Night Blindness by Susan Strecker

J—Mandy called. Call that crazy girl baaaaack! Jenny—I took the VW to Titer’s bash. Get your ass over there! Meet R and me at Breakneck if Jamie’ll let you have the car. Waterskiing! The shoe box also held the condom—the one Ryder and I had never used. As the paramedics were strapping Will to the backboard, I saw its silver corner under the couch and slipped it in my pocket.
    It was grounding, sorting through that shoe box while we talked, breathing the musty smell of my closet, like a bizarre time capsule. Almost everything in it was a piece of history from the three of us. I’d taken it with me to college in Colorado, but after I’d moved in with Nic, it’d gotten lost.
    I didn’t want to let go of my grief. Without it, I would have disappeared. Sometimes, going through my days, I’d forget about Will for a moment, and then feel a sharp panic when he’d come back to me. I deserved to remember what I’d done every second of every day. So, when I still woke at night to the weight of what Ryder and I did, and the physical pressure of remembering made me gasp for air, something in me didn’t mind so much. It made me know I was alive.
    â€œEarth to Whobaby,” my dad said now.
    I squeezed his hand. “I’m here, Daddy.”
    We were stopped at a red light again near the Westbrook town line, his skin sun-kissed from the drive. “Thinking, thinking, my bright shining star, always thinking.” He beamed over at me as if that tumor weren’t ticking away like a clock. My dad still thought I was the straight-A student I’d been before Will died, when he used to pin my report cards on the refrigerator next to newspaper clippings about Will. “My Whobaby’s going to be somebody someday,” he used to say. “You watch.”
    I wondered what he thought when my Andover and UCB report cards arrived. In prep school and then in college, I sat for hours in a hidden carrel in the library, a little stoned, trying to read about the French Revolution or the astronomy of Copernicus. I usually found myself at Hanky’s bar, shooting pool, or, later, in Nic’s studio, listening to Van Morrison and trying to get that self-portrait to be somebody else. What Ryder and I had done, Will’s death, eclipsed every other thing that came after it.
    We’d driven all the back roads and were almost to the Baldwin Bridge when my dad asked if I was hungry. I felt flushed from wind and sun, and the constant drone of the road had made me sleepy. I didn’t care if we stopped for lunch or if I ever ate again. I wanted desperately to go back in time, to spend every weekend of my life riding around like this with him. I wanted to keep driving forever.

 
    6
    â€œI can’t believe you’re here.” Mandy looked even more beautiful than she had when we were teenagers, her blond hair swept up in a loose twist. I couldn’t believe I was there, either, sitting across from her at Liv’s, a lily of the valley bouquet between us, the diamond pendant around her neck throwing rainbows all over the restaurant. “How’s my second papa doing?” Mandy never held it against me that I rarely called or e-mailed and almost never came back to visit.
    â€œHe’s okay.” I felt like crying. Liv’s was noisy for late afternoon in the middle of the week, and no one would have noticed if I had cried, but there was no reason to. “Overwhelmingly favorable odds,” Ryder had said. It was great news, my dad’s prognosis, but I knew no matter how many little red cars my father borrowed for us, I still couldn’t make myself believe it. “They think radiation will get it.” Mandy put her hand over mine. I studied her big hoop earrings, I remembered now she’d bought them at the plaza when she’d come to Santa Fe.
    Her eyes filled with tears. “Damn.” She picked up her napkin and dabbed at them.