“You are decidedly not going to die, and you still have your eyes,” Dr. Sassoman told me on countless mornings, as I wept and wound my way around the room, crashing into things, unable to move properly, to believe that this had happened, was happening, would continue. “They don’t work the way they did, but you are not without eyes.”
“They’re ruined!” I told her, as if she didn’t know. She considered this progress—any time I spoke, it was “progress”—and several weeks later, when I tried to run from the room but hit the door? Progress. Once, I hurled a useless braille block at her; some well-meaning friend of my father’s had sent a box of “tools” for me, but I never figured that one out. Dr. Sassoman was there when I opened the box, all cheerful and encouraging, so I punished her. She dodged the block, I guess, although I couldn’t see and hadn’t yet learned how to calm down enough to pay attention to what was happening around me. She never lost her patience or raised her voice. My parents tried to be that patient, but couldn’t be, because they were so traumatized that my mom was screaming and throwing things at night when they thought we couldn’t hear, wouldn’t know. But even I knew, as dark and floaty as I was then. She wrecked her studio, sliced open canvases with an X-Acto, poured her paints out, shattered and sawed apart her beloved easels. She hasn’t painted since. My dad became her doctor, which, if everything else hadn’t been so disastrous, might have been the worst part of all.
My parents met in a hospital in the city when he was a resident. The maternity wing bought a bunch of my mom’s paintings, and my dad apparently saw her in the lobby, carrying canvasses. She must have looked like no one he’d ever seen, because my mom has long, curly red hair and has dressed the same way since she was my age, in painty jeans and hoodies and glittery Converse sneakers. And figure everyone else was either a sick person or a puffy-eyed doctor in those terrible, sagging, light-blue scrub pajamas. I bet my mom lit the lobby on fire. My dad says he knew as soon as he saw her, and in spite of his debilitating social awkwardness, he apparently walked right over and asked, could he help her with whatever she was carrying? And then—alert the fairy tale police—it was her spectacular paintings! And I’m not kidding; her paintings used to be beautiful, full of the feeling of light on water, the way Leah’s words are.
It’s no surprise my dad practically fainted with love the first time he saw my mom. The part about why she fell for him is less clear; it’s almost as if, because he was a doctor, she naturally loved him, too. He’s very stiff and difficult and she’s floppy and easy to be with. But people adore doctors, because they save you. Although it turns out they can’t save you from everything, not even when they’re your parents. Maybe my mom just liked the way he’s handsome—the strong, square-jawed, clean-shaven, sleek-haired way. It’s the opposite of how she’s beautiful—her wild-haired, rule-hating prettiness. My mom smells like pasta and lavender, and sounds like traffic and music and the beach. My dad smells like mint and rubbing alcohol; he’s a smooth motor, gears, keys clicking, machinery that works. In fact, my parents are so different from each other that it sometimes seems like the two of them combine to make one whole person. But after my accident, they couldn’t keep the parts in sync anymore; the world was spinning on a faster, looser axis suddenly, dark, brutal, everything out of control. And I knew everything, the way kids always do and parents either don’t realize or can’t face that we do. In my family, whatever the little ones don’t understand, the older ones translate. If you’re a grown-up and you have a pink vibrating toy in the drawer by your bed, for example, you might as well keep it on the mantel in the living room, because your eleven-year-old daughter, who is me, will find it while she’s looking for a flashlight and she’ll think it’s a perfect rocket for her American Girl doll until her older sister, Sarah, who’s mean about knowing everything, will tell her what it actually is.
Obviously our parents’ fake daytime optimism didn’t trick any of us, least of all me. I knew my life was wrecked, and every time I thought about it, my hands and face would go numb and then I would black out and wake up later, with my parents’ and Dr. Sassoman’s voices standing over me.
“You can calm down,” Dr. Sassoman said finally. “You can tell yourself to calm down.”
And I said, “You can tell yourself to fuck off.” I had a momentary pang of power, before my shame and helplessness overwhelmed me again. I had never said anything like that to anyone, not even Sarah. I had no idea who I was, and couldn’t find a way to apologize.
But Dr. Sassoman said nothing, just let it go, just let me scream for weeks, until my throat was raw and her point was made. She was still there, waiting for me. Just like my parents and sisters and brother. And Logan. And my own body, which I could feel but no longer see. My arms, there. My fingers, one through ten, there. My neck, throat, cheeks, collarbone, my small breasts, which Logan and I had joked about since we had both started getting them the year before. We had a contest about whose would get bigger, even though it was obvious that it would be hers, because she’s a breasty, bouncy, dimply person and I’m a stick figure, just like my parents and my sisters and probably Benj, although he’s still baby-chubby so it’s hard to say. I was even more knees, bones, and elbows then; it seemed a miracle that I had any breasts at all, but I did, and they were still there. Everything was there; I just couldn’t see it. Nothing had been altered by my shrieking about everything being altered forever. By my not being able to see it. If a tree falls in the forest and I can’t see it, it still falls. That’s what it feels like to have the world tell you to fuck off.
Logan came to the hospital six times a week. Her parents were breaking up and saying incredibly terrible things to each other and about each other to her, and her mom was suing her dad, and he was moving out. On Saturday mornings Lo’s mom tagged along to my room. She brought perfume samples, Pixy Stix, stickers, chocolate kisses. The stickers were always textured. I traced the shapes: hearts, stars, puffy animals with googly eyes that clicked around inside their clear plastic half-globes. I often let my fingers linger on the eyes of those lucky bunnies and ducks. Logan stayed all day every Saturday, reading out loud to me, playing me songs. She climbed into my bed with me, talked about her parents, cried over them and my eyes, laughed until she snorted, spelled out boys’ names on my back with her long fingernails, and brought stuff I could feel: coins, sandpaper, beach glass, feathers. Once, a giant conch she definitely got at one of the souvenir shops on Lake Street, Sauberg’s pathetic “downtown.” Lake Street has a strip of stores, partially because if you live here you occasionally need things, and partially because of Lake Brainch, the big freshwater lake that gets called “Branch” by the tourists who come to swim and boat and water-ski and bring home beach souvenirs. Because of them, all the shops on Lake Street are vacation colors: pale yellows, sky blues. They sell taffy and temporary tattoos, straw hats and swim toys, seashells and flamingo wind chimes, even though no flamingo has ever set a bony pink foot anywhere near this place. But I loved the shell Logan brought, and was certain it held the ocean in it. I could hear the water rushing through, and smell the salt.
Logan asked about everything she handed me: “What does it look like to you, Em?” And I worked on what words I’d use to describe the world—maybe for the rest of my life. While she listened. In late August, I stopped screaming. Just before Logan started ninth grade, I got out of the hospital. The nurses hugged and kissed me and gave me cards, and Dr. Sassoman made a chart about what I’d do and when and how. I would apparently come to her office every week for eternity, and other people, including her, would come to my house and teach me, and I pretended to listen and then staggered home after my mom and dad. And sat down, numb, on our gold couch. And tried to open my eyes, rocked, counted my legs and arms and fingers. I didn’t cry. Or talk.
Then the world moved forward anyway in the relentless anyway way it does. Dozens of mothers came to our house with frozen blocks of pasta and breads and cakes they’d baked and their daughters, m
y friends from another life. I wasn’t hungry. I hid, refused to see anyone, and hung the green curtain over my bed in the guest room on the first floor, which was suddenly Naomi’s and my bedroom. My mom thanked everyone in what Sarah dubbed her “suburb-drug” voice. Sarah also later pointed out that our mom got pregnant with my littlest sister, Baby Lily, that August, so, well, whatever. That was what it was, but she was taking drugs? When our mom was pregnant with Benj, she wouldn’t even drink a soda or touch a piece of fruit that wasn’t organic and grown in front of her, but now her unhappiness and guilt were so profound that she was poisoning our new baby just to keep from dying of misery or maybe killing herself. Because of me. Knowing the depth of her fear doubled mine.
I met Dr. Sassoman every other week at her office, which smelled like vanilla beans and the color beige. It was so quiet the thoughts in my head pounded, bounced, and echoed: “It’s fall, fall, the world is racing by without me. Without me. Where am I? Where am I? Open your eyes, Emma, open your eyes.” On the in-between weeks, Dr. Sassoman came to our house, and talked with my parents, too. It was September and I was on our gold couch, in Dr. Sassoman’s office, back on the couch. Everyone else started school and I became part of the dark, scratchy couch fabric. I was clutching the braille cube I never learned to use, not moving, cold-sweating. When Logan said her dad was moving to California, the words sounded like they came from outer space and floated down. I couldn’t hold on to them or respond. I wasn’t there for her or anyone. It felt like I literally wasn’t there; everyone else was still human, living on the same earth I’d once been on. They were doing human things like starting ninth grade at Lake Main, but I had dropped out of the world. I lived in this weird, dark, spinning void. I lay back on the couch. Open your eyes, Emma. I thought of myself as “Emma” then, or “you,” or “she,” anyone but me.
Logan came over every day after school, and asked all the time when our other friends could come and see me. When I could manage to respond at all, I said, “Never.”
“But it might cheer you up, Em,” she said. “Everyone misses you.”
I said nothing. She brought and read me notes from girls I’d known since preschool: Deirdre Sharp, Claire Montgomery, Monica Dancat, Elizabeth Tallentine—their names were dimly familiar, like words from a language I’d once spoken but no longer knew. Logan said Lake Main was hell without me, that she was going to die if I didn’t come back. But I could never go back. If I’d never see anyone again, why should they see me?
My mom made me walk outside occasionally, made me feel the grass, the sunlight, fresh air, the world. She begged me to shower, but I couldn’t stand water on my face. No matter what she asked me to do, I said no, burrowed deeper. Then, a million no’s later, it was October. And even though July, August, and September had been the longest, worst months of my life, October’s arrival felt sudden. I was furious. How dare it be October? I was lying on the couch in sunglasses, fingering a braille alphabet page, trying to use it to line dots up in some meaningful way, but failing: A: 1; B: 1 and 2; C: 1 and 4; D: 1, 4, and 5; E: 1 and 5; and so on. I had just figured out that turning letters into numbers just took a 3, 4, 5, 6 in front and A became 1, B 2, C 3, D 4, E 5, and F 6, when my awkward dad I could no longer see came into the living room.
“Hi, Emma,” he said. Was he looking at me? I felt his weight at the foot of the couch, and smelled something funny and alive. I heard scratching. Fear rose in my throat, indistinguishable from the fury I couldn’t temper. “What are you doing?” my dad asked, waiting for a second, as if something was caught in his throat, before adding, “Sweetie,” my mom’s word.
“I’m learning my fucking ABC’s. What are you doing?” I responded. He swallowed a gulp of sorrow so hard I heard it. I had been so quiet my whole life; maybe my parents thought the vile things I now said were representative of who I’d been all along. I hoped not, even though I couldn’t stop being cruel to them. I wished I hadn’t been so quiet before, when my life had been easy. Why didn’t I say cheerful and clever things when I was still intact and happy? Now there’s no chance of it. My dad and I both tried to think what to say next; it’s hard to know who felt more lost or miserable. My dad is like me; he doesn’t like to talk, either. But the scratching sound saved us both, and a bark sat me up like I’d been yanked by a string. I dropped my cube and groped around.
“We brought you something, sweetie,” my mom said. So she had come in the room, too. My dad handed me Spark. I put my face right up to Spark’s, felt his warm, silky face with my cheek, his wet nose with my nose, his furry ears with my hands. He licked my face wildly, not even avoiding my sunglasses. It was love at first whatever isn’t sight.
My dad was talking: “He’s a K9 buddy, Emma, blah blah, so he’s not really allowed in restaurants or blah blah real seeing-eye dog, blah blah.” This turned out not to be true, except at the Briarly School for the Blind, where they were strict about distinctions between “real guide dogs” and “pets.” Other than at Briarly, I’ve yet to meet the shop owner who throws the blind kid’s dog out the door, pet or not. But there is a rule that you have to be sixteen to get a guide dog and my dad loves a good rule. “As soon as you’re sixteen, you can go to training school and choose a genuine mobility assistance dog, blah.”
I had tuned him out at “He’s,” was burying my face in Spark’s fur, crying. My mom and I were both crying and my dad was not. I was furious at my mom for crying and at my dad for not crying. And the more I hated them and myself, the more I loved Spark. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I loved him completely, the way I couldn’t love anyone or anything else anymore. Everything else was ruined and he was perfect.
“Spark can help by keeping you company as you get up and about more,” my dad continued.
I couldn’t stop crying. But I stopped kissing Spark long enough to say, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes, you are,” my dad said, but in the pause that followed my mom either shot him a withering look or grabbed him quietly, because he added, “When you’re ready.”
Then my mom came and put her arms around me, but I kept mine around Spark, who was wildly licking my face. Spark! Who understands me without any effort, who doesn’t care what I look like, who asks for nothing but love and to go on walks, and who is the only one who actually always helps. He has never once made being blind worse for me. I spent the rest of that day off the couch, roaming the house with Spark, laughing as he sniffed everything in the house and tackled and licked me. It was the first time since the accident that I’d heard my own laugh. July, August, September, October is a long time to go without laughing.
• • •
My father’s entire life has been a study in how patients who walk soon after their surgeries recover, whereas those who “mope about” stay bedridden disappointments to their parents forever. Which is why he was all over me to work my way back into the land of people who move and live. He got me Spark, my white cane, and, to my fury and embarrassment, a mobility coach named Mr. Otis who came and pried me off the couch so I could learn to walk, find my own room, pour and drink a glass of water without spilling it everywhere, and get to and from the bathroom without tripping and cracking my spine.
I could hardly breathe when Mr. Otis first started coming. While I tried to keep my hands and face from going numb, he showed my mom and me how to organize drawers, make braille labels, and sew them into my shirts and skirts and tights so I could choose my own outfits. We labeled the individual items with premade tinfoil labels Mr. Otis suggested at first and then, later, with pieces of plastic milk gallon cartons my mom cut up and used, her sculptor’s inspiration. But mostly, I tuned his bright red voice out and streamlined my clothes. I wore only jeans, V-necks (T-shirts when it was hot, long-sleeve T-shirts for in between, and striped hoodies when it got cold), and blue Converse all the time. I have three pairs. And four red nightgowns. I still dress that (and only that) way, because why change? All of my
bras are nude, so they’ll never show through, no matter what shirt I choose.
Mr. Otis spent countless hours helping me click and slide the white cane in front of me, in step, back step. I thought of the ballroom dance class Logan and I had taken on weekends when we were eleven, trading off who had to be the boy: triple step, rock step, triple step, rock step. In step, back step, spark step, rock step. She was so loud and extroverted and crazy in those classes, and I was so quiet. I loved her, loved listening to her joke and be confident and laugh and stomp all over the place. It’s hard to believe how shy I already was. How will I ever dance again with anyone other than my white cane or Spark? Mr. Otis once told me, “The cane is an extension of your pointer finger, Emma. You are feeling your way. Touch, touch, find a shoreline, find a landmark. Indoor, outdoor, find a shoreline, where’s your shoreline?”
This was what music would be for me: Mr. Otis’s voice; this was my sad dancing: my “feeling my way” with a long, bony, witchedy digit scraping the sidewalk. My graphite finger tapping, searching for a shoreline. I can’t remember how many times Mr. Otis showed me a new one, or asked me to name a landmark: here’s where the grass becomes a curb, where the curb rolls into the street, where the carpet meets the wall. Here are the planks of the porch, down one stair, two stairs, three stairs, grass. Maybe ten million times, maybe twenty. My mind gets melty when I think of his voice, of those gasping weeks or months or whatever they were. Listen to the traffic. Hear it stop on your left, and when the rush of it starts on your right, stick your cane straight out into the crosswalk in case. Everything was “in case” with Mr. Otis: in case someone is turning, in case you’ve made a mistake and it’s not actually a red light, your light. Listen. A landmark can be the smell of the Mantroses’ rosebushes, or the sound of cars at the end of Oak Street, the grind of engines stopping or starting up at an intersection. Once you’ve stuck your cane out and no one has hit it with a car, then okay, strike out into the crosswalk, try to stay straight. If the engines have just begun to idle, then you have the whole light, Emma. Remember, the band of that walk inside the white lines should be approximately the same width as the sidewalk. It’s Mr. Otis who told me that, and when I have that thought, even now, I have it in his urgent red voice. Hug the side away from the cars that are moving, try to stay straight, in case.
Blind Page 4
