by Jan Hudson
Nothing.
She searched the den and the kitchen. Then, thinking that he might have gone out for a quick errand, she checked the garage. Both his pickup and his Jaguar were in their places. Retracing her steps, she had started down the hallway to his bedroom when she heard a loud crash and muffled cursing coming from Jackson’s study.
She hurried to the door and knocked. “Jackson!”
She knocked again, then opened the door. Only a dim desk lamp illuminated the room.
“Dammit!” Jackson shouted, hurling a sheaf of pages against a wall and letting out a string of vitriolic oaths.
Papers flew everywhere, and Olivia gasped at his behavior. “Jackson! What on earth is wrong?”
He turned to her, anguish, soul-deep and terrible, etching his face, despair burning from his eyes. He raked his fingers through his hair, then clamped them against his skull as if holding his head on. “I can’t do it, Olivia. I can’t. Dammit, I’m such a loser. You deserve better than me.”
He slumped to his chair, put his elbows on his desk and dropped his forehead into his hands.
Alarmed by a Jackson she’d never seen before, a thousand thoughts went through her mind. Was he drunk? On drugs? Psychotic? She’d never seen him in a fit of temper, and it frightened her. Witnessing his behavior brought a torrent of old memories rushing into her head, memories that carried heavy emotions with them.
Her impulse was to hasten to Jackson’s side and comfort his obvious pain.
She hesitated, shuddering as tapes of her father and of Thomas flashed through her mind, the countless times she’d suffered through their vehement outbursts, been left battered and demoralized. The sequence was always the same. First came their rage and violence, then contrition, often sorrowful self-abasement and empty promises. She’d endured enough of such behavior to last a dozen lifetimes.
Was Jackson the same sort of man?
No, she prayed. Please, God, no. Not Jackson.
She couldn’t believe that she’d ended up repeating her mistakes, falling into the same pattern. Women did it all the time, ended up choosing a clone of fathers or former partners.
No. She wouldn’t believe it. Jackson was a different cut of man, and she was a different woman from the one she’d been when she was younger. She was wiser, more experienced.
Wasn’t she?
Dear Lord, she hoped so.
Her hesitation lasted only a moment more before she went to him, knelt beside his chair and laid her hand on his thigh.
“Jackson, what’s wrong?”
Seconds seemed like hours.
Finally Jackson lifted his head. His expression was no less anguished. “I’m a stupid son-of-a-bitch. Damned stupid. And a fake. I’m a fake.”
“Jackson, what are you talking about? I don’t understand. Why are you so angry? What’s going on?”
“Oh, hell, this is a mess.” He swiped his hands over his face, then dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Tami’s little boy got sick, and she had to go home, and I can’t locate Jennifer or any of the others that usually help. Hell, nobody’s home on Sunday afternoon. I’ve got this whole blasted bunch of cases to go over before the hearings tomorrow, and I can’t do it. I’ve been sitting here for two damned hours trying. Wanna know how far I’ve gotten? Two pages. Two measly, sorry-assed pages. A page an hour.” He gave a hollow bark of laughter and rubbed his forehead. “I’m about as sharp as a rubber knife.”
“One of those headaches?”
“It feels like somebody’s hammering roofing nails into my skull.”
“I’m sorry. Where are the aspirins?”
“Right here.” He jerked out the drawer and dropped the bottle onto the desk top. “Aspirins won’t help. I’ve already taken a handful.”
She stood. “Then one of my massages ought to do the trick.” Her fingers went to his shoulders, but he caught her hands and pulled her into his lap.
He cradled her close and laid his cheek on her head. “Darlin’, I’d sooner fight the devil with a willow switch than admit this to you, but I’ve gotta do it. I’ve been wrestling with it for a while now, and if anything is to become of us, there’s no way around it. I’ve got to tell you the truth about me.”
He took a deep shuddering breath, and panic began to build inside Olivia. What was he trying to say? Her imagination raced from one wild notion to another. Did he have a secret wife? A terrible communicable disease? Some shocking sexual perversion?
“Is it…bad?” she asked.
“Bad enough.”
One part of her wanted to clamp her hands over her ears or over his mouth to hold back this awful thing that he was about to reveal. The more sensible part of her said quietly, “What truth?”
She could hear his watch tick.
“I can’t read.”
The tension left her muscles, and Olivia laughed. “Of course you can’t read. You have a splitting headache.” She pulled him to her and kissed his forehead. “Poor baby.”
He captured her hands, kissed first one palm, then the other, then looked earnestly into her eyes. “Listen to me, love. I…can’t…read. Headache or no. I…can’t…read.”
Puzzled, she stared at him. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re illiterate?”
“All but.”
She sat up straight. “That’s ridiculous. You have a college degree. How can you be illiterate?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t resourceful. I flunked out of four schools—some sooner than others—before I landed in the one where I got my degree. It’s an…unusual college, small and unaccredited, kind of…experimental. I got my degree in dramatic arts.”
“Dramatic arts? As in acting?”
“Well, yeah. I wasn’t too bad at it. I’d always been a ham and the class clown.”
“To hide the fact that you couldn’t read.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve never tried to analyze it.”
“Your parents don’t know?”
“Nope. I was always ashamed of how stupid I was compared to everybody else in the family.”
“Jackson, I’ve known you for quite a while, and I’m very sure that you’re not stupid. In fact, Pete told me that you’re the smartest of his grandchildren.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Didn’t your elementary school teachers ever catch on that you were having problems?”
“Not really. Oh, I learned to read some, that is, I could recognize words on flash cards, but developing a phenomenal memory got me by.” He chuckled, but there was no mirth in the sound. “I used the cookies from my lunch box to bribe a couple of kids in my class. They’d read the lesson to me, and I’d memorize it. If we had to read aloud, I’d always volunteer to be first so I’d know where to start, things like that. As I said, I learned to be resourceful. I was never much of a student, but I managed.”
“You compensated.” She hugged him close, thinking of the little boy struggling with his awful secret.
“Yeah, I suppose. But this time I got in over my head. All the reading that goes along with being a railroad commissioner is a bitch.”
“That’s what Tami and Jennifer and the other girls do,” Olivia said. “They read for you.”
“Yeah. They think I have an eye problem. Like I said, I’m resourceful when it comes to hiding my ignorance.”
“Have you actually had your vision tested?”
He nodded. “It really is twenty-twenty. And through the years, I’ve hired tutors on the sly a time or two, trying to learn to read, but it’s no use. The letters start running together, and they might as well be chicken tracks dancing around on the page. God, I hate telling you this. It’s humiliating.” He stared at the ceiling some more.
“Don’t be silly. I’m a psychologist—or soon will be, anyway. I suspect that you have some specific learning difficulty—a form of dyslexia would be my first guess. We won’t know exactly until we have you tested.”
“Tested? What’s dyslexia?”
�
��Yes, tested. And I’m not an expert in the field, but, basically, the wiring in some people’s brains is different, and signals get scrambled so that reading is difficult. Dyslexia is a wastebasket term that covers a range of perceptual problems.”
“Great. Now I’m a freak with a miswired brain. I’m not sure that it wasn’t better just to be dumb.”
Olivia bit back a smile. “You aren’t a freak. Or dumb. Lots of people are dyslexic—would you believe Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and Pablo Picasso among others? And there are many kinds of dyslexia.” She stood and walked to the wall switch. “Let me get some proper light in here, and I’ll show you.”
Jackson winced at the brightness. “Actually, I do better with dimmer light.”
“Hmm,” Olivia said as a thought suddenly struck her. Headaches, words moving on the page, now photosensitivity. “Does strong light bother you? Is that why you wear your sunglasses so much?”
“I suppose. But everybody wears sunglasses.”
“That may be a clue, but I’ll have to talk to JoAnna.”
“Who’s JoAnna?”
“She’s a friend of mine from the university. She’s doing her doctoral research on a special kind of reading difficulty and some new and unconventional techniques for ameliorating the problem. JoAnna’s a whiz at this kind of stuff. We’ll set up an appointment for her to test you.”
He looked uncomfortable, and she chuckled. “It’s painless. I promise. And speaking of pain, how’s your headache?”
“Better. Almost gone. I guess confession is good for the head as well as the soul. But I still feel like a dope.”
“Why? I told you that lots of very bright people have similar problems. And at least it’s not catching. I was afraid that you were going to tell me that you had some dread disease.”
He grinned. “Nope. I’m clean.”
“Good. Tell you what. Let’s go pig out on Ed’s barbecued ribs, and then we’ll come back here, and I’ll read whatever you need to bone up on for tomorrow.”
He stood and tucked in his shirt. “You’re on. I could eat a dozen of those ribs right now.”
“Then let’s get the beer and go.”
They walked to the kitchen where Jackson retrieved two six-packs from the fridge and set them on the counter. He took her into his arms and kissed her—a long, slow, sweet kiss.
“Have I told you what a very special lady you are?” he asked. “You never cease to amaze me.”
“I never think of myself as amazing.”
“You are. I sweated blood over telling you about—you know—and you didn’t even bat an eyelash.”
“Why would I? Your problem isn’t shameful. We can handle it.”
He smiled at her, and an expression of infinite tenderness came over his face. “You’re something else.”
He kissed her again, almost reverently. “We’d better get a move on.”
“You’re right. We don’t want to miss out on the ribs. And I baked a coconut cake. Without a single crack.”
He laughed and grabbed the beer.
“Where’s Streak?”
“Oops. I forgot about the little dickens. He was banished to the patio for chewing up one of my favorite golfing boots.”
“Golfing boots? You play golf in boots?”
“Yep. I have a pair of boots for just about everything.” He held up one foot and showed off a pair of well-worn black ones. “Now, these are my eating ribs and drinking beer boots.” He grinned.
“Oh, you!” She laughed and swatted his bottom.
“Miss Olivia! Such liberties.” He gave her a quick peck. “Let me tend to the animal, and we’ll go.”
After Streak was fed, watered and left in the mud room with newspapers, they went out the front door.
Outside, dark was falling, and as they crossed the street, they could see Tessa and Ed waiting on the porch. “Darlin’,” Jackson said quietly, “if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon you didn’t mention my, uh, problem to the Jurneys.”
“My lips are sealed. I won’t tell a soul but JoAnna.”
On Tuesday afternoon Jackson felt like a wiggletail in hot ashes as he paced the hall waiting for Olivia’s class to be over. His boots were too tight and his tie choked him and he thought he might be coming down with a fever.
He jiggled the change in his pocket and paced some more.
Finally the door opened and a deluge of students poured through the door. Was he getting old or were college kids getting younger? And he couldn’t believe the garb they wore to class.
When the herd cleared, he stepped inside the room. Olivia was at the lectern talking to several lingering class members. As he approached, one of the girls elbowed another standing beside her. They stared at him, looked at each other, then giggled.
Yep, he must be getting old.
In a few minutes the stragglers left, and the two gigglers giggled again as they passed him.
Olivia grinned as he approached. “You really are a hottie.”
“A hottie?”
“That’s a compliment. Bridget and Emily think that you’re very handsome.”
“Who are Bridget and Emily?”
“The gigglers.”
He grinned. “A hottie, huh?”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Commissioner. If you were precocious, you could be their father.”
“Don’t rub it in. I feel 103 today. Is the meeting with JoAnna still on?”
Olivia nodded and glanced at her watch. “She should be in the lab by now. Nervous?”
“Naw. I always trim my fingernails with my teeth.”
She laughed and tucked her arm through the crook of his elbow. “Come on. I’ll introduce you to JoAnna. And, by the way, you really do look very handsome today.”
He glanced down at his gray suit. “These are my commissioner duds. I came straight from the office. Are you going to stay with me while I get tested?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t know. One part of me says yes, I want you glued to my side. Another part doesn’t want you to witness my humiliation.”
“Why don’t we ask JoAnna what she thinks?”
They went to a room on the next floor, and Olivia introduced him to a short woman with a bush of kinky red hair. She had a friendly smile and a handshake like a linebacker. They shot the breeze for a few minutes, then JoAnna Armbruster suggested that Olivia drop back by in a couple of hours.
“I hate for you to hang around so long waiting for me,” he told Olivia. “Why don’t you go on home, and I’ll stop by later.”
“Sure?”
“Positive.” He winked. “Thanks.”
“Take off your coat and relax,” JoAnna told him after Olivia left. “I promise this will be painless. Want a glass of water?”
“Please.” He stripped off his coat and tie and rolled up his sleeves, then downed the glass of water in one gulp.
“Nervous?”
“Does it show?”
She gave a laugh that seemed twice her size and motioned him to a chair. First she asked a lot of questions and filled out a form, then she had him read a bunch of stuff and asked him some more questions. That went on for a while, and his head began to pound.
After more questions and some hmms she opened a folder and removed several colored plastic sheets. “I think that Olivia was right. I think that you may have Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome, also known as Irlen Syndrome.”
“Say what? Is it catching?”
She laughed. “Not the last I heard, but if I’m right, you’ll make a dynamite subject for my study. Irlen Syndrome is a perceptual problem named after Helen Irlen, the woman who first diagnosed it. Read this for me.” She pointed to one of the pages on the desk.
He labored with the words as the letters danced and converged.
“Okay, try this.” She laid two sheets of colored plastic over the page.
It wasn’t any better.
After trying several combinations, she laid a purple and a t
urquoise sheet over the page. “Now try.”
Growing more disheartened by the moment, he sighed and looked at the page.
He glanced up at JoAnna, then looked at the page again. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“The letters. They’re not moving. They’re not dancing or blurring or sliding off the page. They’re just sitting there—as clear as can be. Well, I’ll be damned.”
A grin broke over his face, and he let out a whoop.
The grin stayed on his face while they finished the session and JoAnna put the specific colored overlays into an envelope for him.
“Placing these over the pages will help you read books or other printed material,” she told him, “but you should also be fitted for special filtered lenses at a clinic. The glasses are expensive, but I think you’ll be amazed at how much they will help you.” She handed him a sheet of paper. “This is a list of locations in the United States that do testing for filters.”
“JoAnna, I can’t tell you what this means to me.” He cleared his throat. Twice. Damn! For a little of nothing, he would start bawling like a baby. “It’s a miracle.”
She smiled. “The difference is so dramatic with some people that I know it seems that way sometimes. You’re one of the lucky ones.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice. Listen, do you need any help with your studies? A grant or something?”
“Are you kidding? Grad students always need grants.”
He whipped out his checkbook, wrote a sizable check and handed it to her.
Her eyes widened when she saw the amount. “You’ve made a mistake. I—I can’t take this. This is for—”
“It’s for a drop in the bucket compared to what you’ve done for me. Take it.” He pumped her hand again and strode from the room.
Olivia sat just outside the door.
His heart swelled up to twice its normal size to find her waiting there. “You stayed.”
She smiled. “I did. What’s the verdict?”
“Not guilty.” He grabbed her and swung her around, laughing. “I’m not an ignoramus after all. I just needed a little more color in my life. Can you believe it? I swear it’s a miracle.” He held up the envelope JoAnna had given him. “All I have to do is put a purple sheet and a turquoise sheet of plastic over a page, and I can read it. Olivia, I can read it. The letters don’t jiggle or dance or run together. The words just sit there and let me read them.” He laughed and swung her around again. “Let’s go home. This calls for champagne!”
