The One Thing

by Marci Lyn Curtis

  “Okay, then. That’s easy. My Thing is soccer,” I said with an air of finality. I used to be amazing at soccer: the sprinting down the field, the dribbling of the ball with the inside of my foot, the scoring.

  He considered this for a moment, and then he said, “When was the last time you played soccer?”

  “Like, six months ago, maybe? Right before I lost my sight?” I said, sort of defensively.

  “Then it isn’t your Thing. Not anymore.”

  I shrugged, trying not to let his words sink in enough to bother me. But they trickled in anyway, through the wide, jagged cracks the blindness had cut into me. They left my stomach pinched and my mouth dry. “Okay, so then I don’t have a Thing,” I said, hoping he’d drop the subject.

  But he didn’t. He set down his controller and stared at me, aghast. On the screen, his character got incinerated by a purple dragon. “Thera. Everyone has to have a Thing.”

  “But I don’t,” I argued. My life had been so stuffed full of soccer that I’d had little time for anything else. I grant you, I’d tried other things. Summer yoga camp. Snowboarding club. A decade’s worth of piano lessons. But for countless reasons, they hadn’t cleaved to me like soccer had.

  “What about the Loose Cannons?” he said, gesturing to my T-shirt. “Are they your Thing?”

  “The Loose Cannons are a band,” I explained. “They can’t be my Thing.”

  “Why not? Do they make you happy?” he asked.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “I guess. They’re my favorite band. They just seem to get me. But that doesn’t make them my Thing.”

  “Have you ever been to one of their concerts?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No.” Rather than having conventional concerts, the Loose Cannons played impromptu in completely random places—like the mall or the bank or whatever—and then uploaded the footage online. Five months ago, when they’d burst onto the music scene by posting their first concert on YouTube, they’d snagged a million hits. Their second concert? Three million. But as big as they were right now, the only way you could see one of their concerts was to uncover the band’s obscure online clues to where and when they’d play next, which was something I’d been trying—and failing—to do for months on end. “Seeing the Loose Cannons in concert is next to impossible.”

  Ben shook his head and picked up his controller. His on-screen character immediately jumped up and started running through a cave. My character followed. “Thera,” Ben said, “seeing the Loose Cannons is totally possible.”

  “Sure. Uh-huh. Right.”

  “Woman. Your words wound me greatly. You’ve already seen them—or one of them, anyway. My brother is the lead singer. Hel-lo? Mason Milton?”

  Mason Milton.

  That was when reality fell over me like a suffocating wool blanket. I had to be hallucinating. I’d spent the better part of the past several months either pining for my eyesight or pining for the Loose Cannons.

  Of course I’d conjure up both of those things when I cracked.

  Of course I would.

  On top of that, the Mason Milton I’d met tonight looked brutally close to the one I’d pictured over the past several months. I huffed and let my head fall back. Fine. Fine. It was time for me to wake up or whatever it is that happens when crazy people realize that they are crazy.

  I didn’t, though. I just sat there and continued to be crazy.

  A half hour later, Mrs. Milton knocked on Ben’s door and pleasantly informed him that she was dropping him off at swim practice in “exactly forty-two minutes” and he needed to find his suit “and use the restroom, because the pool is not a toilet.”

  Ben looked mildly embarrassed. “Mom. I have plenty of time. We can even drop Thera off at her house on the way. She just lives in...” He turned to me. “Where do you live?”

  “Bedford Estates,” I said, and his eyebrows shot up.

  “Bedford Estates,” he informed his mom. “So we have plenty of time.”

  It wasn’t until after we piled into the backseat of the Miltons’ minivan, and after we pulled out of the driveway, and after I gave Ben’s mom directions to my house, that Ben leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You seriously live in Bedford Estates?”

  “Yup.”

  Our house was just like the others in Bedford Estates, outrageously huge and sort of gaudy. We’d moved there when I was four, and even at that tender age I thought the place was outrageously huge and sort of gaudy. So I spent most of my time upstairs in my bedroom. It was a dreamer’s room that stared out at the great maple in our front yard. It had slanted ceilings plastered with a couple dozen glow-in-the-dark stars and a little cutout in front of the window, the perfect place to read. A thousand memories lived there now, all in suspended animation: pictures of friends slapped on a corkboard, a half-deflated soccer ball wedged in the corner, books jumbled on the nightstand. I’d set foot in it only once after meningitis took my sight, and it had felt as though it belonged to someone else. Someone with possibility. So I stayed downstairs in the boxy, functional room my parents had set up for me before I came home from the hospital.

  After we came to a stop in my driveway, Ben leaned out the window, craning his neck to peer up at my house. He whistled, long and low. “Sweet,” he said, dragging the word out as though he were talking about a skateboard trick or a new video game.

  And then, silence. Ben and his mom were waiting for me to climb out of the car.

  I swallowed. This was it: the end. The dream of the past couple hours had freight-trained past me in a blur of normalcy. All those minutes and seconds were gone now, and I felt like I’d squandered them. I wasn’t ready to let them go. I swallowed again, louder this time, and looked around, taking in the back of Mrs. Milton’s head and Ben’s skinny legs and the cracked vinyl seats.

  “Um. Thera? I’m gonna be late for swim practice,” Ben prompted.

  I flinched. “Right,” I said, yanking down on the door handle and stepping out of the van on wobbly legs. With one last aching look at the colors and the textures and the life, I said good-bye.

  Grandpa Keith’s first words that evening were directed at an auto auction on TV: “Nineteen sixty-eight Dodge Ram. Absolute piece of crap.” (Technically, the first thing he said was, “Your dad just called. He wants to know where you’ve been all afternoon and why you aren’t answering your cell phone.” But that little spiel was just the sort of thing that I didn’t want to deal with right now, so the “absolute piece of crap” comment was the first thing that I actually paid any attention to.)

  I was sprawled out on the sofa in an unladylike tangle of legs and hair and confusion. My cat, Louie, the laziest feline in the feline cosmos, was a massive lump of sleeping fur beside me. Gramps had commandeered Dad’s overstuffed, overused armchair, something he did every evening just before Dad got home from work. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that he was getting even for all the childhood grief Dad had put him through. But Dad was the most ho-hum guy on the planet, so the only thing Gramps could possibly be avenging was getting bored to tears all these years.

  Gramps was a TV nazi and he guarded the remote control with his life. So I was stuck listening to the auto auction. I wasn’t paying attention to it. I was...well, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Trying to convince myself that what had happened today was real, maybe?

  I wasn’t having any luck.

  The more I thought about it, the more outrageous it all seemed. I mean, really. Banging my head and suddenly reclaiming part of my eyesight? Mason Milton’s just happening to be Ben’s brother? Of course I’d fabricated the entire thing.

  Except.

  Where had I been all afternoon if I hadn’t been at the Miltons’? How had I even gotten home from Mr. Sturgis’s office?

  “Gramps,” I said suddenly. “Did you happen to see the van that dropped me off?”

  “Van? No. Why?” he said suspiciously.

  “No reason,” I said. I wiped my palms on the sofa and then cast around f
or a change of subject. “So. What did you do today?”

  “Went to Manny Grayson’s funeral.” Gramps was obsessed with funerals—what sort of coffins people chose and what was written on their tombstones and whatever.

  “Who’s Manny Grayson?” I asked.

  “One of Hank’s friends—went along as a plus-one.”

  I scrunched up my nose. “A plus-one...at a funeral?”

  Gramps ignored me. “Played polka music during the service.” He scoffed. “Polka music. Heh. Who plays that crap?”

  I winced inwardly. I played it—or I had played it, rather. Not because I’d wanted to, but because my ex–piano teacher, Mr. Hawthorne, had an affinity for crap music. Problem was, I’d been physically unable to strangle such dusty sounds out of a piano. So I hadn’t. I’d improvised the pieces in spectacular fashion, reaching into his concertos and mazurkas and mixing them up, scattering the notes like leaves in the wind. My creativity didn’t fly with Mr. Hawthorne, however, and so after nearly a decade of arguing with him over starchy piano theory, I lost interest and quit. I don’t know which one of us had been more relieved.

  At exactly seven thirty, my mother stepped into the house. I knew this not because I actually knew the time, but because I knew my mother. She was nothing if not regimented. Giving me a cursory greeting—just a hand running across the top of my head—she unloaded on the arm of the couch, all sighs.

  I swung my feet around to the floor. My cat hit the carpet with a wide-pawed flump. “Hey, Mom. How was your day?”

  “Exhausting,” she said. Her customary reply these days. Particularly while ducking conversation about her job—head coach of the women’s soccer team at the University of Connecticut. Clearing her throat, she changed the subject. “Hilda called me today to set up an appointment with you. Said she’s left you several voice mails and you haven’t gotten back to her?” When I failed to reply, she went on. “Anyway, she said she’ll be here at eleven o’clock tomorrow.”

  “In the morning? I have plans.” Which, in fact, I did not. But I could have some plans if I really wanted to.

  While I might be lacking in marketable skills, I happened to do a bang-up job when it came to lying. Unfortunately, my mother was aware of my talent. I could practically hear her eyebrows hike up. “What plans?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Well, change your stuff,” she said tiredly. And then her phone rang: her assistant coach. With a grunt, she stood up and paced away, talking backpasses and kick-and-runs and shoot-outs.

  Back in the day, my mother had played soccer for the women’s national team. She’d been a middie, the fastest on the field, and we had a box of old DVDs to prove it. When I was real young, I used to sneak into the basement late at night, put the TV on mute, and curl up under an afghan to watch them. Back then she was my hero. My biggest and grandest memory of her came from when I was five. It was fall, and the sky was a crisp, cloudless blue, almost too blue to be real. My mother’s team was playing against Norway in the quarterfinals of the Women’s World Cup, and the United States was hosting. The critics considered Norway the favorite that year, but my mother proved them wrong. She scored the only goal in the game. When the last buzzer sounded, she ran to the sidelines at full force—just a blur of sweat and smile and ponytail—threw me on her shoulders, and paraded me across the field. I’ll never forget how I felt on her shoulders: strong, pretty, smart.

  In the stadium’s parking lot that same evening, some punk slammed into her, snatched her purse, and bolted off at a dead sprint. Yes, Dad was right beside her. And yes, he stood there like a complete dumbass while the guy took off. Mom, however, tore after the guy, screaming at the top of her lungs. It didn’t take long for her to catch up to him. She seized him by the arm, yanked her purse free, and said through her teeth, all up in his face, “Your mother must be so proud.” Then she clobbered him on the side of the head with the purse and stomped off.

  She was huge to me that night, larger than life. Magical, even. Her confidence and energy on the field leaked out into everything she touched. It was as though she could do anything, be anything, conquer anything she wanted to, and I wanted nothing more than to become just like her. But then a couple days later, just before the semifinals, she tore her Achilles tendon. I remember all too clearly the thin set of her lips when she was told she would never again play competitive soccer. She’d always been so strong and so centered that I didn’t expect the injury to change who she was. Which was exactly why the following weeks were so strange. She just got...distant. Hardened. There was something haunting and sharp-edged about her facial features. She refused to see her friends, sulked in her room, stayed in her pajamas the entire day. She was suddenly this person I didn’t know, and it terrified me. Dad assured me that she was going to be fine, that she was just going through some sort of grief process. A big part of her—her dreams, her talents, and her strengths—had died.

  But all that changed when I turned six and started to play soccer. I wasn’t a natural, like she had been. I spent long, arduous hours outside, banging the ball against the garage door and practicing footwork. “You’re doing it wrong,” she told me one day from the back porch while I worked on my finish into a makeshift goal. When I glanced up at her, hair every which way and clothes rumpled, I noticed something different in her eyes—a hope or a yearning or a need.

  I scratched a mosquito bite on my collarbone. “Can you help me?” I asked.

  And that was all it took.

  My mother’s demeanor started to improve as soon as she walked down the porch steps that day, and so did my soccer skills. With Mom’s tireless coaching, I became unstoppable with the soccer ball between my feet, scoring eight, nine, ten goals per game. I loved watching the expression on her face when I scored. It was the same face I used to adore: bright-eyed, explosive, and full of energy. Even back then I knew—I was her second chance. I could picture myself, nothing but sweat and smile and ponytail, running across the field toward her after the last buzzer of the World Cup finals. To celebrate with her. To give her what she’d been cheated out of. To give her back the life she had lost.

  But six months and five days ago, all that changed. And she lost her dream again.

  I didn’t remember much from that first week in the hospital, but I remembered what was important. I remembered the steady rhythms of the machines beeping behind me. I remembered the thick odor of disease that hung in the air. I remembered the way my head had felt—like it had been cleaved in half with a rusty hatchet. But most of all, I remembered overhearing a conversation that hadn’t been intended for my ears.

  “Do you think she knows yet?” a nurse said as she adjusted my sheets.

  Something that sounded like heavy machinery rolled across the floor. I could smell coffee breath in my face as another nurse said, “That she’s blind?”

  “No. About her mom leaving town.”

  Heavy sigh. “She doesn’t know much of anything right now.”

  “What sort of mother just takes off while her kid is in the hospital? What sort of mother does that?”

  I didn’t believe it at first, that my mom had gone. But for several days running, as I lay in a medication stupor, I listened for Mom, waited to smell her linen perfume or to feel her take my hand and whisper that everything would be okay. But she didn’t.

  Dad was there, though, more often than not—a solid, protective presence at my side, pleading to God under his breath. This was so typical of him. The praying. He was so characteristically down-to-earth and no-nonsense that most people never would guess he prayed all the time. But I remembered it so clearly from my time in the hospital—Dad’s pleading for me, for Mom.

  For the happily ever after.

  And he got it. Almost.

  When I finally started to pull through, Mom appeared out of nowhere, complaining to the doctors that I needed more pain medicine and grumbling about the room temperature and making me wonder whether I’d imagined it all. And by the time I got released
from the hospital, I wondered if maybe I did.

  I was sitting in front of my computer when the doorbell rang the next morning. I ignored it completely. I’d grown to despise answering the door. It was too much of a crapshoot. Could be the Pope. Could be a serial killer. I had no way of knowing, no peephole to peer through. And anyway, since I’d rolled out of bed I’d been particularly engrossed in the Loose Cannons’ website, where I’d learned that the band had performed last night on top of an abandoned building in Bridgeport.

  And I’d missed it.

  The biggest difference between my computer and a sighted person’s computer was that mine was armed with software that converted what was on the screen into speech—like, every link, every piece of text, every everything. In other words, it had taken me an exhaustingly long time to tab my way through the website using keyboard shortcuts to find...basically nothing.

  Rumor was, clues to the band’s concert times and locations were embedded somewhere in the site, though I’d never been able to unearth one. Today I’d found a short post from the band, thanking the fans who’d attended the concert—nothing cryptic there. A couple quotes from last week’s newspaper, which had featured the band—ditto. And the link to the concert’s YouTube video.

  The doorbell rang again.

  I hit the link, and “Lucidity,” the first song in last night’s concert, snaked into my room. With a sigh, I tabbed down to the video’s comment section. Hardcore fans in the know haunted this spot to brag indecently about having attended the concerts. Today was no exception. There was a post from some superfan who called herself Pink Pistol, boasting that she’d gotten Mason’s autograph after the performance. Another from Tommy X, who claimed that the concert had been “mind-blowing.” After that were probably a half-dozen posts from brainless bastards such as myself, begging both Pink Pistol and Tommy X to divulge how they’d found the clue.

  The doorbell rang again.

  I navigated down to Tommy X’s reply: “In order to keep the mystique alive, I can’t disclose the Big Secret. But I’ll tell you this: you have to look beyond the surface.”