by Rice, Luanne
“William died,” the doctor said, her eyes wide and steady. “Just last year. We had thirty wonderful years together. How I miss him…”
“I’m sorry,” May said. “I remember how he looked at you. I was only seven, but I’ve never forgotten.” She had told Martin that although her family had overseen so many New England weddings, from Greenwich, Connecticut to Bar Harbor, Maine, some stood out more than others.
The doctor turned her gaze on Martin and took his hand. He felt a powerful current flowing from her fingers into his, but even more, he felt the warmth of her gaze. He blinked, wanting to see her better.
“You’re Martin,” she said.
“Yes, Martin Cartier.”
“I’m so happy to meet you. William was a great hockey fan. We watched you play many times. And now, to know that you’re married to May.”
“Nice to meet you, Dr. Collins,” he said.
“Call me Teddy,” she said. “May, you too. Your mother called me that. Your grandmother always insisted on Theodora, but that’s just the kind of woman she was. Correct and formal on all occasions. Let’s not stand on ceremony around here. Okay?”
“Okay,” May said.
Martin stared at her. She had to be sixty-five years old. Her hair was pure white, swept up and twisted behind her head. She wore pearls at her throat and ears. Her eyes were bright blue, wise and youthful at the same time. Something about her reminded him of his mother. But wouldn’t he want someone young, aggressive, at the top of what had to be a changing field for eye doctors?
“Come on inside,” she said, holding the door so they could walk in.
Through the white door was another world entirely. Instruments and machines were everywhere. A massive microscope sat on one desk, a computer terminal on another. Martin felt as if he had walked into the inner sanctum of a top scientist, not a gentle old lady who wanted them to call her “Teddy.”
“This is my research office,” she explained. “I write most of my papers here at home, and I like to have the equipment I need right here.”
“You do research?” May asked.
“Yes. I teach at Harvard, and I need to stay ahead of my students. My practice is affiliated with Boston Eye Hospital, and I see most of my patients there. But I thought, considering your high profile, Martin, that it would be more private for us to meet here first.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Martin told her.
Teddy didn’t say anything, but she gestured for him to take a seat. May and Martin sat side by side, Teddy across from them. She took a detailed medical history, from childhood diseases to torn ligaments. She paid special attention to allergies and medications, his surgeries to have his tonsils removed and ankles repaired.
“Ever had any head injuries?” she asked.
“About ten thousand,” he said.
“Can you remember them all?”
“Every one.”
“Name them.” She smiled, starting a new page.
Concussions, a fractured skull, broken cheekbones, a shattered eye socket, a detached retina, a dislocated jaw, lacerations of the scalp, forehead, chin, and cheeks. He showed her his scars, and she seemed to admire them. He had a story to go with each one, the memory of various opponents in different cities. But especially, his eyes told the tale of Nils Jorgensen.
“Tell me what brings you to me,” she said.
“Well, my eyesight’s been a little blurry,” he said.
“Blurry?”
“Yes. Not always. Sometimes it’s fine. But sometimes it’s like looking through…” He searched for the right word, as if by calling it the wrong thing he might make his problem worse. “Fog. Or a curtain.”
“Both eyes?”
“It’s worse in the left,” he said, without looking at May.
“When did it start?”
“A while ago,” Martin said, still avoiding May.
“How long? A month, two months?”
“A year,” Martin admitted. “It started then.”
He had first noticed a problem just before the playoffs last year, during a regular season game against the Rangers, a few weeks before he’d met May. It had seemed almost like nothing, especially compared with what had happened three years before, when Nils Jorgensen had clocked him and the world had gone dark.
Martin had had a shattered eye socket and a detached retina. He had missed half a season, but surgery had repaired the damage, and by the next year he was as good as new. At first he had been religious about his eye exams, but once he had his 6/6 vision back, he had started slacking off.
And, until a year ago, his eyes had seemed perfect. But one day his vision had blurred. It happened suddenly, for no apparent reason, and at first he’d thought he had something in his eye. Distracted from the game, he had caught a stick in the side of his head, Lefebre had scored for New York, and Martin had learned a lesson: Keep playing hard whether you can see straight or not.
That wasn’t much of a challenge. Martin had discovered long ago that on the ice he could adapt himself to many things. He had skated through his father’s abandonment, his divorce, his mother’s and Natalie’s deaths. Every day he hit the ice with pain in his ankles and knees—pain his doctors told him would cripple some others. So blurry vision in one eye was no big deal; it had slowed him down just long enough for him to learn to compensate for it.
But now, hearing himself say this had been going on for a year, Martin felt a kick in his stomach. Why had he ignored an obvious problem for so long? What if it had been fixable then, but not now? Teddy made notes without expressing concern or judgment. Martin didn’t want to look at May, to see the dismay reflected in her eyes, but she reached over to touch his knee, and when he looked into her face he saw her smiling with encouragement.
Teddy had him face the eye chart, and he repeated the process he’d gone through with Maurice Pilote. Both eyes okay, right eye okay, left eye nothing.
“All right,” Teddy said. “Come sit with me over here, and I’ll examine your eyes.”
“I can do exercises,” Martin said, crossing the room. “Whatever you tell me. I know I should have started them earlier, said something at my last physical. I guess I thought, if the doc notices, I have a problem. If he doesn’t, I must be okay. I’ve always had six/six vision.”
“That’s right, you’re Canadian.” Teddy was smiling as she gestured for him to take a seat across the exam table from her.
They faced each other with the Haag-Streit slit-lamp biomicroscope between them. Teddy directed him to lean forward, placing his face into a masklike contraption. She explained that she was going to project a beam of light onto and into the eye, thereby getting an optical cross-section under high magnification.
“Can you see what’s wrong?” he asked after she’d been staring for a while.
She chuckled. “Patience.”
“Not my strongest suit.”
“No, I wouldn’t think it would be. I’ve seen you play, remember.”
“Right.”
The air-conditioning hummed. Martin tried to sit still, but he felt anxiety rippling through his body. He felt like jumping up, grabbing May, running out onto the street. He had never been any good at staying in one confined spot—an airplane seat, an easy chair, on the bench—for very long. His muscles ached, and his brain screamed for him to run.
Teddy told him to breathe deeply, and he did. The panic faded out.
“You’ve had some scarring,” she said.
“I have?”
“Yes. I can see where your retina became detached in your left eye. That’s where you suffered the blunt trauma?”
“Madame, I suffer blunt trauma for a living,” Martin said.
“I suppose you do,” Teddy said.
Now she explained that she was going to put drops into his eyes, to dilate his pupils. The drops stung, but he didn’t even flinch. Using the Goldmann aplanation tonometer, she measured the pressure in each eye for glaucoma. Finally, using a high-power
ed camera mounted on the slit-lamp, she took a series of photographs.
Sitting up straight, she smiled at him, indicating that the exam was over. She made a few notes, and Martin glanced over his shoulder at May. She had been sitting quietly across the room, and Martin tried to bring her into focus. The drops and strange light in his eyes had temporarily clouded his sight even more, and all he could see was a dark shape sitting near the window.
“What did you find, Teddy?” he heard May ask.
“Well, there’s evidence of the retinal detachment Martin told me about.”
“That’s the problem, then?” Martin asked, somehow relieved. “That happened almost four years ago—Nils Jorgensen getting me back for some damage I laid on him. I was playing for Vancouver at the time, and I had laser surgery up there. The doc told me he did ‘spot welds,’ and I’d be fine. I was—no problems at all. I got Jorgesen back, he got me again.”
“A sort of endless cycle,” Teddy said.
“Hockey.” Martin shrugged.
Teddy nodded. With her hands folded in front of her, she reminded Martin of how his mother would stand there in the kitchen at Lac Vert, listening to one of his more far-fetched excuses about why he’d been playing hockey with Ray instead of doing his chores or homework.
“That’s the problem?” May asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” Teddy said. “I’d like to do more testing, but I don’t have the equipment here. Can you come to my office at the hospital?”
“Sure,” Martin said. “And just hope the GM doesn’t hear about it.”
“The GM?”
“Translate, Martin,” May said.
“Oh, sorry. General manager of the Bruins. My contract’s up this year, and all I need is for them to find out I’m having eye problems. They’re already giving me a hard time about my ankles. I don’t want to hand them more ammunition for the bargaining table.”
“They won’t hear it from me or my staff,” Teddy said. “But I can’t speak for everyone at the hospital. I’ll tell you what. Come after hours, tomorrow night. Around nine? I’ll see you then.”
“Thank you so much,” May said gratefully.
“Merci bien,” Martin said.
He wished the drops would dissolve from his eyes. He remembered the photographs around the room, and once again he thought of his mother. She had taken great pictures. “Who took the photos on your walls?” he asked the doctor.
“My husband did,” she said.
“He was a photographer?”
“That was his hobby. We loved to travel, especially to islands. We both adored islands. And everywhere we went, we’d find the lighthouse, and William would take its picture.”
“Why lighthouses?” Martin asked.
“Because they’re beautiful in their own right, and because William wanted to honor the work I do with the blind.”
Blind: The word filled Martin with fear. But Teddy just kept talking, telling about the brick lighthouse on the bluff at Gay Head, the striped lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, the stone lighthouse on Block Island, the dark column on Gull Island.
“Photography was his passion,” Teddy said.
“My mother took pictures,” Martin said.
“Perhaps you inherited her talent,” Teddy said.
Martin shook his head. “No, I got my father’s. Playing hockey. Rough stuff.”
“You might be surprised what you’d find out if you ever picked up a camera,” Teddy said.
Martin’s throat closed. His vision, blurred with eye-drops and whatever else was going on, would make it impossible for him to take any pictures. He started to speak, but instead he just shook his head.
“So,” Teddy said. “Tomorrow at my other office.”
“Thank you for doing it that way,” May said.
“It’s the least I can do,” Teddy said. “Martin is like Boston royalty. William wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“My mother would thank you, too,” May said, hugging Martin. “I wish she could have met Martin.”
“I have the feeling she knows all about him,” Teddy said.
Chapter 24
THE SUMMER BREEZE BLEW THROUGH the prison yard and gave the prisoners a little relief from the heat. When Serge looked out through the bars of the yard, he saw a young boy standing there with a baseball glove. It wasn’t visiting day, but even if it was, the person this kid had come to see was no longer there. Serge recognized him as Ricky, Tino’s son.
“What’s he doing?” Serge asked Jim, the guard.
“Sad case,” Jim said. “Comes here every chance he gets.”
“His father’s dead.”
“Tell him that.”
“He doesn’t believe it?”
Jim shook his head. “They had a funeral and everything, but the kid refuses to accept the truth.”
“What does he do?” Serge asked, staring through the bars. The boy was about eight, small and wiry, dressed in a blue T-shirt and Yankees hat. He held his baseball glove on one hand, and he was thumping the ball into it, like a pitcher waiting for a batter to take his stance.
“Stands there. Throws his ball against the wall till I tell him to go home.”
“What about his mother?”
“She’s got trouble all her own.”
“What does he want?”
“Who knows?” Jim asked, watching the boy. “Maybe he’s waiting for his turn to come inside. Like father, like son.”
“That’s a lousy thing to say.”
“I didn’t write the statistics,” Jim said. A skirmish across the yard attracted his attention, and he went to see about it.
Serge stared at the boy. What had he bothered asking Jim for? Serge knew what he was doing: waiting for his father to come play ball with him. Reason didn’t play any part in it. Even after Agnes had banished him and Serge had taken off for the big time, he had always plotted to return for a big father-son reunion.
But something always got in the way: the next game, the next party, the next horse race, the next woman. His kid hadn’t deserved his abandonment. Martin had never stopped waiting and hoping, looking out the window or down the ice, wishing for Serge to come around the corner. Serge knew; no one had to tell him.
“Hey, kid,” Serge called.
The boy was standing across the narrow street, and he pretended not to hear. He just kept throwing his baseball into the glove, staring at it with total and fierce concentration.
“Kid,” Serge said again. “Ricky.”
At that, the boy’s ears perked up, but still he didn’t look over. The ball kept whacking the leather glove, harder and harder.
“Good boy,” Serge said. “Don’t talk to strangers, especially cons.”
Now the kid turned his back, so he wouldn’t see Serge at all. His throwing got more intense.
“You miss your dad,” Serge said. “I miss him, too.”
The kid threw and missed, and the ball went bouncing down the sidewalk and hit a tree. Running for it, the kid might have been fielding a line drive down the left field line. He dug in, slid, came up with the ball. Then he returned to the spot where he had been standing and started throwing the ball into his glove again.
“Your dad was a good man,” Serge said.
The boy said something under his breath, and although Serge couldn’t swear to it, he thought he’d heard a correction: “Is,” the boy said.
“He said you’re a good ball player,” Serge said. “That true?”
Instead of replying, Ricky just wound up and threw the baseball as high as it would go. It exploded out of his hand in a straight shot to the sky, then fell into his glove with a perfect “thwack.”
“Excellent,” Serge said.
Ricky resumed his private game of catch. The day was hot, a beautiful summer day. Serge thought of Lac Vert, wondered where there might be a nice lake or pond around here. Boys should be spending their summer days swimming, playing with friends, not haunting the prison gates for a glimpse of their murder
ed fathers.
Serge looked at the boy and thought of Tino. There was a strong resemblance: the sinewy build, the high cheekbones, the intense dark eyes, the crew-cut hair. How old had Tino been when he had become more interested in the streets than in playing catch?
“My son played a lot of ball,” Serge told him.
The child seemed not to hear.
“He never stopped. He worked and practiced, day in and day out. Now he’s a professional athlete.”
In spite of himself, Ricky glanced over. He broke his rhythm, and the ball rolled away. This time, when he retrieved it, he took a step closer to the bars and started playing again.
“Yeah, he’s one of the greats,” Serge went on. “Next year he’ll win the Stanley Cup, plays hockey for the Boston Bruins.”
Ricky glanced over, as if trying to discern whether Serge was lying or not. He’d probably heard plenty of lies from his father along the way. Serge had become expert at delivering half-truths and non-truths, telling himself it didn’t matter, that what he did was no one’s business, justifying every lie with a reason.
But he was a liar from way back, and he deserved the kid’s suspicious look.
“Martin Cartier,” Serge said. “The Gold Sledgehammer.”
Ricky lifted his eyebrows as if to say “Maybe yes and maybe no.” Then he began throwing the ball against the wall, catching it on one hop.
“He never stopped practicing,” Serge said again. “He never took his eye off the ball, and don’t you, either. Keep your eye on the ball, Ricky. Make your father proud of you.”
Throw, hop, catch. Throw, hop, catch.
The guard came back from the melee, and he stood at the gate and clapped his hands, scaring Ricky. The boy caught his ball and faced the guard with a mixture of fear and defiance in his eyes.
“Go home, now,” Jim said. “Don’t make me call someone to come get you.”
“I’m waiting for my dad.”
“You know you’re not,” Jim said. “You know your father passed away. Now, I’m sorry about that, but you can’t be hanging around here.”
“I’m waiting for him,” Ricky insisted.
Jim shook his head. “You’re gonna make me call the cops to come get you.”