Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [33]
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to go in another room and you have to count to a hundred and then come find me. You can call my name three times. Wait, no, only two times. If you call my name three times, then you lose points, okay? And I’ll answer you so that you can try to hear where I am.”
“Got it,” Isabella said.
“Okay. This is hard, though, Auntie Iz. You have to listen with your insides. You can listen in a way that you didn’t before. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Connor walked out of the room and then Isabella heard him stop. “But Auntie Iz? If you get scared or fall down, you can take it off, okay? That’s okay.” Isabella nodded. She felt Connor touch her eyes softly. “You really can’t see, right? Okay, here we go.”
Isabella heard him run out of the room and shout, “Okay, go!” She was counting to one hundred in her head, and then she heard him say, “Auntie Iz, you have to count out loud!” So she started over. “One, two, three, four,” she said, and then she heard him scream, “Slower!” so she slowed down.
She heard a door slam downstairs and then voices. Her mother was talking to Connor. Isabella could tell that he was frustrated that she was interrupting the game. Then she heard her brother’s voice. They were talking to Connor like he was younger than he really was, and Isabella felt bad for him. She hadn’t noticed how their voices changed when they talked to him. She heard them ask him about where she was.
“No,” she heard him say. “No, you can’t get Auntie Iz now. She can’t come in here yet. She’s blind,” and Isabella was struck by how he said that last word. He said it like he was proud of her for choosing the blindness, like he was amazed that she would choose not to see.
She could hear Connor’s voice start to rise. His pitch got higher and his volume louder as he said, “No, you said three-thirty and it’s only three o’clock. I’m not ready. I’m not finished.” Isabella knew that he was shaking his head as he said this, tightening his arms and shaking them back and forth with quick, little movements. She had seen him work his way into a fit a number of times in the past week, but now she just listened.
“I’m not done, I’m not ready!” he said. “Izzy is still blind, and I didn’t know you were coming yet. I’m not done! I’m not done!”
Isabella listened to him as he shrieked so high and loud that she knew the neighbors could hear. “This isn’t how it was supposed to go!” he yelled. She listened to her mother and brother try to quiet him down, try to plead with him to settle himself. But he didn’t. Connor screamed with all of his might. He fought against it with everything he had. All he wanted was to know what to expect. His world didn’t look like he’d thought it would, and she understood. How could he keep calm if he couldn’t see? Isabella lay on the floor of the playroom upstairs and listened. She heard the screams and she knew exactly how he felt. He was right—she could hear it on her insides.
The bartender at McHale’s was sleazy in an attractive way. This annoyed Lauren. She couldn’t make sense of it. She was disgusted with Preston, yet still happy whenever he threw a lime at her from behind the bar. “He’s gross,” she tried to explain to her friends. “He has dirty blond hair that he slicks back behind his ears with little curls at the end. It always looks greasy. His eyes are a filmy blue, like he’s thinking pervy things. And he has this big scar on his chin that I just always want to touch.”
“So he’s dirty sexy,” her friend Shannon said.
“Yes!” Lauren said. “But why?”
“Dirty sexy can’t really be explained,” Shannon said. “It’s kind of like ugly sexy. Only you feel worse about it because you think you should be above the sleaze.”
Lauren felt better for the explanation, but it still unsettled her to be around him. “I will not sleep with him,” she told herself. Two weeks after she started working there, she stayed with Preston to have a drink after work and found herself having sex with him in the walk-in