“The first one. Definitely the first one.”
“Good.”
She felt a little glow of pride, then embarrassment for caring at all. She had arrived at the doctor’s office on a wave of apologies, having skipped her annual exam for the last three years, despite the friendly little postcards that arrived every spring. She was AWOL from the dentist, too. And she might have passed on this eye exam, if it weren’t for her younger sister’s sly observation that Cynthia was squinting more often these days. “You keep straining like that, you’re going to have one of those little dents,” said Sylvia, who had never forgiven Cynthia for getting the one pair of green eyes in their generation. “Better reading glasses than Botox.”
Cynthia had almost snapped: Get off my damn back, I’ve earned that dent. Instead she had made this appointment with Dr. Silverstein, who had moved to the northern suburbs since she saw him last.
Satisfied, Dr. Silverstein swung the machine off her face, returned her contact lenses to her, along with a tissue to catch the saline tears that flowed from the corners of her eyes. He was younger than she, it dawned on her. He must have just been starting out when she first went to him thirteen years ago. She wondered how those years had treated him, if his life had gone according to his expectations and plans.
“Well, I’ve seen this before,” Dr. Silverstein said, smiling so broadly that his dimples showed, “but I’ve seen few cases as pronounced as this.”
Cynthia was not comforted by the smile. She had known too many people whose expressions had nothing to do with what they were about to say.
“What? What?” I’m going blind, I have a tumor behind one of my eyes, which explains the headaches. But she hadn’t told Dr. Silverstein about the headaches. Should she?
“Your eyes are getting better, Cynthia. We see this sometimes in people who have worn contact lenses for a long time. Nearsightedness improves. You’ve been having trouble focusing on things because your contacts are old and pocked by protein deposits, not because you need a new prescription.”
“What about reading glasses?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. I’ve heard that if you get reading glasses, your close-up vision gets worse and worse.”
“Ah, yes, that old wives’ tale. It doesn’t quite work that way.” Dr. Silverstein picked up a model of the human eye, which Cynthia found disgusting. She hated to visualize what lay beneath the fragile veneer of skin, always had. She was nauseated at the sight of flattened squirrels and cats in her neighborhood, and a passing glimpse of one of those surgery shows on cable could send her into a near faint.
“There’s a muscle that controls the lens of your eye, if you will. It gets rigid with age…” His voice trailed off when he realized Cynthia was staring over his shoulder, refusing to make eye contact with him or his plastic model. “Anyway, no reading glasses yet, just a new contact lens prescription. These should be ready in a week. Should the nurse call you at home or at work?”
“Home. I haven’t worked in years.”
Dr. Silverstein blinked, suddenly awkward. He was one of the people who had never had a chance to say, “I’m sorry,” because the tragedy was almost a year in the past by the time he saw her at her annual exam. Cynthia’s life was full of such acquaintances, well-meaning types who had been left stranded by the tenuousness of their connection. Doctors, mechanics, accountants. She remembered the April immediately following, when Warren asked the accountant how one calculated for a dependent who had not survived the calendar year. Did they take the full credit, or did Olivia’s death mean they had to prorate the deduction? For Warren and Cynthia, who had already asked a thousand questions they had never planned to ask-questions about burials and caskets and plots and the scars left by autopsies-it was just another dreary postscript. The accountant had looked so stricken she had wanted to comfort him.
She was beyond that now.
Cynthia went blinking out into the bright day, remembering, as she always did upon leaving the eye doctor, that first pair of glasses when she was ten. The wonder of finally seeing the world in sharp, clear focus had been dwarfed by the fear of her classmates’ taunts. The other girls at Dickey Hill Elementary, even her friends, were always looking for a way to prick the self-importance of Judge Poole’s oldest daughter. Another girl might have begged her mother to let her carry her glasses in a case, putting them on only as necessary. But to take them on and off would be an admission of weakness. So Cynthia wore those tortoiseshell frames wherever she went, holding her head high.
“Four-eyes,” one girl had tried. “Four is better than two,” Cynthia had said. And that was that.
She climbed into her car, the BMW X- 25, a sports utility vehicle chosen not for its status but its heft. At 4,665 pounds it was heavier than the Lexus, even heavier than the Mercedes, and easier to maneuver than the Lincoln Navigator, which was a bit ghetto, anyway. Cynthia had actually wanted something a little less glamorous, because high-end SUVs were big with local carjackers. But the BMW had the best safety rating, so she bought the BMW and withstood the usual teasing about her love of luxury. Yes, she had once cared about things like expensive shoes and fine jewelry, had deserved her family’s fond observation that Cynthia believed herself to be, if not at the center of the universe, just a few inches to the left. But that Cynthia was long gone, even if no one else could bear to acknowledge this fact.
Her cell phone rang. Headsets weren’t the law in Maryland, but Cynthia had opted for one anyway. It amazed her to think of how she had once driven one-handed through the city behind the wheel of a smaller, sportier BMW, heedless of her heedlessness.
“Cynthia?”
“Yes?” She recognized the voice, but she would be damned if she would grant this caller any intimacy.
“It’s Sharon Kerpelman.”
Cynthia didn’t say anything, just concentrated on passing the cars that were entering the Beltway from the tricky exit off I-83. The Beacon-Light had recently run a list of the most dangerous highway intersections in the city, and this spot was in the top five. Cynthia had memorized them without realizing it.
“From the public defender’s office?”
“Right,” Cynthia said.
“I guess this is a courtesy call.”
As if Sharon Kerpelman were even on speaking terms with courtesy.
“I guess,” Cynthia said, “that if you don’t know what it is, I don’t either.”
“Yes. Well. How have you been?” Sharon asked, as if reading from a script. Maybe she had finally gotten a copy of Dale Carnegie, which she sorely needed. But Sharon, being Sharon, would go straight past the part about winning friends and skip ahead to trying to influence people.
“Why, just fine,” Cynthia drawled. Not that Sharon would ever notice anything as subtle as a tone. “But I’m driving and I don’t like to talk on the Beltway unless it’s urgent. So-”