Blind (4 page)

Our walks home are how the slow hours of that first day morphed into a week and then that week into two and three and a month, and even I settled surprisingly into the dim lull of school. Everyone wanted something: good grades; a starring part in the Lake Main Players’ production of
Annie Get Your Gun
; someone to go to the first football game with; someone for the second game; an escape from parents, from church, from whatever was eating away at your particular insides; to get a driver’s license; to get a car, a boy, a girl, someone else’s lips or body pressed against theirs. Meanwhile, I just wanted to make it from room to room, not to get hit by a car or pitied too much by anyone but myself. To keep doing well in school, which used to be easy for me, but maybe won’t be anymore, with Ms. Mabel and my brailler and my ears. I just want to stop thinking about forever in the dark and my endless, claustrophobic tunnel of a future. Because I’ll never drive or get a job, or get married or lose my virginity. Maybe I’ll never even kiss anyone.

Because how will Zach Haze—or anyone—fall in love with me now? I’m definitely not invisible anymore. Everyone has noticed me now that I’m “famous,” as Logan says. But having everyone know who you are isn’t fabulous if it’s because you’re the star of a gruesome tragedy. Or because you’re disfigured. The way people stare and fuss makes me feel like I’m trapped under a magnifying glass, gasping and sweating, in danger of catching fire. Again.

Because that’s what
happened. The summer before I should have started ninth grade at Lake Main, I went to a Fourth of July party with my parents and my sisters and Benj. It wasn’t quite dark out yet, and we were standing on a stretch of green lawn, clutching paper plates imprinted with stars. My mom spread out a blanket, but my dad and Leah and I stood waiting for the first fireworks. It must have smelled like barbecue, wet grass, summer, dogs. I didn’t notice, because I didn’t have to care about smells then. There were people everywhere, our neighbors and friends, carrying flags and balloons, laughing and chattering. In my memory, it’s like the “before” picture of my life and our town. And then the sky darkened and the show started and maybe Leah went to throw our plates away or something, but my dad and I were still there, holding the rope they’d strung up like a boundary, watching.

I loved the way the giant booms sent out wheels of spinning pink, red, yellow, and orange. I loved standing there dizzily, everywhere hot rocket smoke, colors shooting up and exploding into art that disappeared almost instantly. Even then, I got what’s so thrilling about beauty we see briefly or only once, the kind we can’t hold on to. Maybe I jinxed myself by thinking that? Because I tilted my head back to watch, like I was drinking the magic of each explosion of color, waiting for the next and the next. My dad had his hands on my shoulders, and he pulled me toward him a little. I took a step backward as he said, “Maybe we should—” and then I felt the spray of heat and pain across my face and my hands flew up to catch it, stop it, protect my eyes from whatever the sharp, shocking hot, melting, screaming blaze was, but then there was nothing.

My dad never finished his sentence. Maybe we should . . . what? Back up? Duck? Cover? Run? Not have come to this place that will ruin our daughter’s life in 3, 2, 1. Well, there wouldn’t have been time to count, or he’d have gotten at least the next two words out. Lie down? Move back? Who knows what he would have said if a rocket hadn’t blown backward and shot into the crowd. Right where I was standing. I’ve tried to stop wondering why the tiny band of my eyes—that one spot in the universe—was the place it hit, because, as my therapist Dr. Sassoman likes to say, that kind of wondering is “unproductive.” I used to ask obsessively, what were the chances? Chances are funny, though, because now that it happened, they’re 100 percent.

Sometimes the accident seems like the beginning of my entire life, because I can’t fully remember who I was before. Even though—or maybe because—I work so hard to keep what I used to be able to see: colors, light, shapes, my mom’s and Leah’s and Benj’s faces, even the way those fireworks looked.

I found myself in a cold, blank, metal-smelling hospital. That’s where I woke up, where I first heard my mom crying and my dad talking in his doctor voice about sockets, scarring, loss, regaining. Where were my sisters? Benj? Where was I? Was I awake?

I remember thinking,
I can’t be waking up
, because waking up and opening your eyes are the same thing and I couldn’t open my eyes. But then, all of a sudden, I knew I was awake. And that my eyes wouldn’t open. That they were sewn shut, or something; something was wrong. It was after that realization that I felt shrieking, amazing pain. How had I not felt it first? Nothing happened in order. I reached up, but my hands found only band after band of cotton pads, fabric, tape. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t think. I used to believe that seeing and thinking were the same thing.

“Emma,” my mom said. “You’re awake.” I don’t know how she could tell. Her cool hand arrived somewhere near my forehead; it must have been on a patch of skin uncovered by the bandages, but I couldn’t tell exactly where. Was it near my eyes? Where were my eyes?

“Where am I?” I screamed. “What is—Take this off!” I tried to peel the bandages, to tear them off, to see where I was, but someone held my arms down—I don’t know who. One of my parents? A nurse? I’ll never know, because then I was out, and then I was me again, thinking, screaming.

Whoever came up with the words “out like a light” knew something terrible. Because even when I was on, I felt out, off, gone. I could not calm down, could not stop shrieking about the pain and where my eyes were and where I was. My parents were a desperate loop, trying to answer, trying: “You had an accident; you’re in the hospital; you’re awake; you’re okay, you’re Emma. Emma. Emma.”

Then everything—the words, the rustle and scrape of the hospital, the robotic reports of machinery I couldn’t see, even the air—would go gauzy and soft. Like curtains, fluttering in the sort of light that’s about to turn into nighttime. There were needles in my arms. Someone pushed buttons. I heard beeps, and the room drowned out until I was awake again, screaming. That’s how it was then, when I was a prisoner in the hospital, in that metal dark. I couldn’t have said if ten minutes or ten months had passed until the day someone peeled the tape and then lifted off the cotton and cloth from my eyes. I asked if I could open them now, but they were already open; I knew because I reached up and felt my right eye. It was open. And I saw nothing.

“What do you see, Emma?” someone asked me.

“Who is that?” I asked, trying not to yell, not to panic.

“I’m Dr. Walker,” he said, and put his hand over mine. It felt to me like a cooked steak, a heavy piece of warm meat on my cold hand. I shuddered.

“It’s Dr. Walker,” my dad said. As if we all knew each other, or that might mean something to me.

I screamed, “Why can’t I see?”

For a few days, they held out hope for my right eye, but then Dr. Walker wasted no time in declaring that neither eye’s sight was going to “be restored.” So I lived those weeks in the hospital learning to be alive without my eyes. That’s when Dr. Sassoman showed up, talking about “therapy,” smelling like vanilla lotion, holding my hands, and putting whispered questions into my ears, where they stopped and stayed. I did not answer “how are you feeling?” or “what do you remember?” My parents talked noisily, far away from my ears, but in a buzz somehow around my head, about how great Dr. Sassoman was, how she was “the best in the business.” She was going to help us “get through this,” and I saw a tunnel. If I could just gasp and squeeze through a tunnel, I thought, maybe I’d be able to see. Light at the end. I said nothing. And Dr. Sassoman, as lovely smelling and whispery and practical as she was, wasn’t a magician. She still isn’t. She just guided me around the hospital and objected—like my parents—whenever I said I was going to die “without my eyes.” Like it mattered what the hell I said.

“You are decidedly not going to die, and you still have your eyes,” Dr. Sassoman told me on countless mornings, as I wept and wound my way around the room, crashing into things, unable to move properly, to believe that this had happened, was happening, would continue. “They don’t work the way they did, but you are not without eyes.”

“They’re ruined!” I told her, as if she didn’t know. She considered this progress—any time I spoke, it was “progress”—and several weeks later, when I tried to run from the room but hit the door? Progress. Once, I hurled a useless braille block at her; some well-meaning friend of my father’s had sent a box of “tools” for me, but I never figured that one out. Dr. Sassoman was there when I opened the box, all cheerful and encouraging, so I punished her. She dodged the block, I guess, although I couldn’t see and hadn’t yet learned how to calm down enough to pay attention to what was happening around me. She never lost her patience or raised her voice. My parents tried to be that patient, but couldn’t be, because they were so traumatized that my mom was screaming and throwing things at night when they thought we couldn’t hear, wouldn’t know. But even I knew, as dark and floaty as I was then. She wrecked her studio, sliced open canvases with an X-Acto, poured her paints out, shattered and sawed apart her beloved easels. She hasn’t painted since. My dad became her doctor, which, if everything else hadn’t been so disastrous, might have been the worst part of all.

My parents met in a hospital in the city when he was a resident. The maternity wing bought a bunch of my mom’s paintings, and my dad apparently saw her in the lobby, carrying canvasses. She must have looked like no one he’d ever seen, because my mom has long, curly red hair and has dressed the same way since she was my age, in painty jeans and hoodies and glittery Converse sneakers. And figure everyone else was either a sick person or a puffy-eyed doctor in those terrible, sagging, light-blue scrub pajamas. I bet my mom lit the lobby on fire. My dad says he knew as soon as he saw her, and in spite of his debilitating social awkwardness, he apparently walked right over and asked, could he help her with whatever she was carrying? And then—alert the fairy tale police—it was her spectacular paintings! And I’m not kidding; her paintings used to be beautiful, full of the feeling of light on water, the way Leah’s words are.

It’s no surprise my dad practically fainted with love the first time he saw my mom. The part about why she fell for him is less clear; it’s almost as if, because he was a doctor, she naturally loved him, too. He’s very stiff and difficult and she’s floppy and easy to be with. But people adore doctors, because they save you. Although it turns out they can’t save you from everything, not even when they’re your parents. Maybe my mom just liked the way he’s handsome—the strong, square-jawed, clean-shaven, sleek-haired way. It’s the opposite of how she’s beautiful—her wild-haired, rule-hating prettiness. My mom smells like pasta and lavender, and sounds like traffic and music and the beach. My dad smells like mint and rubbing alcohol; he’s a smooth motor, gears, keys clicking, machinery that works. In fact, my parents are so different from each other that it sometimes seems like the two of them combine to make one whole person. But after my accident, they couldn’t keep the parts in sync anymore; the world was spinning on a faster, looser axis suddenly, dark, brutal, everything out of control. And I knew everything, the way kids always do and parents either don’t realize or can’t face that we do. In my family, whatever the little ones don’t understand, the older ones translate. If you’re a grown-up and you have a pink vibrating toy in the drawer by your bed, for example, you might as well keep it on the mantel in the living room, because your eleven-year-old daughter, who is me, will find it while she’s looking for a flashlight and she’ll think it’s a perfect rocket for her American Girl doll until her older sister, Sarah, who’s mean about knowing everything, will tell her what it actually is.

Obviously our parents’ fake daytime optimism didn’t trick any of us, least of all me. I knew my life was wrecked, and every time I thought about it, my hands and face would go numb and then I would black out and wake up later, with my parents’ and Dr. Sassoman’s voices standing over me.

“You can calm down,” Dr. Sassoman said finally. “You can tell yourself to calm down.”

And I said, “You can tell yourself to fuck off.” I had a momentary pang of power, before my shame and helplessness overwhelmed me again. I had never said anything like that to anyone, not even Sarah. I had no idea who I was, and couldn’t find a way to apologize.

But Dr. Sassoman said nothing, just let it go, just let me scream for weeks, until my throat was raw and her point was made. She was still there, waiting for me. Just like my parents and sisters and brother. And Logan. And my own body, which I could feel but no longer see. My arms, there. My fingers, one through ten, there. My neck, throat, cheeks, collarbone, my small breasts, which Logan and I had joked about since we had both started getting them the year before. We had a contest about whose would get bigger, even though it was obvious that it would be hers, because she’s a breasty, bouncy, dimply person and I’m a stick figure, just like my parents and my sisters and probably Benj, although he’s still baby-chubby so it’s hard to say. I was even more knees, bones, and elbows then; it seemed a miracle that I had any breasts at all, but I did, and they were still there. Everything was there; I just couldn’t see it. Nothing had been altered by my shrieking about everything being altered forever. By my not being able to see it. If a tree falls in the forest and I can’t see it, it still falls. That’s what it feels like to have the world tell you to fuck off.

Logan came to the hospital six times a week. Her parents were breaking up and saying incredibly terrible things to each other and about each other to her, and her mom was suing her dad, and he was moving out. On Saturday mornings Lo’s mom tagged along to my room. She brought perfume samples, Pixy Stix, stickers, chocolate kisses. The stickers were always textured. I traced the shapes: hearts, stars, puffy animals with googly eyes that clicked around inside their clear plastic half-globes. I often let my fingers linger on the eyes of those lucky bunnies and ducks. Logan stayed all day every Saturday, reading out loud to me, playing me songs. She climbed into my bed with me, talked about her parents, cried over them and my eyes, laughed until she snorted, spelled out boys’ names on my back with her long fingernails, and brought stuff I could feel: coins, sandpaper, beach glass, feathers. Once, a giant conch she definitely got at one of the souvenir shops on Lake Street, Sauberg’s pathetic “downtown.” Lake Street has a strip of stores, partially because if you live here you occasionally need things, and partially because of Lake Brainch, the big freshwater lake that gets called “Branch” by the tourists who come to swim and boat and water-ski and bring home beach souvenirs. Because of them, all the shops on Lake Street are vacation colors: pale yellows, sky blues. They sell taffy and temporary tattoos, straw hats and swim toys, seashells and flamingo wind chimes, even though no flamingo has ever set a bony pink foot anywhere near this place. But I loved the shell Logan brought, and was certain it held the ocean in it. I could hear the water rushing through, and smell the salt.

Logan asked about everything she handed me: “What does it look like to you, Em?” And I worked on what words I’d use to describe the world—maybe for the rest of my life. While she listened. In late August, I stopped screaming. Just before Logan started ninth grade, I got out of the hospital. The nurses hugged and kissed me and gave me cards, and Dr. Sassoman made a chart about what I’d do and when and how. I would apparently come to her office every week for eternity, and other people, including her, would come to my house and teach me, and I pretended to listen and then staggered home after my mom and dad. And sat down, numb, on our gold couch. And tried to open my eyes, rocked, counted my legs and arms and fingers. I didn’t cry. Or talk.