If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (3 page)

“See you in a little bit, Dad,” she says, and turns away.

B
ess’s kitchen is small and cluttered, a far cry from the scrubbed hygienic laboratory Ann inhabits, and nothing like the near empty, seemingly unused room in which Miranda grabs bottles of liquor and microwaves frozen food for them after sex. Among Bess’s things it takes him longer than he can believe to find the coffeemaker, which is full, as promised, but hidden behind bags of white and whole wheat flour, loaves of bread and mason jars of who knows what. He opens and inspects three cabinets before locating a mug. The one he chooses advertises a local folk art museum—one of the many places he’s told himself he ought to see but hasn’t managed to yet. Because he can’t take Lila; there’d be no point. And he’s promised Ann not to be seen in public with Miranda, to show her that much respect, anyway. “Just don’t make a spectacle out of us. And please don’t let my daughter know. That isn’t asking too much, is it, Jack?”

No. No, it wasn’t asking too much. He’s been very careful to do as Ann asked. Lila knew nothing, he was sure, and Miranda has only seen Lila once, a few months earlier, back in the fall. Jack picked her up at the café after work and on an impulse, his impulse, they drove across town to Lila’s school, just in time to watch the kids boarding the late bus for home.

“That’s her,” he said, pointing out his lanky daughter, curls pulled back into a messy knot. She was walking arm in arm with her best friend, Gabrielle. The blind leading the blind—personified. He was grateful to Miranda for not making the joke. “That’s my Lila,” he said. “The tall, pretty one in the red T-shirt.”

And for some moments Miranda looked silently toward the girls. “But they’re wearing the same shirt,” she finally said. “In different colors.”

Jack saw that she was right. Sure they were. They often were. “Yeah.” He nodded and he started up the car. “On any given school day… One kid made a fortune selling them.”

“What does it say?”

He told her.

“Funny,” she said, as he pulled out into traffic.

“Yeah, funny,” he repeated, some seconds later. “I guess it is.”

Jack fills the art museum coffee cup, though he doesn’t really want the coffee. He steps out the screen door onto a small wooden porch.

Behind the house is an open field, and twenty yards or so away there’s a dirt track where Bess and Lila stand, close together. At first Jack can’t see the dog, but as the two figures step apart, he finds him there. His broad, tawny back is bound by the harness, no ordinary leash, even from that distance, but the unmistakable constraints of a guide dog at work. The stiff lead is in Lila’s hand and Lila looks suddenly blinder to Jack than she has for years, as though something about the image has been completed, the last piece of a puzzle snapped into place. From two dozen yards away, his daughter is visibly blind. For all the world to see. And for a moment, he stands still, snagged on the paradox of being glad that at least she can’t see herself like this.

“Jesus,” he says, out loud. “Jesus Christ.”

Eleven years. It’s been eleven years. You have to let go, Jack, Miranda would say. You have to let her go. He sits onto the steps, slowly, his hand behind him as if to be certain the wooden surface will be there, as though he is the one who must feel, to be sure. And then, without noticing, he begins sipping at the coffee he didn’t want—but there’s a chill in the air and the warmth feels welcome after all. Holding the cup close to his face, he watches through the rising steam. Then he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls his glasses out, the ones he has always needed for distances but didn’t wear for years and years after the accident, not until Miranda gave him holy hell for the notion that walking around in a blur would somehow help his child.

Lila begins to move, very slowly, the dog many steps ahead. Then Bess joins her, says something, and Lila stops, starts again, pulling the animal closer to her side this time. She walks another ten feet on the track, then stops. Then pulls him close, again. Every once in a while, Bess Edwards pats the dog. And after she does that a couple of times, Jack sees Lila begin to do the same thing. He watches as his daughter’s face moves very close to the dog’s and her hands run over his ears and nose. Her lips are moving; her head is tilted to the side. Bess Edwards take a step away from them. Soon she looks up at him and waves. Lila just keeps talking to, touching the dog.

Wally. The animal’s name is Wally.

“Jack!” Bess calls out and he can almost feel himself materialize as Lila’s head swivels, seeking him.

“I’m over here. I’m over here.” Jack raises his arms overhead and waves as if toward his daughter, who waves back, in the right direction—more or less. “Looking good, Lila,” he calls. “I like your new friend.”

“Wally?” Her voice cuts through the air, banishes his invisibility, calling him back to her again. “I’m not so sure about the name,” she says. “I think he’s more of a Hubert, myself.”

“Get to work!” Jack has his hands cupped as a bullhorn around his mouth. “You still have a lot to learn.”

“Are you kidding? This is a breeze.”

When Lila turns away, Jack settles back onto the step. He watches the scene, and tries to take it in. This is the creature who is to become his daughter’s eyes from now on. Jack’s replacement in a way, he understands. Just like Miranda said.

The dog barks, as though in response to Jack’s thoughts, a deep, confident bark. This is who she must trust completely now—even when others turn out to let her down. Wally. The companion she’ll have for years and years. Because her guidance counselor talked them into it. Because Ann handed him the card. Because the other phone was busy. And because Bess Edwards is a woman who thinks that we should all do something decent now and then.

“It’s the best way to do adulthood,” the counselor said about her own guide.

It probably is, Jack thinks. It probably would be for anyone. He looks at his watch. Just past ten. Miranda should be rolling out of bed now, sleeping late the one luxury she cares about. He thinks again about their conversation, about the way the question of his strengths was left hanging in the air.

“I can’t remember his name,” he said to her.

More lies.

The kid’s name had been Oliver. Oliver Franklin. A skinny little boy with dark blond hair and eyes that filled with tears all too fast, that October afternoon. A little boy who cried much too easily when Jack stepped into the child’s yard and found him—caught him—tossing a ball up into the air. Playing, alone. Playing with a ball. Throwing it up into the sky, and knowing how to catch it as it fell. Knowing where to put his perfect little hands and catch the falling sphere. Every goddamned time. “It might have been Bob,” he said as they lay side by side. “Except I don’t think it was. It was something like that, though. Something simple and harmless-seeming like that.”

He’d been light as nothing, and Jack had just picked him up in his arms. Just the work of a moment, lifting him and carrying him behind the hedge. Away from any adults watching them. Away from the sight of the child’s house, where the mother must have stood, fixing dinner, or maybe sat, resting for a moment in front of the TV. Away from the garage, where it had happened. Away from the wheelbarrow. The can of paint.

Shake it harder, Lila. Shake it harder
.

“Is that what you said to her?” he asked, as he himself shook the boy, digging his fingers into the child’s skinny frame. “Is that what you told my daughter to do?”

But his young eyes had filled up all too soon, great rivers of distorting, falling tears, his little shoulders convulsing in noisy sobs.

“Yes,” he told Jack, his head flopping in a violent nod, from chest to back, chest to back. “Yes, I did. I did. I told her to. I did.”

And that was that.

And there hadn’t been any good from that. No good at all. There hadn’t been a single moment of satisfaction to be felt. But before he took his hands off the boy, Jack had thrown him to the ground. “Little fucker,” he said, as if that might somehow help. And then he walked away. Left the kid lying there. He walked past the house. Past the garage. Down the street. All of that. All of that for nothing.

Because when he got home, Lila still couldn’t see.

B
ess touches Lila’s shoulder and they exchange a few words; then Bess begins to walk toward him. Jack shifts toward the rusted rail, making room for her.

“Lila’s doing great,” she says once she’s close enough for a normal tone of voice. “She talks a good game, your daughter, but she’s a good listener too.” As she sits in the space beside him, a clean soapy smell drifts his way, and he notices a slight haze of freckles across her cheeks and nose. “She’s a nice kid,” Bess says. “She asked me how I was going to feel letting Wally go, asked me how I keep from getting too attached. Not every kid thinks in those terms.”

“I was wondering that myself. How do you?” Jack is half watching her, half watching his daughter on the field.

“Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t.” As she speaks she smooths tiny wrinkles from her jeans. Her hands are broad. A silver ring glistens on her index finger. “I miss the dogs pretty badly when they go. Then, eventually, I get another and start all over. And that helps, I suppose.”

“Did you tell Lila that?”

“I told her something like that.” Her hands settle on her knees. “With a little less emphasis on the sad part. I don’t want her feeling bad.” Jack doesn’t know what to say, but then Bess picks up again. “She tells me you and her mother are having a hard time thinking about her taking off for school on her own next year. That’s understandable. She’s quite a girl.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think all parents probably—”

“She told me something else, too.” She’s turned away a little from him now, so Jack can’t see her eyes. “She told me you weren’t entirely truthful about your wife.”

“Huh.” He looks out toward Lila, kneeling now in her denim skirt, patting the dog along his flank. “Huh,” he says again. “She told you that, did she?”

“You’d be amazed how many people are terrified of dogs.” Bess is smiling a little at him again, but he can’t quite smile back. “I deal with it all the time, Jack.”

“I don’t…” He can’t come up with very much more. “I guess that’s right. I guess a lot of people are.”

“Your daughter’s exact phrase was ‘I don’t know why my dad was so bizarre about this. As if it were leprosy or something.’ ”

Jack smiles at Bess’s imitation, in spite of himself. Pitch-perfect. He looks down toward his shoes. “That sounds like my girl,” he says. “And I’m sorry about the bluff. I don’t know why I did that. Really, in all honesty I can’t imagine why.”

And he can’t. There is no real why. Just a further symptom of how messy everything’s become. Ann’s fears: a symptom. His habitual lies: another symptom.

Bess shrugs. “It doesn’t matter, Jack. I’m not pegging you as some kind of criminal because you covered something up.” She smooths the fabric along her legs again. All the little wrinkles. All the little disturbances. “It probably just felt private to you, which is fine. But I do need to be a little clinical about all this. Something like a doctor, I suppose.” She turns to face him. “I really need to understand Lila’s home life—really understand it. If your wife has a dog phobia, even if it’s just a minor problem, we’ll deal with that. I just have to know about it.” He notices her small, off-white teeth that have never been fixed, a little crooked, a little buck. “We can work around just about anything—I just have to know the truth about what I’m sending Wally into. Wally, and Lila too. They have to trust each other. Which really means that we have to, right?”

As he nods, Jack’s chest rises and falls in a sigh. He’s probably already broken some aspect of Bess Edwards’s personal code of decency, he understands. She’s trying to be kind, but for a moment, sitting there, he’s oppressed by his sense of the bad impression he must already have made. He looks out to Lila, still kneeling in the dirt, her feet sticking out from her long denim skirt, her face right up against the dog’s. Never lie to her. Never lose her trust. Maybe that would be an easier mandate for an animal to follow.

“Listen, Bess,” he begins. “Lila doesn’t know everything.” Jack closes then opens his eyes. “There’s a lot more to our home life than her mother’s fear of dogs.” He leans over and picks up a small stick. “My wife and I are separating, after Lila goes away to school. It’s all been decided. I’m planning on moving out.”

As the words come out, something else occurs to him. This woman whom he barely knows is the first person he’s been honest with about this. Other than Ann. Even Miranda doesn’t know how concrete these plans are. “We haven’t said anything to her yet.” Jack shakes his head. “We’ve had to give our daughter an awful lot of bad news in her life. I guess I just haven’t been able to face doing this. Pretty cowardly, right?” Bess’s eyes give no reaction he can read, and for just a second, he thinks of adding something more. Something about how Ann has told him he’s the one who has to tell Lila, because he’s the one who first gave up on them. Because he’s the guy who wants out. The guy who can’t keep himself from seeking something resembling pleasure somewhere else. That all he can think of when he imagines breaking this news to his daughter is that other terrible conversation. The one he had with her when she was six. The one in which it felt as though with every word, he personally, Jack Snyder, was robbing his own child of any hope. Bess’s eyes are so open to him and so kind, he can easily imagine trying to explain it all to her. Trying to defend his decision to leave. To betray. To run away. Going into the petty, the hurtful, the heavy drag down into failure that has brought their marriage to this end. He can feel this desire to confess and then plead his own case swell like a powerful wind gusting somewhere deep inside his chest. But he stops himself. Closes himself tight against the urge, and for a time, Bess gives no response at all. Just looks away a little from his gaze, and gradually it becomes the kind of moment when the sounds that were there all along are audible, anew. Cars passing by on the distant road. Birds calling out to one another; birds calling back. A plane overhead.