The One Thing

by Marci Lyn Curtis

  The dog looked up at me, and our eyes locked for a terribly long moment. You’re going to be all right, I mouthed. Her tail twitched as though she wanted to wag it but she had no energy left to do so.

  Something in my throat was strangling me, so I groped for a chair and then collapsed into it, pulling my legs up to my chest and balancing my chin on my knees. I squeezed my eyes shut. If I could just make myself small enough, maybe I’d stop hurting.

  Seconds dragged into minutes. Minutes felt like hours. I wondered why such a tiny dog had been wandering around by herself. I wondered whether we were the only ones who had ever really cared about her. I wondered why life was so ridiculously unkind.

  I couldn’t deal with this.

  I had to deal with this.

  Finally, the vet exhaled slowly. I felt the hair rise up on my forearms. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice soft, almost a whisper, “but there’s nothing we can do to save her.”

  Back in Mason’s car, my arms were crossed again. This time, for a different reason. I was trying to hold myself together. I felt as though I’d been turned inside out, all my emotions scattered across the state of Connecticut.

  I’d stood frozen in place in the vet’s exam room as the dog had died quietly in my arms, her tiny bright light blinking away into nothingness. When I’d handed her to the vet, my hands shaking uncontrollably, I’d felt as though I’d failed her. Which was asinine. I couldn’t have done anything for her. And besides, I didn’t even like dogs.

  “Can you...can you get me home quickly, please?” I asked Mason, my voice breaking. I closed my eyes and pressed my thumbs into my eyelids, angry with myself for being so emotional again in front of him.

  “Sure,” Mason said, his voice pensive.

  I nodded a thank-you but said nothing. Breathe, I told myself. The tears were coming regardless, running in huge, fat trails down my cheeks. I could hear Mason’s concern long before I heard his voice.

  “Are you...are you okay?” he asked, touching my hand lightly for the briefest of seconds and then pulling away.

  Nothing was okay. Things were so not-okay that my no would seem inadequate, flimsy, so I didn’t even bother to say it. And anyway, I was crying hard now in huge, fractured sobs, so he had his answer.

  Neither of us spoke when we arrived at my house. We just sat there for several moments in the uncomfortable silence. I didn’t know what to say to him—Good-bye or Please believe me about Ben or Help me, Mason Milton. Nothing seemed to fit. For once in my life, I had no words. Just a firestorm of emotions raging through me. A volcano.

  Silently, I opened the door, slid out of Mason’s car, and walked slowly into my house.

  My feet felt as though they weighed a thousand pounds as I climbed the stairs to my old room. Oddly enough, it was the only place I wanted to be tonight, even though I hadn’t set foot in there in months.

  The door stuck a little as I opened it, as though it had been hastily sealed shut with flimsy Scotch tape. The room sighed out in front of me. I stood there in the dead silence, my hand still on the doorknob, hovering at the entry but not walking through it.

  The place smelled stale. Dusty. Like old, musty body spray and sweat-encrusted cleats and forgotten dreams. But even so, it was familiar. A part of me nearly as much as my hand or my nose.

  I knew this room. I knew the books crammed into every corner. I knew the glow-in-the-dark stars that speckled the ceiling. I knew the half-dozen soccer balls jammed in the closet. I knew that memories—full and sharp and colorful—breathed freely in this space. I could feel them there. Even see them there.

  I crossed the room and sat on the very corner of my bed, running my hand along the worn blue and green quilt Gran had sewn for me years ago. When I was eight, she’d presented it to me for my birthday. I’d wondered why she had given me a quilt when all I’d wanted was a handheld video game. But after she died, I treasured that quilt.

  I didn’t know why I’d moved into the boxy, functional room downstairs after meningitis took my sight, and I didn’t know why I hadn’t touched this room ever since. All I knew was that this was the only place I wanted to be tonight. So I fell asleep there, underneath Gran’s blue and green quilt and the slanted ceilings dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars.

  The next day I felt foggy, sluggish, like I was trapped in somebody else’s dream—some pitiful girl who had lost more than she ever thought she’d had to begin with, who was about to lose even more. Surely I wasn’t the indomitable Maggie Sanders, that much was true. And yet here I was in that other girl’s body, woefully tapping out the Chopin-Clarissa tune on my sheets. And then on my desk. And then on the shower stall. And then on the kitchen counter.

  It was unrelenting, that melody.

  Finally I crept to the basement, an extension cord in hand. My old keyboard—still on the floor, right where I’d left it—kicked to life with a hum of chaotic energy when I plugged it in. I sat on my knees in front of it, uncertain, and then leaned over and ran my fingers along the sharps and flats until I found middle C.

  I pressed down with my thumb. The note sounded rusty, old, like it had been imprisoned in the keyboard for centuries.

  I was shocked, actually, that I’d managed to produce real sound. So I stayed like that, hunched over the instrument with my thumb on the key, until the room swallowed up the note. Then I placed my hands in position.

  The basement held its breath.

  Originally I’d planned to just tinker with the tune so I could get it out of my head. But my fingers had different ideas. They ripped into the piece as though I’d been playing it forever—quick, clean, flawless.

  I jerked my hands away and twisted them in my lap. It had sounded strange to me. Not like my song. But exactly like my song. It was a hodgepodge of everything that had been stampeding through my head the past couple weeks. It was something that would make my old piano instructor bleed from the ears. Placing my fingers back on the keys, I pounded out the song once, twice, three times, ten times, sometimes adding synthesized effects, and sometimes letting the music stand on its own.

  Then I sat back on my heels.

  The music seemed to hang over me, slightly unfinished—a sentence without an ending. And it picked at me in an indescribable way. Leaning over the keyboard again, I tacked on the descending base line I’d admired the other day in Big Dough. The conversion was clunky as hell, and I stumbled over it again and again.

  “I didn’t know you played.”

  I jumped like a startled cat and shrieked.

  Mason.

  I resolutely turned toward him—like I was trying to prove something. What that something was, I didn’t know. That I wasn’t backing down, maybe. That I’d told him the truth. I said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve played.” It was embarrassing that he’d heard me, but I wasn’t going to let him know that.

  Neither of us spoke for the space of several breaths. Finally I lifted my chin and said, “How did you get in my house?”

  I heard his boot kicking against the wall. Lunk lunk lunk. Lunk-lunk-lunk-lunk-lunk. “The door was unlocked,” he said. “I let myself in. Heard you playing down here.” He cleared his throat and said, “Listen, can I talk to you about your sight?”

  Mason had done some digging. Knowing that Merchant’s would never admit someone who wasn’t visually impaired, he’d called the school to confirm I was a student. He’d stewed on the information for a few hours before he’d come over, but even so he seemed confused, disconcerted, like he had a lightbulb in his hand but no idea where to screw it in.

  “You have to admit,” Mason said, “you can understand why it was so hard for me to believe at first—your hitting your head and then suddenly you can see people who are...” He swallowed loudly and shifted a little, his leg so close to mine that I could feel the heat coming off of it. We were sitting on the steps of my back porch, where we’d been for the past hour. He’d probably asked me a hundred questions so far, about my blindness, about my eyesight around
Ben, about the others I’d seen.

  Having our relationship switch gears so completely and so abruptly was bewildering. What had caused him to confirm my story, I didn’t know—whether he’d noticed my expression change when he’d placed the dying dog in my lap, or whether he’d seen some sort of truth in me when I’d fallen apart in his car, or whether he’d simply taken some time to really consider what I’d told him. All I knew was that the huge boulder between us had shifted a little, and I could finally squeeze past. I said, “Yeah. Believe me, I know.”

  Was his leg drifting closer to mine? It felt like it. Somewhere in my body was a miniature fire truck, speeding desperately to the three-alarm on the side of my leg.

  “It could be something else, though—the reason you’re seeing these people,” Mason said. “It could be a million different things.”

  I nodded a wordless assent, not to tell him I agreed with him, but to show him I was listening. I knew I was right. I just couldn’t explain how. The truth was like a cold palm pressed on the nape of my neck.

  “Have you told anyone besides me?” Mason asked.

  “An online doctor. And it didn’t go well. He suggested I was crazy,” I said.

  As he blew out a sympathetic breath, his leg, just barely, rested against mine. My heart stuttered.

  He didn’t move.

  Neither did I.

  There’s something about a light, hesitant touch. It makes you ache for more.

  I shook my head, attempting to reclaim my brain. Mason had a girlfriend. Probably didn’t even know he was touching me.

  Still, though. The heat on the side of my leg was reaching nuclear. I was going to explode right here, combust all over my backyard. I shifted positions a little, moving away from him to lean against the deck railing, equal parts relief and regret.

  He let out a little sigh.

  A sigh.

  What did that even mean?

  Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Have you considered telling anyone else?”

  “Like who? My parents?” I scoffed. “They’d never believe me. But—what about your mom?”

  I heard him take in a deep, shaky breath. “I think we should wait on telling Mom until we know for sure. Losing Dad was so hard on her. If your theory is wrong, we’d put her through an awful lot for nothing.”

  He was probably right. If I had a little more proof, something convincing, maybe my story wouldn’t be so far-fetched. “What about Ben?” I asked. “Are you going to tell him?”

  “He’s ten.” I nodded, feeling relieved. After a short pause, Mason said, “It’s just hard for me to swallow because Ben had a routine checkup a couple months ago and he was fine. And he hasn’t been sick, hasn’t even had a cold. I mean, he’s been a little tired and grumpy, but that’s it.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Ya think?”

  “He’ll forgive you, Maggie,” he said, a half smile hiding somewhere in his tone. “It’s not in his nature to stay angry.”

  The next morning I told my parents I had a stomachache. It wasn’t a complete lie—indecision and stress had fused into a roiling lump in my stomach, and I couldn’t seem to digest it no matter how hard I tried. And anyway, it was the only way to get out of my session with Hilda, who was due to show up at noon.

  After my parents left for work, I agonized for a while. Cried for a while. Fidgeted for a while. And then I called Sophie. She’d been hovering in the back of my mind for the past couple days, but with everything that had been going on, I’d put off calling her.

  “Hey, Sophie. How’re you holding up?” I asked her as soon as she picked up.

  A couple heartbeats’ worth of a pause on her end of the line. Finally she said, “Well, just about everything I own is getting carted into a moving van right now, I threw up five times this morning, and I’m craving squid. So there’s that.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or bawl.

  Silence spread between us, so bulky and dense I could feel it weighing down the phone.

  “So you’re really moving?” I whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  My throat felt tight, like someone was jamming a fist into my windpipe. “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Sitting on the very edge of my bed, I wrapped my arms around myself. I hated that she was pregnant. Hated that her parents were splitting up. Hated that she was moving to Ohio. Hated that I’d hurt her.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted suddenly. It was all hurried and all shouty and all wrong, but I kept going anyway. I had to try to make this right. After all these years of friendship, I owed Sophie that much. “For avoiding you when I first lost my sight. It was just so...awkward.” I twisted my hands together, gripped my toes down on my flip-flops, like maybe I was getting ready to bolt, just run away from this conversation.

  Sophie waited a moment before she spoke, and when she did, her voice was soft. “It was my fault, too. I’ve been busy fighting my own battles. I’ve been sort of avoiding everyone—keeping people away from my house. I didn’t want everyone to know how bad it was at home. It was so embarrassing.”

  “Well, maybe with a little distance, your parents will decide they want to stay together?” Even as it came out of my mouth, I knew it would never happen. That house had been a time bomb that had detonated the night Sophie told her parents she was pregnant.

  “Right,” she muttered. “And maybe my dad will offer to knit the baby some booties.”

  Baby booties.

  Wow.

  That was when it really hit me: Sophie was actually going to have a baby. I’d always been a little leery of babies, what with their big heads and their inconsolable crying and their jerky movements. I’d once seen a baby laugh and puke at the exact same time. It had been like something out of a horror movie. But if anyone could make it through this, it was Sophie. She just didn’t know it yet.

  Sophie cleared her throat. “Maggie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have to go.”

  I knew she’d meant that she was just busy, that she had to finish packing and whatever, but it felt more like a final good-bye. A decade of friendship and laughter and familiarity slid through my fingers, wisping away into nothingness. I whispered, “Bye, Soph.”

  I was sitting on the back deck when the doorbell rang that afternoon. I made no move toward the front door, just stayed right where I was: butt on the edge of the chair, eyes closed, hands gripping both sides of my head.

  But when the doorbell sounded off a relentless couple thousand times in a row, I staggered to my feet and opened my eyes. Then I froze. I was standing in the murky outer ring of my sight. My eyes traced slowly along a wooden deck slat toward the house, my vision becoming clearer with every foot. Trancelike, I walked to the slider and put one palm on the glass.

  I could see inside my house.

  There it was, just like it had always been, only...different. Furniture was lined up in a square, uniform manner. Mom’s vases, which used to live on the shelf just inside the door, were gone, replaced by a line of books. Independence Without Sight and Adjusting to Blindness and How to Cope with Loss. There were no stray shoes on the floor, nothing that made the space appear lived-in or homey or cozy. It was a page inside a catalog. A model home.

  The house of a blind girl.

  I flinched as the doorbell kicked in again.

  Opening the slider and stepping inside, I felt guilty for some reason, like a trespasser or an unwelcome houseguest. I walked through the house in a daze, hitching to a stop in the hallway in front of a huge picture of Mom and me after regionals last year. I was beaming, one hand holding a soccer ball and the other raised high above my head, knotted together with Mom’s.

  My mother’s expression was triumphant.

  Suddenly I felt like the hallway was caving in on me, and I took off, hurrying toward the door. Everything around me was hospital-bright, and my insides were in revolt, churning and twisting as I stepped to the door and swung it open.

&n
bsp; Ben.

  It was Ben.

  There he was, wearing a scowl and a blue baseball-style hat that said THINKING CAP. At his feet was a fabric shopping bag. Like a nocturnal animal emerging into the daylight, I squinted at Ben, then at the red-flowered cushion on our porch swing, then at the ancient maple in the front yard, then at Mason’s car idling in the driveway, and then back at Ben again.

  Ben used his crutches to propel the bag toward me. It crashed into my shins. “New flavor of Doritos,” he said tersely. “Thought you might want to try them.”

  “Thanks,” I said, shocked.

  “Why are you wearing pajamas?” he blurted. “It’s, like, three in the afternoon.”

  I glanced at Mason, who beamed a gorgeous, white-toothed smile at me from the driver’s seat of his car. I’d seen him so many times in my own head lately that it was weird to see him, see him. No, not weird: overwhelming. I glanced away, but I could feel him watching me regardless, could feel his eyes on my face, my shoulders, my pajamas, my everything.

  I took in a deep breath. Focus, Maggie. Focus. I looked down at Ben. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

  For a moment, Ben and I just stared at each other, then Ben said tightly, “So Mason told me that you told him that you can see when I’m around.”

  I nodded robotically.

  Ben let his head fall backward and he sighed heavily. “Okay, fine. Fine: Mason said I should come over to hear you out. So here I am. To hear you out.”

  All I could think was that he was giving me another chance, and this time I was going to do it right. With complete honesty. Looking down at my feet, I said, “You were right. In some ways, I did use you for my eyesight. I mean, when I first met you, my life was just...I was just...” My voice sounded loud and hurried, and I told myself to take a breath. “I was completely off the rails.” I swallowed. The sound seemed loud in my ears. I glanced up at Ben for a moment. His lips were still tight, but there was a loosening in his eyes that encouraged me to go on. “But you were always my friend. You were always the person who helped me realize that somewhere inside me, there’s still a me. I’ve been a crap friend, and I’m truly sorry. I shouldn’t have left your house without saying good-bye the night of the Dead Eddies concert.” I cleared my throat. “And about Mason...” Instinctively, and before I could stop myself, my eyes shot up to where Mason sat in his car.