and Luke were sitting close to each other on the couch, not speaking. It reminded me of when Will died, when we didn’t talk for an entire day after his funeral. Luke had told me later that the Yupik Eskimo culture didn’t allow people to speak of their dead. I wondered, vaguely, if we’d created our own society of grief. “Your husband went outside.” Luke motioned to the front door. “Sounds like he’s on his way out of town soon.” He raised his eyebrows.
Nic was sitting on the front steps, holding an empty coffee mug.
I sat next to him. “Hey, you,” I said. Out on the road, a boy and a girl were riding their bikes, circling around and around, the streamers on the handlebars standing straight out in the wind. I slipped my hand through Nic’s and leaned against him.
“I’m not stupid, J.,” he said quietly. “I knew it before you did.” His face was like stone, but I saw that quick twitch in his jaw. He wouldn’t yell. It was one of the things I loved and hated about him.
After a while, I said, “I was painting Will.” The girl stood up on her bike and her blond hair flew out behind her. “Those self-portraits were really Will. That’s why they sucked so bad.”
“They didn’t suck.” He kept watching the kids. Eventually, he said, “I told myself when I met you that you’d break my heart.”
I watched the kids ride off, leaving the street empty. It started to drizzle, but we kept sitting there. “I wish I’d known him better,” Nic said.
“My dad?”
He nodded. “I’m an asshole.”
I buried my face in his shoulder. No matter how many times we washed his shirts, they still smelled like glaze. I knew that later it might come, the yelling, the fights over the separation, the horrible words between us, but right now there was a certain peace. In a way, I felt closer to him than I had since we’d met. I pressed my shoulder against him. “You’re not an asshole. You’re a big shot. You’re so big, I could stand on your shoulders and see the whole world.”
Night Blindness Page 27