Blindsided (14 page)

“Excellent!” Mr. Lee exclaimed. “Pretty soon, we get physical!”

 

Things kind of fell into a routine about then. Bree seemed to be trying more, and Natalie wasn’t quite as homesick, even if she still looked forward to daily phone calls to and from home.

“How’s the cat?” she asked her mother one night. “Does he still wait outside the milk room for his scraps every morning?”

There was a pause.

“Actually, we haven’t seen the cat for a while,” her mother said. “But he’s wild, Natalie. You know how they are.”

Natalie was sad to hear the cat had disappeared.

“A guy caught a fifty-one-pound carp in Deep Creek Lake,” her father suddenly recalled. He probably didn’t want her moping about the cat. “Everyone’s talking about that. Hey! And the Steelers won last night! I bet the kids were excited.”

“Actually, Dad, the kids here are all Ravens fans,” Natalie had to tell him. “Remember? Most of them live in Baltimore.”

“Oh, gosh,” he replied. He sounded disappointed.

Her mother jumped in next to report what the cousins were doing. “Uncle Jack says Florie and Tiffany helped tag monarch butterflies so scientists can track their flight to Mexico,” she said. “Isn’t that something? Those little things flying all that way?”

Then, midway through the week, there was a call from Meredith.

Meredith:
Nat, I wanted to tell you something really exciting. I’ve been asked to the homecoming dance this year—with a senior! Can you believe it?

Natalie:
Homecoming. Wow, Meres, that’s wonderful!
(Natalie forced herself to sound cheerful. She had never been to a formal dance herself.)
Who’s taking you?

Meredith:
That guy who took us to the lake last weekend, remember? Richard. Except everyone calls him Richie.

Natalie:
Richie.

Meredith:
Richie Mengler. He’s on the basketball team. Maybe you can come to a game this winter if you get home early enough on Friday. Yeah. So it’s exciting, but now I have to find a dress. There’s got to be something out there that will look good on me.

Natalie:
I’m sure you’ll find the perfect dress.

Meredith:
Look, I gotta go. Richie’s calling at eight thirty and I need to get my homework done or Mom won’t let me talk. See ya.

There was a click and Meredith was gone.

“Thanks for calling,” Natalie said sarcastically into the dead phone.

It was happening, wasn’t it? Meredith was drifting away and there wasn’t anything Natalie could do to stop it. She was having a normal life while Natalie was struggling to have a life, period. It wasn’t anger Natalie felt right then, not even jealousy, just an enormous wistfulness. A sadness.

Bree, who sat on her bed practicing Braille, moved a piece of paper. Surely, she had heard. Out in the hall, a door closed and the sound of a cane hitting the wall echoed down the corridor.

“Hey, my aide gave me this book today,” Bree said.

Natalie rolled her eyes. She was not in a mood to chitchat.

But Bree got up and started patting the top of her desk. “Here it is.” She bumped into her chair, but walked across the room to Natalie and pushed the book into her hands. “You have a little magnifier thingee to read, don’t you?”

“Bree, I need to be doing my homework—”

“Come on,” Bree urged her. “My aide was reading this today and it was
really
corny, but funny, too. Just open to a random page and read it.”

Natalie clicked on her light and focused on the title:
14,000 Things to Be Happy About.
She knew Bree was only trying to cheer her up because of the phone call. Opening to the middle of the book, she ran her finger down the page. A wan smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Dogs nose-deep in wrapping paper,” she read aloud. “An herb-stuffed pillow. Leisurely bubble baths. Slices of fresh pineapple. Bengay muscle rub.”

“Oh, I hate that stuff!” Bree interrupted.

“Me too,” Natalie agreed. Then she read the next one: “Walking into your dreams and coming out a new person . . .” And she stopped. “You know, I have that dream. I dream sometimes that I can still see as well as I did years ago. Like I’m running through the fields or chasing goats. I can see everything so clearly.”

“You had good vision then?” Bree said.

“Pretty normal until I was about eight years old.”

“Me too,” Bree said. “I had perfect vision until the accident in June. Now I have nothing.”

Natalie looked at her and saw that Bree was kind of hunched over on her bed, twisting strands of her long hair in her hands.

“I wanted to be a dancer,” Bree said. “I took dancing lessons all my life. My mom was so proud of that. She’s the one who started me out with tap dance lessons. It’s like the one little dream I had: being a dancer. Then in one afternoon, one stupid thing and it’s over.”

“I’m so sorry,” Natalie said quietly. “Sometimes I wonder which would be worse, losing vision slowly, like me—or all at once, like you.”

“Yeah.” Bree nodded. “I guess I know where the term
blindsided
came from. It might have been nice to get ready for this. It’s been such a nightmare.”

Natalie disagreed. “No,” she said, “having time to get ready doesn’t make it easier. No one can possibly be prepared to go blind.”

Another moment passed when neither of them spoke.

“Guess I’ll go ahead and wash up for bed and do my eyedrops,” Natalie said. But walking across the room, she tripped over the balloon Meredith had given her. The helium was practically gone and the balloon hovered, an eerie metallic ghost, about an inch above the floor. Natalie reached down and grabbed it, then went to her desk for a pair of scissors, cut off its end, and stuffed the deflated balloon in the wastebasket.

No matter how bad off you are, there’s always somebody worse off than you. So be grateful. . . .
It was probably good advice repeating in Natalie’s head. But right then, she wished she could have been one of those little butterflies flying to Mexico.

D
uring the next few weeks at school, the weather shifted and the hot, humid days of summer were blown away by refreshing breezes that brought a stretch of pleasant fall days. Bright colors decked out the forest surrounding the campus, and while not even Natalie could fully appreciate the pretty foliage, all the kids enjoyed the crunchy sound their canes made sweeping aside leaves on the school’s sidewalks. Time was passing; many of the major challenges of six weeks ago were now merely part of daily routine.

But time was running out, too. And Natalie knew it. Her tiny circle of vision had shrunk to the circumference of a drinking straw. Deep inside, she kept her fears at bay by living on hope and denial. Outwardly, Natalie was the star student, feverishly learning new skills, plunging forward, and keeping herself so busy there was never time for her to stop and examine reality, or poke at the fear that lay hidden beneath the surface. Busy. Keeping busy became her modus operandi.

Natalie spent hours in the library or hunched over her desk in her room, completing her lessons with the magnifier and pounding on the Brailler for practice. She stopped counting steps and focused exclusively on cane technique and memorizing mental maps of the school. In her room, Natalie no longer threw her cane in the back of the closet. She carefully set it on the shelf above her clothes, beside her umbrella. A “Go Cougars!” key chain and a simple, silver whistle had been attached to the cane’s handle to identify it as hers.

In her frenetic race against time, Natalie took to heart every new skill she was taught. On laundry day, she did her own wash, using grippers to hold socks of the same color together. She kept herself organized by using different-shaped containers for shampoo, conditioner, and bath gel. A rubber band around her tube of face cream prevented Natalie from getting it mixed up with her toothpaste.

With others from the dorm, she used the George Foreman grill to turn out steak and chicken dinners. She shopped for groceries and discovered that there were employees available at some food stores who would assist with shopping. The girls then identified the food with premade Braille labels stuck on index cards that they rubber-banded around the boxes of food. A good idea, Natalie realized, since many food items—such as rice, cake mix, cornstarch, and brown sugar—came in similar-size boxes.

The fighting lessons were yet to come, but eagerly awaited. Natalie and the others giggled in the hallway one night, wondering which was better: gym class with Mr. Lee or their new health class every other week with Miss La Verne. The girls made Braille calendars to track their periods the first week. Next time, each of them made a fist-size uterus out of clay to get a tactile idea of what they carried inside their own bodies. They also created clay ovaries the size of grapes and connected the ovaries to the clay uterus with pipe cleaners that represented Fallopian tubes. There was a rumor that in an upcoming class a rubber penis would be passed around. . . .

Natalie also threw herself into doing things for others as well. (She hadn’t forgotten her deal with God.) She talked about starting a student council for the kids at school and perhaps asking for Braille labels on the salad bar so everyone could make their own salad. She tried to think of ways in which the girls on her floor could have fun together in the evenings, too.

“Come on,” Natalie begged Eve. “I know it sounds dumb but give it a chance. Bree said she’d watch the movie if everyone else did. Anything to get her off the cell phone with her boyfriend!”

“A descriptive movie.
Ugh
. Where some guy describes everything? I hate those. If it’s stupid, Natalie, I’m leaving,” Eve warned.

The girls put on their pajamas and slowly gathered in the living room, some bringing their pillows. Natalie popped popcorn in the microwave. When they were ready, Natalie pushed in the tape (amazingly, the school still had a VCR) and started the bowl of popcorn around.

“This better be R-rated,” Serena said, still combing out wet hair from a shower.

The television screen flickered and a voice came on:
An animated logo appears in three-dimensional letters: FOX VIDEO . . . And now the screen glows an eerie blue, then fills with swirling white mist. We fly through the misty clouds. . . . The snow-covered Alps give way to a sunny Alpine meadow where a young woman with short blond hair strolls in the grass swinging her arms in a carefree stride. She wears black shoes and stockings and a gray striped apron over a black dress. She spreads her arms and twirls in a joyous spin as she bursts into song: “The hills are alive—”

“With the SOUND OF MUSIC!” the girls all chimed in at the same time.

“Oh, come on, give me a break!” Serena moaned. “I am not watching
The Sound of Music
! It’s for little kids.”

“It is not! I love this movie!” Murph cried.

“Yeah, it’s nice, Serena. Relax and enjoy it,” Natalie said.

Which is exactly what they did. All of them. They stayed for the entire movie. And for two days following, sweet strains of “Edelweiss” could be heard, hummed and sung out loud in the hallways of that dorm.

Underneath it all, of course, the truth of what was happening stalked Natalie, like a beast in the bushes. When Natalie allowed herself to even
think
about the possibilities, even momentarily, the result was not just scary, it was crippling. Outwardly, she seemed to be doing well. Inwardly, she was still scared to death.

 

“I want to be a biker chick or a gangster’s moll,” Serena said casually at lunch one day.

“A
mall
?” Murph asked. “I thought that’s where you went shopping.”

“Wrong moll,” Serena retorted. “This moll is like a gangster’s mistress. You know, a prostitute? Do you need me to define that?”

“Noooo. Duh. I know what a prostitute is.”

For the past few days, conversation at mealtime had pretty much centered around costumes for the school’s annual Halloween party.

“I am going to be a pirate,” Arnab told them. “With a patch over one eye.”

“Better not put a patch over the other eye, too, or you won’t be able to see,” Sheldon joked.

“How about you, Natalie?” JJ asked. “What are you going to be?”

“Earth to Natalie,” Serena said. “Are you coming?”

“Of course,” Natalie forced herself to say as she went to work prying the top off a carton of yogurt. “Do you think I’d miss it? I was a cat last year.” Her hands stopped moving as she recalled last year’s Halloween sleepover at Meredith’s. Coralee and Suzanne were there, too. Meredith had polished Natalie’s nails while they watched a scary movie—the girls didn’t mind filling Natalie in on what she couldn’t see—and they didn’t go to sleep until three o’clock in the morning.

“A cat?” Eve was asking. “Did you say a cat?”

“Yes, a cat,” Natalie said. “If I can find my tail and my ears.”