The phone vibrated in her hand, announcing a new email. She looked at the time. Hong Kong was open for business. If there was one constant in Sam’s life, it was the steady, unrelenting volume of work to be done.
She didn’t want to commit to retrieving her reading glasses unless there was an urgent message. She squinted, skimming down the list of new mails.
She left them all unopened.
Sam put the phone on the counter. She went about her nightly routine. She made sure all of Fosco’s water bowls were full. She turned off the lights, pressed the appropriate buttons to close the blinds, checked to make certain that the alarm had been set.
She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. She took her nightly regimen of pills. In the closet, she changed into her pajamas. There was a very good novel on her bedside table, but Sam was eager to rest, to put the day behind her, to wake up tomorrow with a fresh perspective.
She climbed into bed. Fosco appeared from nowhere. He took his place on the pillow next to her head. She took off her glasses. She turned off the light. She closed her eyes.
Sam hissed out a low, steady stream of breath.
Slowly, she went through her nightly exercises, engaging, then releasing every muscle in her body, from the flexor digitorum brevis in her feet to the galea aponeurotica beneath her scalp.
She waited for her body to relax, for sleep to come, but there was a pronounced lack of cooperation. The silence in the room was too complete. Even Fosco was absent his usual sighs and licks and snores.
Sam’s eyes opened.
She stared up at the ceiling, waited for the darkness to turn to gray, the gray to give way to shadows cast by the tiny edge of light that always sneaked between the blinds on the windows.
“Can you see?” Charlie had asked. “Sam, can you see?”
“Yes,” Sam had lied. She could feel the freshly planted soil beneath her bare feet. Every step away from the farmhouse, away from the light, added one more layer of darkness. Charlie was a blob of gray. Daniel was tall and skinny, like a charcoal pencil. Zachariah Culpepper was a menacing black square of hate.
Sam sat up, swiveled her legs over the side of the bed. She pressed her hands into her thighs, working the stiff muscles. The radiant heat in the floor warmed the soles of her feet.
She could feel her heart beating. Slow and steady. The sinoatrial node, the atrioventricular node, the His-Purkinje network of fibers that sent impulses to the muscular walls of the ventricles, making them alternately contract and relax.
Sam stood up. She went back into the kitchen. She got her reading glasses out of her briefcase. She held her phone in her hand.
She opened the new email from Ben.
Charlie needs you.
8
Sam sat in the back seat of a black Mercedes, clenching and unclenching her hand around her phone as the driver merged onto Interstate 575.
Two decades of progress had done its damage to the North Georgia landscape. Nothing had been left untouched. Shopping centers had sprung up like weeds. Billboards peppered the landscape. Even the once-lush, wildflower-lined medians were gone. A massive, reversible toll lane cut through the center of the interstate, catering to all the pickup-driving John Boys who drove down to Atlanta every day to make money, then drove back at night and railed against the godless liberals who lined their pockets and subsidized their utilities, their healthcare, their children’s lunches and their schools.
“We be another hour, maybe,” Stanislav, the driver, relayed in his thick Croatian accent. “This construction—” He made a wide shrugging gesture. “Who knows?”
“That’s fine.” Sam stared out the window. She always requested Stanislav when she was in Atlanta. He was the rare driver who understood her need for silence. Or perhaps he assumed that she was a nervous passenger. He had no way of knowing that Sam was so used to being in the back seat of a black sedan that she seldom noticed the road.
Sam had never properly learned how to drive a car. When she had turned fifteen, Rusty had taken her out in Gamma’s station wagon, but as with most family-oriented tasks, he had soon inundated her with work excuses that permanently forestalled Sam’s lessons. Gamma had tried to take up the slack, but she was an incessantly picky driver, and an outright caustic passenger. Add to the mix that both Gamma and Sam were explosive, corrosive arguers, and in the end, they had agreed that Sam should start driver’s ed during her fall semester in high school.
But then the Culpepper brothers had shown up in the kitchen.
While other girls Sam’s age were studying for their learner’s permit, she was busy trying to re-establish the connections between her toes, feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, buttocks and hips with the hope of learning how to walk again.
Not that mobility was her only obstacle. The damage done to her eyes by Zachariah Culpepper was, to use that word again, mostly superficial. Her lingering sensitivity to light was an easily solvable issue. Her tattered eyelids had been stitched back together by a plastic surgeon. Zachariah’s short, jagged fingernails had pierced the sclera, but not the choroid or the optic nerve, the retina or the cornea.
The thief of sight was a hemorrhagic stroke, subsequent to a congenital cerebral aneurysm rupturing during surgery, that had damaged some of the fibers responsible for transmitting visual information from Sam’s eyes to her brain. Her vision corrected to 20/40, a threshold for driving in most states, but the peripheral vision in her right eye fell below twenty degrees of vision.
For legal purposes, Sam was considered blind.
Fortunately, there never seemed to be a need for Sam to drive herself. She took cars to and from the airport. She walked to work, or to the market, or to various appointments and social gatherings in her immediate neighborhood. If she needed to go uptown, she could hail a cab or ask Eldrin to book a car. She had never been one of those New Yorkers who claimed to love the city but couldn’t wait to escape to the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard the moment they were able to buy a second home. Sam and Anton had never even discussed the possibility. If they wanted to see open water, they could go to Palioxori or Kor?ula, not trap themselves in the cloistered equivalent of a Manhattan Disney beach vacation.
Sam’s phone vibrated. She hadn’t realized she was holding it so tightly until she saw her own sweat on the margins of the screen.
Ben had been sporadically updating her since Sam had emailed back last night. First, Rusty was in surgery, then he was out of surgery and in the ICU, then he was back in surgery for a bleed that had been missed, then he was back in the ICU again.
The latest update was the same she’d seen before the plane had taken off: