Blind

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “No problem!” he said, embarrassingly loud. “I’ll just see you guys at the statue,” he shouted. Then he turned and ran away.

  “What was that all about?” Logan asked. I hadn’t heard her come up. I felt frustrated.

  “I have no idea,” I told her. “He wants to go with us on Saturday night.”

  “With you, Em.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “He’s only been in love with you since second grade.”

  “Yeah, but,” I said.

  “But what?”

  “Oh, come on, Logan,” I said.

  “You’re the only one who has no idea how hot you are.”

  “What are you, my mother?” I said.

  “Love is blind!” she said.

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

  Then we both waited a minute. I wanted to ask her something—about Halloween without me, maybe—but I couldn’t think of what it was, and she didn’t help.

  • • •

  After school that Friday, while Logan was driving, I told Dr. Sassoman that I was full of dread. I did not tell her about the Mayburg plan.

  She said, “Dread? Can you unpack it?”

  Dr. Sassoman likes the word unpack way more than I do. It reminds me of a suitcase, of arriving somewhere and staying, and I don’t want to stay anywhere near who I am. I said, “No.”

  She waited.

  “It’s probably just anxiety about school or whatever,” I said, and whatever sounded tinny, fake, like a wrong note in a piano song I’m pretending to have learned for Mr. Bender.

  But Dr. Sassoman is irritatingly patient, so then we just sat quietly for a long time until she said, “We never expected that going back to Lake Main would be painless, Emma. You’re making steady progress, and there were bound to be bumps. How is Logan?”

  “Logan’s fine,” I said. “She went to a Halloween party without me and won’t tell me anything about it.”

  “I see. Did you want to go?”

  “No.”

  “But you’d like to hear about what it was like?”

  Hearing Dr. Sassoman describe the way I felt made me sound stupid. I said nothing.

  “Is Logan still helpful at school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Ms. Mabel?”

  “She’s okay.”

  “And other than piano and gym, have you been skipping classes?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why ‘yet’?”

  I shrugged. “There are things I can’t do anymore.”

  “What things?”

  “See.”

  “Indeed. But you managed perfect attendance at Briarly nonetheless.”

  “Well, that place was designed for me, right?”

  “I don’t know. I think there were some things about Briarly that were better for you than Lake Main and some that worked less well. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  I shrugged and then outlasted her through the long, dry pause that followed. I felt thirsty. Finally, she asked, “What about at home? How are things with your parents and your sisters and Benj?”

  “The same.”

  “As what?”

  “As they have been since.”

  “I see. Are you feeling more independent?”

  “No.”

  “Have you gone out alone yet, like we discussed?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Are you sleeping well?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let’s see each other twice next week, okay, Emma? I want to unpack that ‘yet,’ and make sure you’re feeling less anxious. Or if that doesn’t work, will you give me a call on Wednesday, just to check in?”

  I knew she was worried, because Dr. Sassoman never asks to see or talk to me extra times unless she’s freaked out I’m going to die.

  I rode home silently with my mom, pressing my face against the cold passenger-seat window, thinking of Logan, when my phone rang. Logan.

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Did you hear me thinking about you?”

  “I skipped my class,” she said, and I knew her mom hadn’t shown up to take her to driver’s ed and she had missed it, because Lo’s voice was cool blue and even, the way it gets when she turns her heart off. “Can I come over?”

  I was thrilled. “Of course,” I said. “I’m in the car with my mom—we’ll be there in two minutes. Come now.” And she was at the door when we pulled up, which meant she had already begun the sprint to my house when she called.

  At dinner, Benj recited the story of how they had “bernied” Bigs, and now she was a garden, just like she used to eat gardens. We had all heard it more than a hundred times. “Soon Bigs will be another rabbit,” he concluded, as usual.

  “She’s not going to be another rabbit,” Naomi said.

  “It’s okay, Naomi,” Leah said. “You don’t have to be so literal all the time—it’s just a way of understanding, okay?”

  “If Bigs will be another rabbit, why can’t we just keep her until she’s that rabbit and then that rabbit can be Bigs?” Benj asked.

  “I’m with Naomi,” Sarah said. “If we let him believe things like that, then he’ll want to keep the dead rabbit around until it happens.” I agreed, although I stayed quiet.

  “It doesn’t happen as fast as that, Benj,” Leah said.

  “Mom!” Benj yelled. “When will Bigs be another rabbit?”

  “I don’t know when she will, Benj,” my mom said. “Maybe she’ll be something else, like flowers, or a tree.”

  “How can a rabbit be a tree?” Jenna asked.

  “She’s not really a rabbit anymore, guys,” my mom said. “She’s more like . . . I don’t know, rabbit energy.” Then she sighed, the universal sigh for people who are in impossible conversations with toddlers, who, it turns out, are totally irrational and also, I’ve noticed, weirdly rational. That’s why they’re hard to talk to.

  Last year, when she was four, Jenna asked how Baby Lily had “gotten in mama’s tummy,” and my mom launched into a shudder-worthy description of “falling in love” and “putting this in that” and yadda yadda, and then Jenna asked, “Do sperms have eyes?”

  “Um, I don’t think so, no,” my mom said.

  “But they see eggs?”

  “I don’t know if they really ‘see’ eggs, honey,” she said.

  “But they’re alive?”

  I was parked on the couch, as usual, fingering a page of illegible braille, but I perked up, interested to hear whether Jenna thought you could be alive or not if you couldn’t see.

  “They’re alive, yes,” Mom said.

  “If they’re alive and they find the egg, then they have eyes!” Jenna insisted.

  “Maybe they feel their way, Jenna,” I told her. “Just like I do.”

  “When you get eggs?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “When you get eggs from the ’fridgerator, you feel for them, like a sperm,” Jenna said.

  At the table, things were melting in my mind in a way I don’t like: the eggs in my mom’s description, the eggs I had thrown with Dr. Sassoman, the eggs in tonight’s challah. I told myself to focus in, and tried to listen to what was happening at the table, but it was difficult and chaotic. My dad was there, because he eats with us on Friday and Sunday nights.

  Jenna was screaming, “Aigh! Benj, no! I hate peas!”

  “Just leave them on your plate, Jenna. Don’t scream,” our dad said.

  “Benj is throwing them at me!”

  “Benj!” my mom shouted. “Stop throwing peas at your sister! Eat your chicken!”

  “Chicken meat has arsenic in it,” Sarah said. “We read an artic
le about it in bio. It’s disgusting.” Most of us ignored her, but my dad was like, “Tell me about bio these days, Sarah.”

  “I’m not throwing peas; I’m rolling them,” Benj said. My mom cleared her throat, and she must have thrown my dad a glance, because he laughed. Sarah hadn’t bothered to answer his question about bio. She just wanted to pick a fight.

  “This is organic chicken, Sarah,” my mom said. She’s more easily provoked by Sarah than my dad.

  “The arsenic is in the chicken feed,” Sarah told her. “All chickens eat it, even the lucky organic ones.”

  “More challah! More challah!” Benj shouted. I was trying not to fret about the candles my mom had lit, thinking, Dark is cool, light is hot, even though nothing helps with the smell of heat. For the first six months after the accident, we used fake electronic candles, because the first time my mom lit the candles my face and hands went numb and I thought I was paralyzed. My dad said it was an anxiety attack, so we just stopped lighting fires in the house. This fall, we started lighting actual candles again. Leah or Logan sits with me and whispers candle updates.

  Naomi was chattering about the story she’s writing at school, something about a warrior princess cheetah, and Jenna was singing “Oh, I Had a Little Chickie,” the way my mom taught us: “Oh I had a little chickie and she wouldn’t lay an egg, so I poured warm water up and down her leg. And the little chickie danced and the little chickie sang. And she laid a hard-boiled egg. Bang, bang.” She had to add the bangs to make it rhyme, because it’s supposed to go, “So I poured hot water up and down her leg. And the little chickie cried and the little chickie begged. And the little chickie laid a hard-boiled egg.” Yet another pathetic attempt to hide the hideousness of the world from us.

  Naomi refused to eat her chicken. Benj started crying because he didn’t want to eat anything other than challah. Then Jenna and Naomi had a fight over who was hogging the saltshaker. Sarah’s phone rang and she answered it and stood up, and my mom started bossing her furiously because we’re not allowed to take phone calls at dinner, and I seized the beautiful moment to say, quietly, “So I think I’m gonna sleep at Logan’s tomorrow,” into the air.

  Both my parents froze like I’d stun-gunned them. My mom immediately forgot Sarah’s infraction and turned the scalding beam of her attention toward me.

  She smoothed out her voice like a bedsheet. “Did Logan’s mom say that was okay?”

  “It’s fine, Mrs. S.,” Logan said, and she cleverly took a big, wet, crispy bite of salad, to win my parents over. Because watching kids eat salad puts grown-ups in an unconsciously good mood. It makes them feel like civilization will continue after they die. Something biological, I mean, which is why watching us eat junk food makes them hysterical; it gives them the feeling that we’ll all be obese heart-attack victims and the human race will die out either with them or—if we eat enough “crap,” as my mom calls it—before them.

  “Well, it’s okay with me, then,” my mom said. “Robert?”

  My dad cleared his throat. “You’ll take Spark?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And you’ll call if you need anything?”

  I sighed. “Yes, Dad.”

  “And Logan’s mother will be home?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Fine then,” he said, and I heard him put his hands against the table, as if he were bracing himself for the impact of letting me spend a night out of the house.

  “Just give us a call to let us know you’re all right at some point during the night, okay?” my mom said. “And it’s so cold out. Do you want me to drive you?”

  “No thanks, Mom. We’ll walk.”

  I haven’t slept at Logan’s—or anyone else’s house—since the accident. I was impressed that my parents didn’t insist on convening a meeting about it; that they didn’t have to talk it over “privately,” while we all secretly listened, first. Or maybe they had their conversation in a series of glances at each other—the kind that used to annoy me. Maybe I don’t get as much as I used to. But whatever. I could go to Logan’s, and therefore to our meeting at the Mayburg place.

  The fact that my accident happened with them one foot away is sometimes lost on my parents. They’ve had this feeling ever since that if they’re just nearby all the time, nothing bad will ever happen to me again, but it’s totally irrational. I mean, I was standing right in front of my dad, leaning back into him, when it happened. He still had his hands on my shoulders.

  • • •

  Spark and I were giddy on the walk to Logan’s. He galloped along and I kept up, the rubber bulb of my white cane finding sticks and wet November leaves and sidewalk cracks and the shoreline, the edge of the grass. It smelled just right, the hint of winter around a corner.

  Maybe because the night was unfolding so deliciously in front of us, I felt as good as I have in forever, kind of extra human. Like a cartoon hero with sidekicks and special powers or something, my bones and my ears and mind and dog and stick doing the work my eyes used to think they were doing. Work they weren’t necessarily doing all that well on their own. I wish I felt that way more often. Lots of kids at Briarly hate their canes, and some kids, like Seb, fake that they’re not blind. But I can’t do that. And I sometimes like the way my white cane feels, the noise it makes, the way it finds things for me. I like it folded neatly in my bag; like to unfold it, feel its parts snap together, the rope inside go taut. It’s part of me, like Spark.

  Logan jingled her keys as we approached her door, and I bent down to give Spark a kiss. He nuzzled me back with his wet nose. He doesn’t like Logan’s place, because her mom keeps millions of plants and it smells green and loamy, which makes Spark think we’re outside, so he gets disoriented. I also dislike places that smell wrong.

  “Mom?” Logan called out.

  “I’m downstairs!” her mom shouted, and I heard shoes on the backless wooden stairs that lead up from Logan’s basement. We used to do chemistry experiments down there, and when I heard her mom coming up, I remembered vividly, in full-color 3-D, adding borax to boiling water, stirring to dissolve it, and then squeezing out drops of red food coloring. The way that fake blood bloomed came back into my mind so brightly it was almost more beautiful than it had been when I could actually see it. I tried to hold the image.

  “Emma!” Logan’s mom said, high-pitched, excited. It was only then that I smelled food. I hadn’t noticed it when we came in. I don’t like it when what I smell or hear feels random or disorderly. Logan’s mom said, “I made spaghetti and meatballs!”

  “Oh!” I said. “Thank you.” Spaghetti and meatballs was my favorite when Logan and I were in first grade, and her mom has remembered it forever, even though I actually stopped eating meat three years ago, after my parents took us to a farm and I saw some chickens snuggling each other and realized that chickens are actually just people, except bumpier and smaller and covered with feathers. They snuggle their family members, is what I’m saying, and that was enough for me—I could never eat anybody’s body again, even a chicken’s. But I made Logan swear not to tell her mom, because once I didn’t mention it the first time and instead made a huge deal about how great her meatballs were (and hid them under my napkin and threw them out later), it was already too late. Now I’d rather toss some meatballs to Spark once every few years than have Logan’s mom realize I’ve been lying to her for years about the giant balls of ground-up flesh she feeds me.

  “Thank you, Ms. F.,” I said. I kicked my Converse off and felt my way to Logan’s room, which is smaller than Naomi’s and my room, and which she has described to me so many times I feel like I can still see it. Every time Logan changes a poster, she tells me, so I’ll still know what her room looks like. She does it as much for herself as for me, but I don’t mind.

  “I put up that picture of us. From the first week back? On the field?” she said. I closed the door behind me and sat
on her bed, felt Spark relax and curl up next to me.

  “What picture?”

  “One Trey took on his phone. It’s super cute of you—you’re leaning your head back and your hair looks especially dark in the sun and your glasses are perfectly balanced on your face and you’re laughing. You look amazing, and you have my lipstick on—remember I put X-S on both of us? Anyway, I’m right next to you, looking over at you. I’ll give you a copy. And I posted it on Facebook so everyone can see how hot we are.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Um, Em, do you mind going up to my mom’s room with me, just for a little bit?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  We sat in Logan’s mom’s room while she was getting ready to go out, because Logan likes to, even though we’re too old and it always ends up making Logan feel bad. She can’t resist; there’s some magnetic pull between her and her mom. Whenever her mom is in the house, Logan slides and drags and races, almost against her own will, toward her. Probably she just wants to spend as much time as she can with her mom. So they chatted about dresses her mom might wear, and the whole room had a silvery feeling, the glittery clicking of her heels and the smell of her perfume, which was sweet and sharp, nothing like my mom’s. My mom smells like shampoo and bread, and she’s soft when she hugs you. Logan’s mom is skinny, and if she hugs you, you can feel her breasts like they’re attached to her bones, olives-on-a-toothpick style. She came over and told me to touch a dress. It was crunchy and awful, and she laughed when she saw my face.

  “You’re right, Emma,” she said. “It’s synthetic and itchy.” She changed, and when she came back, in a blaze of perfume, the next dress was so silky it felt cold.

  “I like that one,” I told her, but Logan didn’t like it, said it looked too much like a nightie.

  Her mom laughed: a metal sound of money, coins touching each other in a pocket.

  “That’s the idea,” she said to Logan, which made Logan unhappy, and her mom must have noticed, because she added, “I’ll wear a little bolero over it, of course,” and I heard Logan breathe in a bored way, and then she stood up from the bed and I sank.

  “We’re gonna eat now, Mom,” Logan said, and she paused for a minute, waiting for me, before starting out of the room. I bounced up off the bed, relieved.