Stephen White - Blinded

“Whew, interesting weekend” was her opener.

I suppose. I tried to read her face for signs of what she might be feeling, but no clues jumped at me.

I did, however, check “distressed” from my list.

“Tell me,” I said. I could just as easily have chosen silence or said “go on” or “yes,” but “tell me” is what I chose.

“I talked with that detective, finally.”

She lifted her latte and took a baby sip. I expected her to continue with her tale of her meeting with Reynoso, but she returned the cup to the small table between us and looked at me expectantly.

I sat holding my mug just below my chin with both hands, and I waited. Gibbs had apparently decided that this appointment was going to be more dental than psychological and that it was going to be my job to pull the teeth. In turn, I decided that it wasn’t going to happen. In therapy, when things go according to plan, the patient sets the pace.

On good days in the therapist’s chair, I could outwait Job. And I felt like having a good day.

I needed a good day.

Two minutes, maybe three, later, Gibbs blinked. “Oh, and I met that friend of yours. Detective Purdy? He stopped by my house yesterday for a visit. He’s so nice. Don’t you think he’s nice?”

I thought, You have to be kidding.

But I kept my face impassive and said, “Tell me.” Steam blossomed up from the mug below my chin.

I allowed Gibbs to go on uninterrupted. She sensed, I think, that her story was causing me consternation, but I doubted that she understood why I was feeling almost cataplectic at what she was telling me.

If Gibbs was to be believed-and I admitted to myself that I was experiencing more than a few instances of severe doubt about the veracity of her story-Sam was probably well over halfway, or more, to Georgia as she and I were speaking. I’d been on road trips with Sam before. The image in my head needed no further developing. He was crammed behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee, listening to some music that was as full of lament as was his current life. He was hungry. He was cranky. Road maps were spread out on the passenger seat beside him. Maybe they had already crumpled into heaps on the floor. He’d marked his preferred route with a pastel highlight pen, then marked an alternative in a different color. Something you could count on when traveling with Sam was that every time he stopped for gas, he would decide that there was a better way to get from where he was to wherever he wanted to be.

If it was more than an hour from his last fuel stop, he probably needed to visit a bathroom. But he wouldn’t pull over again until he needed gasoline. Highway rest stops were for wusses. Sam was a velocity traveler, not a comfort traveler. Bladder be damned, full speed ahead.

I was willing to make a guess that he was someplace in Arkansas or, if he was making particularly good time, had already crossed the border into Louisiana.

I had a fleeting wish that I was beside him, riding shotgun. Sam grows reflective on long trips. The monotony of the road or the infinity of the sky or something about the miles passing below his feet causes him to consider opening windows into his life that were otherwise nailed shut and hung with blackout curtains.

There was so much for Sam and me to discuss right then: Sherry. Simon. Heart disease. Rehab. Cop work. Lauren’s exacerbation. The future.

God, the future.

And of course, Gibbs and Sterling Storey.

But the real reason I had a yearning to be sharing the Jeep with him was that I wanted to be a fly on the wall, a silent spectator, as the inevitable collision occurred between the recalcitrant Iron Ranger and the southern good old boy. I wanted to watch as Northern Minnesota, personified by Sam, said hello to Southern Georgia, personified by any number of unwitting volunteers. I would have paid good money for a chance to witness what happened as Sam Purdy tried to reconnoiter Dixie.

I blinked myself back to the present. Gibbs was still talking, oblivious to the extended holiday my attention had just taken.

“He said he’d call when he got to Albany, but I don’t expect that will be before tonight. I’m thinking thirty hours minimum.”

“Tonight,” I repeated for no other reason than to get my bearings. I didn’t bother telling her that Sam would be doing the trip nonstop; that his head wouldn’t see a motel pillow between here and there. I didn’t know the mileage, but Gibbs should be dividing by seventy-five-plus miles per hour, not any pedestrian fifty-five.

“You think sooner? You know better than I do, I’m sure. Cops don’t have to drive the speed limit, do they? He could just flash his badge and make the ticket go away, couldn’t he?”

With those words she grew silent.

I used the interlude to consider the obvious. What was it Sam hoped to accomplish in Georgia? I knew him well enough to suspect that his motive had nothing to do with what he had told Gibbs: that he wanted to help her find her husband in the Ochlockonee River.

In usual circumstances Sam wouldn’t have driven to Denver to look for Sterling Storey in the shallows of the South Platte.

So then, why?

The silence spread between us like a little pond of fetid water. We each sat on an opposing shore.

Gibbs finally said, “He used to think he was falling. Sterling did. That’s when he used to say ‘catch me.’ Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t it? And now he goes and… disappears trying to catch somebody else. He really was falling, and there was nobody there to catch him.”

The abrupt change in direction threw me, once again, off balance. The invisibility of the silent associations that had helped Gibbs traverse the undoubtedly rich affective territory between Sam’s arrival time in Albany, Georgia, and her husband’s beseeching her for support while he fantasized himself falling perplexed and frustrated me.

Catch me. Yes. Gibbs had once told me something about Sterling saying “catch me.”

But what?

Sex. Was it sex? It was probably sex. But I couldn’t remember. My brain was on full overload. I felt as though I had un hacha en mi cabeza .

It probably had been sex. An awful lot of what Gibbs ended up talking about seemed to ultimately be about sex. Maybe Diane was right: Maybe I just had a difficult time hearing it.

I asked, “Literally falling? Or figuratively falling?”

“Gosh, that’s an interesting question,” Gibbs said. “I never really thought about that. I always thought he meant falling like that first time on the balcony. Do you remember?”

Do I remember? Do I remember what?

“He was leaning against the side railing, and I was in front of him, you know… I was wearing a skirt. But I wasn’t wearing any…”

She blushed a little. I finished her sentence in my head. The next word was going to be “underwear.”

Diane would have corrected me. She would have maintained that Gibbs’s next word was going to be “panties.”

“Well, I don’t have to paint a picture for you, do I?” she said.

I considered whether the comment was flirtatious or seductive. Although it probably was, a conclusion escaped me. This was not my morning for clarity. I could blame it on the early hour, but that wasn’t the cause.

No, of course not, I said to myself, you don’t have to paint a picture for me. I already have one: New Year’s Eve party, Wilshire Boulevard. The balcony of a friend’s condo. You and Sterling, the first time you had sex. You weren’t wearing any…

“That was the first time Sterling said ‘catch me,’ ” I said. My words sounded insincere, even to me. I knew I was saying them to offer proof that I remembered what she had told me.