Free Blue Skies by Catherine Anderson Page A

said, “She’s asleep right now.”
    Hank figured this must be Carly’s friend. She sounded like a ball buster. “Would you please tell her I called? It’s extremely important that I speak to her.”
    Hank half expected the woman to hang up in his ear as Carly had done. Instead, she said, “This is Bess, Carly’s roommate.”
    “Ah. Glad to make your acquaintance, Bess.”
    “Somehow I doubt that. And I seriously doubt that you’ve got any idea just how important it is that you speak to Carly.”
    Hank’s stomach clenched, and icy foreboding moved through him again.
    “Unfortunately,” Bess went on, “you blew your chance. She’ll never get in touch with you now. She only tried to begin with because she felt obligated to let you know. And then you didn’t remember who she was. Tell me, Mr. Coulter, do you deflower so many virgins in the back of your truck you can’t keep them straight?”
    Hank sank onto the edge of the bed. He couldn’t dredge up the indignation to defend himself.
    “Carly is pregnant.” Bess’s whiskey voice quivered with anger. “That is your fault and, by extension, mine. I never should have taken her to that bar in the first place, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have left her alone so some predatory creep could home in on her.”
    Hank wanted to say he wasn’t a predatory creep, but the truth was that he’d come to see a lot of things differently since that night, and Bess was essentially correct. He’d gone to Chaps to have fun and end the evening with an accommodating female, no strings attached. For reasons beyond him, Carly had happened onto his hunting grounds.
    “I didn’t realize,” he said. “If I’d known she was a virgin, I never would have touched her, I swear, but she didn’t send out those kinds of signals.”
    “Maybe you were just so drunk, you weren’t reading her signals very well.”
    Hank clutched the phone with such force his fist ached. Memories flashed through his mind—Carly, sipping the drink and wrinkling her nose; Carly, resisting momentarily when he waltzed her outside; Carly, uncertain where to put her hands when he kissed her. Bess was right. He hadn’t been reading her signals very well.
    Bess sighed as if the anger had drained her. In a hollow, sad voice, she said, “To make matters worse, Mr. Coulter, Carly wasn’t just any virgin. She was born blind with congenital cataracts and recurring lattice dystrophy. She had surgery to restore her sight only two and a half weeks ago, a mere week before you met her. Do you have any idea what that means?”
    Hank felt as if the mattress had suddenly vanished from under him. “Blind, did you say? I’m sorry. You blew my mind clear off track. Cataracts and what kind of dystrophy?”
    “Lattice. It hardens and cracks the surface of the corneas. In severe cases like Carly’s, it causes blindness. The only solution is to scrape the surface of her corneas or do a corneal transplant. Carly had her first superficial keratectomy a week before you met her.”
    Hank didn’t want to hear this. He really, really didn’t want to hear this.
    “Right now, her visual cortex is like that of a newborn baby,” Bess continued. “That’s the part of the brain where visual images are recorded as memories, for want of a more scientific explanation. When we’re born, the visual cortex is blank. Because she was born blind, Carly’s has remained blank. Now that she can finally see, she’s struggling to learn her colors, to visually recognize numbers and letters, familiarize herself with the world around her, and getting terrific headaches from the ceaseless onslaught of stimulation. Now, thanks to you, she can’t even take pain medication because she’s pregnant.”
    Hank swallowed, hard. He felt sick to his stomach.
    “The night you met Carly, she’d gone with me to Chaps to sit at a table and simply watch. She’d never seen people dance, and the few men she’d ever seen had been at a distance. When you