Night Blindness by Susan Strecker Read Free Book Online

trying too hard.” He rested his hand on mine and placed it on the keys. I snapped it away.
    â€œI don’t remember ‘Reverie,’ Uncle Luke.”
    He tapped my chest below my collarbone. “Your brain might not, but your body does. It’s in there somewhere.” He used to call me his “prodigy,” his “rising star,” and I had that sinking feeling, as he put my hand down and I pressed haltingly on the keys, that I’d disappointed him.
    â€œClose your eyes,” he said. The first verse came out stilted; then the grandfather clock struck twelve, and I remembered the second verse was in the same key as those chimes. At the beginning, my fingers felt stiff, cramped, but after that first refrain, they started moving, like water. I wasn’t sure where they were on the keys, only that I was hitting the right ones.
    And then I was the vibration of hammer hitting string; I was existing both inside and outside myself. My body leaned into the music. I heard the two voices, their melancholy so beautiful, it made me want to cry. The crescendo of the song came, and I played drunkenly, my fingers moving furiously. The playing loosened something in me that had been mashed down, way down, and I could breathe. The secret choking in my chest was, for one brilliant, beautiful moment, gone. And then my fingers tripped over the keys, they missed a note, and I stopped. My hands wouldn’t play anymore.
    Luke put his arm around me. We didn’t speak for a long time. Finally, he said, “Why’d you quit?”
    Outside, a breeze made the weeping willow appear to be dancing, slowly, sadly. I didn’t answer. I felt that thing shutting down inside me again, that slanting edge that built itself instantly when someone asked questions. Luke took his arm away and fingered the keys lightly, pushing against me a little. He was playing an old Harry Chapin song. His handmade silver bracelets glinted in the sunlight. “You’re afraid,” he said while he played. He’d segued to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”
    â€œI am not.”
    â€œYou are afraid. You’re afraid to feel anything.” It was like this with Luke; he skipped the small talk and went deep.
    I watched his fingers running effortlessly over the keys. I wanted that again. I used to play in my sleep, in my dreams. “How do you know that?”
    â€œI can read your spirit.” He transitioned to “Yesterday.”
    â€œI’m not afraid to feel something,” I said. The sun glinted against his thumb ring. “I’m afraid because I don’t.”
    He was playing a different version, slower than the original, more melancholy. “How long are you staying?”
    I’d like to see if we can radiate the area daily for eight weeks. “Two months,” I said.
    â€œI know this is a lot to throw at you a day into it,” he said over the music, “but you’ve got a choice to make here. Either tell your old uncle what you’ve been locking up so tight all these years or I’m going to make you play it out.” I watched his hands, felt the fireplace behind me. I heard Will’s voice coming out of the dark: What the fuck are you doing to my sister? “Things left to boil too long,” Luke said now, “always combust.”

 
    5
    Three days later, I was driving my father around in a red 1966 Alfa Romeo 1600 Spider Duetto he’d borrowed. It was supposedly the one they’d used in The Graduate, my favorite movie. My hands held that shiny wooden steering wheel while the radio played an oldies station out of New Haven. He sat next to me, his wheat-colored hair blowing with the wind. It was just like him to call up a gazillion people he’d known since his football days until he found this car. After Will died, he’d bought a ’57 Porsche 356, and whenever I came home from Andover, he’d knock on my