If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (2 page)

But on the phone Bess Edwards sounded only sensible and experienced. “I’ve done this four other times,” she said and told him it would take her another three months to have the dog—a nine-month-old Lab named Wally—ready to meet them. Then it would take an unknown number of sessions for her to train Lila. Saturday morning visits to her home, about an hour away. “I do this my way,” she said. “It isn’t orthodox, but it’s worked so far.”

Meanwhile, Jack should mail her a few of his daughter’s socks, preferably worn, and tell her just a little about the home. Are there stairs? Is there a yard? Traffic noises? Other pets? Other children? She reeled off the questions and he shot the answers back.

“Are you a single parent?”

Jack felt himself hesitate. “No, there’s a mother too.” The phrase sounded ridiculous. “I have a wife,” he said.

“I will need some money for his food.” She named a sum that sounded low.

“What about your services? We must have to pay you for this.”

“No,” she answered, after a noticeable pause. “This is just something I do. I couldn’t possibly take money for helping the blind.” And Jack flinched a little at the phrase:
the blind
. The words conjured images of ragged, sorrowful men wearing worn and filthy sacks. The blind leading the blind—in the Snyder household they’d made every version of joke possible from that line. Jack had never laughed. Even at the ones he himself had made. The blind leading the blind—to certain doom. In the momentary quiet, he waited for Bess Edwards to go on, to volunteer some connection, tell him that a relative of hers had been sightless, tell him a story about why this was something she would do.

“I guess I believe we all need to be involved in acts that make us feel a little decent,” she said instead. “Don’t you?”

“Well,” he said, after yet another pause. “It certainly is a noble goal.”

“B
ess Edwards,” she calls out now, as, arm in arm, Jack and Lila approach her rickety porch. She’s a little older than he is, he sees. The other side of forty-five. Somewhere in there. “Call me Bess. You must be Jack.” He nods, with a little smile, as he guides Lila up the two painted steps. At the top, Bess gives him a gripping two-handed handshake and Jack notices her dark blue eyes, vibrant against the brownish, lined skin that looks as though she’s never passed a moment in the shade. A healthy-looking woman, discounting all the warnings about the sun. Strong and fit. A single long, black braid hangs slung over her shoulder. “And this must be…”

“I’m Lila.” Jack watches as his daughter extends her slim arm into the exact proper spot and Bess Edwards grasps it. “I’m the blind one,” Lila says, her eyebrows arched just above the black screens of her glasses, all loveliness and charm, using her company manners—much like her home manners only without even the small trace of vulnerability Jack could occasionally detect. She lifts her chin, Grace Kelly at her aristocratic best, and in the clear, natural light, Jack can still just make out the silvery skin along her neck where the cuts had been.

“I’m glad you told me that.” Bess Edwards’s tone is more humorous than he’d expected. Unfair of him maybe, but he hadn’t counted on a woman who put doing something decent on her list of daily deeds to participate in Lila’s kind of jokes. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be mistakenly training your father on the dog.” She throws him a conspiring, bemused kind of look. “Why don’t you both come in and sit down. I’ll go get Wally ready.”

While she holds the screen door open, Jack places one hand lightly on Lila’s back. “Step inside… one small step up… okay, about four steps to the couch.” Passing Bess, he feels their bodies brush and mumbles an “Excuse me,” to which she offers no reply.

“Dog,” Lila whispers, barely audible, two steps in. “I smell dog.”

“You smell your dog,” Jack corrects, as the faint odor hits him too. “Get used to it.”

“Poor Mom. She’ll die.”

“She won’t die.” Jack can hear his own impatience. “She’ll just have to deal with it.”

“Have to deal with what?” As he turns he sees Bess standing just inside the door as the screen creaks shut, her arms folded at her waist.

“My wife is allergic to dogs,” he lies, orienting Lila to the couch and watching as she sits. “But if it’s a problem, she’ll just take some medicine.”

“I’ve had families deal with that before,” Bess says. “It’s pretty unpleasant, but it’s manageable. I’ve even heard of people allergic to their own guides.” As she speaks, she steps farther into the room.

“It’s why she’s not here,” Jack adds, sitting in the shabby armchair beside the couch, trying to banish images of Ann and what she might be doing at this moment. Staring out their front window, alert for intruders. Examining and reexamining the cans in their pantry for signs of swelling or suspicious dents. Or quite possibly still just lying in bed by the phone, anxious, immobile, and alone.

“Hmmm.” Bess shifts her eyes to Lila on the couch, her legs crossed at her ankles, the sunglasses still down. “Well, she probably should come out here sometime,” she says. “Just to meet Wally, before moving-in day.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.” As he shrugs the subject away, Jack sees Lila’s mouth tense. “Lila heads out to college year after next. The dog won’t be living in the house for very long, anyway.”

“I’ll be right back,” Bess says. “Just let me get him harnessed up and all.”

She walks past Jack and through the room. There’s something about the sway of her hips as she steps away, the braid swinging over her shoulder, falling straight down her back, something unexpectedly sexy. He glances over to Lila—almost as if to be sure she hasn’t seen him checking Bess out. Her lips are still curving down, the lower one sticking out in an unmistakable pout.

“What’s the problem?” he asks. “You look upset.”

“I feel bad about lying. About Mom.”

“You didn’t lie. I did.”

“You know what I mean.” She shifts back a little on the couch, still looking troubled. “You could have just said she’s scared of dogs. There’s nothing so weird about that.” She fills her cheeks with air and puffs it out—a mannerism of hers that predates the accident, a thread connecting her, connecting him, to those days. “A lot of people are. It isn’t like it’s some shameful thing.” And then a moment later: “Really, Dad, is it? Is it something we have to cover up?”

Is it? Or is it just his own weariness with Ann’s concerns? “No, I suppose it isn’t. You’re probably right.”

“Now what do you tell Mom? That she has to come here and pretend to be allergic to dogs? And pretend not to be scared? How’s she supposed to do that?”

“I don’t know, Lila. Maybe she won’t come here.”

“She will come, though. She will if I need her to.”

“Okay, then she will. We’ll handle it when it happens.”

Jack watches Lila’s face fall back into thought.

“What if the dog doesn’t like me?” she asks, uncrossing, recrossing her legs. “I’m not exactly an animal person.”

“If you’d seen our hostess, you wouldn’t worry.” He hears his own nervous release of a laugh. “I can’t imagine the creature who won’t do exactly what she says. And that’s including you.”

“Really? What’s she look like? Is she pretty?” Jack stares over toward the door through which Bess has disappeared. Yeah, she’s pretty. Not girlish pretty like Miranda, with her small tight body and mischievous eyes, but attractive, without a doubt.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “I wasn’t really looking for that. She’s tall, I suppose. She has a long braid, black hair. And she’s kind of muscled up. She doesn’t look like she puts up with a lot of crap.”

Lila frowns a little at that and lifts the sunglasses, rubbing her eyes. In the background Jack can hear a dog bark. He sees her flinch slightly at the sound. “My master’s voice,” she says. She turns her head so he sees her now in profile, and sitting there on Bess’s worn couch, she looks a lot like Ann. A lot like Ann did when they were young. The same pale complexion and angular face. The same strong, straight back. Even her half-closed eyes remind him of how Ann always seemed to keep herself a little hidden, a little obscured, back when her need to have Jack guide her through the world felt emboldening to him still, made him feel big and strong. Back before it became a burden. A long, long time ago.

He stands up, begins to move through the room. He steps across Bess Edwards’s faded carpet, past her upright piano. It could almost have been another man’s life, he thinks. Though of course it wasn’t. As recently as last night, after the trick with the bourbon, and after he’d followed Miranda’s instructions, just lie still, just lie still, just lie still, after she was done tracing those heavenly halos with her hips and they’d fallen into two separate bodies once again, he found himself thinking, as he did from time to time, about that boy whose family they didn’t really know. The one who’d told his daughter to shake the can of paint as hard as she could. Beside him, Miranda was blowing long, narrow streams of smoke from the one daily cigarette she’d allow herself, and Jack was telling her he couldn’t even remember the kid’s name. Not Tommy. Not Billy. But something like that. Something plain and seemingly harmless. Something common and deceptively benign.

“You’d think it would be burned into me, that name,” he said. “But it’s gone.”

Rolling onto his side, he pulled Miranda’s patchwork comforter up around his naked waist, and he told her for the first time about the day the boy’s parents came by the house, only that once, leaving enormous, bright flowers and a long, rambling letter on the porch. A letter in which they wrote about the wheelbarrow that had been hanging on the wall, and about how they wished that there was anything they could do. How they wished they knew the Snyders better, and wished that the Snyders knew them well, knew what decent people they were, so the Snyders could understand how terrible they felt. And how terrible the boy felt too—whatever his name—how terrible they all felt that this had happened in their home. Because pain that is shared, their letter said, can be pain that is lessened. They knew that was true.

He’d found it tucked among the flowers and thrown it in the trash, after reading it just once.

“Did you ever talk to them, Jack?” Miranda asked.

“No.” And he didn’t go into any more than that. But he could remember how when they had come to the front door they rang and rang and rang, seeing the lights on, seeing a car in the drive, and he didn’t answer the bell. Because they were upstairs together, he and Ann, making love to one another with all their might, still thinking they might be on the same side, still thinking that the other story might be theirs. The one in which pain that is shared is pain that is lessened, just like the boy’s parents said it was.

“No,” he said to Miranda. “I never did speak to them. I never saw the point.”

As she stubbed out her cigarette and rolled onto her elbows, close enough that he could feel a little of her heat shift to him, he reached over and drew a gentle line up and down her bare, pale back. “I was never a big enough guy to let them off the hook, I guess.”

“Even the kid?” she asked. “He had to be carrying a shit-load of guilt. You had to have felt sorry for the kid.”

Jack didn’t respond, aware of his fingertips, rough against her smooth skin.

“I guess it isn’t your strength.”

“What?” Jack looked her way, his hand stopping, then resuming its long trail. “What isn’t my strength?”

But she only shook her head, a silent no, a partial shrug, and lowered her face onto the pillow so he could keep his fingers moving easily all the way down her back, up to the base of her neck again, just to where he could feel the silky, downy hairs. Up and down. Down and up. A straight line over the knobs of her spine.

“So tell me then, Miranda, what is my strength?”

But by then she had fallen asleep. For a few moments, he watched her breathe, studied her unconcerned rest. Then he rose to dress and stepped quietly out her door, the question still hovering, unanswered, in the air.

Jack hears his daughter sigh, a theatrical, gusty sound, and turns to see her feeling at the face of her watch. “What’s your hurry?” he asks. She’s perched on the edge of the couch, bouncing impatiently.

“It just seems like a long wait,” she says. “How complicated is it to get a dog ready?”

“You should know by now, Li. Everything turns out to be more complicated than you think.”

“Tell me about it, Dad.”

“I’m sure she’ll be ready for you soon,” he says. But her face stays tense.

Jack looks away. A picture of Bess smiles down from the mantelpiece. Bess kneeling beside a big, dark dog. He walks over and picks it up. She’s wearing the same grin she gave him on the porch, over Lila’s head, a grin that looks as though she’s in on something fun. As if she’d be ready to manage whatever came her way. An easy, open face. Maybe the face of someone who does something just to feel decent from time to time.

“Okay, Lila.” If Bess notices Jack holding her picture, she gives no sign; and he puts it where it was. “Wally’s all ready, out back. Why don’t you come with me.” She turns Jack’s way as she walks toward Lila with an arm ready for her. “Jack, if you like, you can come out to the back porch. I’m going to take them pretty far out, where I have a path. I don’t want him meeting you the first few minutes, but you can watch. Just give us a little time. There’s some coffee in the kitchen. If you don’t mind rummaging, feel free to find a cup. Kitchen’s a mess, but milk’s just where’d you’d expect, in the fridge. I’m not sure about the sugar, but it’s there somewhere.”

“Sounds good. I’ll poke around.”

Lila turns in her father’s direction and he smiles, certain that he’ll see her smile too, that odd exchange of expressions they so often have, that she never sees. He stands silently, waiting for the grin, waiting for the flash of humor and the line he knows will come. The joke she has to make. He can almost supply it for her, knowing her nervous patter so well. Something about being leader of the pack. Something about being top dog, maybe. Something to which he can reply, “Very funny, Lila. Now go get to work.” But instead he sees her mouth relax into a child’s tentative lips.