Night Blindness by Susan Strecker Read Free Book Online Page B

upset you.” A cold, horrible feeling washed over me that maybe Ryder had confessed what we’d done. “I know how hard it was for you after Will. They were so much alike. I worried you wouldn’t want to see him.” He stared out his window.
    He was right. I might have half-hoped Ryder would come to the farmhouse all those summer nights and during Christmas breaks, but I would have been scared out of my mind if he had. He knew me only as the girl who didn’t drink, never broke curfew. He’d have been mortified to see what I’d turned into. I downshifted, slowing for traffic around Hammonasset Beach.
    â€œHe asked about you.” He tapped his fingers on the window. “I told him you were married, happy, still my best girl.” He put his hat on backward, and he could have been Will, twenty years from now, if he’d lived. “Painting up a storm, about to be the next Georgia O’Keeffe out there in Santa Fe.”
    Above us a banner waved on the I-95 overpass: WELCOME HOME SERGEANT KINNEY, WE MISSED YOU! I thought of some soldier making his way home from Iraq to this idyllic town, I thought of Ryder at my parents’ kitchen table, hearing I was happily married, and I felt like I might scream.
    â€œAw, Whobaby.” My dad put his hand over mine on the gearshift. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It’s just been nice having him around. Your mother’s gone so much, and it’s like…” His voice faded. But I knew what he was going to say: like having part of Will back again.
    We drove along the coast, past beach houses, churches, and harbors, my father’s palm over my hand the whole time. It was good of Ryder to come by. They needed that. Ryder had been like a second son to my father. He and Will had worshiped my dad. Ryder’s own parents were too old, too stiff to be any fun, and he’d spent most of his time at our house. The three of us were always together. He wasn’t great at football like Will, but he loved playing in the backyard while I kept score and made lemonade.
    It was my fault, I knew. They needed someone to visit them. At Andover, I’d made it home for holidays. But after I went to UCB, I’d been terrible at keeping in touch. I’d been home maybe six times since I graduated. I tried to make up for it by sending my parents presents I knew they’d love. I’d scour antique shops and flea markets when I was on tour with Nic. In Venice, I’d found a candid, never published photograph of Dorian Leigh, the original supermodel. And last year in Cheltenham, England, I’d come across a leather football helmet worn by Bill Hewitt, one of the best NFL players of the 1930s.
    When I got married, even those Sunday conversations we’d made a habit of in boarding school stopped. I hated those calls. It sounded like my dad’s voice had lost its backbone, and it made me feel like the plates of the earth were shifting beneath me. He’d tell me how long it had been since he’d seen Will, recalling the number of days, as though keeping track might bring him back. Inane things ran through my mind while we talked: Will had left his history homework in my room that day; he’d asked me whether I thought Eileen Williams would go to homecoming with him. He and Ryder finally showed me how to drive a stick; they’d taught me all the words to the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” I miss his laugh, I’d wanted to say while I sat on my narrow bed at Andover. But I just hung on the phone, trying to keep up my end of the conversation and sifting through that shoe box I dragged with me wherever I went. In it were Will’s high school ring, which he’d left on the sill in the kitchen; ticket stubs from an Oasis concert he and Ryder and I had gone to; the dried daisies they’d swiped from the neighbor’s yard on my fifteenth birthday; notes he’d tacked on my door: