Night Blindness (18 page)

Nic sat back with his wine while this was said, as if he wasn't listening. The twilight sky had gone from brilliant pink to an indigo black, and we heard the New Haven fireworks before we saw them. My dad stood up. “To the roof,” he said.

“Oh, honey,” Jamie said. “It will collapse.” But she was already up, her wine in hand, and we followed them inside, traipsing through the front hall, up the stairs to their bedroom, where my dad opened the tall south-side window, and we piled onto the flat roof above his office. I was first. Ryder was last. We sat in a row with our legs over the edge, watching the bursts of color explode and trickle down the sky. I could hear Ryder and Mandy laughing. Nic put his arm around me and held me tightly around the waist. “Happy Independence Day, beautiful wife,” he whispered, but another round burst in the air, and whatever I would have answered was lost.

Ryder left after the fireworks ended. Mandy wanted to go out on Luke's boat to set hers off, but he promised her we'd do it soon, and she went home instead. My father and Luke went to the office to show Starflower pictures from when they were younger. I could hear Jamie rattling around in the kitchen.

“I'm beat,” Nic said. We were standing at the bottom of the stairs. He'd been like the new kid at school all night, hands in his pockets, not really talking to anyone, so out of his element. In Santa Fe, he was royalty, holding court in his custom cowboy boots, gallery owners and art dealers draping themselves on him like jewelry. “You coming up?”

“I should help Jamie,” I told him. I walked down the hallway, grabbed a beer from the kitchen, and let myself onto the back deck. Instead of clearing the picnic table, I sat on the glider, watching smaller fireworks pop randomly in the sky. When they lit up, I could see everything clearly, just for a moment.

After a while, the slider opened, and Jamie came out and sat next to me. I could smell Chardonnay and her party perfume. I tried to peel the label off my beer bottle, but it split down the middle and all that was left was Ma Ha. “Do you ever get scared?” I could hear her breathing next to me. “About Daddy?” A quick burst of light startled the sky to the east and I saw that the grass was long. It was unlike her not to have everything perfect for company.

“Sometimes.” She moved the glider with her foot. I took a sip of beer; its coldness floated out of the top like fog. “But I pray,” she said.

I was surprised. “Really?”

She shrugged. “It can't hurt.”

My eyelids felt hot. I thought about that night in the waiting room, before that doctor came out to tell us about Will. “It can hurt to hope,” I said. “When you have hope and then nothing gets better, it makes it even worse.”

She rocked the swing. “Praying isn't hope,” she said. “It's gratitude. Luke taught me that.” I watched her dab her mouth with her cocktail napkin. She was one of those women who could look elegant blowing her nose. “You should talk to Luke, sweetheart. People pay good money to get his spiritual advice.”

I leaned back against the glider and let myself be rocked. “Since when?”

She moved a strand of hair from my face. “Goodness, since forever. He's a wonderful caretaker. But you have such a hard time letting anyone take care of you.” I watched her twist her engagement ring around her finger. I thought of her mother's ring, waiting for me in a safe-deposit box, a platinum band with an emerald-cut diamond she'd gotten from some heir of the Getty family who'd died before he married her.

“Nic takes care of me,” I said.

“I suppose he does.” She leaned back with me, both of us taking in the sky. The cloud cover of the night before was gone, and the sheer number of stars was dizzying. I couldn't see them individually, but the sky seemed wrapped in a blanket of light. Jamie kept pushing the swing, and the rhythm made me drowsy. “It's just nice to feel like there's something greater than us in our lives.”

After Will died, Luke had bought me a bunch of books on ghosts, reincarnation, and near-death experiences. They told amazing stories of euphoria and light. Death as one big cocaine trip. I knew he'd given them to me to help me find some kind of peace, but they just made me lonelier. Mandy had flipped through them one night when my parents were out and we were smoking pot in my bedroom and listening to Neil Young. “Maybe you could actually talk to Will,” she had said. And of course, Mandy, being Mandy, had found some psychic in Mystic. But when we got to the house, a small brick cape in a nice neighborhood, I turned around. “Where are you going?” she'd asked me.

“I changed my mind,” I'd told her. I didn't want to give the psychic a piece of Will's clothing or my palm. If she were the real thing, she would have known exactly what I'd done.

Now I traced Ryder's initials etched into the glider's arm. I'd carved them as a kind of rebellious announcement. Behind us, I heard the slider open. My father came out wearing a Yankees hat backward and carrying a glass of water with lime. “Ah,” he said. “Here are my girls.” He scooted next to me, resting his arm on the glider. “Luke and Starflower said to say good-bye.”

I leaned against him. Jamie put her hand up on the back of the glider to meet his, and we sat there, the three of us, the only family we had left, twenty yards from those old goalposts, lit up by fireworks, silhouetted in the dark like a living ghost.

 

16

A sign posted by the entrance of the Morse Reading Room in Yale's Medical Library said drinks had to be in covered containers. The librarian had the dissertation on hold for me when I arrived. I set it down next to my double espresso in one of the wooden cubicles, kicked off my flip-flops, stuck my earbuds in, and turned on my iPod. The dissertation was about a miscarriage drug from the fifties, thalidomide, which was possibly making a comeback to treat malignant tumors.

I sat there, trying to make sense of the medical jargon and smoothing my bitten nails with a file I'd snagged from Jamie's bathroom. No one, including my father, seemed concerned about his overnight stay at the hospital, but if Ryder had operated first, I wondered if this would have happened. “The ischemia that created the devastating deformities in fetuses is hoped to trigger the cessation of blood flow to cancerous masses, thus causing necrosis of malignant cells,” I read. It went on from there, and after four or five pages, I glanced at my computer. I had only an hour before I was supposed to meet my family at the football game on North Square, A Will to Live versus the Salvation Army. The dissertation was too many pages to copy. Unless I swiped it from the library, I wasn't going to have time to figure out what the hell it was saying.

Someone touched my shoulder. I smelled the perfume first: flowery and expensive. Dale Novak was staring down at me. I wanted to shoot myself. I'm pretty sure she said, “Jensen, how nice to see you.” But all I heard was,
Ha-ha. I'm sleeping with your old boyfriend.
I took my earbuds out. Her auburn hair was in a tight, perfect bun.

“Hello,” I said. I'd read a book the summer before about a teenager with Asperger's syndrome who didn't understand pleasantries and said only what he meant.
Fuck you, Dale. We hate each other.
She peered over my shoulder at what I was reading, and I covered it with my elbow.

“Doing some research?” she asked. I'd seen her in here once before, and she'd barely nodded, so I was surprised she was even talking to me.

Instead of answering, I said, “Nice ring.” She was wearing a cluster of diamonds in the shape of a flower. I thought of my grandmother's engagement ring in Jamie's safe-deposit box.

She glanced at her hand. She had a perfect pale pink manicure. “Thanks.” She started to say something else but then stopped and flashed that nauseating closed-mouth smile. I wondered if she and Ryder ever had quickies in the library.

“Listen,” I said. “I have a question for you.”

“It's actually my day off, if you can believe that.” She held up her watch. “I was just about to head out.” Her impatience made me think of the summer Jamie tried to teach me how to ride a bike. “Just pedal faster,” she'd said, “and you won't fall off.” “What can I do for you?” Dale said.

Move to Alaska.
“Radiation isn't even halfway done,” I said. “I still don't understand why my dad got so sick.”

She started to explain about dehydration and radiation being cumulative, all the same bullshit she'd said in the hospital.

“But,” I said, interrupting her, “shouldn't you have seen this coming?” I was all out of graciousness. “I mean, you are the one treating him.”

Heat flashed across her face. “Obviously, if I had, I would have done something. I'm sure Dr. Anderson told you that every case is different.”

“My father is a person,” I said. “Not a case. And by the way, Dr. Anderson was at my sweet sixteen, so I think you can refer to him as Ryder.” God, I was turning into a jealous bitch.

“Fine.” She had a clipped, cutting tone. “
Ryder
decided it was best to alter the typical treatment protocol. So he's the one you want to talk to.”

“He told me he discussed the decision to do radiation first with you.” There was nothing I hated more than someone who wouldn't take responsibility. “And that you agreed it was best.”

Suddenly, I got the awful feeling that she'd agreed with Ryder only because she was in love with him. What if she knew the plan wasn't right but had never said anything? What if my dad was about to die because she didn't want to contradict Ryder? She looked back at me, and I thought I saw a stiffening around her eyes. “We need to treat the patient in the current situation.”

“All right, then, what route do you propose we take, going forward?”

The librarian glared at us from her desk, silently told us to shut up, and went back to reading. Dale crossed her arms. “That's an excellent question, one we should discuss with your parents and also…” She glanced down, as if she could see right through my elbows to the dissertation. “Dr. Anderson should be present. We'll have some big decisions to make in the coming weeks, and it will be important that we make them as a team.”

“I'm the one taking care of him.” I'd meant for my tone to be businesslike, but I couldn't get the
fuck you
out of it.

“Technically I can't discuss your dad's case without his being present. So you should call the office to schedule a sit-down.”

My head felt like it was about to split open. “Good enough.” I started gathering papers. “Have a nice day.”

*   *   *

“We didn't even come close to winning,” I said to Nic later that afternoon when I was kicking off my muddy sneakers. “You should have played.” I tried to ignore that his lips didn't have any give when I kissed him. I wondered if he was mad I'd been gone all day. He was sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, watching Luke brush dirt off his elbows.

“I could have used another blocker,” Luke told him.

Jamie came in next, her hair falling out of its ponytail, and her hot pink warm-up suit had grass stains on the knees. “Without Sterling, we got annihilated.”

My dad patted her butt. “We would have done better with Nic on the team,” he said. It was the first time my father had sat out on A Will to Live staff football game, and we got killed, but whenever I saw him in that lawn chair on the sidelines, he was smiling and clapping.

“Maybe next time.” Nic wasn't a sports fan. When I first met him, I'd been surprised he'd never heard of my dad, hadn't known the story of Will. His idea of exercise was using a chisel and rasp to sculpt a hunk of marble.

Luke peeled off his sweatshirt. “I need a beer,” he said.

“I want one, too,” my father called from the doorway to the deck.

“No way,” Luke and I replied together.

“Well,” my dad said meekly, “at least a ginger ale.”

Luke grabbed a bunch of drinks from the fridge. “You guys coming'?” he asked.

I was about to trail after them to the deck, when Nic grabbed my arm. “Can I talk to you?”

“We'll be out in a sec,” I yelled.

“Suit yourself,” Jamie called. “I'm making old-fashioneds in a few minutes.”

They filed out to the deck, and I followed Nic through the kitchen, down the hall, and into the formal living room. We never really used it, except as a way to get to my father's office. I sat on the uncomfortable couch, with Nic across from me in the white wing chair, which I was terrified he'd get paint on. He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. I was sweaty and hot, and I wanted a beer, or anything cold to drink. My phone beeped. Mandy had some secret boy she was meeting and she'd texted me to guess.
Who?
I'd write.
Guess,
she'd write back.

“I'm going to Crete,” Nic said.

I'd just started to take off my socks, and I stopped. “When?”

“In a few weeks.” He watched me.

I rolled my socks in a ball. “I thought with everything going on…” I threw them into the hall. “That we'd wait.”

“We've been talking about moving there for four years. We've had this trip planned for months.” Above his head was the Heisman my dad had won at Notre Dame. The little gold man was running with his hand out. That's what I felt like doing, blocking out what I knew was coming. “Everything's paid for,” he said. “And my cousin spent a lot of time researching houses. My family's expecting us for six weeks.” The first time we'd visited Demetri, his cousin, we'd gotten so drunk on homemade Kotsifali that Nico asked me to marry him, and we'd eloped on the beach.

“But that's the rest of the summer.”

“Greece isn't the Third World.” He tented his hands like he did when he was trying to convince me to try new things, like goat-hair paintbrushes or modeling in front of an art collective. “You can fly home if you need to.”