Blind (22 page)

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.

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.

“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.

“Is that how you can see me?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What do I look like?”

“You look like you,” I said, thinking of Logan. I felt his little shiny nose, and his soft baby cheeks. I felt his eyebrows, but if they’d been furrowed a moment before, they were high above his eyes now, cheerful, puppety. His face felt like Baby Lily’s. I was glad he was still a baby. He bent down again, to put his milky, beloved turtle on the rabbit’s grave.

“Do you know what I’m thinking?” I asked Benj.

“About Swedish fish?” he asked, because those are my favorite. “The lemon ones?”

“Well, that too,” I said. “I was also thinking if I ever have a kid, I hope he’s like you.”

“You don’t get to pick that kid,” he said.

“I know, I’m just saying I hope.”

“Actually, the egg and the sperm decide, is that kid a boy or girl, and then they tell you.”

“You’re smart,” I told him.

“You’re smart, too, Emma,” he said. “Because you can see me even though you have no eyes.”

• • •

The door of the rec center slid open automatically as soon as my white cane touched the mat in front of it; I had to remind myself to breathe.
Think of yourself the way Benj thinks of you
, I suggested to myself.
Or Leah, or your mom, instead of the way you do
. It was hot inside, and I began to sweat the moment I walked in.

“You okay?” someone asked. A woman, maybe in her twenties. She had a deep voice, kind but gruff.

“I’m fine, thank you. Um, I’m looking for beep ball practice—do you know where I might find it?” I had been nervous on the way, and now I was here, even more anxious. Leah had agreed to drop me off on her way somewhere—I hadn’t even asked where—and she was going to pick me up whenever I called for a ride. I felt agitated to be out on my own, even though Leah had driven me. It wasn’t like I’d taken the bus or ridden my bike. Spark could tell I was doing a shabby job of staying calm, though; he kept shaking his body, trying to get imaginary water off his fur.

“Sure,” she said. “That’s where I’m headed, too. My brother plays. I’m Alexis.” She tapped my shoulder and held out her hand to shake.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Emma Sasha Silver,” I said, blushing terribly. Why I had decided to use all three names was anyone’s guess.

“Cool name,” she said. “There’s a turnstile three steps ahead at your waist,” she said. As soon as we were through, the smell of chlorine rose up into the thick air and stayed suspended there.

“This way,” Alexis said. Spark was relaxing a little; he had stopped doing the dry-off fear shake, and was sniffing around. We went down two flights of stairs, and came into a room I could tell was giant and open by the echo of Alexis’s voice. “We’re here,” she said. “Do you want to sit with me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No worries,” she said. “Who are you here to see?”

“Sebastian Metropole,” I said. “He’s a . . . a friend of mine from Briarly.”

“That’s where Mark, my little brother, goes,” Alexis said.

Then we sat quietly, listening to the game, which is exactly like baseball except that the players are blind and the ball beeps, so they can hear it coming and hit or catch it. Whenever anyone makes a play, the sighted people in the crowd tell the blind people what happened, which was how it went with Alexis and me. I wondered if she resented having to be a sports commentator for me, but if she did, it wasn’t obvious. Maybe she was lonely and glad to have company, or used to being an interpreter for her little brother. I don’t get why people love watching sports, honestly. I can’t bring myself to care who wins unless I know something personal about the players. I used to like competitions where I knew everyone’s stories and I could see their faces. I tried to hope that Seb’s team would win, but mainly I was busy practicing in my mind what I would say when I saw him after. Whenever anyone hit a home run, the crowd cheered and shouted, “Good eye!” Other than that, we stayed quiet, so that players could hear the ball beeping its way through the air toward them, and feel the arc of it, smash into that sound with the bat, or grab the sound from the air like an electronic butterfly into a net.

“These guys are good!” Alexis said, after what she told me was an “elegant catch.” The crowd was screaming, and I asked into the already loud noise, “How old is Mark?”

“Eleven,” Alexis said, and I heard sorrow in her voice.

“Was he sighted before? Or has he always been—”

“He was born blind,” she said. “What about you?”

“I was sighted,” I said. “This”—I gestured up to the band of sunglasses where my eyes used to be—“was an accident.”

“That’s lucky,” she said, and I knew what she meant: that I had gotten to see everything. That I would have those visual, colorful, fluttering memories of what the world looks like forever. And Mark never would.

“I guess it is,” I said.

After the game, she took me down the risers to find her little brother and Sebastian, but when I called out Seb’s name, no one answered. “Are you Sebastian?” Alexis asked someone.

“Yeah,” he said, so he must have heard me and turned but not responded. At the sound of his voice, still so familiar, I felt sorrow rise up in my throat, and shoved it back down.

“Hey,” I said, no tears in my voice. “Hey, Sebastian.” This huge name felt oddly formal—I had called him Seb at Briarly, but I knew I’d forfeited any right to nicknames.

“Hi, Emma,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

I realized I’d been hoping he would be thrilled to see me. And how unfair that was. “I, um, I wanted to see you,” I said.

“No hope of that, obviously,” he said. I smiled, but I could hear that he wasn’t smiling.

“Good game,” I said.

“It was just a scrimmage.”

“Um. I was wondering if we could talk? I know I’ve been kind of—”

“Yeah,” he said, meaning no. “I have to get dressed and do a postgame now. I’ll give you a call sometime.”

“Seb!” It was Dee, who had come from behind him somehow. Then she turned suddenly and her voice came toward me. “Who’s this?” she asked, super friendly and casual, sticking her hand out and down to shake and brushing mine.

“It’s me, Emma. Hi, Dee,” I said. I took her hand.

“Emma Silver?!” She let go of my hand, but whether out of surprise or because she hated me, I wasn’t sure.

“Yeah.”

“Wow. We thought you died,” she said.

“I know. I’m . . . things have been kind of a disaster, and I was hoping I could talk to you guys about—” I couldn’t finish and no one came to my rescue. The beat of silence finished me. “Well, um, great to see you both.”

Then, like with Logan, I turned and began to flee, the sobs that had formed in my stomach the instant I heard Seb’s voice forcing their way out of my throat.

But before I got to the top of the stairs, I heard Dee calling my name. I turned and groped for the banister on the rising stairs. “Our final ski trip’s next Sunday, Emma,” Seb called up to me. In his voice was a mean, sharp dare. It came out in a color I’d never heard him use, something dark and metallic gray. “How about you come and try it out this year?”

• • •

Their invitation to ski was obviously my last chance to know them. I knew right away that if I said no, as always, as I had nine billion times last year, as I wanted to, well, then I was not only a wretched chicken but also a lost cause of a friend. So I had no choice. I had to say yes. I heard the yes come out of my throat like something yellow and small, fluttering before it died of regret.

And then I had to tell, rather than ask, my parents.

“I’m going to tag along on a Briarly ski trip, because it’ll be ‘empowering,’” I said at dinner, the word growing on me now that I needed it to convince them. My dad didn’t even have a chance to say anything before my mom said, “But there’s no snow. It’s already almost spring. How can you—”

“It’s Mount Crandon, Mom. The snow is fake.”

“But will you have to miss school?”

“It’s a Saturday.”

“But who will take you?”

“I’ll go with Seb and Dee.”

“But can you sign up even if you’re not at Briarly anymore?”

“It’s a great idea, Em. We’ll absolutely make it work,” my dad said.

It turned out, predictably, that my dad was so thrilled that my mom had to give in. I heard them argue it out at night. And we all heard her console herself with hundreds of daily phone calls with Principal Antoine, Mrs. Leonard, and Mr. Crane, the teachers who were chaperoning. Were former students welcome? (She hoped no, but got yes.) Could it possibly, actually be safe? (She thought no, but got yes.) Who would be there? (
Everyone
, including lots of teachers.) How many possible ways were there that I might die? (This sort of speculation they refused to indulge in directly.) It was endless, even after it ended, because once she couldn’t call and torture everyone, she decided to come with me.

So my dad took a day off from saving people’s lives so my mom could drive to Silverton and take the school bus from Briarly three hours to a fake-snow-covered bunny hill with me and Seb and Dee and a bunch of kids from last year whose names I had hardly bothered to learn. A few of them politely asked how I was and how school was, and I said fine. No one was that excited to have me back, and who could blame them? Sebastian and Dee sat together on the bus, and I sat behind them with my mom. Everyone was so excited that the driver stopped twice to turn around and tell us to calm down or he was going to turn around and drive right back to Silverton. I sat silently, listening to Sebastian and Dee shout about all the near-death experiences they’d had on the slopes the year before. When I had smartly refused to come. We had not acknowledged yet what a psychotically terrible person and friend I’d been all fall. And all last year, too, really. Not when I said yes, I would come skiing; not when I called to get the trip details; and not when I showed up and boarded the bus. We all just acted like nothing had happened. Which was really weird.

“Do you remember how I almost totally wiped out on that huge hunk of ice?” Sebastian was saying. I could hear him bouncing on the plastic bus seat, the tired springs creaking and breaking further every time he slammed his body back down. I had a flash of wonder about his body then, what it might look/feel like.

“Yeah,” said Dee, her voice full of awe. When I was at Briarly, I thought no one there could have crushes, that blind kids couldn’t fall in love with each other. Obviously that’s insane, but I hadn’t realized yet that it was possible to be both blind and capable of thinking about anything other than the fact that you’re blind. Somehow, now that I’m not at Briarly anymore, I have a better view of life there. It’s like life anywhere, at any school, really. Even Lake Main. Except for the life skills classes, I guess, but the truth is, the kids at Lake Main could probably use those.

“Scott was like, ‘Look out, man!’” Sebastian was saying. “And I was like, ‘Left? Right? What the fuck, man?’ And—oh, excuse my language, Mrs. Silver—and he was like, ‘Right in front of you, man!’ And I swerved at a ninety-degree angle to the left and flew up four feet in the air.”

I could feel that my mom hadn’t breathed since the story began, and knew that Sebastian apologizing for swearing in front of my mom was fully missing the point.

“Who’s Scott?” I asked, trying to distract my mom from the idea that whatever had happened to Sebastian might happen to me, too.

“Our ski instructor,” Dee said. “He’s amazing. He can snowboard, too.” Her voice pitched up toward her crush register. “He used to be a professional skier. He’s cute.”