Blinded (10 page)

She leads you back into the apartment building.

“Hey, Danny.”

The security guard is suddenly a little more animated, seeing her.

“You’re back.”

You nod and follow Amanda into the open elevator.

“You live here too?” you ask her.

“I come here enough. I have a key.”

“Is Jasmine here?”

Amanda glances at you for a second.

“Or J? Whatever her name is.”

“I don’t think so. I’m a little worried.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Where’d she go? I got a voice mail from her.”

“We went to a place. I forget the name. It’s got numbers—”

“345.”

“That’s it,” you say as the numbers ding off in the small elevator. “A couple guys sat down next to us. Scary-looking guys. She acted like she knew them.”

“J knows everybody.”

“She disappeared. Next thing I knew, someone was holding a gun in my face and dropping me off in some dead-end neighborhood.”

Amanda shakes her head and laughs. “You’re having a great night, huh?”

“I’m just a little worried for her.”

“I’m always worried for J. That girl gives me ulcers.”

The door opens to a small hallway with only four doors. Amanda searches through her purse and finds the key.

“I think I stay here more than she does.”

“How long have you guys been friends?”

Amanda inserts the key. “Long enough. We’re quasi-sisters. More or less.”

The door swings open, and Amanda waits for you to go in.

“Go ahead. It’s okay.”

You nod but you don’t feel okay. You don’t know what’s waiting behind that open doorway, inside this apartment, inside this continually evolving world.

You take a step, then another. Amanda follows you and closes the door.

She turns on a switch and several canned lights go on, illuminating the spacious, high-ceiling loft.

“Nice little place, huh?”

Everything is modern and tidy. A two-piece sofa looks like it’s never been sat on. Black is the main color, with vibrant patches of orange or red in various places. You notice the plasma television screen on the wall, the Bose speakers in all four corners of the living room, the wet bar next to a mantel full of picture frames. There is a massive painting that looks just like Jasmine.

Amanda anticipates your question. “Some big painter in New York did that for her. For free.”

She walks over to the kitchen and checks the phone for messages. “Want something to drink?”

You’re thinking no, you don’t really want anything, but you say yes, sure. Yes, sure. That’s what you’ve been saying all night. Yes, sure.

“We’ve got a
lot
of vodka. Name it and we got it. J collects it. She likes the colorful bottles.”

“Anything.”

“Screwdriver? Or wait, let me see.”

She opens the stainless steel refrigerator that is stocked full of everything. You see two full packages of bagels, beer, wine, Gatorade, bottled Evian, everything in its nice, neat order.

“I’ll take a Becks,” you say, trying to make it easier.

“Oh, sure? We’ve got everything.”

She hands you the beer as you continue to examine this unlived-in loft.

“Clean, huh?”

“Does she even live here?”

“You can’t put J in a box.”

Amanda fixes herself what looks like a martini. She takes a bottle out of the freezer to make it.

“Where do you think she is?”

“No calls,” Amanda says. “She’ll call soon.”

“She called me.”

The redhead takes a sip from her glass and doesn’t look

worried. “J is a drama queen. They need to do a reality TV show with her.”

You see assorted pictures of Jasmine around her kitchen. All placed for show, not tossed up on the fridge with magnets. Jasmine in a tiny bikini on the shores of some tropical paradise. Jasmine in Paris. At a bar with friends. With a good-looking older couple, probably her parents. With her arm around … Brad Pitt?

“Ever wonder why some people are so blessed?” Amanda says, glancing at the same photos you’re staring at. “Why some people get it all and don’t even have to ask?”

“Yeah, I think about it.”

The merger crosses your mind again, the deal that went south, the deal that brought you here, the deal you couldn’t close.

“Why is it that women like Jana can get men to do almost anything?”

Her tone is different suddenly. You look at her and watch her drain her martini the way a college student might pound a beer.

“Tell me something,” Amanda says, walking up close to the counter you lean against. “Would you be looking all over the city for me?”

There is a glint in her eye, something you can’t necessarily place, something that makes you feel a bit nervous. “Sure I would,” you say, not very convincingly.

Amanda picks up a picture, the one with Jasmine on a beach in her little white bikini.

“You either have it or you don’t, you know? I am a size smaller than J and it doesn’t matter. I can spend four hours a day on myself and never even be in the same vicinity. Why does a girl that gorgeous have to have everything too? Why is that?”

You take a sip of your beer and walk away from the kitchen, toward the living room. Canned lights illuminate the area.

“What is this?” you ask, trying to change the subject.

Amanda fixes herself another martini and tells you about the piece of art sitting on the end table. It looks like someone found it in a garbage heap. Next to it rest all the latest fashion magazines:
Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Elle
. The dates reveal them to be brand-new.

“She gets those replaced every month. Sometimes when she’s bored—and
if
she’s ever here—she’ll read them. But they get replaced like clockwork. Like the milk in the fridge that goes untouched. I don’t even know why she has them put milk in the fridge because she never drinks it. But you have to have milk in the fridge, right? I mean, of course you do. Not to have it would be just that. Not having something. And Jana always has everything.”

An iPod rests in a Bose docking station on another table. Next to it is a framed photo of a Chihuahua.

“So, Steve?”

“It’s Mike.”

“Yeah, Mike. Come over here.”

Amanda is on her second martini and sits on the couch, one long leg crossed over the other. She pats the seat next to her.

“Look—I just want to—I’d like to know where your friend disappeared to.”

“Did you guys get a chance to have any fun?”

The look on Amanda’s face is mischievous and wild, almost scary.

“Come on,” she says after your silence. “You look like you saw a ghost. Look—I’ve got a little something that can make you feel a lot better.”

“I’m fine, really.”

She stands and comes by you. The glass on the coffee table is empty. She twirls a finger under one of the buttons of your shirt and pulls it toward herself.

“I won’t bite,” she says with a laugh.

Didn’t Jasmine say that too?

Though she looked attractive at first, this close, you see that Amanda wears a lot of makeup. Her eyes look cold and her lips fake. She’s pale and almost anorexic, and nothing about her appeals to you. She tells you to follow her and walks toward a hallway and a dark room.

She turns on the lights and turns around, looking at you standing still in the same place you were.

“Come on. I just want to show you Jana’s room. And what she keeps in there.”

Really it’s okay it’s fine I’m fine this is fine everything is going to be fine everything’s gonna be just fine
.

“Look, I’m really okay.”

“Come on. I swear, I won’t force you to do anything. It won’t hurt.”

What is she talking about? What won’t hurt? Amanda won’t hurt you? Is this all some game?

You walk toward the bedroom and enter it, another large room with high ceilings and simple, straightforward styling. The large bed sits in the middle of the room, all black. Amanda sits on the edge of it and takes off one of her high heels.

“These things have been killing me all day.”

“Look, I think I should go,” you say.

Amanda laughs and curses at the same time. “God, I want a cigarette. Do you smoke? One thing we never do in here is smoke. You can’t smoke anywhere in this ungodly city.”

There is a room off to the side of this uncluttered bedroom. You want to get away from Amanda and this place.

“Can I—I’m going to use the bathroom.”

“Right in there,” she says, taking her other shoe off.

You wonder if she’s going to keep going. Maybe you should bolt out of here. This is crazy. This is crazy and what would anybody you know think of this right now.

You search the wall for a light and turn it on. It’s a large bathroom with two sinks and a separate room with a walk-in closet. You walk by the closet heading to the toilet and

what the

lift up the toilet lid and then realize what you just saw.

A face, in the darkness, staring out at you.

Before you can turn around, before you can suck in a breath, before you can put your arms out or above you or in front of you, something hits you on the back of your head.

And the only thing your mind sees as you go black is the face of Riley, the curly short hair, his lips laughing, grinning, cackling. But then the face turns into Jasmine. Then you’re out.

T
HE DARKNESS LANDS ON THE LIGHT
of a candle, a small lit flame burning in the middle of the table, illuminating her slender hands and the wedding band you gave her years earlier. You look up to see the flickering shadows against her shirt, her neck, her chin, her little button nose, her brown eyes, her brown hair.

“I’m just tired of everything,” you say.

You’ve had a few drinks tonight and maybe that’s allowing you to talk. You’re not saying anything you haven’t felt for a while. It’s just that you’ve been so busy and Lisa has been so busy and now that you both have come up for air and can actually sit across from one another without an obligation or a cell phone going off or something to do, you feel the waves of reality rushing over you.

“Tired of what?”

She’s not shocked and shouldn’t be shocked.

But what are you saying. Really?

“Tired of living next to you but not really being with you.”

“What does that mean?”

You have another sip of the wine. Wine does wonders on you. A few glasses and you feel the weight of the world slip away. This is vacation and you’re allowed to have that feeling. But you’re not feeling good and you haven’t felt good for some time.

“It means—I don’t know what it means. Why do I have to be the one to bring this up?”

“I asked you what was wrong,” Lisa says.

“I don’t know exactly what’s wrong.”

“I thought—getting away—spending some time on the beach and away from it all—I thought that would be good.”

“Maybe …” But you can’t finish your thought.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

Lisa knows what you were about to say and you know that she knows. She just wants you to say it. To be a man and say it and get it on the table.

Say it. Go ahead, Mike, and say it. Just say the truth. Say what you’re thinking
.

“Maybe we need to get away from each other.”

There. I said it
.

She looks at you, the face of a woman you used to love, that you don’t know if you love now, a face that you trusted and that once trusted you. Hurt and confusion and anger pour down over that sweet face.

“I’m just—”

“What does that mean?” she asks.

Except she’s not asking. She’s demanding to know.

“I don’t know.”

But a part of you knows what you mean. Part of you simply doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

You’re not one of those couples and never could be one of those couples and always knew you were different from one of those many couples that tried to make it work but couldn’t and finally gave up.

I’m not giving up
.

But telling yourself is one thing. You know your heart and your soul and your mind and they all feel this way.

They all gave up some time ago. You can’t remember when, but they gave in.

And now … you look into eyes that no longer mesmerize you. They only hurt you.

Where did it all go wrong?

And then this picture, this faint memory, goes out, like the flame of a candle blown out too quickly.