"Everything okay?" Lex asked. I could hear the humor in his voice. The whole scene felt oddly domestic. It reminded me of the early days of my marriage when my wife and I had taken turns cooking dinner. Warmth accompanied the memory for all of about three seconds before the bitter truth of my situation returned.
"Gideon?" Lex asked. I realized I hadn't answered him.
"Yeah, everything's okay," I responded. I tried to keep my voice light, but Lex's next words made it clear I hadn't managed it.
"Do you want to talk about it?" he asked.
That was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do. "Are there any vegetables you don't like or can't eat?" I asked, avoiding his question entirely. "Is chicken okay with you?"
I didn't miss the way Lex took a long time to answer. I didn't dare look at him, not that it would've mattered since he wouldn’t be able to see me. But I didn't want to see his disappointment that I’d sidestepped yet another one of his questions. "Chicken sounds good. And as long as the vegetables came from the ground, grew on a tree, or fell from the sky, I’ll eat them.”
I found myself chuckling. "I haven't been to the city in a while. Are divebombing veggies a problem down there?"
Lex's soft chuckle was music to my ears. I sent him a side glance as I began prepping the food all over again. He was fussing with the controller for his insulin pump. This time I didn't even consider asking him if he needed help. Instead, I listened as he spoke into the device, which looked a lot like any old smart phone. He waited for the thing to calibrate and then it was reading off his blood sugar. The value matched almost perfectly with the measurement he'd taken just moments before. My curiosity got the better of me. I left the stove off and went to sit in the chair next to Lex's. "Do all insulin pumps have voice technology?" I asked.
Lex shook his head. "No, most of them don't. The company that designed this one"—he held up the controller—"is trying to change that. Even though most people who suffer from diabetes in the US don't suffer vision problems until they're older, there are a lot of other countries where the disease isn’t caught early enough and patients end up losing their sight when they’re younger."
"Is that what happened to you?" I asked.
Lex stilled for a beat and then nodded.
"Where did you grow up?" I asked. I tried to remind myself that it was none of my business and that it was better if I didn’t know anything intimate about the man, but another part of me wanted to know everything about him. I really needed to figure out how to shut that part of me down.
Easier said than done.
"New York," Lex said as he looked at me. He didn't quite meet my eyes, but it certainly wasn't for lack of trying.
"New York?" I said in surprise. I'd expected him to say he was from one of those countries where the care for diabetic patients was substandard. "Isn't vision loss treatable in diabetics as long as they get regular eye exams?"
"It is," Lex agreed. "But if they aren't diagnosed quickly enough or if they don't get those exams, then by the time they start to lose their sight, it's too late for treatment."
"Didn't anyone warn your parents?" I asked. It was difficult to keep the anger out of my voice. To think that Lex's blindness had been entirely preventable was beyond painful.
Lex was quiet for a long time. I fully expected him not to answer and was about to apologize for overstepping my bounds when he said, "No parents to warn."
I wanted to ask him what he meant but when he looked me directly in the eye, as much as he could anyway, I held my tongue. I knew what was coming next. It had been pretty much inevitable. I tried to steel myself for the question, but it was pointless.
"How do you know so much about this?" Lex asked carefully.
There were a dozen different answers I could have given him. I could have even just gotten up and walked away like I so often did when the subject came up. But I found myself unable to move. My feet felt as weighed down as my shoulders always did when I let myself think about the past and the mistakes I'd made and the terrible consequences that had followed. I looked back at Lex and saw him rubbing his finger over the surface of the table.
He was nervous.
Nervous about asking the question in the first place or nervous about my response—I wasn't really sure which, but it didn't matter. I was crossing a line with him that I’d promised I'd never cross with anyone ever again. The whole reason I’d returned to Fisher Cove was so I could draw that line and make sure that everyone who'd once known me understood it wasn't to be crossed. That I was no longer the Gideon Callahan they'd watched grow up each summer year after year.
Lex’s finger began tapping more incessantly on the table but when he suddenly sat back, drawing his hand with him, I found myself reaching out to cover it with mine. He let out a little whisper of air but didn't say anything. Nor did he try to remove his hand.
"Because my daughter was diabetic."
Chapter Seven
Lex
One of the things I’d feared most about going blind was no longer being able to read a person's facial cues and therefore not being able to pick up on what it was they weren't saying. Less than fifteen minutes had passed since I'd confronted Gideon in the living room and accused him of intentionally keeping me in the dark.
On its surface, his statement about his daughter could have been taken the same way, because he’d provided so little information. But he’d done nothing to hide the raw pain in his voice as he spoke.
So I knew what the "was" part of his admission meant. He’d used past tense not because his daughter had gotten over the disease but because his daughter had been lost to him. And I didn't need to have my sight to know that the event had devastated him.
I didn't even consider asking him to confirm it or to tell me how he'd lost her. What I did do was turn my hand over beneath his so our palms were touching. I rotated my hand enough so I could link my fingers with his. "I'm sorry," I whispered in the softest of voices. He didn't react at first and I fully expected him to just pull away. I had no way of knowing if I was upsetting him further or offending him or making him uncomfortable. I could only hope it was none of those things.
But when the chair did scrape across the floor just a little, he didn't drop my hand and walk away. Instead, he gave it the smallest of squeezes and held it like that for a few seconds.
A million things happened in those few seconds. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I wasn't Lex the blind guy. I was just Lex, the guy who wanted to offer comfort to a fellow human being.
I was someone who understood loss and grief. I hated that it was something Gideon was going through, but it did make me feel a little less alone. And it reminded me that despite everything I'd been through, I was still here. I'd always lived with the philosophy of not taking life for granted, but sometimes I forgot. It was also a reminder that Gideon was, indeed, human. It hadn't been fair of me to unleash on him like I had. He'd just been a convenient target. I wished I could go back to that moment and do things differently. After all Gideon had done for me, it hadn't been right to use him as a scapegoat for my problems.