The One Thing (6 page)

Gramps was a TV nazi and he guarded the remote control with his life. So I was stuck listening to the auto auction. I wasn’t paying attention to it. I was...well, I wasn’t sure what
I was doing. Trying to convince myself that what had happened today was real, maybe?

I wasn’t having any luck.

The more I thought about it, the more outrageous it all seemed. I mean, really. Banging my head and suddenly reclaiming part of my eyesight? Mason Milton’s just
happening
to be
Ben’s brother? Of course I’d fabricated the entire thing.

Except.

Where had I been all afternoon if I hadn’t been at the Miltons’? How had I even gotten home from Mr. Sturgis’s office?

“Gramps,” I said suddenly. “Did you happen to see the van that dropped me off?”

“Van? No. Why?” he said suspiciously.

“No reason,” I said. I wiped my palms on the sofa and then cast around for a change of subject. “So. What did you do today?”

“Went to Manny Grayson’s funeral.” Gramps was obsessed with funerals—what sort of coffins people chose and what was written on their tombstones and whatever.

“Who’s Manny Grayson?” I asked.

“One of Hank’s friends—went along as a plus-one.”

I scrunched up my nose. “A plus-one...at a funeral?”

Gramps ignored me. “Played polka music during the service.” He scoffed. “Polka music. Heh. Who plays that crap?”

I winced inwardly. I played it—or I
had
played it, rather. Not because I’d wanted to, but because my ex–piano teacher, Mr. Hawthorne, had an affinity for crap music.
Problem was, I’d been physically unable to strangle such dusty sounds out of a piano. So I hadn’t. I’d improvised the pieces in spectacular fashion, reaching into his concertos
and mazurkas and mixing them up, scattering the notes like leaves in the wind. My creativity didn’t fly with Mr. Hawthorne, however, and so after nearly a decade of arguing with him over
starchy piano theory, I lost interest and quit. I don’t know which one of us had been more relieved.

At exactly seven thirty, my mother stepped into the house. I knew this not because I actually knew the time, but because I knew my mother. She was nothing if not regimented. Giving me a cursory
greeting—just a hand running across the top of my head—she unloaded on the arm of the couch, all sighs.

I swung my feet around to the floor. My cat hit the carpet with a wide-pawed flump. “Hey, Mom. How was your day?”

“Exhausting,” she said. Her customary reply these days. Particularly while ducking conversation about her job—head coach of the women’s soccer team at the University of
Connecticut. Clearing her throat, she changed the subject. “Hilda called me today to set up an appointment with you. Said she’s left you several voice mails and you haven’t gotten
back to her?” When I failed to reply, she went on. “Anyway, she said she’ll be here at eleven o’clock tomorrow.”

“In the
morning
? I have plans.” Which, in fact, I did not. But I could have some plans if I really wanted to.

While I might be lacking in marketable skills, I happened to do a bang-up job when it came to lying. Unfortunately, my mother was aware of my talent. I could practically hear her eyebrows hike
up. “What plans?”

“Stuff.”

“Well, change your stuff,” she said tiredly. And then her phone rang: her assistant coach. With a grunt, she stood up and paced away, talking backpasses and kick-and-runs and
shoot-outs.

Back in the day, my mother had played soccer for the women’s national team. She’d been a middie, the fastest on the field, and we had a box of old DVDs to prove it. When I was real
young, I used to sneak into the basement late at night, put the TV on mute, and curl up under an afghan to watch them. Back then she was my hero. My biggest and grandest memory of her came from
when I was five. It was fall, and the sky was a crisp, cloudless blue, almost too blue to be real. My mother’s team was playing against Norway in the quarterfinals of the Women’s World
Cup, and the United States was hosting. The critics considered Norway the favorite that year, but my mother proved them wrong. She scored the only goal in the game. When the last buzzer sounded,
she ran to the sidelines at full force—just a blur of sweat and smile and ponytail—threw me on her shoulders, and paraded me across the field. I’ll never forget how I felt on her
shoulders: strong, pretty, smart.

In the stadium’s parking lot that same evening, some punk slammed into her, snatched her purse, and bolted off at a dead sprint. Yes, Dad was right beside her. And yes, he stood there like
a complete dumbass while the guy took off. Mom, however, tore after the guy, screaming at the top of her lungs. It didn’t take long for her to catch up to him. She seized him by the arm,
yanked her purse free, and said through her teeth, all up in his face, “Your mother must be so
proud
.” Then she clobbered him on the side of the head with the purse and stomped
off.

She was huge to me that night, larger than life. Magical, even. Her confidence and energy on the field leaked out into everything she touched. It was as though she could do anything, be
anything, conquer anything she wanted to, and I wanted nothing more than to become just like her. But then a couple days later, just before the semifinals, she tore her Achilles tendon. I remember
all too clearly the thin set of her lips when she was told she would never again play competitive soccer. She’d always been so strong and so centered that I didn’t expect the injury to
change who she was. Which was exactly why the following weeks were so strange. She just got...distant. Hardened. There was something haunting and sharp-edged about her facial features. She refused
to see her friends, sulked in her room, stayed in her pajamas the entire day. She was suddenly this person I didn’t know, and it terrified me. Dad assured me that she was going to be fine,
that she was just going through some sort of grief process. A big part of her—her dreams, her talents, and her strengths—had died.

But all that changed when I turned six and started to play soccer. I wasn’t a natural, like she had been. I spent long, arduous hours outside, banging the ball against the garage door and
practicing footwork. “You’re doing it wrong,” she told me one day from the back porch while I worked on my finish into a makeshift goal. When I glanced up at her, hair every which
way and clothes rumpled, I noticed something different in her eyes—a hope or a yearning or a need.

I scratched a mosquito bite on my collarbone. “Can you help me?” I asked.

And that was all it took.

My mother’s demeanor started to improve as soon as she walked down the porch steps that day, and so did my soccer skills. With Mom’s tireless coaching, I became unstoppable with the
soccer ball between my feet, scoring eight, nine, ten goals per game. I loved watching the expression on her face when I scored. It was the same face I used to adore: bright-eyed, explosive, and
full of energy. Even back then I knew—I was her second chance. I could picture myself, nothing but sweat and smile and ponytail, running across the field toward her after the last buzzer of
the World Cup finals. To celebrate with her. To give her what she’d been cheated out of. To give her back the life she had lost.

But six months and five days ago, all that changed. And she lost her dream again.

I didn’t remember much from that first week in the hospital, but I remembered what was important. I remembered the steady rhythms of the machines beeping behind me. I remembered the thick
odor of disease that hung in the air. I remembered the way my head had felt—like it had been cleaved in half with a rusty hatchet. But most of all, I remembered overhearing a conversation
that hadn’t been intended for my ears.

“Do you think she knows yet?” a nurse said as she adjusted my sheets.

Something that sounded like heavy machinery rolled across the floor. I could smell coffee breath in my face as another nurse said, “That she’s blind?”

“No. About her mom leaving town.”

Heavy sigh. “She doesn’t know much of anything right now.”

“What sort of mother just takes off while her kid is in the hospital? What sort of mother
does
that?”

I didn’t believe it at first, that my mom had gone. But for several days running, as I lay in a medication stupor, I listened for Mom, waited to smell her linen perfume or to feel her take
my hand and whisper that everything would be okay. But she didn’t.

Dad was there, though, more often than not—a solid, protective presence at my side, pleading to God under his breath. This was so typical of him. The praying. He was so characteristically
down-to-earth and no-nonsense that most people never would guess he prayed all the time. But I remembered it so clearly from my time in the hospital—Dad’s pleading for me, for Mom.

For the happily ever after.

And he got it. Almost.

When I finally started to pull through, Mom appeared out of nowhere, complaining to the doctors that I needed more pain medicine and grumbling about the room temperature and making me wonder
whether I’d imagined it all. And by the time I got released from the hospital, I wondered if maybe I did.

I
was sitting in front of my computer when the doorbell rang the next morning. I ignored it completely. I’d grown to despise answering the
door. It was too much of a crapshoot. Could be the Pope. Could be a serial killer. I had no way of knowing, no peephole to peer through. And anyway, since I’d rolled out of bed I’d been
particularly engrossed in the Loose Cannons’ website, where I’d learned that the band had performed last night on top of an abandoned building in Bridgeport.

And I’d missed it.

The biggest difference between my computer and a sighted person’s computer was that mine was armed with software that converted what was on the screen into speech—like, every link,
every piece of text, every everything. In other words, it had taken me an exhaustingly long time to tab my way through the website using keyboard shortcuts to find...basically nothing.

Rumor was, clues to the band’s concert times and locations were embedded somewhere in the site, though I’d never been able to unearth one. Today I’d found a short post from the
band, thanking the fans who’d attended the concert—nothing cryptic there. A couple quotes from last week’s newspaper, which had featured the band—ditto. And the link to the
concert’s YouTube video.

The doorbell rang again.

I hit the link, and “Lucidity,” the first song in last night’s concert, snaked into my room. With a sigh, I tabbed down to the video’s comment section. Hardcore fans in
the know haunted this spot to brag indecently about having attended the concerts. Today was no exception. There was a post from some superfan who called herself Pink Pistol, boasting that
she’d gotten Mason’s autograph after the performance. Another from Tommy X, who claimed that the concert had been “mind-blowing.” After that were probably a half-dozen posts
from brainless bastards such as myself, begging both Pink Pistol and Tommy X to divulge how they’d found the clue.

The doorbell rang again.

I navigated down to Tommy X’s reply: “In order to keep the mystique alive, I can’t disclose the Big Secret. But I’ll tell you this: you have to look beyond the
surface.”

I leaned back in my chair, exhaling in irritation. I’d spent months combing through the band’s website. Months. I knew it forward and backward. If there were a clue—on the
surface or not—you’d think I would’ve bumped into it long ago.

The doorbell rang again.

And again.

And again.

I cursed under my breath, jerked to my feet, and stomped to the front door. My manners were always a couple steps behind my mouth, so I swung the door open in all my glory—hair, like a
squirrel had been running through it; pajamas, like a homeless guy had been wearing them for a month straight; expression, like it was teetering on the edge of a four-letter-word—and said,
“I don’t speak English.” Then I slammed the door shut.

It was quiet for a beat or two, and then I heard a familiar burst of strong Romanian consonants: “Neither do I.”

I yanked open the door. “Hilda,” I breathed. “I forgot about our session.”

“Oof,” she said, pushing past me.

During the first session, right after I’d lost my sight, she’d burst into our house like a hurricane, ordering my parents to relocate furniture, barking at them to reorganize the
kitchen and closets, and urging them to vandalize the cabinets with braille, all of which had been pretty entertaining. After that, though, she’d started in on me, and our relationship had
gone downhill.

“Put on your shoes and grab your cane,” Hilda said gruffly. “Today we will go outside.”

“Outside? Why?”

“To learn.”

I waved a dismissing hand at her. “I’m pretty happy with the inside, actually.”

“
Pish.
You cannot stay inside for the rest of your life.”

Oh, but I could. Inside our house, I was a rockstar. I knew where to walk, which drawer held what, whose footsteps were banging through the entryway. I didn’t even need my cane. But
outside? Well. That was completely different. And I had no desire to take the show on the road.