Blind Sight (34 page)

“I don’t want to hear what a good person your sister’s husband is,” Luke says. “I don’t want to hear another fucking thing. I want you to get out of my room.”

“They had just met. I had no … I didn’t think … Luke, it has never mattered to me how you got here. Just that you did. You were a gift to me. You have to believe that. That is the truth.”

“That’s nothing.” It’s so nothing, Luke thinks, that it’s not even nothing.

“Belief is not truth,” Luke says. He cannot understand why Sara is standing there like she has a point.

“Belief is NOT TRUTH.” Luke wonders how he can make this really clear to Sara. Perfectly clear. Painfully clear.

“Everything,” Luke says, “EVERYTHING about you is a LIE. Get out of my room.”

“Luke—”

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY ROOM.”

“You are MY SON,” Sara says, covering her face with her hands. “MY SON.”

And then Sara looks up at Luke and she says, “Oh God,” and something in her face implodes, caves in, collapses, and Sara begins to sob. She doubles over, grabs her ribs, as if the force of her crying might crack them. Luke watches her in silence. Sara sobs violently for several minutes and then stops, still bent and shuddering: a boa who has lost the power to constrict.

Luke goes to his desk, grasps the glass sculpture of the banyan tree, turns, chooses a spot on the wall in between the poster of Earth and the one of deep space, takes a step back, aims, and hurls the sculpture as hard as he can. It hits the wall and shatters, instantly and completely, as if the molecules that bonded it together were expecting this to happen all along.

S
ara? Luke?”

It is Nana’s voice, in the hallway. Sara and Luke freeze, and look at each other.

“Don’t—” they say to each other, simultaneously.

“Luke?”

Nana appears in the doorway, one hand holding her maroon leather Bible to her chest.

“Mother.” Sara holds out a warning hand, stepping forward as if to push Nana out of the room. Nana catches Sara’s hand and looks at Luke, at the shards of glass on Luke’s floor, back at Luke’s face, and then at Sara.

“You told him,” Nana says, on a sigh.

“You know?” Luke asks, at the same time that Sara says, “Oh my God.”

“She knew?” Luke asks Sara, who shakes her head no and backs away from Nana’s grip.

“Oh, Sara,” Nana says.

“Who else—” Luke begins shakily, but Nana turns to him, fiercely.

“That’s enough now.” It is not the Sword of Silence. It is far heavier, and sharper: as if all previous swords have been mere practice for this moment. Luke steps backward onto a piece of glass, which cuts his foot.

“Careful,” says Sara, automatically.

“Come with me.” Nana puts her arm around Sara tenderly. Sara submits to this, her tall frame shrinking to fit under Nana’s arm. Nana puts her Bible down on Luke’s bed in order to put both arms around her daughter.

“Mom,” Sara says into Nana’s chest.

“Luke is going to stay right here,” Nana says. “Let’s go downstairs now.”

From below, the sounds of the front door, of Pearl’s laughter, of Nancy’s thick-heeled sandals, can now be heard.

“I don’t know what happened here just now,” Nana says to Luke. “But I suggest that whatever did stays in this room.”

“We’re home!” Aurora calls out. “Hellooo!”

“I’ll get the dustpan,” Nana says. “Sara, come with me.”

Sara lets herself be led out of the room. Nana shuts the door softly behind them.

Luke sits down on his bed. He examines the bottom of his foot. A piece of glass, not large, is stuck in the callus of his heel. He pulls it out, watches a tiny pool of A+ blood well up, and tosses the shard back into the pile under the posters. Luke presses his thumbs against the sides of the hole in his callus to force any remaining glass out that might be embedded. Blood spills over onto his thumbnails. He wipes this away on his sweatpants. Luke shuts his eyes.

“Hey.” It is Pearl, tapping at Luke’s door. “You in there?” Pearl opens the door. Luke bends quickly over his foot again.

“You missed it!” Pearl cries out. “You would not believe what—whoa, what happened? You drop something?”

Luke says nothing.

“Is Nana back? Oh yeah, I guess she must be.” Pearl picks up Nana’s Bible. “She left her instruction manual. You get sworded for missing Assembly?”

Luke begins to look around, for socks, for shoes, for a T-shirt. He needs to get out of this house.

“Did you and Nana have a fight?” Pearl asks. “She was going to wake you up but Sara was really adamant that you be allowed to sleep. I’m so used to getting up at the butt crack of dawn on Sundays that I couldn’t sleep in. So Rory and I hauled Aunt Nancy off to observe our local marketry. Please don’t tell me you had a fight with Nana and I missed it. Not even Aunt Nancy versus that really cranky Amish guy with the tomatoes is worth that.”

Luke turns to Pearl, takes a step toward her. Luke is taller than Pearl by several inches. He looks down at her, and he can tell, in an instant, that for the first time in his life he is making someone physically afraid of him. Pearl’s mouth opens, and she takes a step backwards.

“Leave. Me. Alone,” Luke says.

Pearl turns on her heel and runs out of Luke’s room.

Luke pulls a T-shirt over his head, shoves his feet into running shoes, and heads into the hallway, down the stairs, past Pearl on the landing, past Aurora at the foot of the stairs, past Nana, who is coming out of the kitchen holding a broom and dustpan, past Aunt Nancy, who is by the front door holding a cloth bag. Luke leaves his house and begins to run.

Luke knows these streets so well he runs without destination or direction. For lengths of time he runs and knows with absolute certainty that his Uncle Louis is actually his father. Louis is tall. Louis is thin. Louis has a precise, questioning sort of mind. Louis wanted to touch his head; Louis didn’t like the way he was being brought up. Louis looks to grocery-store clerks like he resembles Luke in some way.

Then this switches, and Luke knows with absolute certainty that Mark is his father. Mark is left-handed, Mark’s second toe is longer than his first. Mark has green eyes. Mark was once a skinny guy, and Mark hates cottage cheese. Mark was younger than Uncle Louis at the time of Luke’s conception, possessing more viably potent sperm. Mark has a sense of humor. Mark needs him. Mark loves him.

There is no evidence to suggest that handedness is genetic.

Luke thinks that he doesn’t need Uncle Louis. He doesn’t care if Uncle Louis needs him. He doesn’t love Uncle Louis. He never will.

“Mark is my father,” Luke says. He repeats this. Mark is my father. Mark’s my father. Mark’s my father. He’s my father, he’s my father, he’s my, he’s my, he’s my.

Luke stops running for a moment, sucks in air. He has no evidence. And without evidence you only have belief. Luke, panicked, wonders what else he is blindly believing, taking evidence for granted. He starts running again.

Luke thinks that he has had it all wrong, even from the very beginning, even from the Moment Before, and that he has never known what Sara was thinking. And that everything, every moment before every moment would have to be reconsidered. Every mandala swept away.

Luke thinks about the things he shouted at Sara. He would not have thought he was the sort of person who could say those things. He would not have thought it
probable
, based on the evidence of himself that he has. He would not have thought it probable that, having said those things, he would not regret saying them. Not totally. Not yet. Luke thinks of additional things he could have said. He continues the fight in his head, sometimes saying worse things, sometimes not.

He tries to argue rationally:

Was Mark using him?

Did Mark tell him he was gay because he felt guilty about using him, putting Luke on his website, talking about him to interviewers, taking him everywhere? Maybe Mark wanted to be honest about one thing, because he was being dishonest about everything else.

Kati could have been in on it too. She asked him to do a walk-through. She wanted Mark to be “out there” but not “out.” The whole summer she and Mark could have been working together.

But Mark had made lists of things he thought might make Luke happy. Private things, for just the two of them. Like Hawaii.

Which had become a story that Mark told on television. “My son, my son, my son.”

But he was his son. Sara wanted him to doubt his father. He was not going to doubt his father. He was on his father’s team, forevermore. He would stand by his father, even if his father never knew it. His father could never know it.

Sara didn’t really want him to doubt his father, did she? She wasn’t that kind of person. Maybe he has no idea what kind of person she is. Maybe no one knows anyone at all.

Luke thinks of his mother sobbing, waves this thought away, continues his argument:

Sara taught him to be compassionate.

No, that was wrong. He was compassionate. He would have been a compassionate person no matter who raised him.

Mark was his father.

But that was just hope. It wasn’t truth.

Sara had slept with Louis. Apparently Nana knew this, or had guessed it. That was why Nana never wanted to know how Louis was. Nana didn’t blame Sara. She blamed Louis. For marrying Caroline instead of Sara? And Sara hadn’t known that Nana had known. And did Louis really believe Sara? Did Caroline really not know? Aunt Linny couldn’t find her own way to the bathroom, but maybe she just preferred not to know.

Mark slept with people who were married. People had sex. You might think you knew the reason why, but maybe you didn’t.

You could have sex even if you knew it was the wrong thing to do and would never stop being wrong.

So he wasn’t intended to be a girl. He wasn’t intended at all. He wasn’t the Chosen One. He was the Accident. He was the thing that
made Sara feel she wasn’t invisible? He was something Mark could think about, and stop worrying for ten minutes?

It would be a simple thing, to know the truth. They swabbed the inside of your cheeks with a Q-tip and you could know your DNA. Soon they will have sequenced the entire genome and there will be no more mysteries.

But of course there will always be mysteries. Because people lied.

But he could know who his father was. That was something that could be known.

Luke hears a car behind him, and he moves to the right of the road. The car passes him, then slows down, pulls over, stops. Aurora gets out of the front seat. Luke stops. He is almost at the cemetery now. If he turns and cuts through the woods behind him and runs north for about fifteen minutes, he’ll be out of the state of Delaware. Aurora walks toward him. Luke, breathing hard, puts his hands on his hips, walks in circles.

“Luke.”

Luke, breathing too hard for speech, nods at Aurora, acknowledging her.

“Luke, sweetie. Are you okay?”

Luke sucks in a lungful of air.

“What happened?”

Luke shakes his head.

“I’m fine,” he says, before he starts to cry.

Aurora has her arms around him in an instant. At first Luke does not want this, does not want contact, can’t breathe, does not want to be still. After a moment, though, he holds on to Aurora as hard as he can. His sister’s arms act as a kind of myelin sheath, accelerating Luke’s sorrow, and he cries harder. Aurora pulls Luke down to sit by the side of the road and settles his head on her shoulder. Luke cries into this while Aurora rakes through Luke’s hair with her fingertips.
Aurora’s hands are Sara’s hands: large, wide, always warm and dry. Luke reaches an end of crying but remains in the curve of his sister’s shoulder for awhile longer. A car comes down the road. Luke can hear it slowing down, can feel Aurora waving it away. Luke listens to the gravel sound of tires on road. Luke can hear some kind of warbler singing in the woods behind them.

“I scared Pearl,” Luke says, sitting up.

“It’s good to know someone can,” Aurora says. “She’s fine.”

“I don’t want to go home right now.”

“So we won’t go home,” Aurora says. “We’ll stay right here. Or I’ll take you back to New York with me.”

Luke nods.

“Did Sara tell you what happened?”

“No. She and Nana are having some kind of a talk. Pearl’s getting Aunt Nancy high.”

Luke finds half a laugh coming out of his mouth.

“No, I don’t know what they are doing,” Aurora says. “I’ve been driving around looking for you. I remembered you like to run up here. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“No.”

“That’s okay.”

Luke takes off his left shoe, then sock. He looks at his heel, where the glass puncture is now a little inflamed. Aurora leans forward to examine it.

“Does it hurt?”

“No, but I should put something on it,” Luke says. “Or clean it or something.”

“There’s a first-aid kit in Vlad.”

Luke walks with Aurora to the car, keeping his heel off the ground. Aurora opens the trunk, starts searching beneath dusty blankets, folding camp chairs, a yoga mat, reusable grocery bags, beach hats. Aurora pulls out a battered white first-aid kit. Luke sits on the fender and holds out his foot.

“Remember when Pearl got all those splinters in her feet?” Aurora asks, crouching down.

Luke shakes his head.

“When Mr. Pollack redid the porch? You remember.”

Luke shakes his head again.

“You were so cute. The porch was falling down, so Nana enlisted Mr. Pollack and he came over and tore it all down and rebuilt it. You followed him around everywhere. Sara made you a little tool belt, and you walked around with, like, a little plastic ruler, measuring things, telling everyone that you were helping. You don’t remember that?” Aurora dabs some alcohol on Luke’s foot.

“Ow. No, I don’t remember that.”

“I guess you were too little. Anyway, when it was done, Pearl went running across the porch. In her bare feet. And it hadn’t been sanded yet. She got about halfway back before she realized what had happened and then she started screaming. Sara came rushing out and hauled Pearl off to the bathroom. They were in there for hours, Pearl screaming the whole time, while Sara pulled all the splinters out.” Aurora laughs, shaking a bottle of Mercurochrome. “Then Sara coated Pearl’s feet in tea tree oil, or something like that, and gave her an amulet to wear, and a little sign that said, ‘Pearl is a brave girl,’ and that night Nana came tiptoeing into our room with a tube of Neosporin.”