The Window

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First Harcourt paperback edition 1996

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ingold, Jeanette.
The window/Jeanette Ingold.
p. cm.
Summary: When she comes to live with relatives on a Texas
farm, fifteen-year-old Mandy encounters the grandmother
she never knew and begins to come to terms with her blindness
caused by the automobile accident that killed her mother.
[1. Mothers and daughtersâFiction. 2. BlindâFiction.
3. People with disabilitiesâFiction. 4. Family lifeâTexasâ
Fiction. 5. GhostsâFiction. 6. TexasâFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.I533Wi 2003
[Fic]âdc21 2002191957
ISBN 0-15-204926-6

Text set in Fairfield Medium
Designed by Camilla Filancia
Printed in the United States of America
H G F

This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, organizations,
and events portrayed in this book are products of the author's
imagination. Any resemblance to any organization, event, or
actual person, living or dead, is unintentional.

For my husband, Kurt

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of the teachers and counselors who answered my numerous questions and who read and commented on the manuscript: Fred Bischoff, Judy O'Toole-Freel, Bob Maffit, Dennis Slonaker, and Dr. Karen Wolffe; of willing readers Jamie and Kristy Maffit; of students at the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind who reviewed the manuscript and talked about it with me; and of my good friends who gave varied and valued help: Peggy Christian, Hanneke Ippisch, Wendy Norgaard, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, Greg Patent, and Carol Soth. I especially thank my editor, Diane D'Andrade.

Chapter 1

S
TAY SEATED,
Mandy," the flight attendant says. "When the other passengers have gotten off, I'll come get you."

Right. She should try staying seated herself, when everybody else is standing up and the guy by the window wants out and stuff's tumbling from thÃ© overhead bins and you get bumped half into the aisle.

A man says, "Watch it," and some other man says, "Hey." Suddenly there's a pocket of hot silence. Everyone around has just realized I can't see.

"Those must be your folks. They've got a sign with
MANDY
on it."

Then a woman is hugging me, Aunt Emma I guess. Her front is soft and she's shorter than me. She laughs, flustered. "I knew you were fifteen, but somehow I hadn't pictured ... I mean, I thought of you younger..."

A man hugs me, and another, hugs of wool jackets and aftershave, clumsy big hugs, and their voices rumble.

One tells me he's my uncle Gabriel. Great-uncle Gabriel. They're all greats, for that matter, Great-uncles Abe and Gabriel and Great-aunt Emma, who is Gabriel's wife.

"So, Mandy," he says, "I hope you're going to liven up our gloomy old house."

"Gabriel, hush," Aunt Emma whispers. "It's too soon."

"Don't worry about me," I say. "It's OK."

And even if it's not, I can take care of myself.

That's my gift. Other girls get blond hair and nice families and brains that tell them the right things to say. I've got knowing how to take care of myself, and how to face what I have to face.

Like that night I woke up in the hospital and heard the nurses talking about whether they should take me to my mom. One said, "I hate for her to see," as if there was any way I could through bandages over eyes that had stopped working.

Besides, did that nurse think I couldn't imagine how my mom was? That I couldn't guess what happened to people when they got thrown from cars and smashed against utility poles?

I fussed until she put me into a wheelchair, took me to another floor, to intensive care, and I was too dumb to wonder why I was getting to go there now when they hadn't let me for days and days.

"Here's your mother," the nurse told me, and I had to take her word for it. The only sounds in the room were machine sounds.

I found my mother's arm, reached for her face, but the nurse moved my hand away. "You'll dislodge the tubing."

I listened for Mom to make some noise, even to just breathe out loud, but all the room became one steady, tiny monitor blip.

"Hey, Mom," I said, "you sure we can afford the rent here?"

I could feel the nurse get uptight, knew she was thinking: Hard case; people like these don't have feelings like they should.

"Don't worry, Mom," I said. "I'll get along."

My mom died the next morning, without me ever knowing if she'd heard.

This is my first time to Texas. The cold air surprises me. Somehow I thought Texas, even in the north, would be warm and dusty-smelling, not damp and cold and made empty by a wind without scent. There is no sun; I would feel it through my eye-lids. I would see it. I can see sunlight, bright light. There is none this day.

We drive a long while after leaving the Dallas airport, first over highway and then back roads, and then I'm inside a house and still chilly. Aunt Emma puts a bundlely sweater on my shoulders and I hear a furnace come roaring on. "Cold November," says Uncle Abe. "We'll have heat in just a few minutes."

I can't stop a shiver.

"Em," says Abe, "guess we've got another cold-blooded one," and I think he's saying that I'm mean, but he's not.

Gabriel says, "Your Uncle Abe means thin-blooded. Emma always wants the heat up."

The house smells of cooking, onion and broccoli and meats layered one meal into the next, nice smells, but smells.

And of flowers, but not sweet ones like my roommate's at the hospital. I ask Aunt Emma what kind and she says marigolds. "About the last, I guess. We could get frost any night now."

"Most people plant marigolds to keep deer away," says Gabriel, "that's how bad they smell. But Em likes them."

"An honest smell," says Aunt Emma, "and they're easy to grow." Her answer starts another question. It seems to hang in the air: This Mandy, does she grow easy?

No, I want to shout. I don't grow easy. I'm trying the best I can and messing up terribly and I don't see how the three of you are going to make anything any better.

No, I want to shout. Don't you read? It's never easy to raise a child, not even for the people whose job it's supposed to be. Mothers grow children. Not great-aunts and old uncles.

No, I want to shout. Stare at me, in this bundlely sweater. I don't even know quite where to look, now that you're silent and your voices don't tell me where you are. Do I look easy to grow?

"May I see my room, please?" I ask.

Again that silence. I'd said,
May I see.
You'd think I'd know better, would have learned these last weeks what
see
and
look
do to people who can, when they hear the words said in front of someone who can't. When someone who can't says them herself.

"Certainly," answers Aunt Emma. She laughs, an embarrassed little laugh. "Actually, we have a choice for you. About what room you want, I mean. There's one here on this floor..."

"Aren't your bedrooms all upstairs?"

I know they are. Mom had a picture of this house, though she'd never been in it. "My mother's house," she'd say, when she'd find me looking at it. "Your grandmother's."

Again that embarrassed little laugh. "Yes," Aunt Emma says, "but there's a little room down here, a study, that we thought you could..."

"Whose study?"

"Well, your uncle Abe's, but..."

"I don't need it," he breaks in. "I can work perfectly well upstairs. Lots of space in my bedroom for a desk."

I ask, "What's the other choice?" I know what they're doing, trying to give me a room where I won't have to climb steps. But I'm blind, not crippled.

"The other one is on the second floor," says Emma, "but it's so tiny..."

It's Uncle Gabriel who interrupts this time. "Actually, there's another choice," he says. "Nobody's using the attic room, nobody has for years. It's not much bigger, but..."

"Let me see it, please."

I am not going to stop saying
see
just to spare their feelings. It's what I mean. And what do they want me to say, anyway?
Let me feel the attic, please? Smell the attic?
Choose it for my bedroom without learning one thing about it first?

It's Gabriel who puts my hand on his arm and walks me to the staircase. I run the tip of my long cane side to side. The bare treads are wood and very wide, worn to rounded edges.

"It's a long flight," he says.

I start up on my own, as rapidly as I can go and not hesitating once, even when I'm thinking, Please God help me find the top so I take a smooth step onto it and don't fall on my face. And I do it right.

I wait for the others. Aunt Emma comes up wheezing. I've made her climb the steps faster than she usually does. Abe doesn't come up at all.

"The attic?" I ask. "How do we get there?"

I start to unpack by myself, opening my suitcase on a high, creaking bed. It's afternoon now, and someone has cleaned and made the bed with sheets and a puffy quilt. Aunt Emma comes in long enough to hang lace curtains. "Washed and pressed," she says. "They don't give much privacy, but there's no one out there but cows."

She chatters as she works, telling me about Herefords and Angus and how the uncles are thinking of trying some exotic breed.

I hear metal snap. "There, done," Aunt Emma says. An instant later she touches my hand. "Mandy," she begins. "Mandy, I'm glad your caseworker found us. Your uncles and I had no idea we even had a niece."

I can't decide which response to pick from the several that come to me: I'm not your niece, I'm your grandniece; I didn't know about you, either; I must have been some surprise. Any one of them would lead to more talk, when all I want is to be left alone.

"If you don't mind," I say, "I'll finish unpacking now."

I find the closet and a dresser and put away my clothes, becoming angry all over again about how much is missing. Half my things got thrown away by the child services woman who closed up the apartment after Mom died, I guess because she thought my stuff looked cheap. "It wasn't your right," I told her when I learned what she'd done. She'd answered, "Your needs will be different in Texas."

At least she left me my photos. Now I stand them on a dressing table. Mom. Her dad, who died before she was born. I touch the glass in the frames.

The sun has come out now and it's making the attic too warm. I go toward the sun, feel behind the curtains to the window latch, unlock and raise the window. Fresh, cold air rushes in, blowing the curtains against my face. I hold them aside and lean out, into the wind. There's someone calling.

I lean out farther, to hear....