Footsteps rounded the corner behind me. And then a girl’s voice: “Oh wow. That’s...wow. Want some help picking those up?” There was an awkward pause in which I deliberated whether to decline the offer, a pause just long enough for her to discover she knew me. “Maggie?” she said, clearly surprised.
Now, if I were the observant type, I would have already recognized Sophie’s voice. Lord knows I’d heard it a million times out on the high school soccer field, and a million times before that. It brought back memories of normalcy. Memories of slumber parties and laughfests and summer camps.
Sophie and I had known each other for what felt like an eternity, but I was reasonably certain we were seven when we first met. It was during our first soccer practice for a coed league, where all great friendships are born. That day, one of our teammates, Trevor Wilson—a boy with tumbleweed-looking hair and one lazy eye that had spread to his entire body—kept tripping Sophie. He and his friends thought it was funny. A game. But I did not. I have this thing about bullies. They infuriate me. So after he tripped her a half-dozen times, I marched up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned around, I kneed him in the groin. That was the end of the tripping thing and the beginning of Sophie and me.
Sophie was exceedingly tall and exceedingly red-haired, and she had these slender fingers that she drummed against her chin when she was trying to figure something out. I knew this because I’d seen her do it, oh, a thousand times on the soccer field when our plays went awry. I suspected that she was tapping her chin right now. Which was exactly why I felt the urgent need to escape.
“Hey, Sophie,” I said.
“Um, hi,” she said.
Painfully long pause.
The only sound was Dad’s favorite Foreigner song, wandering out of the overhead speakers. I clung to it, desperately bouncing my heel to the beat.
She blurted, “God, I haven’t seen you since...I mean, I haven’t seen you in forever. You look great.” That was the thing about Sophie. She was nice. This was why I’d liked her. Back in the day, I’d informed her of this. And she’d told me that she liked me because I was not nice. Whether that had been a compliment or an insult, I’ll never know.
“Thanks. So do you,” I joked. She was quiet for a beat too long before she laughed. And her laugh was screechy. All wrong.
We stood there for a moment in thorny silence while the conversational walls closed in. I shifted my weight. I’d never been good with small talk. It had always been sort of painful for me. Made me feel as though I were trying to shove a boulder through a funnel. And generally, all that came out of my funnel was the sort of dust that made me choke. Besides, talking to Sophie just didn’t feel natural. Not that it felt natural to talk to anyone these days. Except for Ben, of course. The long and the short of it was this: my lack of eyesight made people uncomfortable. Self-conscious.
Awkward.
Sophie plowed on, her voice muffled as she picked up the boxes for me. “Um,” she said, her voice shaking a little. “We haven’t been the same without you.”
By “we” she’d meant “the soccer team.” We’d all been friends. Usually when you’re on a soccer team, there are one or two players who are too girly or too fake or too gossipy or too irritating, but I’d honestly liked everyone on my team. When I first got out of the hospital, my friends told me they wanted to stand beside me while I adjusted to my sudden blindness. We were a team, for Christ’s sake. One for all and all for one and all that crap. But without my eyesight, my friendships spun off-kilter. They were unpleasant. Everyone felt it. But I was the only one with enough balls to do something about it. I started brushing off their phone calls, their attempts to visit, and their invitations to get-togethers, claiming I was too busy to spend time with them.
Okay, so I had been the one who had turned away from my friendships. But it had been so easy. And now, as I stood facing Sophie in the store, I felt a thick, bitter glob in the back of my throat. Now, I wondered why Sophie had given up on me so quickly. Now, I couldn’t help but think: Why had she stopped trying? I’d had to try to walk, navigate new school hallways, fight my way through the void. I just hadn’t wanted to try with friendship.
“Lauren’s going to freak when I tell her I ran into you,” Sophie said.
It took a concentrated effort for me to not roll my eyes. Lauren had been the easiest one to walk away from—almost like she’d been relieved.
Silence.
More silence.
The Foreigner song gave way to some Kenny G disaster. Suddenly my breath felt like it was strangling me.
Sophie cleared her throat. “So my mom is waiting for me in the car? And I have to go. But it was nice seeing you.”
“You too,” I muttered. “Um. Before you go?”
“Yes?”
God, this was humiliating.
I held up the box. “Is this super plus?”
There was a pause in which I figured she was reading the box. Then: “Um. Yeah. It is, actually.”
We said good-bye and I made my way to the end of the aisle. While I waited for Gramps, I squinted and swiveled my head around and generally tried to will back my eyesight, tried to see something—anything. I was in such deep concentration that I actually flinched when some dirtbag of a guy shuffled up to me and said in my ear, “You blind?”
I shamelessly ignored him. I was an authority on ignoring people. It was one of my hobbies. Plus, it was one of the few perks to being blind. Generally, strangers will speak to you only once before giving up, figuring you’re also deaf. Or too slow to form a coherent response.
“You blind?” he asked again, louder this time, his breath in my face. He reeked of stale cigarettes, crappy English, and about a quarter century of failure.
I turned my head away from him and twirled my cane against the floor, signifying that I had better things to do than talk to him. What those things were, I wasn’t exactly sure.
He went on to say, “You know, you’re pretty hot for a blind girl.”
This guy was the perfect example of why they print directions on shampoo bottles. “Gee. Thanks,” I said.
“Welcome.”
Gramps showed up at that precise second and rescued me, saying in a low, gravelly voice, “I might be old, but I’m strong.” The next thing I knew, the guy was gone.
That night, I wandered outside to the timeworn Adirondack chair on the back deck. I came out here sometimes in the evening, when the house felt too lopsided to hold me upright and when the weather was agreeable, either listening to music or just eavesdropping on the crickets. Tonight I could hear the neighbor’s sprinkler hissing as I unloaded into the chair and folded one leg underneath me. The air was gluey and promised rain, but I’d spent too long in our brutally air-conditioned house this afternoon, too long trying to keep myself from calling Ben and inviting myself into his life again. And while it had been several hours since I’d run into Sophie at the store, I still felt as though I were tripping over all the loose strings of our failed friendship.
And so: the deck, where I could breathe.
I didn’t use headphones anymore—they heisted far too much of my hearing—so when I fired up my iPod, the Loose Cannons’ “Transcendence” emerged through the tiny wireless speaker in my lap.
My entire body exhaled.
The Loose Cannons’ music had been the glue that had held me together over the past several months, the only thing that made sense to me anymore. I closed my eyes, whisper-singing the lyrics until the end of the song, the keyboard solo. Then I pressed my fingers down on my thigh in time to the notes. Though I hadn’t sat in front of a piano in a good couple years, I could still pluck notes out of the air and put them exactly where they belonged on a keyboard.
The sliding glass door opened and exhaled a burst of air-conditioning and my mother, who had evidently just gotten home from work. “Mind turning that down?” she asked, ghosting across the deck in what sounded like her standard rubber-soled Coach Sanders shoes.
>
I almost got up and left, just slunk back to my room. Being alone on the deck with my mother dredged up all kinds of painful memories—all of a sudden there I was, lying on that hospital bed again, half-dead and newly blind and miserable, wondering where she had gone. Wondering whether she’d ever return.
I pushed the recollections aside. “Whatcha doing?” I said, turning down the music and putting both feet flat on the wooden slats. There had been a time when I hadn’t been able to walk barefoot across the deck without collecting at least a dozen splinters, but the years had worn the boards smooth so they were soft and creamy on my feet.
“Watering,” she said tiredly, her voice now coming from the far end of the deck. We had an eight-thousand-year-old fern that lived there every summer—the only thing my mother had ever succeeded in growing. It was gigantic and sprawling, the sort of beast that could swallow a small child whole. Come September, she’d roll it back inside to its winter home at the bay window. She sighed. “Fern looks droopy.”
“Maybe it needs to be watered twice a day,” I suggested, like the fern expert that I was. The last time I’d picked up a watering can had been years ago, to squash a spider. In a dream I’d had.
“Maybe,” she said vaguely.
Silence.
More silence.
It’s conversations like these that make a person look forward to standing in line at the DMV.
I cleared my throat. “Feels like it might rain,” I said.
“Mmm. Little bit,” she said.
This pretty much summed up 99.9 percent of our chats since I’d lost my sight. We spoke, but we never really said anything. Our exchanges had never been like this when I’d been able to see—so full of holes. We used to stuff soccer balls into every gap, so we’d been able to navigate practically everywhere. Now every time I took a step I plunged into a crater.
Sure, Mom had eventually come back from wherever she’d gone while I was in the hospital, and maybe she’d even tried to make up for it in her own way. She’d been all over me when I’d first gotten home, working with Hilda to blind-proof our house and getting me set up with a new computer and whatever. But then she’d tiptoed out the door and gone back to work.
And the quiet settled in.
None of us ever mentioned her disappearance. And we didn’t speak of her quick exit back to work. We just adjusted to a new norm. Dad was the one who worked from the house for a couple months while I got established both at home and at Merchant’s. It should have been reassuring, having him there, but he spent an abundance of that time following me from room to room and chattering away, something he’d done only once before, when Gran was sick. Gramps brought home bags upon bags of cookies from Big Dough, my favorite bakery downtown. Everyone did their best to fill in the gaps. But even so, I spent the first several months of blindness alone, palms flat on the walls of my boxy new room, searching for a door that didn’t exist.
The next morning, Dad found me in the kitchen, hunched over a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, my favorite cereal out of sheer laziness. Squat and fat, the box was easy to differentiate from the others on the shelf.
“Good morning, honey,” Dad said jovially.
“Morning,” I muttered back, not sure what was so good about it. Getting up at hideously early hours was not something I generally did during summer vacation. In fact, I loved sleep so much that it was the first thing I thought about when I woke up. But the past several nights my sleep had been fractured, fitful, and I knew why. It had been a couple days since I’d seen anything.
I’d hoped beyond hope that my eyesight was going to trickle back to me as time progressed, that eventually I’d see something else—anything else. But after a couple days’ worth of nothing but my fumbling blindness, I was beginning to feel like I was sinking in murky dark water.
And I hated it. Hated having some sort of hope thrown at me and then discovering it could very well be heavy enough to sink me. So I’d broken down and texted Ben last night, inviting myself to his house. I wasn’t proud of it, using Ben. But at this point I was starting to doubt I’d even seen him. At this point, I was starting to panic.
“Coffee?” Dad asked as he tromped past.
“God, yes.”
Awkward and soft-spoken, Dad had the grace of a yeti. He was the sort of guy who grew up playing backup for the backup right fielder on his Little League team. A real man’s man. Interestingly, his parents had given him two middle names, Melvin and Samuel, both of which sounded less like a middle name combo unit and more like a stodgy debate that his parents had gotten into while Dad was in utero.
“You’re up early,” Dad said, banging around in the cabinets. Although our kitchen had been meticulously mapped out, organized, and defaced with braille, he still fumbled to find even the simplest of items. Like cream and sugar. By great force of will, I refrained from standing up, taking four perfectly measured strides to my left, and producing the sugar from the cabinet—second shelf from the bottom. The fact of it was, I let him do it for me because he felt like he needed to. “Have a session with Hilda this morning?” he asked.
“Nah. Tomorrow at noon,” I said, making a mental note to cancel the appointment. Yesterday she’d informed me that our next lesson would cover How to Cross a Street, which, as fascinating as it sounded, would have to wait until hell froze over.
Dad said, “You got some mail yesterday. It’s on top of the microwave.”
“Like, snail mail?”
He plunked a coffee cup down in front of me. Hazelnut steam wafted in my face. Dad’s tone was forced-casual as he said, “Just some DVDs from a few colleges.”
“Must’ve come by mistake. I haven’t contacted any schools.”
“Your mother did on your behalf, after researching the best programs for students with disabilities.” This was classic Mom. She’d had every opportunity to tell me this last night on the deck, yet she hadn’t. “Cal Poly looks awesome. Also, Missouri State.”
A few months back, I’d thought I had the perfect excuse for not sending out college applications: I was the juvenile delinquent who’d defaced Merchant’s. But then my counselor had informed me that the prank was only a misdemeanor—something many colleges would overlook if I explained the situation honestly and apologetically during the application process.
I sighed and said, “I don’t want to go to those schools.”
“Where do you want to go?”
Nowhere. “I don’t know.”
Last year, college scouts wouldn’t leave me alone. Even phoned once a month to grill me on whether I’d chosen a school. Back then there hadn’t even been a question. I was going to UConn. I’d enjoy my last four years playing for Mom, and then I’d go straight to the national team. But now, college seemed like a distant dream. Completely unobtainable. I said, “I’m busy today, so maybe I’ll check them out tomorrow or the next day?”
I could almost feel his eyebrows jerk up. “You have plans?”
“Going to visit a friend.”
“Really? Who?” he asked hopefully.
I took a sip of coffee to avoid the question. What he really wanted to know was whether I was planning on hanging out with Clarissa Fenstermacher. Ever since my little brush with Old Man Law, my parents had been pushing me to spend time with her. Clarissa, who had been blind since birth, had a “lovely attitude,” and she was the sort of person who would help me “make peace with my blindness.” So I fundamentally didn’t want to hang out with her.
“Nobody you know,” I said dismissively. Truth be told, I’d never been much for the students at Merchant’s, particularly Clarissa, whose cheerful, glass-half-full, unrelenting chatter made me wish I could unsubscribe to my own ears. “What are you doing up so early on the weekend? Working on a big case?”
I heard his breath hitch a little. I heard his coffee cup rattle too loudly against the counter. Then I heard the lie come out of his mouth: “Just have a bunch of errands to run, actually.”
A sharp pang seized my chest.
The only thing Dad and I had ever had in common was our love of music. He was obsessed with classic rock, which, combined with his fascination with old-school vinyl and his enthusiasm for a great bargain, made the garage sale his biggest weakness. He’d hover at my bedside first thing on Saturday mornings—just a hulking shadow framed by hallway light—and say, with a passion that, though not exactly charming first thing in the morning, was awfully infectious, “Thirty garage sales today! Thirty! And fifteen of them claim to have vinyl!” And minutes later, I’d find myself stumbling out of bed and getting dressed. Scouring garage sales for old albums was the one thing we’d done together, the one piece of him that had been entirely mine.
And now it was gone.
I wasn’t sure how it all stopped, whether he’d stopped asking me to go along or I’d turned him down too many times, only that it did.
Dad cleared his throat. “Anyway. I’d better get going. See you tonight?”
I nodded, and—even though I’d been awake for a couple hours, gotten dressed, and eaten breakfast—went back to bed.
I was uncharacteristically quiet for the remainder of the morning. Sure, there was the creative cussing when I stubbed my toe on a doorjamb, and there was the singing of three Loose Cannons songs while I took a shower, and there was the asking of Gramps to drop me off at Ben’s house, but other than that, complete quiet. Until I arrived at Ben’s, that is. Because the second I returned to my little cloud of vision, I fell right back into myself again.
So Ben and I were crutch-to-cane at the Miltons’ kitchen counter, preparing English muffin pizzas, and Ben was extracting words from my mouth by way of a Would You Rather? game, which, for all intents and purposes, was just a ridiculous barrage of questions that forced me to choose between two unpleasant hypothetical actions (“Would you rather catapult down a slide made of razor blades or have seven nails hammered into your tongue?”). All the while, I was doing my best to avoid looking at Mason, who was slouched in a chair at the kitchen table, strumming random chords on his guitar. Which was to say that I was totally looking at him. In my defense, an hour ago, when I’d walked into the house, I’d discovered that my tiny ring of eyesight had expanded since the last time I’d seen Ben. And I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to enjoy looking at everything around me.
The One Thing Page 7
