Blind (7 page)

My mom was back in the doorway of the basement staircase, and she must have been watching, because she said, “Leah, take Lily,” and then came rushing over and grabbed the rabbit. She stayed bent over me for an extra second; I felt her hair tumble down—long, curly, red—and she kissed the top of my head. Benj came running in then, his rain boots squeaking across the kitchen.

“Naomi and Jenna, come with me! We’re taking Bigs to the doctor, Benji. We’ll be right back.”

Then my mom and Naomi darted outside, with Jenna behind them, still in just her socks, as far as I could hear, leaving the door open. When it didn’t click shut, I felt my way over and closed it myself.

“Will Bigs have to get a shot at that damn doctor?” Benj asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I made my way back to him and knelt down, reached out and touched his face, the cold little nose and scrunched eyebrows. Wet streaks on his cheeks. I pulled him toward me: toast with butter, bubblegum toothpaste, and tears. Baby Lily was still crying, too, and Logan was holding her now. Logan’s heels tapped the floor. She was rocking, and her hands went
thump, thump, thump
against the romper on Baby Lily’s hot little back. So Leah must have handed her Baby Lily and gone somewhere. I hadn’t heard her leave, but she wasn’t in the room. Sometimes I have to figure out what’s happening now before I can guess what happened a minute ago.

When I stood up, Logan handed me Baby Lily, and I rocked her while Benj kept clinging to my leg. If someone else is holding her, Lily feels to me like a puppety collection of little parts: chubby dumpling face, short arms, a leg here or there, and a
voice
—she screams like she’s being dipped in boiling oil. But when I hold her myself, I can feel the weight of her being a whole human being. I kissed her doughy rolls of neck.

Leah reappeared from the basement in a cloud of laundry steam. “Here, baby, come to Leah,” she said, taking Lily and tucking her into the wrap she must have tied to herself on the way up the basement stairs. As soon as she was in the cloth, Lily started snoring. Babies are like those cars that go from zero to a hundred in under one second. There’s something surreal about their ability to go from screaming to sleeping instantaneously, but also something practical about it. I held Benj’s hand again then, but I didn’t say anything else, because I don’t believe in lying to little kids, and I didn’t think “I have no idea what’s going to happen” or “I think the rabbit’s going to be dead when mom comes back” would be especially comforting.

After a minute, I smelled fire, heard the flash and splatter of butter, reminded myself to breathe. Leah was shuffling through the third drawer over, the one that jams a bit and sticks when it opens, then sinking a knife through something soft to the surface of a plastic cutting board. Cheese. She was making grilled cheese sandwiches. I smelled bread land in the popping butter. The cupboard opened, and she took out a can; hooked and snapped it into the mounted opener, where it turned a slow, grinding circle until it came open with ragged edges and the opener stopped. The red smell arrived: tomato soup, my favorite. Leah unlatched the can and poured the soup into a pot that was already as hot as the butter, from the splatter of it. Logan was helping while I stood there, listening and working to follow, and when the food was ready, she put ours on a tray and took it to my bedroom, where we sat on my bed, pulling closed the green, filmy curtain and eating our soup in my tent. I left half of mine for Spark and put the bowl down next to the bed where he was resting; listened to him happily slurping and gobbling. I love him so much that when I hear him eating, it makes me feel full. Logan and I sat without talking for a long time. She was lying on her back, with her socked feet kicking the bottom of Naomi’s bunk bed. Metal springs. Creak, kick, creak, kick.

“Are you okay?” she finally asked me.

“Not really,” I said.

“The rabbit?”

“I don’t know. That too, I guess.”

“Yeah.” She thought for a minute. “It’s been kind of a rough year.”

“Unlike last year?” I said, and she laughed. Last year, we both almost died of misery. But then Claire actually died, and now here we were, still alive. Logan’s laugh wasn’t a happy one; she always snorts when she’s actually laughing—right at the end of her laugh—and she sighs when she’s not.

She sighed. “Yeah, that was crazy, too. Maybe we’re due for some good luck.”

“I don’t want luck,” I said. “I just want to know what’s going to happen some of the time. Instead of getting shocked to death constantly.”

“We should get a crystal ball,” Logan said. “Or try out some of your magical rabbit-finding powers on the future.” She pulled the curtain back and hopped off the bed, went to turn on some music. “How about ‘Sweetness’?” she asked.

“Whatever you want,” I said. Logan’s always introducing me to music, but I prefer the terrible stuff my parents play, Simon & Garfunkel and Tom Petty. Maybe because embarrassing music played by old people reminds me of being a baby, makes me feel safe or something. No one knows about my horrible musical taste except Logan. And when I pretend to be cool in front of other people, she never rats me out. Lately, I do so much listening that I prefer not to have any music on, but how un-fun do I really want to be, even with Logan?

I lay back and put my feet up flat against the bottom of Naomi’s bunk, stretched my legs. “I wonder what it would be like to be in charge.”

Logan bounced back onto the bed and my legs bent. “Of what?” She sounded kind of surprised.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Anything. How we live? What we do? Whatever.”

“I think there’d be major problems,” Logan said. “Like, who’d go to school?”

“I would,” I said. “And so would you. We’d all probably do the same things we do anyway; we just wouldn’t feel like prisoners about it.” I reached down and felt for Spark’s head, rested my hand on his lovely skull, scratched behind his ears.

“No way,” Logan said. “No one would follow rules if we didn’t have to. Everyone would be having sex in the streets and eating Twizzlers three meals a day. Including me.”

Logan loves red candy, which I find really weird and gross. She has a thing about fake cherry flavor, even though she hates actual fruit, including cherries.

“That’s not true. You could already do that when your mom’s not looking, and you don’t.”

“But if I got to make up the rules for everyone, we’d all be crazy, sugar-eating sluts. Maybe I’d say there’s a rule we have to be.”

Logan has been obsessed with sex since we were thirteen. Or with virginity, depending on how you look at it, since neither of us has had sex yet. Her third favorite shtick, after my parents being rabbits and my family “the Silver circus,” is this thing she came up with in seventh grade about our virginity. We were talking in social studies about destiny and free will, and Logan decided that whom we’re going to lose it to is preordained, so the universe already knows and we just haven’t found out yet. She can’t decide if what we do will or won’t change the outcome. I doubt the question of whom we’ll lose our virginity to was supposed to be the central focus of Ms. Paton’s unit on free will, but it’s very Logan to take something academic and make it sexual. Of course, destiny’s plans have gone kind of badly for me, so maybe I just have less faith in the universe than Logan does. I’d rather make my own plans than rely on anyone or anything else, fate included.

“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s take Spark for a walk.” He perked up, barked.

But Logan went to the window and opened it, and cold rain blew in sideways. I had heard it anyway, hitting the window and the bushes outside.

“You don’t have to drench me. You could just say it’s raining.”

“Maybe we should do a story,” Logan suggested.

“I don’t feel like it.”

Logan and I sometimes write stories where I come up with a few lines and then she writes a few, but her lines always make the stories into weird, sci-fi ones. We’ll have a great character, fighting her way through the regular impossibilities of being a girl, or even a warrior or whatever, and then it’s Logan’s turn and the girl grows horns or wings or an alien lands on her head and wants to have sex with her in outer space, and I have to quit before the story is ruined forever. So we never finish any of them.

I felt incredibly restless. “I wish everyone weren’t so full of shit all the time,” I said. “Do you think Claire killed herself on purpose? Do you think they know what happened, or why, and just aren’t telling us?”

“You know I have no idea. We’ve been over this. And anyway, who’s
they
?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Her parents? The cops? Why do we keep having to have these bullshit meetings at school? Why can’t we have our own meeting, where we tell the truth?”

“You want to have another grief meeting?”

“No, not a grief meeting. Not hideously fake, with the weird other version of us that we all become in those meetings. I hate those conversations.”

“Yes, I know.”

I couldn’t resist. “They make me feel crazy, like we’re all robots. Or in a terrible play.”

“I know.”

“I guess I just feel like everyone’s so apathetic and full of it. Claire was by herself, taking ‘recreational’ drugs for no reason? And now she’s dead for no reason? And we’re all just going to live with that and move on, with our parents and the school even more all over us than ever? It just seems—”

“Unfair,” Lo said. “Yeah, it’s unfair. But what’s new?”

We heard Benj start crying again, followed by banging. Leah must have set up a pot-and-pan band to distract him from Bigs.

“The world is a very stupid place,” I told Logan, picking up speed. I felt choppy and staccato, excited.

“Yeah? And how do you propose we make the world less stupid?” Logan asked.

“I don’t know. What if we talked about Claire
for real
, for one thing? About what she did—and if it’s what I think, why. I mean, how could she . . . we have no control over anything that happens. What if we—”

“But we do,” Logan said. “Have control, I mean. If she killed herself, then that’s the ultimate control, right? Or even if she fell into the lake drunk or high or whatever, she made the choices that got her to that point—some people are super fucking crazy. Maybe Claire was just way crazier than we realized.”

I was fretting about what this might mean for me and my accident, what I considered my own secret insanity, when I heard the little clicking sound Lo makes when she chews her hair.

“Why are you nervous?”

“I’m not.”

“Stop chewing your hair.”

“I can’t. I’m biting the split ends off.”

“Why don’t you just get a haircut?”

“I’ll get one if you do.”

I didn’t respond to this. When my mom came home, she gathered us in the living room and said Bigs was “going back into the earth so that other things can grow and live.” Jenna was crying, either because she was old enough to make sense of this tortured description or because the vet had been more straightforward.

But Benj asked, “Did Bigs die?” directly, so my mom was forced to say yes. He did not cry, just stood there, swallowing and holding his breath. I could feel him quivering with sorrow. Apparently Bigs had eaten something that poisoned her. Naomi asked what, and my mom paused before saying, “Maybe part of a lily plant in the living room?”

Her voice was candy pink and pitched up, maybe because she was lying and didn’t want whoever’s toy it had actually been to die of guilt. I imagined a rabbit-shaped X-ray with a matchbox car or Lego, a Polly Pocket doll head or foam block in the stomach. I knew instantly that my mom had picked the lily because it belonged to her and my dad and it was sitting on the floor, so the rabbit would have only herself to blame if she had snacked on it. My mom is a good and kind liar.

I told Benj what I hoped was the truth, that someday it would be okay. Naomi was comforting Jenna. Then I asked my mom if Logan and I could go out for a walk, and she said if I didn’t mind, she’d rather we stayed in. I did mind, but I didn’t argue. Logan and I went up to Leah and Sarah’s room, since they were out, and talked about what the rabbit ate, whose fault it might have been, and why lie. Logan cares more than I do about blame; she blames her dad for leaving her mom, and whenever she mentions him, she uses her lime voice and I can hear her face squeeze tight and sour. She’s an only child, and since he moved to California she only sees him on school vacations, in huge week- or month-long doses, which is just really awkward—like, for example, she got her period for the first time while she was visiting him last year. She was the last to get it by an entire year, and she would have been totally thrilled except she didn’t want to tell him, so she had to come up with an excuse to go running to the drug store. And when she got home and told her mom, her mom cried because she hadn’t been there for it, and Logan ended up comforting her mom instead of her mom comforting her. Logan’s mom works all the time because they need money, and her dad doesn’t have much, either. And he’s never on time with anything, including sending checks. When her mom’s not working she’s out “making friends,” so she won’t die of loneliness, which I think is really selfish, because who cares if she has friends? Once you have kids, it’s your responsibility to take care of them until they’re old enough to be alone.

Obviously my parents can’t stop blaming themselves for what happened to me, especially my mom. Which is, I bet, how Claire M.’s parents feel. They were so strict; maybe she picnicked on drugs at the beach to punish or escape them. Or maybe they’re the types who think—as you have to, if you want to survive—that there was nothing they could have done. There was nothing my parents could have done about my eyes, either, but they still blame themselves, in a general, feel-like-shit-forever way. I wish they would stop, but I’d probably be furious if they did, too.

Sunday morning, Naomi woke Logan and me, knocking on Sarah and Leah’s door. When I answered it, she said, “I waited forever to wake you guys,” even though it was only seven thirty.

“What’s up, Nomi?” I asked.

“Why did you want to get away from me last night?”