Stephen White: Blinded

“Not exactly. But then I’ve worked hard to repress the memory of the last one. Who knows?”

“Suppress. Not repress. If you have to work hard at it, you’re suppressing. Repression is an unconscious act.”

He snorted at me and shook his head. “Work on your damn paw umbrella. Don’t insult me with your psychobabble.”

I used a totally benign please-pass-the-salt voice to inquire, “How is it different this time?”

“I don’t know.”

He stood up but didn’t go anywhere. He craned his chin upward, then side to side.

“Is your neck stiff?”

His face said it was. He added, “I must have slept on it funny.”

“Adrienne’s already gone for the day. She and Lauren took Jonas and Grace to the zoo in Denver. But I can probably reach her on her cell. Do you want me to give her a call?”

“Nah. I’ll be fine. You almost done with that thing?”

I was taping the plastic strips together, sealing the gaps between them with filament tape. I figured any slender gap was a potential escape route for Emily’s wily Houdini of a tongue. “Why don’t you sit, Sam?”

To my surprise, he did. I noticed beads of sweat dotting his wide forehead like drizzle on a car windshield.

“You don’t look too good. Let’s bag the bike ride. Why don’t I-I don’t know, take you somewhere? Go see a doctor. If you’re passing a stone, you’re going to need some drugs. Given how bad you felt last time, some serious drugs.”

“I’ll be okay. If it doesn’t go away in a minute, I’ll take some Tylenol or something.”

Yeah, that should help. And when you’re done, I thought, why don’t you go put out a forest fire by pissing on it?

He grimaced and twisted his neck some more. “Put that thing on her. I want to see how it works.”

Taping the device to Emily’s left front paw proved more challenging than manufacturing it had been. She didn’t fight me; the halo was so humiliating to her that a multicolored Clydesdale-hoof-shaped paw umbrella was little additional insult to her doggie fashion sensibilities. I needed two different adhesive tapes from the first-aid kit and then had to reinforce the harness with an astonishing quantity of filament tape. But the thing ultimately held together and stayed where it was supposed to stay on her lower leg.

I told Emily to stand.

She didn’t. She sighed.

I took the damn plastic halo off her collar and told her to stand.

She stood.

The umbrella hung over her wounded paw. The plastic strips stopped half an inch above the floor. Without delay her instincts emerged, and she leaned over to lick her open wound.

She couldn’t.

She lay back down to lick her wound.

She couldn’t.

She got back up and took a few tentative steps, offering a quick disciplinary nip at our other dog, a miniature poodle named Anvil. Anvil hadn’t done anything to warrant the discipline. Emily attempted to discipline him at irregular intervals because she could and, she believed, she should.

Anvil, as always, was unfazed. I’d realized long ago that he didn’t recognize discipline in any form.

“You know Jonas? Adrienne’s son?” I asked.

Sam grunted in reply.

“He has trouble saying Anvil, so he renamed him, calls him Midgeto. I think it fits, don’t you?”

Sam’s eyes were shut tight. Apparently so were his ears.

Emily returned her attention to the multicolored umbrella on her paw. She walked in a circle as though she were trying to determine if the thing was really going to stay with her.

After a careful appraisal from multiple angles she stared at me, gave a little flip of her bearded head, and uttered a familiar, guttural, all-purpose murmur of approval. To the untrained ear, the noise probably sounded like an insincere growl. But since I spoke a little Bouvier, I knew differently.

Rarely in history have members of two different species been so enamored of the same invention. I loved the paw umbrella. Emily, our big Bouvier des Flandres, loved her paw umbrella.

Sam’s opinion of the paw umbrella was more difficult to discern.

When I turned back to him to share our joy, I finally realized that he was having a heart attack.

Not wanting to alarm Sam unnecessarily with my amateur diagnostic assessment, I excused myself, walked then ran to the bedroom phone, and called 911. When I got back to the kitchen, Sam said, “I’m a little better, I think.”

I handed him a small handful of baby aspirin. “Chew these, and come lie down on the couch in the living room.”

“What are they?”

“For once don’t argue with me.”

He chewed the aspirin and followed me the short distance from the kitchen table to the sofa in the living room. The hand that had been poking below his rib cage was now pressing firmly at his sternum.

“You called for an ambulance, didn’t you?”

I considered lying. But I didn’t. I simply nodded.

Anvil-Midgeto-jumped up on the couch and snaked under Sam’s arm to spread his lithe body across Sam’s lower abdomen. It appeared as though he was determined to be a little canine heating pad.

Emily rested her big head on Sam’s thigh.

Sam absently stroked the dogs’ fur and said, “You have good dogs.”

Sam and I rarely agreed on anything. But we agreed on that.

“Am I having a heart attack?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid you are.”

“I don’t want to die, Alan.”

We agreed on that, too. I didn’t want him to die, either.

“I think he murdered a friend of ours in Laguna Beach.”

I kept my gaze locked on Gibbs. Her words were as provocative as anything I’d heard in a therapy session in quite some time, but I was having a hard time not thinking about Sam.

Less than twenty-four hours earlier the ambulance had taken him to Avista Hospital, which was closest to my house in the hills on the eastern side of the Boulder Valley, not Community Hospital, which was only blocks from his house in the shadow of the Rockies on Boulder’s west side. The cardiologist who worked him up in the ER and busted his clot with some cardiac Drano had scheduled an angiogram for the precise hour on Monday morning that I was seeing Gibbs Storey. At the moment when Gibbs told me she suspected her husband of murder, Sam probably already had a puncture hole in his groin and a long catheter snaking up an artery to his heart.

What would Sam, an experienced homicide detective, do in response to Gibbs’s revelation, were he sitting here with Gibbs and me? I wasn’t sure. If I could have channeled his presence to assist in this interview, I certainly would have.

I could have said, “Holy shit!” in response to Gibbs’s accusation of her husband, but I didn’t.

Or I could’ve said, “That doesn’t really surprise me,” because it didn’t. Not totally, anyway. Sterling Storey was, like his wife, not only charmed but a charmer. I also suspected that he was a bully. Or more accurately, an intimidator. I’d seen his act up close and personal during one of our conjoint psychotherapy sessions.

As I exhaled, I reminded myself that the fact that Sterling had taken a few cheap verbal shots at Gibbs a decade before didn’t mean he was capable of murder.

But I also recalled the razor edge of his glare. The fact that I remembered it at all told me something that I was certain was relevant. I’d witnessed the glare, I think, during the second of our three sessions. Gibbs had said something about… God, I couldn’t remember what Gibbs had said something about, and Sterling had touched her knee to get her attention and had then frozen her with a look so menacing that I remembered it as though it had happened only yesterday.