"Come along, sir. We have to get going," he urges his handsome young jackass of a friend, and as they disappear out into the night, I finish the story and say goodbye to my adoring audience.
After the parents come to pick up their children, I return to the lobby and lean over the counter to make fun of Susan. I don’t think she’s ever had a boyfriend, and I’m just the sort of jerk to tease her about it given the opportunity.
"So, who’s your sweetheart?" I whisper, and she immediately flushes bright red.
"He... he’s not my sweetheart, Irene," she stammers back at me in embarrassment. "Why do you always do this?"
"Because you react to it," I answer with a wink. "Seriously though, he was cute."
"Oh don’t get me started," she says with a thin-lipped smile. "Terrence is totally gorgeous, but I think he was into you, Irene, not me."
I shake my head and groan.
"No thanks, sweetie. Besides, he’s clearly taken. I mean, he was clinging to that old guy like he depended on him."
Susan gasps and stares at me as if I’ve just said something horrible, and given my record, I probably just did. There it is... the feeling that I’ve just done something so atrocious that I’m going to feel terrible about it for weeks. It always hits me like five seconds too late.
I take a deep breath and brace myself for it.
"Okay, Susan—get it over with. What did I do this time?"
"He’s blind, Irene," she hisses angrily. "That wonderful old man you’re making fun of is his personal assistant!"
Oh my God. He wasn’t staring at me at all; he couldn’t even see me! Could I have been any more narcissistic?
"Gee, thanks Susan—I feel like a complete piece of shit now," I blurt out, and the horrifyingly embarrassing situation gets even worse as I realize there’s still
a crowd of children standing right behind me.
wi
wi
wi
Chapter III
Terrence
Ten minutes earlier...
"About fifteen steps, sir," Marcus whispers into my ear as he leads me into the library. "Fifteen steps and then there’s a counter at elbow height. The librarian is in directly in front of you across the counter."
The push-bar of the door needs oiling and so do the hinges. It creaks loudly as Marcus pushes it open and guides me through it.
Step one... two... three... all the way across the lobby to the librarian. Marcus underestimated my stride length—not that I can blame him—and I catch myself against the counter at step thirteen.
Shit, I feel so helpless.
"Good evening, Terrence," says the librarian from across the counter. She sounds friendly, almost helpful, and I imagine she has thin-rimmed glasses, freckles, and red hair tied back in a ponytail. Damned if I know why—I just do.
"Hello, Susan," I greet her back. "Any updates on the research from la hest week?"
"One second, sir. The research librarian’s gone for the day, but I’ll see if he left you anything."
Her footsteps retreat into the distance, and I lean on the counter and look over my right shoulder at Marcus. If you can still call it ‘looking’ at this point, that is.
"So, just to ask... does the librarian have red hair?"
"Other direction, Terrence," he says from my left. "And no, her hair’s black."
I’m wrong as usual.
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Let down your long hair!" calls out a woman’s voice from somewhere off to my right. It sounds like she’s holding her nose, and children’s laughter immediately follows the high-pitched exclamation. It must be reading night at the library.
"I’m sorry, Mr. Radcliffe," apologizes Susan from across the counter, returning so quietly that I didn’t know she was here. "There’s still no trace of a Nina Torres anywhere matching the information you provided us. Our research librarian even checked in neighboring states, but nobody matches her."
"So what do we know?" I ask, bracing myself with both hands as I lean over the counter.
"Careful sir," cautions Marcus from behind me. "You nearly knocked heads there."
"Oops, sorry Susan," I apologize, and I feel my face flush. It’s been five years and I still don’t know what I’m doing. I hate this.
"No worries, sir. I know you’re blind," she replies from further away this time. I must have scared her.
"All we know," she continues, "is that the Nina Torres you’re looking for disappeared from state records shortly before turning seventeen. There is information all over the place for her prior to that, but not a peep afterward. She entered the state foster program—no record of who her new family is—and then she vanished entirely."
"Terrence," interrupts Marcus from behind me, touching me on my left shoulder. "I’m going to head over to the new releases, if you don’t mind. I’ll be back in five minutes."
"See you in a few," I answer as he shuffles away. I hired Marcus to help with my company’s medical device research, but at his age, he can barely touch a scalpel without getting shaky. He mostly trains the younger, heartier researchers and acts as my personal assistant these days, and I’m indebted to him beyond words for both.
"So... Nina enters the foster program, disappears shortly after, and then what?" I ask.
"Then the trail goes cold," she answers. "Nina doesn’t show up again in any records, didn’t enroll in any of the state universities, didn’t do anything. No obituaries either, just to ease your mind. Rather, it’s as if she never even existed."
She stops to take a breath and lets me absorb the bad news.
"Unless..."
"Unless what?" I interrupt, latching onto her every word. I’ve been looking for Nina for years and I still don’t want to give up on someday finding her. Any little shred of hope is enough for me.
"Unless she’s changed her name and had the state seal the record," she says. "It’s not unheard of for foster children or their parents to want a name change, especially if their birth motherto birth m had a history of abuse or neglect. Do you think this is something she might have done?"
Nina’s mother was—maybe still is—a heroin-addicted prostitute. If I were Nina, I wouldn’t want to be associated with her either.
"If I say yes, does that help find her?"
Susan is silent for a long time.
"Well?" I ask again.
"Sorry – I was shaking my head and forgot about the blind thing," she stammers. "No, it wouldn’t help at all. If the change is sealed, we can’t even see that it exists. She could have changed it to anything she liked, and without that piece of information, we have no way to find her. She could even be married, for all we know, and have a new last name entirely."
"Well shit."
"In theory, the records can be subpoenaed but there’s no judge who’ll approve it without proper cause, and you’d need a target anyway," Susan continues. "It’s not like you can just walk into the county offices and demand to see every sealed name change and hunt for the one you like. It doesn’t work that way. You'd have to know the new name and work backward, if I'm not mistaken."
Somewhere off to my right, the other woman continues reading to the children.
"Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the witch climbed up to her," she says. Now that she’s not playing the witch role, she has a remarkably beautiful voice. Her voice is deep but still clearly feminine, soft and sweet without sounding irritatingly squeaky. I could listen to her all day.
"So there’s nothing else we can do now?" I ask Susan. Marcus taps me on the shoulder, announcing his return from the new releases. The old coot has a weakness for Agatha Christie but almost forty years later has finally accepted her death and moved on to newer authors.
"I’m sorry, Terrence," she answers. "We’ll let you know if we come up with anything else."
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Let down your long hair!" shout the children in unison.
The woman reading to them laughs and my entire world suddenly turns upside dow
n.
I watch from the other end of the hall as Nina approaches her locker. She’s almost there! My heart beats faster and faster. Suddenly, the entire idea seems so stupid, so... embarrassing. I’m such an idiot. She doesn’t like me—why would she? How could she possibly like me when I’m just like all the other assholes in our class?
I’m not like the rest of them, though. Not that she knows that...
She glances around as she reaches her locker, and I duck out of sight around the corner for a moment before peeking out again. She’s the only girl who puts a lock on her locker, but she’s also the only one who needs to. She’s the go-to target for every stuck-up, over-privileged bitch in the entire school.
She started using a lock after someone stole all her textbooks and replaced them with a mop and a note that read, "Why study when this is your future?" There’ll be a really happy dentist in New Haven if I ever find out who did that to her.
Why did I do this? It’s not going to make her happy—it’s just going to scare her that I knew her lock combination. What was I thinking?
Her locker door th locker creaks open, revealing the bouquet of flowers I left inside it, and I brace myself for her reaction.
She’s going to freak out, isn’t she? God, I’m such an asshole.
She tenderly pulls out the flowers and a smile creeps across her face, spreading wider and wider as she reads the attached note.
Then she laughs—a beautiful, soft laugh that echoes through the empty hallway—carefully puts the flowers back inside her locker, and retrieves her biology textbook before hurrying to the next class with a beaming smile on her face.
I watch her the entire way, mesmerized by both her laugh and the way her hips move as she walks. I don’t know if I’m more in love with her voice or the rest of her, but I do know one thing: nobody else in this school can even hold a candle to her.
"Are you okay, Mister Radcliffe?" asks Susan, touching me gently on the forearm as I brace myself against the counter.
"I... I’m okay," I answer shakily. Marcus grabs me by the arm and pulls me upright, steadying me as I regain my composure.
It sounded just like her... that laugh sounded just like Nina.
"Marcus?"
"Yes, sir?"
"The woman reading to the children... what does she look like?"
"Like a very confused Rapunzel, sir," answers Marcus in a low voice. "She’s dressed in a white uniform—kitchen line cook in my estimation—with a long, blond wig."
"Can you do any better than that? What does she look like?"
"I’m seventy-five years old, Terrence. My vision isn’t much better than yours."
Like hell it isn’t. I’ve seen nothing but deep, dark gray since I was twenty-one. It’s not black; everyone thinks I see black, but it’s really a strange, shifting gray as if my face is buried beneath a pile of pillows.
"Skin color?"
"Nondescript."
"Nondescript? Seriously?"
"Yes, sir. Maybe she has a bit of a tan, but otherwise a perfectly normal girl with perfectly normal features and complexion. Nothing special."
It’s always amazed me how Marcus can use so many words and yet tell me so little. I never realized how important the little details in speech were until I lost my eyesight.
"If you’d like," he continues, nudging me with his elbow, "I could make her even more uncomfortable than she already looks with us staring at her and I could go bother her with whatever other personal questions you have lined up. Perhaps I can learn her social security number and bra size for you?"
"Oh shut up."
"Yes, sir."
"The prince ascended Rapunzel’s braid, but instead of finding his dearest love at the top, he found the evil witch instead! She cackled at him with a wicked, venomous look," reads the woman, but I can hear the discomfort lurking behind her words. Marcus is right—we’re staring and it’s upsetting her.
"Alright, let’s go home," I whisper. "There’s nothing for me here."
"Thanks again for your help," Marcus tells Susan as he loops his tae loopsarm around mine and guides me toward the exit. "We’ll be on our way now."
Thirteen steps to the door—I remember from coming in. One... two... three...
"You seek your darling Rapunzel, but she’s gone, never to be seen again! The cat’s got your little bird and will scratch your eyes out as well!" cries out the woman as we reach the door, and I stop dead in my tracks.
What a horrible story. That poor prince... all he wants to find his love and live happily ever after, but instead he goes blind and wanders in the desert because of a jealous witch. I hate fairy tales.
"Come along, sir," Marcus tells me, and he yanks me out the door.
It’s starting to rain, and Marcus quickens his pace as we hurry across the parking lot.
"With all due respect, sir," he tells me breathlessly, "I think you need to start wearing your black glasses again."
"Hell no!" I fire back. "I hate those things and I hate feeling like everyone pities me."
"The alternative, sir, is that they think you’re a jerk," he says. "Your culinary Rapunzel—your sous princess, if you will—was giving you the evil eye for staring at her. Crack in the pavement."
I catch my toe on the crack and the world spins wildly around me as I start to fall. I instinctively try to open my eyes, but nothing happens because they’re already open. They’re wide open and I still can’t see. I can’t see a damned thing and I hate it. I hate it more than anything else in the world.
Marcus catches me and pulls me upright again, gripping me tightly by the shoulder as I regain my balance. The blindness ruined everything. Everything I wanted in life—every last little thing I planned for after college—was all wrecked in less than two years.
"It’s so unfair, Marcus," I whisper as we start walking again. "I was going to find her, tell my parents to shove it, and be happy with her."
"She’s gone, Isa... I mean Terrence," says Marcus, catching himself before he said the forbidden name. I’m not Isaac anymore. I abandoned that name when I abandoned my family—when I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy longer. First, my father got caught having an affair with one of the maids and then my parents separated on hateful, vile terms, each blaming the other for the infidelity. They never divorced, of course—they’d be the talk of their petty, gossiping social circle if they did dared to do something like that.
To this day, they somehow believe they’re a pair of fine, upstanding citizens who everyone else admires and looks up to—except of course for the maid, who my mother fired and then immediately had deported—and I’m the stain on the family for dating Nina and acknowledging the existence of poor people. Go figure.
"I could find her if I could see," I tell him as I stumble beside him down the sidewalk. "I just know it."
I’d known since I was a teenager that something was wrong—that something about my narrow field of vision wasn’t normal—but it wasn’t until college that I found out just how wrong it really was. Retinitis pigmentosa, the doctor called it, and he ended my treatment that day. There was nothing to do but wait as my retinas fell apart a little more every day, as my field of vision grew narrower and narrower and then finally closed completely.
"Thanks for the genes, dad," I mutter under my breath, and Marcus sighs. In my mind, the old man is shaking his head and rolling his eyes at me. He thinks I need to move on and deal with it. Let him try being blind for a bit and see how he likes it.
"Do you think it’d be easier if I’d been born blind?" I whisper, but Marcus doesn’t answer. He just keeps walking, pulling me toward the car...my car, his car now. It’s not as if I can drive it anymore.
The Lexus doesn’t feel as smooth as my old Mercedes and it definitely doesn’t smell like it.
"I miss my car," I say to nobody in particular, and Marcus sighs again. More than just the car, though, I miss eating pizza in it with Nina. It was such a little thing, but I felt like I was the king of the world w
henever I brought her dinner.
"Terrence... you haven’t seen that car in years."
"I haven’t seen anything in years."
"You need to find a new way to look at things," he tells me, his voice low and soft. He’s upset with me—upset for me—and it’s coming through in his tone. He knows where my line is and won’t cross it, but across that line is the truth.
The day I lost the last of my sight, I pressed the pause button on my life and started spinning my wheels. I haven’t changed in five years. I’m still fighting to get my sight back, fighting to find my Nina, and I’ll probably never get either of them.
Chasing Wishes Page 3
