Bill Pronzini - The Lighthouse

She was about to take a sip of brandy, hoping it would steady her, when the wind gusted strongly, baffling around the tower, and then increased to a maniacal shriek. She sat up straighter, a frisson rippling along her spine.

The sound brought it all back to her: that night in Boston, in Jan’s old apartment in the condemned building on Beacon Hill. The night he’d told her about the murder in Madison during his college years. With the memory came a strong sense of deja vu. It was as if they were reenacting that scene in Boston. The cold, the wind, the brandy, even their positions relative to each other, not touching, formal… it was all the same.

Convulsively she raised her glass and took a long swallow. As if it were a signal, Jan stirred and looked at her and then said, “Alix, this isn’t easy for me.” He paused, rolling the brandy snifter between his palms. This, too, called up an image of a younger Jan making a similar gesture before he confessed to the loneliness and emotional poverty of his life. “I’d better start at the beginning,” he went on. “With the headaches I’ve been having.”

The headaches. His health. It was what she’d expected, and something she could cope with.

“When I told you Dave Sanderson didn’t know what caused them, it was only a half-truth. They-the doctors; I’ve seen several specialists-they do know what is causing them. It’s a degenerative disease that affects the optic nerve. Both optic nerves, in my case.”

The word “degenerative” seemed to hang in the air between them. She felt a coldness spreading outward to her limbs.

“What they don’t know,” Jan said, “is exactly what causes the disease. Some kind of virus, maybe; they’re just not sure because it’s rare.” He drew a deep breath. His fingertips, pressed tight around the snifter, were white. “They also don’t know how to treat it, to stop or even slow down the degeneration. They’ve had some success with drugs, cortisone and some others, but… a few patients respond, most don’t. If they don’t, the disease progresses and… eventually they lose their sight.”

Numb now, she sat very still, waiting.

“The drugs haven’t worked on me, Alix. The pain and other symptoms are getting worse. There’s nothing they can do. In a year or two, I’ll be blind.”

Blind!

That word, too, hung in the air between them. And echoed inside her head. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t think clearly.

Then, as she began to feel the impact of what he’d said, it was as if a fine mesh screen had been drawn down between them. She could see him hazily, hear him, but she seemed cut off from him by a gray veil.

Her silence seemed to encourage him. He went on more confidently, using terms like “uveal disease” and “image distortion” and “systemic chorioditis.” She heard it all, but somehow it did not quite register. It was like reading a medical text in which all the unfamiliar terms merely form a pattern on the page-something incomprehensible, arcane.

Jan went on and on, relating medical facts in a too-cool, too-rational tone. Finally, when she’d heard enough, she set her glass down and pushed her hands toward him to stem the meaningless, strange-sounding words and phrases.

“Please stop.”

He stopped. And after a moment, when the screen between them seemed to dissolve and her own vision cleared, she lowered her hands.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” she said.

“I couldn’t. I just… couldn’t.”

Let that go for the moment, she thought. “All right. I’m glad you finally have.” Now her words were too-cool, too-rational. “The details are too much for me to take in right now. I’ll have to talk with… one of your specialists before I fully understand.”

“Yes,” he said, “I guess you should.”

“The headaches… they’ve been getting worse, haven’t they?”

“Much worse.”

“And the other symptoms-what are they?”

He licked dry-looking lips. Behind the panes of his glasses, she saw the fear come into his eyes again.

“Jan, what are they?”

“Nothing the doctors told me to expect,” he said. “I had no warning. They… they’re blackouts.”

“Blackouts?”

“I didn’t have the first one until we came here.” Then the words came out in a rush. “Periods of time-hours-when apparently I’m conscious and moving about, doing things, but afterwards I can’t remember what they are. The night I hit Novotny’s dog… I had one then. And the night coming back from Portland. And the night Mandy Barnett was… the night she died. Alix, I don’t know how or why I ended up out on that lookout; I just don’t know what I did the whole time I was gone.”

The unspoken lay heavy on his mind, if not on hers. He had had blackouts three times, and on each occasion someone-or something-had died. First the dog, and finally Mandy Barnett. And part of his fear was that he might be responsible for the deaths of those two girls as well. She could see that fear, feel it, almost smell it.

The empty snifter slipped out of Jan’s hand, bounced on the rag rug and then onto the floor, and lay there rolling slightly back and forth. He didn’t seem to notice. But Alix watched it as if it were an object of fascination.

“Ah Christ, Alix,” he said in a choked voice, “don’t you see? I don’t know what I do when I have those spells, what I might be capable of. I can’t believe I could hurt anyone, and yet… Novotny’s dog.. I just don’t know.”

She wanted to go to him, comfort him, but she felt frozen, suspended in a time warp between the present and that long-ago night in Boston. Then, as he’d revealed the emptiness and sadness of his life, his pain had been genuine and deep; but this pain cut to the core of him, a hundred times more acute. All this time, since he’d first learned of his disease, he had been living a hellish existence: alone when he should not have been alone, shouldering a torment-a series of torments-that he should have shared with her.

She could do nothing to change the past, or alleviate his fear of his imminent blindness; but she could relieve him of the other part of his terror. She said, “The dog was an accident. And you didn’t hurt anyone else; you couldn’t have.”

“Are you so sure of that?”

“Yes. I know you, I know you’re not capable of—”

“You’re my wife. Naturally you feel that way.”

Had she been so absolutely sure of him all along? If she hadn’t, she must never admit it even to herself. She said, “There’s more than that. Actual physical evidence. The detective, Sinclair, told me Mandy was killed by someone driving a dark-green car or truck; you couldn’t possibly have run her off the road. And whoever strangled Mandy must have strangled that other girl, too. You had nothing to do with either one.”

He sat motionless for a moment. Then he took off his glasses, scrubbed at his eyes as if to wipe away some of the fear. And at last, seeing him do that, she was able to go to him-to kneel down to him, pull his head into the protective curve of her shoulder.

“The dog—” he began.

“An accident. ”

“But the blackouts—”

“Whatever you do during them, you’re not dangerous to anyone except when you’re behind the wheel of a car. The doctors will find out why they’re happening, how to control them. They’ve got to.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he raised his head, but not to look at her, his gaze fixed on a point over her left shoulder. “No matter what the doctors find out about the blackouts, I’m going to be blind. Do you realize what that will mean? If you’re still with me, I’ll become a burden to you. A sick, dependent, blind husband.”

Now the reason for his silence about his illness was becoming clear. He’d been afraid she would leave him! But how could he have been so unsure of her? And needlessly so; leaving him had never crossed her mind, even when she had doubted his sanity.