Blind (6 page)

I was pretty sure I did want to die, but as furious as I was, I didn’t want to tell my parents that. I tried to make progress, tried to be better. On his last day, I even tried to thank Mr. Otis, mainly so my dad would be happy. I said, so quietly I wasn’t sure Mr. Otis had even heard me, “Um, so, thanks. For everything.” He didn’t respond, so I worked up enough words to ask how he knew so much, whether he was blind. I meant to be nice, but he said, in an apologetic voice with broken glass in it, “No, I’m not blind. But I . . . well, you’re welcome, Emma.”

And then he left, and I imagined him pirouetting into his light, sighted life, weightless with relief that he would never have to deal with me or my darkness again.

School week afternoons, Leah and Naomi and Jenna—and sometimes even Sarah—got home from school and sat with me. I could smell the world on their coats, the town outside, the music they had played and listened to, the friends they had seen, hugged, and gossiped with, kids who no longer tagged home to our house to eat or play, because I didn’t want them to. And until this fall, for a year basically, my family accommodated this wish. Naomi made clay figures and handed them to me silently. Once, I told Leah that I missed Mr. Otis and Sarah said, “Yeah, he was hot,” even though I hadn’t realized she was in the room and I wouldn’t have said it in front of her, and then we all sat stunned. I had the new brailler my parents were so excited about on my lap, and was feeling the ports on the side, the long, sleek display of braille dots I couldn’t yet read. But when Sarah spoke, I reached up to touch my sunglasses; thought,
Hot? Mr. Otis?
What did that even mean? Would I ever find anyone hot again? My sunglasses were in place. I reached for Spark. I was always reaching for Spark.

“Can I see that thing for a minute?” Sarah asked. Maybe she was mad that I ignored her stupid, hideous comment about Mr. Otis. How dare she find him hot? I hated her, but I couldn’t have said why.

“This?” I extended out the brailler, and she clucked her tongue and said, “It’s hard to believe that’s worth six laptops.”

“Come on, Sarah, leave her alone,” Leah said. And I thought,
Six laptops?
What did that mean? How much had the brailler cost? And why was it so expensive? How did Sarah always know everything? And would we run out of money because of all my doctor bills and machines? Had Spark cost money, too? I thought about money, which I never had before. My parents had enough money; we weren’t rich, but they didn’t seem to worry about food or even raising a huge brood of kids. But now, would I both cost them everything and never be able to repay them? I would never get a job, never make enough money to support myself, never be okay. I would stay here, on the couch, for the rest of time, until my parents were gone and there was nobody to buy top-of-the-line braillers or tomato soup. What else could I do? School was an utter impossibility, as was walking or running or biking or eating complicated food that required a spoon or reading for real again or taking the bus. Who would fall in love with me? Was I unlovable? Would I always be unlovable?

“Mom!” Sarah was shouting now. “Can I borrow the car to meet Chris or no?”

I heard my mom saying blah, blah, she had to take someone somewhere and something and some o’clock and some errand, and then I heard Sarah slamming the front door and walking out into the bright light of her perfect life. Jenna was singing and Naomi was in the kitchen hammering something that turned out to be a bunk bed for her and Jenna’s dolls, and Benj was on the couch with me, watching a cartoon that sounded inflatable, rubber. I couldn’t hear Leah anywhere. Why had my parents bought such a fancy brailler? Couldn’t they have gotten the eighteen braille display? Or even gotten an old-school one? Did I actually need the one that’s really a computer, or was it another desperate gesture of guilt? Were they trying to make better something that couldn’t be made better? And if so, at what cost?

Nights, I lay back and tried to block out all the noise, to sleep, to stop thinking, to vanish. Sometimes Naomi would whisper down to me in my bunk, “Emma, are you asleep?” I never was, so I’d say, “No,” and then she’d say, “Are you okay?” And I felt sad and swirly and sick, because I knew she was worried about me, even though she was littler than I was and I should be the one asking her if she was okay and now I’d never be her Leah. But I couldn’t take care of anyone else, so I just said, “Yeah, I’m fine. Goodnight, Nomi,” which was her nickname, because Benj couldn’t pronounce
Naomi
.

My memories of that time are the opposite of a photo album. I can’t see the holidays, whether my sisters went trick-or-treating or to Halloween parties, whether we had turkey for Thanksgiving or lit candles at Hanukkah. I remember instead the tiny, unimportant parts of every day, maybe because they were so monumentally difficult. Or maybe because remembering what holds the days together is more truthful than remembering a few big-ticket, smile-for-the-camera events. Or maybe just because I can’t see.

Benj was everywhere, every day, un-ruined by my tragedy. He spent the days tearing through the house like a tropical storm, often jumping onto the couch with me. By November our traumatized mom was barfing every twenty-five seconds, even though her first trimester was done. Sometimes, she’d be taking care of me and Benj, making cheese sandwiches or talking to one of us, and she’d say, “Excuse me,” go to the bathroom and throw up, and then come back and start the conversation right where she’d left off. When she wasn’t throwing up, she and Benj cut out egg cartons and sewed sock puppets and did laundry while I listened to the dark and snuggled Spark.

By December my mom had lost the battle over asking me to shower and so began pouring baths for me. It was one of the many ways in which I went back to being a baby. I brought Spark into the bathroom, and he sat next to the tub while I climbed in. Sometimes Spark leaned into the tub and drank the water or gobbled whatever bath bubbles my mom had added. The soap felt foamy and smelled like different colors to me, depending on the time of day and my mind’s mood. One ice-blue night in mid-December, Jenna, who had just turned five, got into the bath with me. She left her squeezy, noise-making, water-squirting toys in their plastic bucket, and sat quietly for my sake, a feat for her. I was tracing my fingers along the surface of the water, listening to Spark breathe, thinking,
Come on, Emma. Dark is safe, dark is water, dark is safe, dark is water, water is safe
, until I could almost believe it.

Then Jenna asked in a tiny voice, “Emma? What are you thinking about if you’re so quiet?”

I answered her honestly, maybe because I was failing with Naomi, or maybe because I’ve always had trouble determining how much truth is too much.

“I’m thinking about the dark, J,” I said. I don’t think I meant to be mean.

But her breathing stopped. She waited a little bit before she asked, “Is it really scary, Emma?” with so much fear that the words turned an internal organ mix of blue and purple. I backed away and made up a half-truth I now tell all the time, maybe because I’m still hoping to convince myself.

“Being blind is okay—it, um, it makes the dark not scary, J. I’m used to it. It’s calm. Like water.”

Jenna said, “Oh! Like the bath. With bubbles.” And her raspy, choppy, little-kid breathing started up again cheerfully. Knowing she felt better made me feel better, too, almost as if what I had said was true. Sometimes words matter, even when they’re not true. And other times, repeating lies can be the worst possible human crutch. It’s something I can’t work out. That night in the bath, I kissed Jenna’s wet face. She felt like a little soapy seal, my five-year-old sister, and all I knew was how glad I was that she was less scared for me. Or of me, if there’s any difference.

Then Jenna said, “Um, Emma? Is it okay if I tell Nomi that being blind is okay, like a bath? Because, well, maybe she thinks it’s scary, too.”

I tried not to cry.

• • •

Last winter made me realize that even if I stayed on the gold couch without moving for fifty years, we would all still get old and die. In case getting blinded hadn’t made it clear, recovering taught me that my small life didn’t matter to the world overall, which I don’t think is something you’re supposed to understand until you’re old. But I had to learn it early for some reason. My mom would say it made me smart, but actually it just made me desperate. When it snowed in December, I knew in this weird, sudden way that after winter it would be spring, which meant summer would come again. I’d have been blind for an entire year, the year itself another utter loss. I told Dr. Sassoman that I was scaring my little sisters and myself and losing my mind. It was snowing outside of her office window, and I was trying to feel the cold sound of it.

“I can’t stop thinking really fast, so fast it’s scary. And I can’t sleep. And I can’t stop making up weird refrains—like ‘dark is cool, light is heat’—and repeating them to myself,” I admitted, scared, and suddenly embarrassed, too. But to my surprise, she clapped her hands together. The pop made me jump, and she touched my wrist with her cool, papery fingers. I thought of snowflakes cut from coffee filters, wanted to use scissors again.

“I’m glad to hear about the sayings, Emma,” she said, squeezing my wrist a bit. “Those are coping strategies you’re creating for yourself.”

She waited. Dr. Sassoman has a big appetite for awkward pauses.

“No!” I said, my voice too loud and hard for the soft white room, the snow, the moment. “I’m not coping! I’m crazy. I’ve missed an entire half a year of school, and I’ll never catch up, and if I have to be in a different grade from Logan and all my friends for the rest of my life, I’m going to die. And I can never go back. How can I go back like this?”

“You are not going to die,” she said, as usual. “And you
are
coping. That’s what those ‘sayings’ you’re making up are—that’s you coping. Human beings are capable of curing our own miseries if we are courageous enough,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m not courageous enough.”

“I think you are,” she said, and then she repeated it, like I was deaf, too. “We have to figure out a way to help you sleep better, though.”

That night, right before bed, I asked my mom if my brailler had cost six thousand dollars.

“I don’t remember the exact price, sweetie,” she said, “but we got a good one, so you’ll have it for a long time and it can be both your laptop and your brailler. And we wanted to . . .”

“To what?” I asked.

“I don’t know—make braille more fun?”

We both waited, me because I wanted to punish her—for trying to bribe or comfort me, for pretending there could be anything fun about this. She was quiet because she wanted to get this right, but couldn’t. Finally she just said, “Please, don’t worry about it, Emma, okay?”

I wanted to rat Sarah out, to tell my mom that she had made sure I knew how much that stupid thing cost. But I didn’t, not because I’m kind—or even because I’d rather be nice than right—but because I knew my mom already knew. She bent to kiss me and left, and like so many nights that have followed it, I lay with my arms around Spark, thinking,
Okay, dark is safe, dark is water, light is terror, light is fire, focus in, focus in
, until I thought my mind would snap with the effort. Then I used,
Dark is cool, light is heat
, and then,
Relax and close your eyes, close your eyes, relax
. And,
Feel it, Emma, feel it, Emma, read it to feel it, feel it to read it
. Finally I fell asleep.

The next time Dr. Sassoman came for one of her home visits, she talked with my parents for a while and then asked me privately where I was “keeping my anger.”

I didn’t answer.

“Is it in your stomach?” she proposed. “Your heart?”

I shrugged.

She handed me something it took me a minute to recognize. Eggs. A carton of eggs.

“What is this?” I asked.

“A dozen eggs,” she said. “Do you want to throw them?”

This suggestion made sense to me, and I nodded.

“Where? At the walls inside? Or outside? Anywhere you want.”

We went outside first, even though it was brutally cold: step one, step two, step three, four, five, end of porch, here’s the grass, the walkway, sidewalk, maple, crosswalk, traffic, oak tree. I listened hard for the engines, and then, instead of sticking my cane into the street, I threw some eggs, hard, at the sidewalk, at trees I couldn’t see, into the crosswalk I hadn’t realized I hated. Here’s a shoreline where the shell meets the pavement, shatters, yolk, white, blood. Your light, my light, red light, egg light. I listened for the cars to come and smash what was left of the eggs into nothingness. Then I felt around in the carton. I still had four eggs.

“I want to throw these inside,” I told Dr. Sassoman, and she said that was fine; that she would clean them up afterward and I didn’t have to worry about whatever mess we made.

Hearing the eggs crack into the walls—of our living room, Naomi’s and my bedroom, the kitchen, and the upstairs bathroom, I thought,
This is a sound I never realized I’d hear, an experience I wouldn’t be having if my accident hadn’t happened
. But that was it. I didn’t feel anything about it one way or another, and I didn’t stay to listen to Dr. Sassoman or my mom—or whoever did it—clean the egg off the glass cabinets in the living room, the bathroom mirror, or the wall above my desk.

When Dr. Sassoman asked later whether it had helped, whether I was feeling any better, I said nothing. Because I had no idea. How can you know the truth about anything you’re still inside of?

It’s mid-October again—surprise. We all made it through September and two weeks of October, even me. Before they left for fresh death elsewhere, the carrion reporters wrote lists of the drugs in Claire’s blood and stomach: Oxycontin, Percocet, Vicodin. Those are names I remember from after my eyes; they make me feel newly burned. Now we’ve all agreed—without even saying so out loud—to call Claire’s death a tragic accident. No one really wants to talk about it, even at school, where people are pretending to talk about it by listing the same hows over and over. How tragic, how surprised, how, how. But what I want to know is, how did Claire gobble a giant fistful of drugs and fall in the water “by accident”? What the hell was she doing picnicking on painkillers alone at the lake? Did she throw herself in on purpose? And if so, what does “accident” even mean?

The drugs were apparently “recreational,” like she took them as an after-school sport she could have put on her resumé if she hadn’t accidentally died instead. Lake Main is blazing with warnings about the dangers of drug use and “teen suicide prevention.” Of course, I haven’t asked any real questions out loud, either, so I should hardly be flinging rocks at other people’s glass walls. But I can’t help wondering: if beautiful, talented Claire M. couldn’t bear to stay alive, how will I?

The school put up a display case in the tenth-grade hallway “to honor Claire’s memory.” Ms. Mabel described the trophies and pictures to me: Claire as a six-year-old, in a tutu and slippers; Claire kicking a soccer ball; Claire in a swimsuit, her arms around a teammate; Claire in the sunlight, with her streaky hair everywhere. While Ms. Mabel was talking, I remembered Claire’s long, pale neck, and a locket she wore every day when we were kids. It had in it some shards of teeth she’d lost when she fell off her bike. She showed them to me once and I said, “Gross.” She just shrugged and said other people wore shark teeth around their necks, so why couldn’t she wear her own? I remember thinking it was a good point. And even though I didn’t touch the little chips of ivory then, only saw them, now I remember what they felt like.

Ms. Mabel started to tell me what was on the floor, but I stopped her; I could smell the sickeningly sweet lilies, and I reached down to feel the crinkly wrappers on candy and bouquets, the marble-eyed bears, swim goggles—maybe for Claire in heaven, which my parents don’t believe in. I wonder if Claire’s still do, if they think she’s swimming in the afterlife even though she drowned in this one. They weren’t the most religious family in our town—that would be Blythe’s or Deirdre’s—but maybe they think she’s “gone to a better place.”

Heaven or not, there’s definitely a better place than Sauberg somewhere. But I don’t see how that makes what happened to Claire any more palatable. Nothing does. Now words sound hollow, falling out of people’s mouths to the ground like dead seedpods:
We’re just so shocked! In this place, of all places! Such a nice community. Such a safe town. We still can’t believe it happened here
. To hear us tell it, Sauberg is not the kind of place where
that
kind of thing
happens—although I’ve never heard anyone be like, “Yeah, our town loves this kind of thing,” when a girl’s body washes up. Mostly, people are surprised by totally pointless and horrifying death, so maybe no town is that kind of town. Or maybe every town is.

Sarah calls Sauberg a “conservative, small-town lunatic asylum stuck in the nineteenth century.” She’s angry that we live here. Sarah and Leah and I were born in the city, and it was because of me that my parents decided they had to move here, which of course Sarah holds against me. As if I got a vote about whether to be born. Or when. Or being their third kid under three, which meant that they couldn’t even hold all of our hands crossing the street. Not to mention they were about to have four more kids. Sauberg is close enough to the city that my dad can drive to the hospital where he works in under an hour, and far enough away that we can have wholesome childhoods and a four-bedroom house. We’re two to a room, with Baby Lily in my parents’ room, which is pretty civilized for a family with seven kids. If we were in the city, we’d all be sleeping on top of each other. By the time Baby Lily needs her own bed, Leah will be away at college, and so will Sarah, if she can manage to finish a single application and get in anywhere. It’s funny that even though she’s the one who can’t wait to get out of this “vile dump,” she hasn’t even started her applications and they’re due in December.

It’s almost Halloween again, the biggest see-and-be-seen holiday of the year. I’m planning to read or sleep through it. The truth is, I’ve been mainstreamed for almost eight weeks, but I’ve only left the house to go to school and to doctor’s appointments. I’ve only asked to leave twice with Lo, and both times my mom said she’d prefer that we hang out here. She wants me safe in the house, and I don’t know if it’s because of me, or because of Claire. All our parents are stricter and more annoying than ever. But that’s been true for me since last year, and lately I can actually
feel
that year underneath this one, like something jagged and dangerous, slicing up and tripping me back in time. I’m trying to forget about last year, the gold couch, Mr. Otis, braille lessons, Briarly, the way Seb smelled like tangerines and leather jackets.

Benj helps most. Maybe because he lives in the present tense, which makes it easier for me to be there when he’s around. Or because other than Spark, he’s been the one least freaked out by my accident. Little kids have an easier time than the rest of us adjusting to “I see with my hands and ears and mind instead of my eyes.” Once I promised Benj that I remembered just what he looks like, he was okay with the rest of whatever my accident meant.

All we’d been talking about all week was Halloween, which I didn’t want to think about, when he tumbled down the steps of the preschool bus on Thursday afternoon, shrieking, “I winned! I winned! The rabbit will come!”

“I
won
,” Naomi said. She was swinging her violin case against her legs.

“What rabbit?” I asked.

“Bigs,” Benj said, grabbing one of Leah’s hands and one of Naomi’s and swinging and leaping between them. I could both hear and feel his legs kicking, his rain boots stomping and bouncing on the sidewalk. Then Naomi tripped and I heard her violin case go flying.

“Hey!” Leah shouted. “Are you okay?” She picked up Naomi, who was wounded but not crying, and poured some water on her knee, which she had apparently scraped badly enough to tear through her tights.

Jenna rescued Naomi’s violin and there was a scramble of kids as we fell all over each other. I wondered if there was anyone else on the sidewalk, anyone who could see us. When there are other people looking at us, I don’t know how to think of my family, don’t know if we’re clean or dirty, sane or crazy, tame or wild. Even when I could see, it was hard to imagine what my own clan looked like from the outside, maybe like it’s difficult to gauge anything you’re inside of. When we all started walking again, I was thinking how I hadn’t been any help. If it weren’t for my eyes, Benj would probably walk between Leah and me, instead of between Leah and Naomi. Naomi wouldn’t have fallen over. Leah wouldn’t even have to walk us all home every day. She’d be hanging out with her friends instead, like Sarah, who, when my mom asked if she could help with drop-off and pickup, just said, “No thank you.” Maybe I’d be in charge. I wonder if I’d be happier if I were in charge. Probably I’d be resentful of having to help so much, and not even realize how little I had to complain about. It’s not like I spent my whole sighted life being like, “This is so fabulous, to have my eyesight.”

I wonder when I’ll be done with the what-ifs and if-onlys. I hate them, and they play in my mind on a loop, like the voice-over lady in my phone, screaming for a password I can’t type in fast enough. Will the questions ever stop?

I held my white cane with my right hand and Spark’s leash with my left, trying to calm Spark down. Naomi’s walking was odd and jolty. She was probably either trying to avoid the cracks or to step on all of them. Benj was shouting: “Sometimes he, I mean she—you know, that rabbit—will come to my house when we have no school, because it will be my turn for Bigs!”

“Ow,” Naomi said. “Stop pulling on my arm like that.”

“It’s my house, too, Benj,” Jenna said. Scratch, click, scratch, click. I felt something—a stick, maybe—something in the way.

“Careful,” Leah said, seeing me notice it. “There’s part of a tree branch there.”

When an actual rabbit arrived the next day, which was a Friday, Jenna was almost as delighted as Benj, because the kindergarten gecko died and they haven’t replaced it yet. Naomi pretended for about six seconds to be above the excitement, but as soon as Bigs showed up, she immediately wrote a star vehicle play for the rabbit, mysteriously called “Buffalo Rabbit on the Jungle Shore.”

I was in the living room, waiting for Logan, listening to cabinets opening, drawers sliding along their metal tracks, Jenna and Naomi fumbling and shuffling, drawers slamming shut. Then came the furious, thick snipping. Pop of the hole punch and Jenna’s, “Mom? Where’s the yarn? Nomi and I can’t find any yarn,” to the discovery that we were out of yarn and they’d have to use string or ribbon. To tie what they were making—construction paper ears—around Benj’s and Jenna’s heads, so they could be rabbits, too. The doorbell rang and I felt my way along the wall until I reached the foyer table. I opened the door.

“Hi, Lo,” I said as she came in. She smelled like herself, candy with a faint chemical spritz. She took quick stock of the scene. “More animals joining the Silver circus?” She laughed. “Let’s go to your room.”

But we hadn’t even sat down on my bed when Jenna screamed and we raced back into the living room with Spark, who didn’t know what to make of the chaos. “Bigs had a pee accident,” Jenna told us in her teacher voice, the one she uses when she’s trying to sound like Naomi, who’s trying to sound like her teacher. Jenna was calm now, but Benj was crying.

“Gross,” Logan said.

“Don’t cry,” I told Benj. “Just go get Bigs, and Logan and I will clean up the pee. Where is it? On the rug or the wood?”

“The wood. Over here,” Jenna said. I leaned down to pet Spark, who was frozen in his warning position. “It’s just the rabbit,” I told him. “Don’t worry.”

“If you have pee in your body, you have to go to the potty right then,” Benj told me and Logan, sniffling. “Don’t delay!”

“Right,” Logan said. “I guess Bigs didn’t get that memo.”

She had already picked the rabbit up and now she handed it to me, and I was surprised by how un-fluffy Bigs was. Maybe she was some hideous, short-haired, prickly rabbit breed. Logan saw my face and laughed until she snorted.

“Ew, right?” she said. “And you should see her creepy-ass red eyes. Like a picture no one fixed.”

“
Ass
is not a nice word, Logan,” Jenna said, drawing out the s’s so the word lasted a full ten seconds. “You can’t say
ass
at school. Only at home.”

“Help me with this, will you, Jenna?” I asked. I felt for the edges of the cage and gently set the rabbit back down in it and went with Spark to get some paper towels from the kitchen. My mom now keeps everything in its perfect place on the counters or in the drawers, so I can find whatever I need. It’s the thing we’re most organized about. She tries to keep toys off the floor, but that’s been a bigger challenge. So I’m careful. Naomi reappeared, wearing tap shoes and carrying a bin of blocks, which she immediately dropped. I couldn’t tell whether by accident or not, but the noise was enormous.

While Jenna and Naomi collected the blocks, Logan helped me mop up the pee puddle. Logan hates animals, except for Spark, whom she loves because he’s part of me. I could feel her thinking sarcastic thoughts. Logan and I know each other so well that most subjects require almost no discussion, including family and the fact that mine is better than hers, and she’s always over at my house, so that’s why it’s okay for her to complain about how many kids there are, how there’s always some kind of crisis or other and we’re always cleaning something horrible or looking for lost toys or consoling someone who’s hysterically crying or eating a dinner with so much shouting and interrupting and craziness it’s a circus. Calling my family a circus is Logan’s second favorite shtick. And coincidentally, since we were cleaning up after the rabbit, Logan got to say her first favorite thing about whatever drama is unfolding at the Silver house: “This is all because your parents are like rabbits.”

Saturday morning, Bigs was not in her cage and no one knew where she’d gone. I heard my mom come down the stairs barefoot, carrying something she set down—a plastic basket, from the sound of it—and start looking right away. This meant she considered it a genuine emergency. Usually she “triages demands,” as she and my dad like to call it, which means throwing the laundry in first and taking care of whatever crises there are with the epic pajama washing already underway. But she went straight to the couch and ripped off each of its eight velcroed cushions. No rabbit. There were creaks and scrapes as she pushed the couch across the floor, checking behind or under it. She sighed. Still no rabbit. She unlatched and opened up the iron and glass cabinets, although how a rabbit would have launched herself into them—or opened the doors—is anyone’s guess. Maybe my mom thought Naomi or Jenna had stuffed Bigs into one—with the sculpture of us my mom made recently, a tangle of cooked, painted clay I can’t stand to feel for some reason. It’s the first thing she’s made (other than Baby Lily) since my accident, and she’s very proud of it. Sometimes she goes into the old carriage house in our backyard, where she used to paint, when she’s not hopping through the house with Baby Lily tied to her body or running the small country of our family.

My mom headed out of the living room, and I heard the basement door swing open and, at the same moment, heard Benj come wailing and stomping down the stairs in his rain boots (which he wears every day, with Batman pajamas and a cape), creating such a thunderous racket that Baby Lily started crying, too. Crying is contagious in our house. I felt my way into the kitchen and crouched down, touching the floor under the counters until I got to the part between the stove and the fridge. I don’t know how else to explain it, except that my hands sensed her there, and sure enough, I reached into that small groove and felt fur. I grabbed Bigs, but as soon as I did, I knew something was wrong with the way she felt. She was too floppy, too limp, too . . . I don’t know, she felt like a toy.