“That’s me. Carley the Helpful One. How do you suppose that translates in Chinese?” She was babbling, but couldn’t stop herself. She felt totally flustered by his sincerity. Absolutely unsettled by his attention.
“Um—I’d really like to ask you something.”
“You can ask.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m weird or anything.”
“This must be serious.” She tried to sound lighthearted, but her palms were sweating. She hoped her hand didn’t slip out of his.
“Not too serious.” He tipped his head and his brown hair spilled over the gauze wrapped around his forehead. “I’ve just been wondering what you look like, that’s all. I mean, you know what I look like and I haven’t a clue as to what you look like.”
Her heart wedged in her throat. How should she answer him? “I look like a girl,” she finally said. “Hair, arms, legs—the usual stuff.”
He laughed, but she hadn’t meant it to be funny. She didn’t want to be discussing her looks with him. A sudden thought unnerved her. What if one of the nurses had alluded to the fact that she was less than perfect-looking? That something was wrong with her?
“But tell me about yourself. Are you tall, short, athletic? What color’s your hair and your eyes? I’m not trying for your vital statistics, just a mental picture.”
“Well.…” She drew out the word, stalling for time. “What do you think I look like?”
“That’s not fair. No matter how I describe you, you can agree or disagree, whether it’s true or not.”
“I won’t. Tell me, what’s your mental image of me?”
He squirmed, and she knew she’d put him on the spot. But he’d put her on the spot too. “All I have to go on is your voice.”
“How does my voice make me sound?”
“Your voice makes you sound friendly. And nice,” He appeared more comfortable with this third-person approach—this pretense that her voice was a separate personality.
“And what about the color of my hair? Can my voice give you a clue about that?”
“Blond?”
“Dark brown.”
“Straight?”
“Like a board.”
“Long?”
“Long,” she confirmed. “And what color does my voice say my eyes are?”
“Um—blue.”
“Brown.”
“I like brown eyes. My favorite color.” He grinned gleefully, caught up in the game.
“Oh, puh-lease …” she drawled dramatically.
“You don’t believe me? It’s true. In the first grade I had a crush on a girl named Trianna Lopez. She had the most beautiful brown eyes.”
“Fine. Sit there and talk about another girl in front of me.” Carley pretended to be miffed.
She didn’t fool him. Kyle laughed and said, “She was only six!”
“I forgive you.”
“I’ll bet you’re tall.”
“Only five foot three. I’d never make the basketball team.”
“That’s all right. I’ve never had a thing for jocks.” He toyed with her fingers still nestled in his hand. “I’ll bet you’re thin too.”
“Average.”
“There’s nothing average about you, Carley.”
She felt her face blush crimson. If only he knew how unaverage she really was. “So now are you satisfied? Do you have a picture of me?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, here’s what I’ve learned about you, mister,” she said, poking him playfully with her forefinger. “You’re attracted to tall, willowy blondes with blue eyes and straight hair. I, on the other hand, am a not-so-tall brunette with brown eyes and straight hair.”
“One out of four isn’t bad for a guy in my situation,” he insisted.
For a second she thought he might get melancholy remembering that he was blind. Quickly she said, “All right, one out of four is good.”
He sat still, his face turned fully toward her. For an eerie moment she thought he might be able to see through his bandages. “What now?” she asked.
“There’s another way I could satisfy my curiousity a little bit. If you’re willing, that is.”
“How?”
“You could let me touch your face. You know, explore it with my fingers.”
Eight
Kyle wanted to touch her face. But if he did, he’d know for certain something was wrong. Carley got an instant picture of his fingers tracing along the caved-in area between her left eye and nose and recoiling in horror. He’d ask, “What’s wrong with you?” and she’d have to tell him that she was a freak. That just like Humpty Dumpty, all the plastic surgeons and medical geniuses couldn’t put Carley Mattea back together again.
“I know you’re still here,” Kyle said, “because I’m still holding your hand. What’s wrong? Did I upset you?”
“No,” she said, a little too quickly. “I had a shooting pain in my leg. I was gritting my teeth until it went away.”
With those words Carley realized that she’d crossed a subtle barrier. Before, she’d simply avoided telling him the truth by not divulging certain details. Now she’d told him two outright lies. Truthfully she was upset, and there was no pain in her leg.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d offended you by asking to touch your face. I don’t know why I asked. Maybe because the woman from blind services encouraged me to explore the world with my sense of touch. She said it would help me ‘see’ things. Forget it.”
“It’s all right. I—I really don’t mind.” Another lie! “But you know what I think would be better?”
“What?”
“I think it would be better to wait until you can actually see my face for yourself. Yes, that’s what I want. I want to greet you face-to-face once your bandages come off.”
He didn’t say a word right away. He only held her hand and brushed his thumb repeatedly across her knuckles. “Even when the bandages come off, there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to see again.”
“But I think you will,” she insisted. “And because I think so, I want you to wait until you can see me with your own eyes.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then you can touch away.”
He slumped back in the chair.
She disliked bringing Kyle’s mood from happy to glum; it wasn’t a nice way to treat him. But she’d been desperate to take his mind off the idea of exploring her face with his touch. What a disaster it would have been. She didn’t understand why it was so important to her that he maintain his illusions about her looks, but it was.
“Do you know what?” she asked brightly. “The orderly will be here any minute to take me down to PT.” She told him another lie. She wasn’t scheduled for another PT session until Monday morning.
“I’ll go back to my room.” Kyle stood.
“Let me walk with you.”
“How? You’re on crutches, remember?”
“We’ll manage.”
“Then let me take your elbow and follow about a half step behind. That’s the way I was taught to have someone lead me.”
Carley let him grasp her right elbow and slowly she began to take small steps with her crutches so that he could keep up. Back in his room again, he climbed into the bed. “I think I’ll listen to another one of those books you loaned me. I’m not much good at doing anything but listening.”
“I have more,” she said, eager to make up for any distress she might have caused him. “Mom and Dad brought me a bunch of new ones today.”
“Will you come visit me later?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
“My parents are coming this afternoon. I’d like for them to meet you.”
“Um—all right,” she declared, knowing full well that she’d find something to keep her busy and away from her room so that she wouldn’t have to meet them.
Carley returned to her room, grateful to be out of her awkward situation. How had she gotten herself into this mess? Was it wr
ong of her to want to protect herself from his discovering what she really looked like? Was it wrong to want him to believe that she was normal, even pretty?
Later, when she figured Kyle’s parents might be on their way up, Carley went to visit Reba. The girl was still recovering from her surgery, but fortunately she was alone in her room. IVs hung by her bed, and tubes leading from her stomach were partially concealed by bedcovers.
“For drainage,” she explained to Carley.
“Are you in pain?” Carley might have felt revulsion if she hadn’t been through so much medical trauma herself.
“Not much,” Reba said. Her voice sounded soft and she spoke slowly, but at least she was lucid. She nodded toward a small machine next to her bed with its IV line threaded into her arm. “Morphine dispenser,” she said. “If I start to hurt too bad, I can make the drip come faster.”
“How long before you’re able to get up?”
“Don’t know.” Reba’s eyes closed, but soon opened again. “Talk to me. Take my mind off this stuff.”
Carley told her about Kyle’s visit and him wanting to touch her face.
“Wow,” Reba mumbled. “Close call.”
“Tell me about it. It’s getting harder and harder to keep my secret.”
“What if he asks one of the nurses about you?”
“Don’t think I’m not worried about it. But they’re professionals. So if one does tell him about me, I hope she’ll be kind and won’t say, ‘Carley? You mean the dog-faced girl?’ ”
Reba grimaced. “No one would ever say that about you.”
“You’re wrong, Reba. Someone did say it.”
“Who?”
“Jon, my sister’s boyfriend.”
“That’s so mean!”
Carley patted Reba’s arm. “Don’t get worked up about it. It happened months ago. I was cutting through the gym at school and I heard some guys talking and heard one of them mention Janelle’s name. Naturally I stopped and eavesdropped. They were telling Jon how lucky he was to have a babe like Janelle for a steady date. And too bad she didn’t have a sister. And Jon said, ‘She does—it’s Carley, the dog-faced sophomore girl.’
“Then I heard a couple of the guys make barking noises and Jon say, ‘Man, I can hardly stand to look at her, she’s so ugly.’ I stopped listening then. I ran out of there as fast as I could. I didn’t cry until I got home, but to this day I can’t stand to be around Jon.”
Reba’s eyes grew wide as Carley talked. “Did you ever tell your sister?”
“ ’Course not. It’s too babyish to whine about it to her. I mean, what am I going to say? ‘Your boyfriend called me a dog. I think you should dump him.’ I need to be tough, Reba. Kids are always saying mean things about me. Dumb things. They don’t know what it’s like to look at this face in the mirror every day. People who are normal haven’t got a clue about how badly words hurt. Worse than rocks sometimes.”
Reba nodded. “Why can’t people understand that no one likes being different. But people who are different still have feelings.”
Carley realized that Reba, most of all, understood what she was saying. All her life Reba would be confined to a wheelchair. She was simply somebody that medical science couldn’t make normal. A lump of tears lodged in Carley’s throat. Tears for Reba. Tears for herself.
“I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve let this whole thing with Kyle get out of hand,” Carley said slowly. “I mean, why didn’t I just come clean with him from the beginning? You told me to.” Tears swam in her eyes.
“What do I know?” Reba offered a smile.
“You knew more than me. I guess it was just so nice to have a boy like me. And he liked me in spite of the way I looked. And now I can’t seem to stop pretending with him.”
“You could if you wanted to.”
Carley shook her head. “No. I don’t want to. I keep thinking that soon I’ll get out of here and get back to my life.”
“But once he gets out, he might come looking for you.”
“But if he can’t ever see me, it won’t matter.”
Reba blinked. “Do you hear what you’re saying, Carley? It’s almost as if you don’t want him to get his eyesight back again.”
Carley bowed her head. What Reba had said was true. She dreaded Kyle regaining his vision. And yet it was wrong to wish him confined to a lifetime of darkness simply because she didn’t want him knowing she was disfigured. “He’s the first guy who’s ever been nice to me, Reba. The only one since before I was twelve.”
“And you don’t think he’ll be nice to you once he knows what you look like?”
“No,” Carley said miserably. “I live in the real world. And in the real world guys don’t stick around for girls who look like me.”
Just before bedtime Carley’s phone rang.
“Where were you tonight?” Kyle’s voice sounded hurt. “I told you my folks were coming and that I wanted you to meet them. Why did you run off?”
“I went to visit Reba. I hadn’t seen her since her surgery and I didn’t want her to think I’d forgotten about her,” she explained quickly.
“Oh.” His voice lost its edginess. “How she’s doing?”
“Pretty good.”
“Carley, I didn’t mean to sound off at you. It’s just that I’ve been talking about you to my friends and parents a lot. I’ve been telling them about this terrific girl I’ve met and they want to meet you too. Except that you’re never around, so everybody thinks you’re a figment of my imagination. Or worse, that I’m a liar.”
Recalling Reba’s admonition to come clean with Kyle, Carley took a deep breath. “Kyle, I think we should talk. I need to tell you something.”
“Can you tell me tomorrow? The nurse just gave me a sleeping pill,” he said, stifling a yawn.
“Sure … tomorrow’s fine.” She felt relieved. She really didn’t want to confess everything tonight.
“Listen, my two best friends are coming tomorrow afternoon and I want them to meet you.”
She wondered if this fetish of his to introduce her to his friends and family was ever going to end. “You’re putting me on the spot, Kyle.”
“Why? Just because I want my friends to meet the person who’s making this whole ordeal bearable for me?”
She didn’t know what to tell him and she didn’t want to argue about it on the phone either. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, sounding drowsy. “But I promise we’ll be next door to see you, so don’t run off. Because if you do, we’ll go looking for you if we have to search every floor of the hospital.”
Nine
“You want what? Are you out of your mind?”
Carley bit her lip, not wanting to lash out at Janelle, who stood in the hospital room wearing an incredulous expression. “Don’t get all hyper on me,” she said as soothingly as possible. “I’m not asking you to rob a bank or anything.”
“It’s a dumb idea, Carley, and I won’t do it. I won’t pretend to be you!”
Janelle’s stubborness was testing Carley’s patience. Didn’t her sister realize that she was desperate? And that desperate times called for desperate measures?
Carley had come up with the scheme late the night before and called Janelle first thing Sunday morning. “Please come see me right away,” she’d begged. “Don’t even go to church first, just come straight here.”
But when Janelle arrived and Carley revealed her plan for what she wanted Janelle to do later in the afternoon, Janelle adamantly refused. Carley glared at her sister, whose chin jutted out obstinately. “I never ever ask you for a favor, and the one time I do, you act as if I asked you to murder somebody.”
“This is more than a favor, Carley. It’s an out-and-out lie. I can’t pretend to be you just so that you can impress some boy.”
“This isn’t some stupid kid prank, you know. I have good reasons for Kyle’s friends to think that you’re me. Kyle and I’ve become good friends. I really li
ke him and I don’t want his friends to tell him that I’m some kind of freak.”
“You’re not a freak!” Janelle stamped her foot. “And if anyone says you are, I’ll deck ’em.”
“Thanks for the show of loyalty.” Carley sighed. “But I can deck people if I choose to. The one thing I can’t do is look normal. You’re my sister and I need you to help me out here.”
“You really like this guy?”
Carley nodded vigorously. Was her sister about to cave in?
“Then be honest with him. Tell him about yourself; he’ll understand.”
Carley exploded with “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve never had people stare at you. Or call you names. Don’t you see? I don’t want to take the chance that he’ll ‘understand.’ I want him to think I’m pretty. And if his friends meet you, then that’s exactly what Kyle will think.”
Unable to look Carley straight in the eye, Janelle sagged into a nearby chair and glanced down at the floor. “This is emotional blackmail.”
“No. It’s a favor. From one sister to another.”
Suddenly Janelle sat upright, a gleam in her eye. “There is this small thing of your broken leg. Or do you expect me to throw myself down the stairwell?”
“I’ve already thought about that,” Carley said, holding up her hand. “If you roll into Kyle’s room in a wheelchair with your leg stretched out and a blanket over your lap, no one will know that your leg isn’t broken. Kyle’s friends will see a pretty girl who says that her arms were hurting from using crutches. And Kyle won’t see anything at all. I’m telling you, Janelle, this will work if you put a little effort into it.”
“What will work?”
Both girls whipped around in the direction of the voice that had interrupted their discussion.
“Jon!” Janelle jumped up from the chair and went toward him. “What are you doing here?”
“I got to church and your mother said you’d come here instead, so I left and came looking for you. What’s up?” He avoided looking at Carley.
True Love Page 19
