Kara Was Here. William Conescu

weeks, and five days.

      Margot glanced at her computer screen again—no word from Mike. And no messages on her phone either, except the unanswered one from Collin. So she sighed, picking up the phone, and sent a text message back to him. She’d try to be there, she said. Thanks for the invite.

      What else was she going to do on Kara’s birthday? It was going to be a horrible day no matter where she spent it.

      Then Margot plugged in the food processor and dropped in the first zucchini. Six dozen muffins. That’s how she needed to spend this morning: mixing the flour and butter and eggs and sugar. And a touch of zucchini in the muffin batter—her secret ingredient. Who would think to mix zucchini with cranberries and white chocolate?

      Cougar Cominsky, that’s who.

      Neither of them used the word “tumor.” After Brad spent thirty minutes in the waiting room surrounded by children with thick glasses, and ten more sitting alone in the examination room, he was greeted by the neuro-ophthalmologist and informed that the MRI had revealed “no unusual mass.”

      “So everything’s okay?”

      “Let me start with a few questions,” Dr. Thompson said.

      “Have you been in a car accident recently?”

      “Do you fatigue easily?”

      “Were you cross-eyed as a child?”

      “Do you find yourself slurring your speech?”

      “Do your eyelids ever droop?”

      The answer to each of these and at least a dozen other questions was “No” or “I don’t think so.”

      Then the examination began: She shined a flashlight in his face and studied his pupils. She moved her finger around and asked him when it doubled. She held a patch over one of his eyes then snapped it away. She had a nurse come in to take a blood sample for some obscure disorder with a long name. She poked his eyeballs with what looked like a Q-tip attached to a tiny pistol. And she repeated all the tests he’d had at the regular doctor’s office, trying one lens after another. “Is this better, or this? This, or this?”

      When she concluded, as the previous doctor had, that Brad had 20/20 vision, Dr. Thompson pulled out a long leather box from a drawer. It looked like the kind of box that might contain a fancy carving knife or antique jewelry, but inside was a row of about twenty foggy glass wedges. She pulled out one of the thinnest wedges, and when she held it in front of Brad’s right eye, the E’s on the chart in the distance came together.

      “This is a prism,” the doctor explained. “It bends light, so the image you’re seeing with one eye is shifted horizontally to meet the image you see with the other eye.” She pulled the prism away, and the E’s split again into overlapping images. When she held the prism back over his right eye, the two E’s merged.

      “A person with normal vision actually sees two slightly different images from the differing perspectives of the two eyes. The brain fuses these images together into what is perceived as a single, three-dimensional image. What’s happening here is you’re having trouble fusing the separate images on your own.”

      The doctor tried a few different-sized wedges to determine how much prism he needed, then concluded that one “diopter” over each eye was sufficient. The prism over the left eye would move the image to the right; the prism over the right eye would move the image a little to the left. Brad would see what was in the middle. He couldn’t suppress a smile.

      “Why do you think this happened?” he asked, as she scribbled out a prescription.

      “It’s hard to say,” she said. “People are generally born with strabismus—this misalignment of the eyes—and parents notice because a child’s eyes start to cross, or the child gets in the habit of ignoring one eye so it starts to drift. It’s possible you’ve always had a very mild case and your brain was able to compensate for it, but now as you’re getting older, you need a little help.”

      So he was always ever-so-slightly cross-eyed but never knew it? That certainly beat the alternative scenario that had sent him into the MRI tube.

      Brad left the appointment delighted to feel healthy and unremarkable. One diopter over each eye didn’t seem so bad. A lot of kids had it worse. The largest prism in the box looked like it was an inch thick. How could they even make glasses out of something like that? He dimly recalled a classmate in grade school with crossed eyes and very thick glasses.

      Had he ever made fun of someone with a lazy eye? Brad tried to remember and felt penitent just in case.

      FIVE days later, Brad picked up his new glasses before heading over to Annie’s Coffee Shop. The shop at the mall advertised lenses in an hour, so he was surprised that they needed so much time. “But sir, these are prisms,” the optician had said, as if the problem were self-evident. Brad had felt himself blush and cut the conversation short.

      Now he was wearing his new glasses—wire-rimmed rectangular frames that looked like ones half the people in the world were wearing—and through the lenses, each person, chair, and mug in the coffee shop remained singular. Brad surveyed the room, with its exposed brick walls and framed mirrors, and as pleased as he was to see the world in front of him more clearly, a part of Brad was seeing beyond what was there to what had been there before.

      Annie’s Coffee Shop used to be Tyler’s Steakhouse. Then it became a Greek restaurant, then a pool hall, then Annie’s. The whole place had been paneled in dark wood back in Brad’s day; the floor had been clay-colored terrazzo. Near the front window, where Annie’s had a few mismatched loveseats, there’d been a bar where Brad would wait for Kara’s shifts to end. The bathroom in back, he discovered as he passed through its door, looked exactly the same as it had a decade earlier. The walls were painted a bright Carolina blue, the toilets and sink were black ceramic, and the stall door and walls were black too. It was like peeing in a time machine. During the summer that he’d worked as a busboy at the steakhouse, he’d mopped that black-and-white checkered floor too many times to count. Once he’d even slept on it.

      He was running a few minutes early and had settled into one of the coffee shop’s wooden chairs when Kara walked in the front door.

      No, not Kara. Gwen. Of course it was Gwen. She wore her hair pulled back in a barrette and hanging down below her neck, and though her hair was much straighter than Kara’s, from a distance, she looked like her older sister fresh out of the shower.

      Gwen spotted him at once—he gave a quick wave—and she walked toward him with something of a smile. She wore a navy knit shirt with tiny buttons up the front and carried a backpack slung over one shoulder. When she adjusted her own glasses, Brad saw she was wearing the onyx bracelet again, the one he’d given to Kara.

      “It’s hot,” Gwen said as she dropped into the chair across from him. Her brow was shiny with perspiration.

      “And humid,” Brad said. Kara used to sweat a lot, too.

      Gwen ordered an iced tea and was on her second refill by the time the salads arrived. She told Brad all about orientation and its “eye-opening” activities. “I can’t decide if I was more stimulated by the don’t-rape-girls exercise or the don’t-be-a-racist presentation,” she concluded. “But I know I’m a better person now.”

      Brad had met Kara during their summer orientation. They were both assigned to the same group during a session in July, along with a pimpled surfer from Los Angeles who had a fake ID and a large quantity of marijuana. Kara and the surfer were sitting together on a bench when Brad walked past. This one seems artsy. I bet he’ll join us. The words were spoken to the surfer but meant to be overheard. Brad stopped and met Kara’s eyes, dark and inviting. They both smiled. That evening, while the rest of their group went on a Carolina-themed scavenger hunt, the three of them sat together in a dorm room and Brad was introduced to what would soon become a fixture in his college