At least keep it safer.
The Glock is in my hand. Burt had explained how to work the safety mechanism on the gun, so I know there’s no chance of it going off accidentally. I’d promised Burt I’d never leave my house with it but figured he’d have given me an exception in this case. Just this one time.
I check the doorknob.
The door is open.
I step into the front room and call out, “Tay? It’s me.”
“In here,” she says. Her voice is calmer now.
I stick the Glock in my back pocket, not wanting to frighten her more than she obviously is, over whatever it is that had made her get me over here.
As I head toward where her voice had just come from—the kitchen, I’m pretty sure—the house is quiet. No television. No music playing. Just the slight creak of the floor as I make my way, guided by the stove light shining through the kitchen doorway.
Then I see her, seated at her small kitchen table, completely still, hands in front of her, palms down.
Even though she knows I’m here, I don’t want to startle her.
“Tay,” I say, keeping my voice low. “Are you all right?”
She doesn’t turn or answer me right away.
“What are you doing sitting here in the dark?” I ask her now.
“It’s all dark.”
“Wait… what…?”
“I can’t see,” she says.
SEVENTY-FOUR
IN THE MODERN world, meaning this one, someone like Jed Frazier would surely be called a concierge doctor. But that’s not him and not Cross Rivers, where he’s just a family doctor out of another time, the kind of family doctor who still considers making a house call the most natural thing in the world, even at this time of night.
He’s well into his seventies by now, a hunched-over six-three or so, white hair, craggy features, big hands starting to lose their battle against arthritis, still smelling like the inside of an ashtray, as if the surgeon general has been bullshitting everybody from the start about smoking.
He’s been seated for several minutes next to Taylor McCarter Webb on her living room sofa, where Taylor has been doing most of the talking.
“I was on my way into the kitchen to get a bedtime glass of water,” she says, “not that I’m doing much sleeping lately. And all of a sudden, I started to get dizzy, so dizzy that I had to sit down because I was afraid I was going to fall down. Then my vision started to get blurry, and I thought it might be the dizziness. But then everything was just gone.”
I sit there across from them and can clearly hear how difficult it is for her to hold herself together as much as I can see it. Along with the fear I can see in eyes not seeing anything right now.
She pauses and says, “I realized my phone was on the table, and called Silas.”
She’s still trying to tough her way through. She’s been trying to do that for the past week since Burt died. But her voice is starting to crack now, just slightly. And so is she. I want to do something for her, find some way to help, but have no idea what that might be.
“You’re going to get through this,” Dr. Frazier says in that soothing way he’s always had.
“I just went blind!” she snaps. “How could something like this happen? One minute I could see and the next I couldn’t.”
He takes one last look at her eyes with his medical penlight, then sticks it in the pocket of his shirt.
“I’m almost certain it’s hysterical blindness,” he says. “Or conversion hysteria, another way of describing it.”
“Well, I sure wasn’t hysterical until I couldn’t see,” Taylor says.
“The condition can be brought about by a stressful event or emotional trauma,” Dr. Frazier says. “Sometimes physical trauma. But apart from the physical part, Taylor, you seem to pretty well check the other boxes.”
