That the murderer was SOMEONE SHE KNEW?
No, that the hard-bitten detective and his pretty client were IN LOVE. And also, that it was SOMEONE SHE KNEW.
Are you looking for a re-creation?
Of the darkroom scene?
Let me turn out the lights. Turn out yours, too.
I don’t have to, I’ve already turned out the lights. I balance my laptop on a stiff sofa pillow and lean against the back, ask him.
Who gets to be the hard-bitten detective?
You can. I’ll work on being unwittingly irresistible.
When I first started exchanging messages with C, we were careful and polite. Friendly. I liked his pictures. He liked what I had to say about them. I sometimes scroll through our saved chats trying to pinpoint where the turn was, when we started playing, when we said something that led to our teasing the other about where our hands were when they weren’t on the keyboard.
It’s impossible to say how it happened.
A zillion harmless words between two strangers keeping the other company, and then a night with a handful of reckless words.
It had felt so good.
It was a risk I could take.
Did you? he had asked.
I did, did you? I had answered.
Yes, he’d said.
And then we weren’t strangers, not exactly, but I didn’t tell my mom about him, either.
You’ve got that covered, I answer, pulling open the knot on my drawstring pajamas. You’re so irresistible I’m already tucking your hair behind your ears, clenching my fists to keep from touching you.
Where do you want to touch me?
Where are you touching yourself?
I’ve been touching myself since you said that darkrooms are kind of sexy. Now I’m hard, and I hate stopping to write, but I don’t want to stop what we’re doing.
I’ve never done anything like this before, cybering, cybering with a stranger, role-play cybering with a stranger. Then again, there isn’t anything I recognize about my life anymore, so why not?
Why not grab another pillow and push it between my legs so I have something to kind of roll against while I tell him how to hold himself tight at the base, and then rub his thumb over the top because when I write that, when I imagine it, it makes my clit feel three sizes too big and wet besides and that’s about a thousand times better than feeling afraid or lonely or angry.
Now faster. Lick your palm if you need to.
He doesn’t answer, but that’s how I know he’s listening.
Chapter Two
Falling
I’ve always been clumsy.
Five-seven-and-a-half is nothing to sneeze at, and by the time I was in high school I had the kind of hips that managed to find the corners of tables, doorjambs, and knickknacks balanced on decorative surfaces, such was their breadth.
The top half took after my hips, as Mom said, and I learned to keep water glasses at the twelve o’clock position of my plate, to lean forward when eating popcorn or anything sauce-laden, and that I would always have to brace my arm across my chest when going up and down the stairs. To reduce bounce and because it’s easy to lose track of your feet.
Oh, also, my ass. Who knows where that’s ended up, exactly. It’s made its own fabulous place in the world.
The summer before I moved here, Mom and I had laughed over the increase in my ungainly stumbles and butterfingers, chalking it up to nerves over moving so far away.
It seemed normal that I would spend the summer tripping and walking into walls, like my subconscious trying to say that I still needed my mom, or something.
When I got here in the late summer, I found out I had to take a driver’s test to get an Ohio driver’s license as I had accidentally let my Washington license expire. On the freeway just south of the university, with the officer from the DMV in my car, I got into an accident while changing lanes.
Thank God it was a sleepy, late Tuesday morning before classes were in session. I was going slow, too, because of a work zone. It still makes me so thankful that I get shaky to remember that no one was hurt. The officer was kind and perfect and talked me through breathing out my sobs.
I couldn’t tell them how it happened. At all.
My certainty that my lane was clear felt bone deep, and because it was a test, I was on alert. I had checked my mirrors, and my blind spots, and there was nothing there, except, there was.
A landscaping pickup truck with a huge neon green decal over the side.
I had stood in the shoulder of the freeway and looked at that huge green sticker on that big truck and I knew I hadn’t seen that truck. Then, there was this whoosh of knowledge that came over me, made me get chills even though it was August, and so hot and muggy on the shoulder of the freeway that we were all sweating through our clothes.
I hadn’t seen that truck.
I’d never been to the eye doctor. At all my physicals, when they do the thing where they make you look at the letters?
Twenty-twenty, every time.
I’d never been to the eye doctor, but then I ended up going to so many, that August and September, I’ve lost count.
Retinitis pigmentosa.
Now, it’s just December, and I lean against the cold window of the bus and watch brand-new snowflakes swirl in the icy breeze. We haven’t had a really good snow yet, one that’s left behind a lot of inches, and I’m looking forward to it because they’re rare in the Northwest.
I’ve been told it’s actually kind of a crapshoot that December will bring a bunch of snow to Ohio, but the natives keep telling me we’re due for a white Christmas, and so I’m hoping.
There are only a few little snowflakes now, but even a handful of snowflakes, spread out in the wind all over a big city, still means it’s snowing.
Snowfall.
Even though the vision I have left is twenty-twenty, my visual field has narrowed, and my night vision is grainy with little acuity and full of interlocking halos radiating from artificial light sources.
I can see, but I am told my diagnosis means I’m going blind.
It’s like how at first, when a snowflake finds its way to rest on the pointed top of a fence board, melting a little because it is all by itself, we say it is snowing, but everything in our neighborhood still looks the same.
The pointy boards of the fence still point, the bare trees zigzag their branches all across the pale sky, all the patio furniture we never bothered to bring in is still exposed on its lonely patio.
Then, three or four new snowflakes join their pioneer on the fence, and because they can huddle together for cold, they don’t melt. They can make a little cold spot for another three snowflakes, until there is a soft pile, like spilled sugar.
One snowflake at a time, the pointy boards of the fence grow soft, the branches of the trees round with drifts, the patio furniture disappears into white and indistinct humps and caves.
I draw a six-pointed snowflake in the fog of my breath on the bus window.
One snowflake at a time for the world you thought knew to transform.
Unrecognizable.
At first, it’s snowing, and then, while you aren’t looking, snowfall.
The world you knew is still there, but it’s hidden.
Campus and home have been enough, for me, this winter. I wrote to C, last night, curled in the dark, his words glowing under the glass of my screen.
He wants to know why I’m not getting out more. Why I’m always available to chat in the evenings. He isn’t, always, and then he’ll tell me about a concert I had vaguely heard about, or some community locavore dinner, or a movie.
Sometimes, Bob or one of my other lab colleagues will invite me out at the end of the day. I got a lot of invitations, at first. Which, actually, I’m surprised how many I turned down. I like bars. I like people. I like outdoor concerts and cookouts and trying new restaurants. Mom and I had a membership to all the museums in Seattle, the zoo even, just so we could go whenever we felt like
it and see one thing.
Sometimes you just want to look at lemurs. Or one Monet. Or sit in a listening booth at the Experience Music Project and try to figure out Bob Dylan. Which is impossible, by the way.
Everyone has told me that there is a good museum here. C went to the Rothko exhibit, the Andy Warhol one, too, with the giant, silver, balloon clouds.
The closest C and I ever got to meeting each other was when an Annie Leibovitz installation came to the gallery on campus, hundreds of her photographs and serials of her proofs, and for several breath-holding minutes, we talked in hypotheticals about that installation because, of course, meeting on campus was nothing.
Safe as houses.
It was photography, and we talked about his pictures all the time.
Then, the hypotheticals drifted away, scrolled up the screen, and disappeared.
He didn’t talk about the installation, later, after he had surely been to see it.
As if we had stood the other up and couldn’t speak of it, when really, I had not let him quite ask me so that I wouldn’t have to either reject him or accept.
He knows I am a new member of the Lakefield State research faculty, but that’s all. He hasn’t asked what I research and I haven’t told him. I know he works somewhere on campus, and that he likes his job, but he hasn’t told me what it is.
Or at least, I change the subject when I’m worried he’s getting close to saying something that will release him from my computer.
He wants to know why I’m not comfortable going out, and because I won’t tell him, he worries it’s because I’m shy or not adjusting well.
Because we don’t really talk about our day, not exactly.
More and more, he’s told me about these things that he’s done—the concerts and the new restaurants, and the events.
When he does, I try to get him to talk about his photographs. Or I tell him the room is dark.
I don’t tell him exactly how dark it gets, nowadays, how that scares me. How I’ll look at the time on the laptop again and again, certain it must be later, and it’s still early and I’ll realize, looking at the living-room windows and the giant halo around them, the distorted ring my night blindness refracts a light source into, that there is still enough residual evening light that I should be able to see better.
I don’t tell him that I take one bus line, the one that I worry about missing, every morning, because it’s the line without any transfers and I’m not sure about transfers yet. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, terrified I’ve overslept and I’m going to miss that bus.
I don’t tell him that I get all of my groceries at the corner store three straight blocks from my house. Or that my whole life I was a vegetarian, but it’s too hard to find good options at the corner store so I’ve started eating meat again.
I don’t tell him that I talk to my mom every day on the phone and that sometimes, I make her talk to me after I’ve gotten in between the covers and that she talks me to sleep.
I don’t tell him that I miss museums, and concerts, and getting tipsy enough at bars that I’ll sneak a drag of a friend’s cigarette, or cool restaurants, or coming back from the bathroom during a movie date with an extra button undone so your date notices and tries something.
I couldn’t manage the aisles of a dark theater, now. The crush of bodies in a dimly lit bar. The strobe lights at a concert.
C, I can manage.
His words are lit and bright and framed into the square of the laptop screen.
C is hypotheticals and light. Pictures of the world I’ve been missing.
I can fix him on this little slide of a life I’ve made and figure him out, slowly, as the magnification increases, as I catalog the bits and pieces he shows me and think about them in different combinations, or simply label them—C doesn’t take pictures of people. C lives next to a couple who keeps goats right in the middle of the city.
C can make me come just by telling me he will stay online while I touch myself in the dark, by telling me that he’s touching himself thinking of me with my hand between my legs.
He’s right in front of me.
I can see him, as long as neither of us moves and keeps the focus where it is.
I think my best bet is to keep still and let the snow fall, let the days get long again, the light return its hours to me, a few more chances a day to figure out what it is I can comfortably keep in front of me and see.
For me, there isn’t some miracle cure, this is my life, or my disease will progress and my life will change focus again, and I’ll have another new life.
I need C to stay right where he is because for now, I don’t know enough to move from where I am.
My hypothesis is that the light will come back, both outside and inside me.
I’m afraid and angry, but the light is a theory I want to prove.
Until then, I just have to keep the experiment going with as many controls as possible.
One bus, back and forth.
One store.
One man, his words under glass.
Chapter Three
Break in the Weather
After all the doctors, I got assigned one doctor, this crazy-smart woman who actually is an expert in visual-field vision loss and double-majored in anatomy and micro in undergrad so we have sort of a common ground, or at least, she totally gets why I have a mug that says EAT. SLEEP. MICROBIOLOGY.
I see her every other week and she has me on really high doses of vitamin A and a supplement called lutein that has been demonstrated to slow the progress of my disease.
I go in, we visit, and she asks about my research, then she measures my visual field, which is mostly done with a big machine I sit down and look into, but Dr. Allen always checks me again, by hand, with a semicircular cardboard meter and string.
Retinitis pigmentosa is an inherited disease where the light-sensitive rods of the retina degenerate, leading to gradual and progressive night blindness, smaller and smaller central visual field, and loss of peripheral vision, until the patient is left with only a very tiny central field of vision and no or limited peripheral vision.
Or has little functional vision left at all.
You don’t know until you get there.
I inherited a recessive gene, so no one my mom or I know in the family has it. Mom even called my dad’s parents, and she hadn’t talked to in years, to ask. My dad died when I was little, but hadn’t been in my life before that. After my mom got pregnant, he became kind of hard to pin down.
My night vision has undergone the most dramatic change, even more so than the degrees of peripheral vision I’ve lost. I might have noticed my changing vision sooner, but I rarely drove at night in Seattle, rarely drove at all since public transit is decent, and at night, the places I was out with my friends were well lit. And yeah, I stumbled around the house in the dark but chalked it up to my natural grace.
That’s where physical therapy comes in, or really, occupational therapy, where the occupation I’m supposed to learn is “activities of daily living,” in other words “relearn how to do all the stuff you did before, but in more difficult and convoluted ways.”
Which is unfair, I know.
So after Dr. Allen and her measuring, I’m supposed to trudge across the courtyard to see my therapist, who I actually have to see every week.
My best friend back home, Neil, broke his femur when he was doing field research on the Ivory Coast, and when he came back and after all the surgeries, he had to do physical therapy for a year. He was grumpy and cranky that entire year, even more so than he was the six months he was in and out of the hospital all the time.
When I asked Neil, after having picked him up from one of his appointments, why he hated physical therapy so much, he said it was because it was a really hard workout where you were reminded every minute of how fucked you were.
Neil is not a poet like my mom, but I think what he was driving at was that there is nothing worse than spending an hour or more
a week banging your head against a wall while someone told you that you were “doing a great job!”
This week, Dr. Allen is finishing up with me and she invites me to sit down with her at one of the tables where her bigger instruments are.
“How is it at the lab?” She’s never one to tiptoe around a subject, Dr. Allen.
“Well, fine,” I say, because mostly, it is. “When I came in for this position in the lab I already knew I’d be refining images someone already captured for further study and doing a lot of writing. I won’t be doing new stuff at the bench until March, I think.”
“Remind me what your focus is?”
“Bacterial morphology plasticity.” Microbiology is really good at fancy words.
“It’s been a while since I’ve messed around with a microscope, Jenny, so bring me up to speed.”
“Well, I look at the evolutionary changes in the size and shape of bacterial cells. But I’m really psyched about what I’m doing in March because, someday, it might have clinical application. Basically, E. coli, when they’re stressed, become filamentous, which is a change in their shape. Stressed-out E. coli are dying, but large filamentous E. coli probably have a role in making it easier for other colonies of E. coli to live in stressed environments, like the urinary tract of the human body, where the body is busy trying to kill it off.”
“So you’re studying these stressed-out E. coli?”
“That’s the simple explanation, but yeah. The women in our family always had trouble with urinary tract infections, so I’ve had it stuck in my head for years that I wanted to do something to help people like my mom and her sisters, and me, actually.”
“What’s the spec for the project?”
“My postdoc’s renewable, and it’s a great lab. I’ll probably be working on this, barring any problems with my design, for five years or more.”
Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Page 13