Mrs. Magliano makes coffee. Hands everyone a mug. Harvey asks the police several times if they’ll take the handcuffs off before they agree.
“You gonna pay for the mess you made?” one of the cops says to Jason.
Jason nods. “Yes, sir. I am.”
“You better, because if Mr. and Mrs. Magliano file charges, most likely you’re headed back to prison. You know that, right?”
Jason nods.
“And it’ll be a longer stretch than you did the first time,” the cop adds.
Jason keeps his head low but then raises his eyes. “You the judge now, too, Sheriff?”
“What a piece of work,” one of the other cops says, shaking his head.
Harvey is standing nearby with her arms crossed. “Please don’t speak to my dad like that. Even if he is in the wrong, it’s not right.”
The cop apologizes. Calls her miss. Jason can’t believe how grown up she sounds.
“No one wants anyone to go to jail,” Mrs. Magliano interrupts. “Harvey, if your dad agrees here and now to pay for all the damages, then we’ll consider the matter over and done with.”
Harvey says how grateful she is and how sorry they are for what happened.
“I’m sure my daughter is sorry too,” Mrs. Magliano says. “For whatever her part was in this.”
Harvey can tell Jordan has been crying, because her makeup is ruined.
After the police leave, Mrs. Magliano sits opposite Jason in a patio chair. Mr. Magliano is there too, standing to one side with his arms crossed. It’s almost dark, and insects are spinning chaotically around the outdoor lights.
“Oh my God, what a mess, huh?” Mrs. Magliano says, but in a friendly way.
“The truth is,” she goes on, “Jordan is on probation right now for shoplifting and driving a motor vehicle without a license, and she’s also in major frickin’ trouble at school. So the deal is, in return for us not pressing charges, you pay for the damage you did to my husband’s van and promise not to report this to the school.”
Jason sips his coffee. Looks at his daughter’s black eye. Promises he won’t say a word.
“Because if one more parent makes a written complaint against Jordan at school,” Mrs. Magliano continues, “she’ll be expelled.”
A FEW NIGHTS later, Harvey woke up in the early hours to get a glass of water, and heard noises coming from Jason’s bedroom.
It wasn’t the first time she’d heard him crying.
A week after that, watching her father pore over bills for the damage he had done to the Magliano van, Harvey had an idea, and spent the weekend at her computer, reading through old newspaper articles in search of a name.
Three nights later, while Jason was at work, Harvey psyched herself up and made the call.
“Yes? Hello?”
“Oh, hello,” Harvey said. “May I please speak with Vincent?”
“You wanna speak with Vinnie? Who is this, please?”
“My name is Harvey.”
“If you’re selling something, we’re not interested, okay? We don’t need nothing.”
“I’m not selling anything.”
“What do you want to speak to my son for then?”
“Is he there?”
“Are you from the library?
“No.”
“You sound like the woman from the library.”
“I would like to speak to your son, if that’s okay.”
“What it’s about?”
“I’d rather speak to him first, if that’s okay.”
“I hope this isn’t bad news. We don’t need any bad news.”
“It’s not bad news, but I’d like to speak with him.”
“He’s downstairs. I gotta call him from the basement.”
“I don’t mind.”
“It’ll take him a while to get up here.”
“I can wait.”
“He’s blind, you know. Did you know that? Did you know my son is blind?”
XLII
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY there was a knock on the door. Harvey looked through the peephole and saw a woman brushing her adult son’s hair with one hand.
Harvey had expected him to look more dangerous. But the blind man was short, with a tight, round belly and a pockmarked face. He had on dark glasses and was steadied at the elbow by his mother.
“Who is it?” Jason shouted from the bedroom. “Mrs. Gonzales?”
Vincent’s mother guided her son over the doorstep, and Harvey invited them to sit down. Jason must have heard voices, because the toilet flushed and he came rushing out with a motorcycle magazine under his arm.
“What’s going on, Harvey? Who are these people?”
“You haven’t told him?” Vincent’s mother said. “He doesn’t know we’re here?”
Vincent let out a small laugh, then removed his dark glasses to reveal a delicate but quick motion under his eyelids, like small creatures fluttering under silk.
Harvey bit her lip. “This is Vincent, Dad.”
“Who?”
“The guy you fought with when you were nineteen.”
Jason went pale, started to back away.
“C’mon, let’s go,” the blind man’s mother said, getting up. “This was a bad idea.”
Vincent put his glasses back on, then moved his hands around in the air.
“Your daughter should have told you!” she snapped at Jason. “We’re leaving, and we don’t want any trouble. My son is blind.”
Jason turned to Harvey. “This is the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
But Harvey was defiant. “You need to deal, Dad,” she said firmly. “Or you’ll always be angry, and I love you too much to let that happen.”
Jason shook his head. “What do you know? You don’t know anything.”
“I know a lot actually, from things I read on the Internet . . .”
Jason didn’t want to hear it, but Harvey kept going. “One article said if you apologize for what happened and make up and face it head-on, you’ll feel better in the long run. I’m serious. All you have to do is apologize.”
The blind man turned his head slowly in the general direction of Jason. “I’m sorry,” he said, fingering his dark glasses. “I’m so very sorry.”
“Not you!” barked his mother. “Harvey was talking to her father!”
Then she took her son’s arm to leave.
“Don’t go,” Harvey said. “My dad cries at night. I hear him.”
Jason threw his arms in the air. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Then the blind man spoke up. “Don’t be mad at her! Be mad at me if you want, but don’t be mad at her. She’s trying to help us. She’s being a good person.”
“I went to jail because of you,” Jason said.
Vincent removed his glasses again, to show them what remained of his eyes. “And I haven’t seen anything since that night because of you.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then Jason spoke. “What the hell then, I guess I’m sorry too.” Then he turned to his daughter. “Satisfied now?”
“That’s good, Dad,” she said. “It’s a great start.”
“I wasn’t expecting this on a Saturday morning. You should have told me they were coming.”
“Well, we’re here now,” Vincent’s mother said. “Harvey begged us to come, and we came.”
When they were sitting on the couch again, Jason took a chair from the dining table and sat opposite the blind man’s mother.
Harvey put out some snacks and cold drinks, and they fell naturally into conversation. Turned out Vincent had also given up drinking. His mother had gotten him treatment after he fell down the basement stairs one morning before she was up.
As Harvey refilled everyone’s glass, Jason told the story of his motorcycle accident and the fruitless search for work in the city.
The blind man had not worked because there was nothing he could do. He was not married, but sometimes had dates with women, most of them divorced, whom hi
s mother met at the beauty parlor in Bethpage. She would have to drive him there and pick him up. When they got home, she’d make hot tea, ask what the woman was like, if she had any kids, whether Vincent thought they might see each other again.
Mostly though, his life consisted of just sitting, listening to his mother or the TV. In the early days he used to cry, he said, really bawl, and move his hands around in the air, which meant he wanted to be touched.
His mother took him shopping on Wednesdays. They went to the park in the spring to hear birds, and to the beach in August when it was hot. Their most regular outing was to the library twice a week so that Vincent could socialize with other blind people and check out talking books. Around Christmas, he built doll furniture from clothes pegs, which the local Catholic church sold in the church shop with a sign that said MADE BY A BLIND PERSON.
Vincent’s mother asked Harvey if she would show her the yard, give Jason and Vincent some time alone. When they were outside, she said her big dream was to see Vinny married. “I’ve even thought about getting him a girl from Russia. They call them mail-order brides. I ordered the catalog and everything, but all that lipstick and blond hair—Vincent wouldn’t be interested.”
After Harvey showed her the climbing roses and the Japanese maple, the blind man’s mother said that she was actually grateful to God for sparing her son’s life.
“He could have gone back to the bar with a gun,” she said. “He had one, you know . . . but that’s what he was like back then. You couldn’t stop him from doing anything once his mind was made up.”
WHEN IT CAME time to leave, Jason asked if there was anything he could do for them, now or in the future.
Vincent’s mother said that if they were ever near Massapequa, they should make a point of stopping in. But then the blind man stood quickly, his body shaking. “There is something you can do,” he declared.
“Vincent!” his mother said, pulling on his arm. “Sit down!”
But he wouldn’t. Jason asked what it was he wanted.
“Take me fishing,” he said. “I want to go fishing.”
The woman shook her head. “How can you go fishing, Vincent? Tell me that.”
“I want to go fishing, Ma. I’m sick of the frickin’ library. I want to go fishing, and I want to catch a fish.”
XLIII
THREE WEEKS LATER, Vincent stood on his mother’s back porch and held up a bag of ice.
“I don’t believe it,” she called from an upstairs window. “Is that a fish in there?”
A month later, they took another boat out of Sayville and caught enough fluke to fill a cooler.
When winter came, the two of them bought thermal overalls at Roosevelt Field mall and took the cod boats out of Montauk. Most fleets sailed in the early hours and went fifty miles into deep water.
After a couple of years, Jason and Vincent had a routine, leaving by eleven o’clock at night, then stopping at midnight for bacon and eggs at a diner on Old Country Road.
On the first trip of their second winter season, the waitress said she recognized them from the year before. Vincent said that it must have been the tattoo on Jason’s neck, but the waitress overheard and said to Vincent, “No, it’s you I remember, not your friend.” At first she thought Vincent was drunk, but then she saw him feeling around the table for salt and pepper and realized.
She asked what they were doing up at midnight, and Vincent said they were chasing a cod boat out of Montauk. The diner was quiet so she lingered awhile at the table after bringing their food, asking if they weren’t cold out there on the sea, or afraid, or if it wasn’t better just to buy fish at the supermarket.
In the parking lot, Jason couldn’t help himself. “I personally think you look like an ape—but the waitress must like that kind of thing, ’cause she filled your coffee cup first and gave you way more home fries than me.”
Vincent told him to shut up.
“C’mon, Vincent,” he said. “Why would I make shit up about home fries?”
The waitress had told them her name was Bethany, and had given them pound cake for the trip—for when they got hungry on the boat.
Driving through the darkness along Southern Parkway, Vincent asked Jason to tell him what Bethany looked like. “Start with the hair,” he said. “Is it long or short?”
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, on their way home with seventeen pounds of cod in two coolers, Vincent wanted to stop at the diner. When they got there, Jason helped his friend out of the car and led him around to the trunk. Then he put Vincent’s hand on the lid of the cooler and let him open it. The fish was already cut up in bags, ready to freeze.
“What if she doesn’t like seafood?” Vincent said.
“Let me go see if she’s there first.”
“Wait, Jason. Wait a second, please. Jason, stop!”
A moment later, Bethany came out and Vincent handed her a bag of cod. The flesh was white with silver streaks.
“Are you serious?” she said. “You brought this for me?”
A FEW YEARS later, when Vincent’s mother passed, they put a picture of Vincent and Bethany on their wedding day in the casket under her rosary.
Vincent and Bethany had rushed the wedding so his mother could attend. At the reception, Vincent said in his speech that if it hadn’t been for his best friend’s daughter, Harvey, he’d still be sitting in a basement watching life instead of actually living it.
Vincent’s mother was very sick by then and couldn’t speak. In the car home, Jason said it was good that Vincent couldn’t actually see how bad she was. Harvey agreed.
“Listen,” he said when they were almost back. “It was going to be a surprise, but as I’m on a sugar rush from all the soda at Vinny’s wedding, and so proud of all you done—I might as well tell you now: I’ve saved up a little money in case you want to take college classes at Nassau Community after you graduate.”
Harvey had already been talking with the guidance counselor at her high school, and believed her illustration skills could turn out to be more than a hobby.
She brought home brochures for art schools in the city, and spread them out on the table for when Jason got back from work.
Over dinner, Harvey showed her father pictures of the best ones and read their course descriptions. When he asked about tuition, she was afraid to say.
Jason couldn’t believe it. “You could buy a whole house for that.”
“A small house, Dad. But it doesn’t matter. I’m probably not good enough anyway.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“They only take a select few.”
Thinking about it that night in bed, Jason decided they should at least visit her favorite school and see what it was like.
Soon after, they took the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station and had breakfast at a diner on Eighth Avenue. The restaurant was full of European tourists reading plastic menus, unable to decide what to eat.
There were so many people in the group touring the school that Jason and Harvey could hardly hear. The girl who led them around wore an Alice in Chains T-shirt. which Jason told her was collectible and would go for a lot on eBay.
The tour ended in a gallery of student work. The cost of private school could be daunting, the tour guide admitted, but there were many types of financial aid, scholarships, and loans.
By the time Harvey received the application paperwork a week later, she had already made the school website her home page and started planning what artwork to include in her portfolio. On Sunday, before Jason’s shift at the supermarket, she laid her drawings on the floor, and they picked the best ones.
Harvey wanted to include some multidimensional work, like the motorcycle gas tank she’d airbrushed, but Jason told her the drawings were more than good enough.
The next day they drove to the post office together and sent the application by Priority Mail.
Jason stayed up that night doing calculations.
A MONTH LATER, a letter arrived from the s
chool. At first Harvey couldn’t open it. Jason was in the kitchen, making stew. Lumps of beef and white potato rolled at the surface.
The letter went unopened all through dinner, but Jason could tell Harvey thought it was good news because she kept putting her fork down and grinning. Finally, when Jason was in the kitchen fixing two bowls of ice cream, she ripped open the envelope and unfolded the letter.
“I didn’t get in,” she called out. “So that’s that, end of story.”
Jason rushed in, took the letter from her, and began to read it slowly. “It says they thought your portfolio was really interesting . . . and they liked your figure drawings . . .”
Harvey couldn’t look at him.
“That’s something,” he said. “They didn’t have to write that.”
After eating they watched a movie in silence. When it was over, Harvey said good night and went to her room. Jason reread the rejection letter, which was signed William Reiner.
Then on his way to bed, he noticed that Harvey’s light was still on.
He stood for a moment, then went back to the kitchen, hoping the tick of the coffee machine brewing might bring her out to talk. But when the coffee was ready, he checked again and her light had been switched off. He listened at the door and couldn’t hear anything but felt that she was in there crying.
Harvey had an early shift at Dairy Barn the next morning, so he wouldn’t see her until late.
After drinking half a cup of coffee, Jason poured the rest out and set his mug in the sink. When he went to throw out the coffee grounds, he noticed a stack of Harvey’s drawings in the trash.
XLIV
IT WAS PAST nine A.M. by the time he got to the Long Island Rail Road, but the Manhattan-bound platform was still crowded with men and women in business clothes.
When he boarded the train, it was hard to find a seat. But in the section where the seats pulled down to accommodate wheelchairs, a teenage boy with a black hoodie stood and asked Jason if he wanted to sit. The boy was with his family, who all had suitcases with them. The cases had wheels and kept moving around.
“Where are you headed?” Jason asked the father.
“Hawaii,” he said.
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