I said it again.
“I know,” he said quietly.
“But you told me you never felt guilty. You said—”
He slapped his hand on the arm of the chair. “Why do you think I took your father on as a patient?” I looked up at him. “To save him. To take it all back.” His brown eyes were moist. “As a physician, I’m not supposed to take friends on as patients, but when your dad got sick, as fucked-up as this is”—he ran his hand through his hair—“I thought, Here’s my chance. Here’s my chance to make up for what I did. I thought, Here’s my chance at…” He looked around the room, as if searching for the correct word.
“Redemption,” I said for him.
“And what I said at East Rock was a lie.” I felt his hand get firmer on my knee. “Will is the reason I’m a brain surgeon. It’s why I broke my back getting through medical school in such a short time, why I’m constantly trying to cure people who are most likely going to die anyway.” For the first time, I noticed circles under his eyes, worry lines on his forehead. “It’s my whole fucking life. All I do is try to prove myself. I work all the time. I hardly sleep. I haven’t been out to eat since I went with you to the Seafood Shack. I never visit my parents.” I saw him on Will’s handlebars when they were thirteen, grinning at me when they rode by the yard. “Every single day, I think about it. I don’t want anyone to sleep with me, because I dream about it. I can’t get a hold of myself.” He took in a big breath. “Do you know how crazy this is making me? Something’s wrong with your dad, and I can’t figure out what. What if I screw this up, too? I have to”—he turned in his chair—“cure him.” I felt a deep, almost exhausting relief wash over me. I wasn’t alone. Ryder understood. I wanted to touch his face. I remembered the quick, hot feeling in my body when I was with him.
“It’s all right,” I told him quietly. I thought about my mother cheating, how much I’d hated her for it in high school. But now I was starting to understand. My parents had to be alone in their grief to be able to come back together. Being there with Ryder, feeling what I was feeling, I knew I’d been unfair to Jamie all those years. “It’s okay.” I felt myself move forward in the chair, felt myself reach over, and before I decided to do it, I was kissing him, kissing Ryder Anderson. And he was kissing me back; he was murmuring, “Jesus, Jenny.” I heard him try to catch his breath. He said my name again. My fingers went to the buttons of his oxford shirt, his smooth skin. I thought maybe I would die from that urgency, from that hot, sure thing that bound him to me. It didn’t feel horrible anymore to be alive. It felt so right. And then the intercom sputtered. Scott said his name, and Ryder jerked away from me.
25
I didn’t talk about kissing Ryder. I didn’t text Hadley, and I didn’t tell Mandy or Luke. My dad’s parents had passed away long ago, but Jamie’s mother came and went. She flew in from Venice, Florida, a teetering old woman with bright red lipstick, an inch of powder on her face, and spindly legs. She talked too loudly and still pinched my cheeks. Like her daughter, she was a former beauty queen. Now she lived in a simple cape-style home a mile from the beach with a poodle and a man who loved her. Jamie was in a foul mood for the four days she was there, and then my father’s brothers showed up, the whole pack of them, and stayed at the house for two days, eating up all the food and snoring and farting in their sleep, and Jamie really started to unravel. One day, she wore her bedroom slippers to the hospital. “Oh,” she said when I pointed them out. “It was too much trouble to change.” Her nails were breaking, and I could see gray roots starting in her part. Sometimes she didn’t put on lipstick all day.
Mandy texted daily from Paris. Any change? she’d write. No, I’d write back. Hadley must have been busy on his tour, interviewing Latvian photographers or something, because I rarely heard from him. I kept calling Nic and got a couple of scratchy, broken calls back, but the connection was bad, and I couldn’t tell if he could hear what I was saying.
Luke came every day, but he didn’t tell stories anymore. He sat with his hands between his knees and his eyes closed, and I knew he was praying to whatever God had claimed him. When Ryder came, he tried too hard to be all business. There was something electric between us I couldn’t name. We tried not to look at each other.
But as the days passed, and they were no closer to figuring out what was wrong with my dad, I sat vigil at his bedside and started to feel that kissing Ryder was like those mirages lost travelers have, where they see water in the desert moments before they die of dehydration.
* * *
I was in the cafeteria when I saw Dr. Griffith a second time, getting a coffee from the machine late one morning. When I turned around, he was standing there, watching me. We stared at each other. I remembered the night Will died, how we’d waited for him to tell us everything was going to be all right. That same sickle-shaped scar was standing out in bas relief now, and I saw his thick eyebrows twitching. “Are you sure he didn’t hit his head again later on in the night?” he had asked. “Dr. Griffith,” I heard myself saying now. “I’m Jensen. Jensen Reilly.” I stepped forward, and saw recognition in his eyes. “Sterling Reilly’s daughter.” His swarthy skin flushed a deep red.
He came at me like he was going to shake my hand, then veered off to glance at the other people in the room. His eyes darted from one person to the next, as if he’d just shoplifted. Without speaking, he turned quickly and disappeared through the swinging doors.
When I got back upstairs, I sat on the couch while my dad slept and thought about how Griffith had been standing there in the middle of the cafeteria, as though he’d followed me there. As though he’d been watching me, waiting for me. And again I had that strange feeling that maybe it wasn’t Griffith I’d seen. Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. The door opened and Luke was standing there wearing a Hendrix T-shirt. He glanced at my father, who was sleeping, as usual, and then at me. “You need to get out,” he told me.
“I went home yesterday to change.”
“No.” He walked across the room and gave me his hand. I could smell the sandalwood lotion he used when he played piano. “I mean out out. I have something to show you.”
I let go of his smooth skin and sat on the end of my dad’s bed. “How long will this take?”
He rolled his eyes. “Jesus, girl, your uncle Luke’s not flying you to Spain. Come on.”
Jamie had gone downstairs to get food with Sid and his wife, and I knew as long as they were here, Jamie wouldn’t miss me.
We went in Luke’s Navigator. It felt weird not to get on the highway to Colston right away. Just like every other time I’d been out, I envied the people bustling along the streets, so unconcerned. Their fathers weren’t dying. We went out South Frontage and took a right onto Church Street. “I’ve lost count of the days,” I said.
“Give Him time,” Luke told me.
“If you mean the big Him, He better be coming up with a way to pull a cure out of His divine ass.” He laughed, a quick, sad noise.
I watched Yale’s Tudor dorm buildings pass. Back in high school, Ryder had talked about applying there, to stay close. I tried not to think about him.
“Don’t you even want to guess?” We were passing the New Haven Green. I had no idea where he was taking me. “My T-shirt gives it away.”
“Hendrix?”
He jiggled in his seat. “He played there, too.”
“Played where?”
Luke grinned that famous smile. “Where you are going to play today. Right now.”
A glimmer of excitement I hadn’t felt in I didn’t know how long sparked inside me.
“Holy shit. Luke?”
He nodded, his dreads bouncing.
I didn’t want to say it aloud, in case I was wrong. But, sure enough, when we got to Woolsey Hall, Luke parked the Navigator in front of the Roman columns framing the door. This was where I used to see myself when I was a kid on Luke’s piano bench, when he would say, “Picture yourself famous, baby girl, visualize.” I’d ima
gine my parents in the audience under that beautiful round dome. Will and Ryder, too.
Luke took a key from his dash. “I reminded an old friend of a favor.” He tossed the key in the air and caught it. “It’s now or never, little Mozart.”
Three students were sitting on the benches outside, smoking, and as they watched Luke work the key in Woolsey Hall’s lock, I felt inflated, larger than life. “You ready?” he asked before he opened the door.
Inside, the place was silent. The only word I could think of as I stood under the vast ceiling was holy. The arched windows were shot through with an incredible light, which bounced off the ceiling’s gold filigree. When I gazed up at the frescoes, I felt Luke’s hand on the small of my back. “Yes, angel,” he whispered, “God exists.” He slipped his hand into mine and led me forward, our footsteps echoing in the huge space. My dad had held my hand like that, one night long ago. I was eight and Claude Frank, Seymour Lipkin, Christopher O’Reilly, and Jody Gelbogis DeSalvo had been playing here. I’d gotten to stay up past my bedtime, and my dad had worn a white silk scarf. He’d bought us front-row seats. I knew now, twenty years later, that my father didn’t understand or care about piano concerts. He had done it just for me.
“I’ll sit in Mr. Taft’s seat.” Luke took a wide seat in the front row. “You go on.” I took one step and stopped. “Go on. Show me what I taught you.”
The 1884 Alma-Tadema Steinway sat on the stage. Rumor had it that it had been bought at auction for more than a million dollars. The walk to it felt endless. Luke appeared tiny in the front row. He sat with his hands folded in his lap. His patience reminded me of my kindergarten teacher, Miss Rettig, who used to kneel beside me while I worked on the y at the end of my name.
As soon as I sat down, I could feel them, those haunting ghosts people talked about whenever they mentioned Woolsey Hall. Luke had told me once they were melancholic spirits who played the organ in the middle of the night—wandering melodic phantoms. My hands moved lightly across the keys, fingering them restlessly. It took a while before they began to press down, to really move. I didn’t play what I’d been practicing with Luke, the old Springsteen tunes or those Beatles songs that came so easily and brought back such acute nostalgia. I played something I hadn’t remembered learning, Schumann’s “Pleading Child” in D major. My fingers moved like wind, remembering; they flew across the keyboard as though ordered by a higher force. It hit me somewhere deep, the playing, and I almost started weeping. Except, it seemed, my hands were doing that for me.
When I finished, I stared at my fingers. Luke was silent, but I could feel him waiting. It seemed he was holding his breath.
“I kissed Ryder.” The words echoed across the hall.
“Is that why you played so beautifully?”
“You liked it?” My voice was almost lost in the huge hall. “Did I do the right thing?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Kissing Ryder?”
“Marrying Nico.” My fingers played with the keys, but no sound came out. I thought of the day that Nic had slipped the thin gold band on my ring finger. “I was only twenty-one,” I said.
“None of us are static, Jensen.” Luke pushed forward in his seat and put his elbows on his knees.
“What do you mean?”
“Change is our nature. We’re made of water; water conducts energy, and energy is constantly shifting. What you felt back then isn’t necessarily what’s right today.”
I watched him. He seemed perfect in that enormous space. “I’m afraid,” I said.
“Fear,” he told me, “is just resistance to the unknown.”
This little lecture, delivered in Luke’s reassuring, easygoing voice, made me feel better. But I said, “Until death do us part.”
“Death can mean a lot of things,” he shot back.
I didn’t want to talk anymore. I wanted to play the piano. I wanted to play until my fingers bled. That’s what I did. I played pieces that must have been living in my cells, songs whose names I couldn’t remember, my feet moving on the brass pedals, my fingers liquid. I played hard and sometimes very fast, played until my knuckles rebelled, my hands stiffened, and my back hurt from sitting on that bench.
When I finally finished, the light had shifted. Luke was still sitting in William Howard Taft’s oversized seat, tears running down his cheeks.
26
When I got back to the hospital, a man in blue clogs with a bunch of pens stuffed in his breast pocket was standing by my dad’s bed. “I’m Dr. Waller.” His name didn’t sound familiar, but lately there’d been a constant stream of men and women with clipboards and white coats. They had a seeming inability to smile. “Infectious diseases.” His accent sounded Australian.
“Jensen Reilly.” I offered my hand. “Sterling’s daughter.” We shook. “I thought they already ruled out all the scary stuff.”
“Well, we need to keep at it until we have an answer.” The monitor near the top of the bed beeped, and he reached up and pressed a few buttons until the machine quieted. My dad never moved.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I asked.
I wanted him to reassure me, but he dropped his eyes. “It’s unusual for a fever not to respond to meds, even if only temporarily.” He hung the chart on the metal hook at the foot of the bed. “There’s a saying in the medical profession. ‘When you hear hoofbeats—’”
“‘Think horses,’” I said, finishing for him, “‘not zebras.’” By now, I knew all the jargon.
“That’s right.” His smile was a little crooked. “We’re all out of horses, so I guess I’m the zebra guy.” He checked his watch. “I’m going to borrow him for about thirty minutes to examine him.”
It took a second for me to understand he was asking me to leave. “I’ll run down to get something to eat.” I touched my dad’s foot. “I hope you can find out what’s wrong.”
* * *
“Demetri and I went to Corfu,” Nico told me as soon as he picked up. I was standing at the vending machines, trying to decide what to get. “I didn’t get your messages until we got back.” His voice sounded echoey and unfamiliar.
My phone beeped. Low battery. “Did you have a nice vacation?” I asked. I’d forgotten my charger at the house.
“Come on, J.,” he said. “I went for us.”
I chose a bag of pretzels, even though I was never hungry anymore. “Find any girls to paint on the nude beaches?” The bag dropped down. My phone beeped again.
“Jensen,” he said, then stopped. I heard him take a deep breath. “How is he?”
Confused. Terrified. Dying. “It’s been several weeks, and he still has a high fever.” I slid down the wall and sat on the dirty floor with my pretzels. “When he comes to, which isn’t very often, he has no idea where he is.”
“Did the tumor grow or…”
“They don’t know, okay?” I snapped. “No one fucking knows. He won’t wake up, and all these supposed experts poke and prod him and stick needles in his arm, and he looks like a fucking refugee.” My phone beeped again. “So ask me something easy, Nico, okay?”
“J., I’m coming,” he said. His voice was calm, sure. This is what I loved about him. “My flight leaves in—” And then my phone beeped in my ear and went dead.
I stuffed it in my pocket and slid down the wall to sit on the floor. I let my mind go numb, I didn’t want to think about Nic or Greece. I didn’t want to think about anything. I stared into space and just let myself do nothing. I don’t know how long I sat there before I walked back to my dad’s room with the bag of pretzels. Waller was gone.
“Will?” my father said as soon as I walked in. “Will?” He squinted at me. “Is that you?” His words were garbled. “Will?” He tried to sit up in bed.
“Dad.” I shook him by the arm. “It’s me, Jensen. You were dreaming.”
He reached for his glasses. “I can’t see.” His voice was panicked. “I can’t goddamn see.”
I gently pulled his glasses awa
y from his face and turned them right side up, slipping the arms over his ears. “Is that better?”
He stared at me. In the dim light, he seemed so much older. “Who are you?”
“Jenny.” I thought he might recognize that name. “Your daughter.”
“My daughter?” This seemed to panic him more. He pulled the sheets up to his chest. “What did you do with Will?” He reached for me, patting my face, pressing too hard. “Is that you, Will?”
My skin went cold. The monitor above his shoulder said his temperature was 105. I reached for the call button, but he threw up all over both of us. “I’m sorry.” His voice was scared.
“It’s okay.” The vomit smell was medicinal, almost sweet from the glucose running through the tubes to his veins.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, and I immediately smelled urine. I lowered the bed rail, threw the covers off, and managed to get his feet over the side. Then I used all my weight to leverage him to a standing position. He wobbled for several seconds then grabbed the IV pole to steady himself. At first, I wasn’t sure I could get him to the bathroom, but he was lighter than I expected. I thought about the dead dove Nic and I had found in a fallen nest last spring, how it almost felt like nothing when I put it in my palm. “We can do this,” I told him.
He started to cry.
The bathroom was a few feet away, but it felt like a mile. Diarrhea puddled on the floor between his legs. I guided him around it. “Take small steps and don’t let go of the pole.”
But the walk to the bathroom took forever, and by the time I got him lowered onto the toilet, we were both exhausted. I curled his hand around the railing. Then I took off my sweatshirt, threw it in a corner, grabbed the trash can from under the sink, and placed it between his knees. “Will?” He waved his arms like a blind person; then he threw up again.
I turned on the shower, untied the strings of his gown, and wrestled his arms out of the holes. I was too scared to disconnect his IV, so I left his johnny hanging off his arm. I tried to pull his glasses off, but he pushed my hand away and held fast to them. I checked the water. It was lukewarm. “Dad,” I told him. “I’m going to try to get you into the shower.” I pried his fingers loose and helped him across the tiny bathroom, finally managing to lower him onto the handicap seat. Leaning his head against the wall, he closed his eyes. I went to work, squirting soap out of the dispenser onto a plastic loofah. As I made sudsy circles around his chest and arms, water seeped into my clothes and soaked my hair, and the vomit fell off him onto the shower floor.
Night Blindness Page 21
