Blind Sight (33 page)

Reluctantly, he tunes back into Sara. She is instructing Luke to think about the events of the summer, and his emotions, and form them into symbols. Luke listens to this, and tries to remember what the little pipe devices that monks use to shake sand into mandalas are called.

“When you become distracted by other thoughts, acknowledge them gently, and let them go,” Sara says. “Focus on the images you are creating in your mandala.”

Luke, concentrating, adds another cell in the center next to his own. He imagines some silver mammoth tusks, a series of Braille-like dots, in purple. Gold arrows, pointing upwards.

“Chakpur,” he thinks, happily. “That’s what they are called. Those little pipes.”

That settled, Luke becomes slightly more interested in his mandala.
He puts in satellite bursts, canyons, green squares, waves, a red carpet.

“Nothing is unimportant,” Sara says. “Everything is central, and unique.”

Luke swivels his mandala in his mind, mapping it from new angles, memorizing it. For a second, his square elongates into a rectangle, then back to a square. “What a trip,” he hears Mark say.

“Experience the image in its entirety,” Sara says.

Luke wishes Sara would stop talking, actually.

Luke admires his mandala.

He adds sequoia trees. Sara keeps talking.

“And now, begin to detach yourself from its design and observe it quietly.”

“Wait, detachment already?” Luke thinks, annoyed because he is not finished creating. He puts a Joshua tree in each corner of the mandala, for symmetry.

“Observe the pattern and your place in it.”

Luke tosses in some dancing leprechauns, tries hard not to think about Leila.

“Observe.”

“I could do an essay about symbols,” he thinks.

“Observe.”

Luke begins composing an essay: “The act of observation affects the outcome of an event. Total objectivity is impossible.”

“Detach your emotions from your symbols. Let them exist in their own reality.”

Luke gets stuck inside this thought. What reality could these symbols inhabit, without him? And emotions inside symbols? That wasn’t real. At some point the meaning of an arrow was agreed upon, but an arrow by itself was nothing. It was lines.

Occasionally, in meditation, Luke will get a little claustrophobic. That is happening now.

“When you’re ready, Luke, reach out your hand in front of you.”

Luke knows in a moment Sara is going to ask him to destroy his mandala. Because that is what you do with mandalas. Luke feels a little nauseous.

“Reach out your hand,” Sara says. “And gently, and with compassion and love, sweep it all away.”

The moment she says “sweep,” Luke opens his eyes. Sara has her eyes shut and is leaning forward, swaying slightly.

“Sweep your hand across it,” she says. “Let it all go from you. Sweep until there is nothing left but that pure and empty space. Sweep the space and release yourself from it.” Sara’s own hand reaches out, wiping the air before her. Luke decides that enough is enough.

“Hold on a sec,” he says.

Sara jerks upright, opening her eyes.

“Why,” Luke asks, “are we doing this?”

Sara’s mouth opens a little.

“Maybe,” Luke tells her, “I don’t want to erase anything. Maybe I’m not ready for that.”

“Okay,” Sara says, nodding. “Okay. Talk to me about that.”

“You talk to me.” Luke stands up. There is a buzzing feeling occurring in his sinuses. “You talk to me about why it’s so important for you that I let it all go. It’s my mandala. My summer. My father. You can’t make it all go away with a meditation and some candles.”

Luke is not really certain of the words coming out of his mouth, but they seem to be still coming.

“If you have something to say to me, just say it,” he says. “Don’t make it into some Buddhist visualization. I’m not a Buddhist. You’re not a Buddhist. Why are we doing this?”

Luke stands up and walks out of the room, moving quickly down the stairs. He is not sure of where he would like to go next. He goes to his room. He is, he finds, experiencing some sort of adrenaline rush, and his hands are shaking. When he hears Sara’s footsteps coming down the hallway after him, he knows that there will now probably be a fight of some kind. But he decides he will not fight with Sara. He
will listen to whatever Sara wants to say, and he will manage it. He walked away from her guided meditation and that was exciting, and a little dramatic, but not really necessary. It was the kind of thing Pearl would do. Luke knows that in a few minutes he will calm Sara down, and it will all be over.

Luke turns to the doorway just as Sara enters his room.

“You want to talk?” Sara demands. “Or do you want to walk away from me?”

Sara shakes something at him: the magazine with his father’s picture on the cover.

“Is that what this is about? That interview?” Luke almost laughs. “Rory said you wouldn’t take it personally. She said—”

“This is not,” Sara says firmly, “about me. This is about you, Luke.”

“Really?” Luke folds his arms. “Really? ’Cause I think it’s about him. Actually.” Luke knows that challenging Sara will not calm Sara down, but he can’t help himself. Now that he has said that, Luke thinks, he will start calming Sara down.

“Well, let’s talk about him, then.” Sara tosses the magazine on Luke’s bed. “And how he’s had you participating in all of his … whatever. Going on television. And talking about my son all over the place. Taking you to baseball games and parties. And dressing you up, giving you a new expensive thing every time you turn around—”

“Okay, dressing me up? That’s crazy. So he took me to a baseball game. That’s hardly corruption. He wanted me to have a good
time
!”

“Yes.” Sara’s voice races up an incline. “In front of as many people as possible.”

“Okay, you don’t know what you are talking about.” Luke shakes his head. His voice has an unfamiliar pitch. He hadn’t known he could make this sound. “It wasn’t like that AT ALL. He didn’t buy me. It wasn’t a STUNT.”

“I don’t know what it was.” Sara points at the magazine. “But
nobody asked me about this! And now people are coming up to me, in
grocery stores
, and in my own
studio
, asking me about my private life.”

“Oh, so that’s it.” Luke kicks the bed lightly, just below the magazine. “That’s what you’re worried about? What happened to not caring about what people thought? Are you ticked off because a magazine didn’t list all of your healing arts?”

“That is NOT what I am talking about—”

“Or because it says you weren’t married? You weren’t married! You didn’t even know him!” Luke believes this is a very reasonable point, but maybe he should lower his voice now, because things are starting to get out of hand.

“You don’t know anything about it,” Sara says, sharply. “You don’t know what I was going through—”

“Yeah, what did you go through?”

Luke tosses this off, casually, but once it’s said, it seems to require something else.

“You got what you wanted,” Luke continues, gaining velocity. “You got pregnant. That was the plan, right? Get the third daughter and fulfill your destiny. Sorry I screwed that up. Sorry I wrecked your whole mystical ride. I apologize on behalf of my father for the chromosome that made me a boy. Maybe you should have been more careful.”

“Luke, you can’t possibly,” Sara stutters. “You don’t.…”

“You had two girls.” Luke shrugs. “You needed the third. You got my dad to get you pregnant.”

“You think my husband left me and I WHAT?” Sara’s voice starts to shake. “I just went out and found someone to get me pregnant?”

“What was I supposed to—”

“You don’t know what it was like.” Sara is fully shaking now. “Paul WALKED OUT ON ME. He turned to me one day and said, ‘This isn’t the life I need to be living,’ and twenty minutes later he was out the DOOR. My whole world … everything … just collapsed.
And you think my family rushed in to help? Like, they didn’t just all take it as another opportunity to sit around and JUDGE ME?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Everything has to do with everything else, Luke. And I am trying to tell you what was going on with me—”

“Yeah, what the hell
were
you doing?” Luke backs away from Sara, from a Sara abandoned by Paul, holding the collapsed cocoon of a butterfly. “You didn’t even TRY to give me a father. And if you hadn’t run into my dad again on a … on a TRAIN, he wouldn’t even know he
had
a son.”

“So that’s it?” Sara is shouting now. “You’ve got all the answers now after spending ten weeks with some man—”

“Some man?” Luke says, shouting now too, because he wishes Sara would go away and maybe if he shouts that will happen.

“Some
man
? That man defended you! His stupid aunt and her stupid friends in Illinois, they were talking behind our backs, saying Dad should take a paternity test, and he defended you! He was ready to rip their heads off!”

“Maybe we should have started with a paternity test!” Sara throws up her hands. “And then we’d all know exactly what we were talking about.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Luke can’t believe Sara is still here. Doesn’t she notice that he is yelling? “I’m telling you he defended—”

“And I’m telling you, you don’t know everything,” Sara yells back. “You don’t know what it was like for me—”

“Stop saying that!” Luke kicks the bed again, but harder now, which hurts his foot, but he’ll deal with that later because … wait.

What?

“What do you mean we should have started with a paternity test? What’s that about?”

“Your father doesn’t know what I went through! He disappeared for seventeen years and thinks he can just show up and—”

“Don’t you—” Luke’s hands are in fists. Like he might hit someone. Like he might hit Sara. “Don’t you say ONE MORE WORD about my father. You don’t know my father!”

“No, YOU don’t know your father,” Sara shouts. “You don’t know that Mark is your father any more than I do!”

“Wait. Wait.” Luke starts to laugh. He feels strange. Is he laughing? No. No, he’s actually almost screaming. “WHAT?” shouts Luke. “WHAT? Mark is my father! Who else could he BE? What are you TALKING about?”

“There was someone else.”

Luke, who has never been punched in the stomach, feels as if he has been punched in the stomach. He tries to force another sound out of his throat, but nothing comes.

“There was someone else. And I knew … we knew … right away that it wasn’t right. And then there was … Mark.”

“SOMEONE ELSE?” Luke can barely hear himself over the pounding in his head. He can barely hear Sara’s next words.

“I know this is hard to hear, Luke, but you need to understand that this was a different … I … I was struggling and I thought I couldn’t do it on my own. Take care of my girls, myself. Everything. So there was someone that I thought … I was wrong, and then the thing with Mark happened. It was just a … I wasn’t planning ANYTHING, he was so young … But yes, it could have been … either one …”

“Either one,” Luke repeats. “EITHER ONE?”

Luke thinks for a moment, wildly and absurdly, that he would like to go back to bed now. He would like it to be the Moment Before he woke up, or any Moment Before this Moment. Luke decides that he will go back to bed. Except.

“So, what, you were like with one person one night, and then with my dad …”

“Things happen, Luke.” Sara’s jaw is clenched so tight there is barely enough space for the words to emerge and they come now
jaggedly, between her teeth. “They just do. And I was wrong about that … other person … in one way, but he was a friend to me and he helped me so much … and what happened with Mark was like—”

“So this someone, this OTHER person …”

Luke stops. Luke stops because he feels something shift now, inside his brain. It happens so suddenly, so sharply, that he nearly sits down under the weight of it, almost covers his head with his hands to protect it.

“Luke—”

But Luke holds up a hand, stopping her. It almost hurts his arm to hold it up like this, like his arm is a metal rod, hit by another metal rod. Luke tastes iron on his tongue.

“This person was a friend to you.” There is something coming toward him now, something gaining speed, starting to stampede. He needs to keep his arm up. “Paul left you and you were scared and things just happen, and you had this person. But you had
Uncle Louis
to help you with all of that. The divorce. The apartment. The money. That’s what you’ve always said.
Uncle Louis
was your friend. You’ve always been like, ‘Oh, he held out a hand to me in a dark hour,’ you SAID that, and …”

Luke drops his arm. It’s too heavy. He thinks of falling, of bouncing off nails. Axons. Dendrites. Arrows. Symbols. Charges. There was a hand that was held out in a dark hour. The wrong hand. Luke feels this wrong hand descending toward his own head, slowly, inevitably.
Don’t touch my head. Please don’t touch my head
.

“It was one time,” Sara whispers. “One time with Louis. I thought … he would … but right away he said … he didn’t feel … and it was just one moment. He had already met Linny. But she was so much younger, I didn’t think. I … Caroline never knew. After awhile I saw that they were right for each other and I didn’t want to …”

“You’re making this up.” Luke thinks he’ll just go outside for awhile, maybe. So Sara can stop making things up. Then he’ll come back. He’ll come back later when it’s over.

“But at the time,” Sara continues, “I felt like … NOTHING. Invisible. I’d never … I felt so old, like I’d never be young again, and all of a sudden there was your … there was this beautiful young guy treating me for a moment like … he really was like an angel. I know that doesn’t make sense to you now. It all happened so fast—”

“No,” Luke says. “No.”

“Luke, I feel—”

The thing that was stampeding, falling, crushing Luke is now Luke himself. He stands up under the weight of it.

“Get out,” Luke says. “Because I don’t give a SHIT how you FEEL anymore. Get out.”

Sara doesn’t move.

“I told Louis that you weren’t his son. He asked me if I knew for sure and I said yes and he believed me. The timing … I wasn’t sure. I’m
not
sure. I don’t know if Louis is your father, but he is a good person, Luke, and he’s always—”