“Smaller than Bigs!” he said, having moved from devastated to hilariously cheerful in under one second, still a baby, still able.
“You made a joke, Emma,” Benj reminded me.
“I get it. Smalls. Your blues are Bigs and mine are Smalls.” He laughed again, but this time it was a forced ha-ha-ha. Even Benj had to humor me. “But why do you feel blues?” he asked. We walked up the back porch steps and into the house, kicked our boots off in the mudroom next to the kitchen.
I settled on, “Logan and I are in a kind of fight.”
“Your friend Logan?” Benj asked.
“Right. My friend Logan.”
“Logan is your best friend,” Benj told me. “Like Taylor and Sophie and Paolo are my best friend.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe you can have a playdate and you’ll share better then,” he suggested.
“That’s an excellent suggestion,” I told him. “Thank you for helping me with my blues.”
“But what about my blues?”
“What about them, Benj?”
“You didn’t help me with my blues.”
“I guess that’s true,” I said. “I have an idea, though. Do you want me to take you to visit Bigs’s grave?”
“What’s a grave?” he asked. “Is it like a grandma?”
Benj is on his way to being weird, like me and Naomi. Maybe the kids in our family will eventually be divided almost evenly between outsiders and people who can blend seamlessly in with the rest of society: Sarah, Leah, and Jenna will have normal lives, whereas Naomi, Benj, and I will never escape our own freakishness. I guess Baby Lily will shoulder the burden of being the tiebreaker.
“A grave is the place where you and your best friends and your teacher, Nancy, buried Bigs. Remember? Do you want me to take you to Bigs’s grave? Maybe we can even bring something that she liked.”
“Bigs liked me,” Benj said. “I was her favorite boy. Just like I’m Mom and Dad’s favorite boy.”
We walked into the kitchen, where people were up having breakfast now. I could hear my mom shuffling around in the fridge. It’s funny how even when the sky falls around us, people still have to make pancakes.
“Is it in the cabinet?” Sarah asked my mom. Syrup, probably.
Benj tugged on my hand. “Emma?”
“Yeah, Benj?”
“Do you think I would still be Mom and Dad’s favorite boy if there were other boys in our family?”
“I can’t speak for Mom and Dad, Benj, but you would still be mine,” I said.
I went straight to my room and turned on Antigone. She was reburying her dead brother and I was taking notes in my brailler when someone came in without knocking. “Naomi?” I asked, taking my headphones off.
“It’s me, Emma,” Leah said. I was losing track of who was who, even among my sisters.
“I think you should apologize to Sarah,” she said, coming to sit on my bed with me. She put her hand on my back, started to make the motions of “X marks the spot,” which we used to do when we were little. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d done it.
“Whatever. Everything I said was true,” I said.
“Maybe so,” Leah said, “but why hurt her feelings?”
“She hurts my feelings all the time,” I whined, knowing even as I said it that it wasn’t exactly true anymore.
“Come on, Em,” Leah said. “There’s so much horrible shit going on—just be generous. I mean, she’s a mess and you’re a champion.” I thought of Principal Cates. Champions are made in the mornings. Champions are blinded in the summers. I felt my brain clicking and locking in the wrong places.
“Do you hear yourself?” I asked, angry. “I feel like I’m going to die. Look at my life!”
“It’s been a brutal stretch, no doubt,” Leah said, and she didn’t even know about Logan. “But do you really not know what I mean about you and Sarah?”
“I’m not sure I do,” I said.
She sighed. “Sarah can hardly survive a hangnail, Em. You know that.” She lowered her voice. “Whereas you get blinded and are going to be fine. She can’t pass a math test to save her life, and you can’t even see anymore and are acing your way through school without even thinking about it. You don’t even notice, because school is so easy for you. It’s impossible for her. And you’re Dad’s favorite, his hope, the one he takes to work to save children. You can acknowledge that or not, but you should say you’re sorry.”
“Can you do ‘X marks the spot’ for real?” I asked.
She put her fingernails inside my T-shirt, tracing the figures out on my back as she spoke: “X marks the spot, with a circle and a dot. Spiders crawling up your back, stabbed the knife so hard you crack. Blood pouring down your back. Cool breeze, tight squeeze, makes you get the shiver-ies.”
I saw the circle and dot like they were 3-D—glowing, moving—and the spiders and the blood. I saw the cool breeze across my back and the lake, and thought of my dad saying I’m a warrior, Leah saying I’m a champion.
But I didn’t apologize to Sarah, because my dad and Leah are wrong about me.
• • •
I surprised my mom and myself by saying yes when she asked if I wanted to come to a concert with her on Valentine’s Day. She was going to the city to hear some chamber music, she said, and did I want to bring a friend? We could pick Logan up on the way, she said, but I told her I wanted to bring someone else. I had no idea what Lo was doing on Valentine’s Day, and I didn’t want to know.
When we got to Annabelle’s house, her mom led her to the door, holding her hand the entire way. She put Annabelle’s coat on her, and said, in a very shivery, nervous voice to my mom, “Are you sure you can handle watching her for the night? I could try to—” It was funny; she sounded like my mom, making my mom sound like someone other than herself when she responded, “It will be just fine. I’ll hold Annabelle’s hand and Emma does okay on her own. We’re just going to the Symphony Center and we’ll park right in the lot and walk into the hall and listen and then I’ll text you when it’s over and drive her straight back.”
“Thank you again for doing this,” Annabelle’s mom said, and I had the terrified feeling she might cry. I wanted to leave before that happened, to rescue Annabelle.
“Bye, Mom,” she said in a whisper, and reached out. My mom grabbed her hand and helped her down the porch steps. I wondered if they had hired Mr. Otis, or someone like him.
“Do you have a mobility coach?” I asked Annabelle.
“No,” she said. “My mom mostly helps me.”
“How do you get dressed and get to school and stuff?”
“My mom drives me. And she picks my clothes.”
“I could come over and teach you some tricks, if you want,” I said. “I don’t have to, I mean, but if you think it would be fun or whatever.”
We were climbing into the backseat together when I said this—my mom had moved the car seats out of the way in honor of our hot concert date with Annabelle, and my mom stopped buckling Annabelle’s seatbelt to give me a grateful squeeze. I don’t think Annabelle noticed or felt it. I nodded at my mom.
“I’ll call your mom, Annabelle, and maybe we can make a date for Emma to come over and help you label clothes and locate shorelines.”
When my mom said shorelines, I cringed down into my bones. She sounded like an old person trying to be cool. But then I realized there’s nothing cool about knowing the word shorelines, and that made me realize, the way I often do, stumbling into it from a seemingly unrelated thought, that I’m a blind kid.
In the car, we talked about Annabelle’s favorite book, which is Charlotte’s Web. She told me she’d watched the movie and listened to the audio, but it was in an old man’s voice and she didn’t like it. She said she wanted it in her mom’s voice, so her mom had made a recording of herself
reading Charlotte’s Web so Annabelle could listen whenever she wanted to. She said she was dying for a dog, but her mom had told her she had to prove she was responsible enough to take care of a living thing before they could get something as big and complicated as a dog. Apparently she had a cactus now, and if she was able to keep it alive for six months, she would graduate to a fish, and then from there to a turtle, and then a hamster, and maybe by the time she was my age, she’d have her skill set and her dog.
When we arrived at the Symphony Center, we were underground first in a parking garage that smelled like concrete and sounded like danger, engines, and oil, in a black swirl around me. I missed Spark terribly, but the Symphony Center was apparently one of the few places where they distinguish carefully between legitimate guide dogs and K9 buddies, and they didn’t want Spark barking along to Tchaikovsky. As we walked from the car to the escalator up to the street, my mom talked about some composer who was still alive and had written the other piece the quartet was going to play, and the whole time I tuned her out I was thinking in a claustrophobic way that I would have to add being underground to my growing list of what terrifies me.
Annabelle seemed okay, though, walking quietly, holding on to my mom’s hand, and listening to her talk about music. My mom was the happiest and most excited I had heard her in a long time. She loves live classical music, and I realized she hadn’t left the house in the evening even once since my accident. This was the first time she’d left Baby Lily at night with anyone, and it was my dad.
The concert hall was warm and shiny. It smelled red and gold and black, and I could hear the kind of light that comes off of chandeliers, reflecting into rainbows all over the walls. People were everywhere, in expensive coats that smelled like fur and mothballs, clicking in heels along a marble hallway my mom told Annabelle and me was lined with photographs of the musicians. I’ll never see a photograph again. My white cane finger kept track of the floor and the depth of each step on a winding staircase up to a room with ceilings so high it felt as if the roof had blown off. The place bounced with voices and echoes.
“This is just a quartet, girls,” my mom said. “It’s my favorite.” Her voice sounded like a string instrument, running up and down the notes of the words, all vibrato. I felt bad for all the piano lessons I had been skipping and bombing even when I showed up. I vowed to start practicing again. My mom ran her hand through my hair and then fluttered the pages of a program. She read us the biographies of the violinist, cellist, and pianist; told us the places they’d been, awards they’d won. “There’s a part in the Moravec that’s played by a bass clarinet,” she was saying. “Caliban, the villain part. The song is based on The Tempest. The violin is Ariel.”
The room hushed. “They’ve dimmed the lights,” my mom whispered. “Here come the musicians.” And then she finally stopped talking, as a line of people walked out onto the stage, women’s heels, men’s shoes, men’s shoes, men’s shoes. I couldn’t tell after that because they were drowned out by clapping. I could almost feel the heat of whatever lights must have been shining onstage, and the silence of the audience was dark and oddly safe. I sat back against my seat, listened to the few lonely, hopeful tuning notes shudder out into the giant cave of a room and then vanish.
Then one of the musicians, I couldn’t tell which one, breathed in sharply and they all started playing together on an exhale, and hearing the music start that way made me put my hands on either side of my chair. I steadied myself and listened hard; I could hear that the violinist was to my left, the cellist in the middle, and the clarinetist to my right. The piano was coming from behind the other instruments. At first, it was as if my way of separating sounds out got in the way: I could only hear the individual strands of music, but then, as I reminded myself to breathe, I started hearing all of it: the ridges and drops and the notes swelling and falling, and sometimes they were purple, dark like velvet curtains, and then the clarinet would come in and the notes were summer, lemonade, sand, and then the piano behind them became a drum for me, became fear, became Claire, a chorus was pounding and she was drowning, and then the violin was playing a shivery line alone, above everything else like a bird, or something smaller, a bird so small and delicate it was invisible. To everyone except me.
When the piece ended, I was crying.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” my mom asked. She stopped clapping and put her hand over mine.
“Can you take me and Benj to visit the rabbit’s grave?” I asked.
My mom leaned right up to my ear. “You want to take Benji to Bigs’s grave?”
The clapping around us was still thunderous, and I thought about people who climb into barrels and send themselves over waterfalls. “Yeah. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s lovely.” She leaned over and kissed me, brushing my hair out of my face with her hands. “We should get you a haircut,” she said.
“I don’t want a haircut.”
“No? Okay.
“Annabelle, honey?” she asked. “It’s intermission—would you guys like to get some M&M’s or something? Or go to the bathroom?”
We said yes, followed my mom in a row out the door. Annabelle held my mom’s hand, and I thought how we should get her a white cane. Everyone was everywhere, talking about how beautiful and Pulitzer and composer and tempest, and the words were boring compared to the music and I wanted to keep the sound of them away from myself so they didn’t replace the notes in my mind. We bought M&M’s at the bar, peanut ones for Annabelle and plain ones for me, and then we went back to our seats.
They played Tchaikovsky and the notes melted in my mouth, turning the colors of M&M’s—red, green, yellow, blue, brown, a rainbow—and I thought of rainbows over the lake when we were little and it rained, and my chest hurt and the chocolate melted on my tongue and I thought how Claire will never taste chocolate again or see a single color, let alone hear a symphony. I held my mom’s hand through the scary parts of the piece and remembered to breathe, and smelled colors and fire and lightning and the peanut M&M’s Annabelle was eating. I heard Logan night-swimming with Claire and then without Claire, felt in the rawest bow strokes of the cello the bottom of the lake. I saw Claire deciding her life wasn’t worth it—right as I saw the rainbow the day Lake Main called and said I could come back, right as I danced around the living room with Logan and banged into Sarah and she shouted at me. The music raced up a scale toward a terrible question mark: what changed? How do you decide you’d rather be dead, and never hear music or eat colors again? I both wanted and didn’t want to feel what Claire had felt. And I didn’t know whether it was possible to feel what someone else feels. Whether you wanted to or not. Being me at that concert was so shatteringly specific—could anyone else ever have understood what that music sounded like inside my head, my eyes, my ears, my fingers? I couldn’t tell anymore, listening to the strings vibrate into colors and textures and mountains, what was imaginary and what was actually happening. Everything blurred, even though the world was sharper and clearer to me sitting in that rush of beauty than it had ever been before. It was like dreaming, and this is really weird, but all those notes, conflicting and moving and working themselves out, the way I could feel the rush of the music underneath, above and inside me, made me want to be even more alive than I am, than anyone is. It made me want to feel everything, to be in love. It made me want to start my piano lessons again immediately, to ride a bike again, to call Sebastian, to swim.
-12-
At the rabbit’s grave, I bent down to touch the letters BIGS carved into it, and then, underneath, I felt the braille: B, I, G, and S. So my mom had made it. Under Bigs’s name, it read, AUTUMN TO AUTUMN, the dates of his life. That’s such a my-mom way of putting it, making the rabbit’s dead life endless, ongoing, somehow okay. Benj was crouched down with me, touching the stone, too. Then we stood up together and I held his hand. It smelled green outside even though it was only February.
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“Do you want to put down what we brought for Bigs?” I asked him.
He set the carrot down and then stood up and leaned into me, sighing. “Do you think Bigs will like the carrot?”
I felt Spark move closer to the carrot. He sighed longingly. Spark loves carrots and green peppers. “I think it’s a very nice way to remember her, and to celebrate her life,” I said, and I was suddenly catapulted forward in my mind to when I would have a little kid like Benj. I hoped someone would love me enough to have a kid with me someday. And that if anyone did, my little kid would be just like Benj. I also hoped Benj would let Spark have the carrot, but I didn’t want to be the one to suggest it, in case it felt like Benj’s dead pet had to sacrifice for my live one. We both stood there, and I could feel Spark tugging on the leash, nosing the carrot.
“Emma?” Benj asked. “Can Spark eat the carrot? Or will that make Bigs be frustrated?”
I laughed. “I think it’s okay for Spark to eat the carrot,” I said, and fast, since Spark was already crunching it delightedly. “Spark and Bigs liked each other, and Bigs will be happy for Spark to share her carrot.”
“But they can’t share, because Spark already eated the whole thing,” Benj said. “I want to give something else to Bigs, a toy for her to sleep with.”
“Okay,” I said. “We can get a toy for her and bring it next time.”
“I want to leave a toy for her now.”
“But I don’t have one here, Benj.”
“I have Champon.”
“You want to leave Champon here for Bigs?” I asked.
I didn’t hear anything from Benj, so I reached over to feel his solemn nod. I wanted very badly to see Benj’s face, suddenly. I knew his eyebrows would be scrunched up, that he was furrowing his small brow, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen him in almost two years. How was such a horrible thing possible? I felt furious and crushed, like the accident had happened two days ago, like I was only realizing it now. I hate it when that happens. I took a deep breath, the way Dr. Sassoman taught me to, and touched Benj’s face.
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