The One Thing (20 page)

The microphone crackled and the crowd hushed. My head jerked up.

It was time.

For a couple heartbeats, it felt hard to breathe. Like maybe something had crept into my chest and taken up residence against my lungs.

I leaned toward Clarissa. “This is...”

“The best!” she squealed.

David gave the cymbals one quick hit, as though metaphorically clearing his throat, and then Mason’s voice rang out—devastating and absolute and compelling—buckling my knees
and stealing my breath in a single instant.

I’d heard “Lucidity” probably a thousand times over the past couple months. It was a ballad that began with just Mason’s voice and nothing else, a ballad that ached and
exhaled and bent and glowed, so intense and so earnest that it almost hurt to listen to it. It was as though this sort of emotion was what this park was made for, maybe even what Mason was made
for—to sing here, where the modulations in his tone arched up to the sky, sank into the grass, and then vaulted back up again to twist through the trees. An instant later, the band fell in
step alongside him and the music took off, all wheeling clouds and gossamer strands of wind.

There was a type of perfection I would always connect with that moment. Someday, I might forget a few of the details—how the pads of my fingers felt as they tapped the keyboard riffs on my
thighs, or how Mason’s voice dipped an octave lower than expected when he sang the third verse—but I would never, ever forget how I felt.

Clarissa grabbed my hand. I squeezed and didn’t let go, smiling the most genuine smile I’d had in years. And just for that moment in time, I couldn’t remember what it felt like
to be unhappy or unfulfilled or unloved. This was my whole world, in this very moment, and for the first time since I’d lost my sight, I felt like I belonged.

“R
each your hands back a little more,” said a fellow restroom patron who wore so much sweet-smelling perfume, she was giving me a
candied headache.

Trying not to inhale, I nodded a thank-you in her direction and moved my hands backward in the sink. Nothing.

Ugh.

I wasn’t in the mood for China Bistro Day, and I certainly wasn’t in the mood for this restroom. Couldn’t we go back to knobs? What was wrong with knobs? You grope around for
them, find them, and turn them. One, two, three. But these days, you have to be a Hogwarts graduate to get all this automatic stuff to function properly.

I waved my hands under the sink again. And...nothing.

“Here—let me help you!” she yelled. She took my hands unexpectedly, attempting to move them to the right spot. Startled by her sudden touch, I sucked in my breath and twitched
away from her, which must have triggered the automatic faucet, because water was abruptly flying everywhere, spattering my hands and face.

She stuffed a wad of paper towels in my hands and said sympathetically, “I’m sure it isn’t easy being blind.”

I fought the urge to sigh. She was using the Voice—the one people use that is saturated with pity. I said, “I’m fine, thanks,” and I took off toward the door, suavely
tripping on what sounded like a trash can on the way out.

China Bistro Day was a cornball holiday, a ridiculous celebration that Gran had fabricated years ago to persuade Gramps to eat Chinese food. Gramps, a picky eater who always claimed that
“Chinese food has too many damn colors in it,” would unfailingly grumble and grouse all the way to the restaurant, but when it was time to leave, his plate was always licked clean.

The tiny restaurant was out in the sticks, about twenty miles inland from our house. Which was sort of weird if I really thought about it. Why drive away from a perfectly decent midsize city to
Podunk, Connecticut, to eat a meal? But the fact was, years ago Gran had claimed that this place was the best, so this place was where we came. Even now, years after Gran’s death, we all
piled into the car on this day and drove to the China Bistro for dinner.

I’d been coming here since I was a little girl, so I knew the place well. I knew it was owned by an ancient Chinese woman who shook a good-natured index finger at me when I used a fork
instead of chopsticks. I knew that there were so many reds and yellows and oranges decorating the place that it looked as though a Starburst bag had burst all over the walls and then tracked its
feet over the throw rugs. I knew that the fortune cookies tasted like pure heaven when dredged through plum sauce. And I knew that the side window overlooked a monstrous soccer field owned by a
neighboring college. My mother always requested a table next to that particular window, which meant that we usually had to wait to be seated. Tonight had been no exception. We’d waited a full
hour for our table. It was now creeping up on eight o’clock, and though our table was dotted with appetizers, Gramps was growing more and more irritable with every passing second.

“Where are the breadsticks?” he said in a surly voice.

“Dad,” my father said to Gramps, “there are no breadsticks here. It’s a Chinese restaurant.”

Gramps was a big eater. I knew this because he spent a good deal of time in our kitchen, mooching food out of our fridge. He lived with us without technically living with us, in the garage
we’d converted to a one-room apartment after Gran died. While he griped about his lack of privacy, he spent more time in our house than in his own place, swiping food from our refrigerator
and watching TV on our big screen. Though he’d never actually said it, I knew why. He was lonely. He missed Gran.

Since my mother spent her days coaching and Dad spent his days lawyering, Gramps leveled out our lopsided house. He was the guy who was available to cart me around when I needed to go somewhere.
He was the guy who sat with me at the counter to eat microwavable frozen dinners. He was the guy who’d taken me to the hospital when I’d come down with meningitis.

The morning I’d gotten really sick, I’d stumbled out of bed and into the kitchen. Though it was only five o’clock, my mother was already up and dressed in her usual attire:
pleated khakis and a pressed oxford shirt. She was making a pot of coffee.

“Mom, I have a fever,” I said, my voice slow and thick.

She frowned and touched my head with the back of her hand. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, her face crumpling. That was the thing about my mother: she hated seeing me sick. “You
must have that flu that’s going around.”

“Yeah,” I told her, so lethargic that the words felt heavy as I struggled to move them out of my mouth. “And my head is killing me. Plus, my neck? It’s so
stiff.”

She held my face in her palms and kissed me on the forehead. “Go back to bed and rest. I’ll call my boss and tell him I won’t be in today.”

“Don’t you have a game this afternoon?”

She waved a dismissive hand and nudged me toward my room. “That’s why I have an assistant coach.”

Guilt clawed at my stomach. “I’ll be fine, Mom. Promise. I just need to sleep. Go to work.”

And so she did.

Four hours later, I called her to tell her I was getting worse, but she must’ve already headed to the field, because I got her voice mail. Six hours later, Gramps took me to the emergency
room. Two hours after that, I’d nearly died—twice—from my fever. Three hours after that, I was blind.

But tonight at the China Bistro, my mother had absolutely no problem picking up her phone. It rang twice during dinner. Both times it was the university.

“Hey, kid,” Gramps said to me as Mom took her second call. “Your friend just walked in.”

My fork hovered over my plate. “What friend?”

“The blond one with the big mouth.”

Lauren.

I swallowed. “Where is she?”

“Hostess station.”

I probably should have stayed put, just sunk down in my seat and played dumb. I had the perfect excuse for not knowing she was there, after all. But something inside me tugged me upright, toward
the hostess station. Maybe I wanted to find out why she hadn’t come to my house with Sophie. Maybe I wanted to know where I stood with our friendship. Maybe I was just into self-torture.

I called out a general hello as I approached. And in the short, uncomfortable silence that followed, I almost spun around and hauled ass back to the table. But then Lauren descended on me in a
cloud of her mother’s perfume, hugging me quickly in one jerky motion and then pulling away. “Maggie!” she said, her voice overly resonant for such a tiny place. “Holy
crap—I haven’t seen you in
forever
.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s been a while. I thought maybe you’d come by with Sophie last week.”

Awkward pause.

I crossed my arms. Shifted my weight. Trying to calm down, I tapped the little Chopin riff on my side. Then the Clarissa rhythm. Then both of them together.

It didn’t help.

Finally Lauren cleared her throat and said, “Yeah, well, I had plans to hang out with Kirsten Richards. Remember her? Used to play middie for Southington? The girl who could hit the upper
nineties without even trying? She’s on our team now! She moved here after you...”

Another awkward pause.

“Lost my eyesight,” I supplied.

“Right,” Lauren said. “Anyway, we sort of lucked out because Kirsten’s, like...well, you remember. She’s so good. She’s already bagged a full ride to
UConn!”

“A full ride to UConn,” I breathed, swaying on my feet as the enormous injustice sucked the wind right out of me. “Good for her.”

And as I lugged myself back to the table, I realized that Lauren hadn’t even bothered to ask how I was doing. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Lauren had always been more
interested in Maggie the Soccer God than just plain Maggie. Still, it didn’t hurt as much as it should have. I just wondered why I’d set the friendship bar so low.

“How’s Lauren?” Dad asked as I sat down.

“Great,” I said with false cheer.

“Did she mention where she’s applying to college?” he asked.

I propped my elbows on the table and jammed my fingers into my eyelids. “She didn’t say.”

Dad cleared his throat, segueing into interrogation mode. “What about you? What did you think about those DVDs?”

“I haven’t had a chance to listen to them.”

“Chop-chop,” he said, his tone practiced-casual. “For the record, Cal Poly sounds amazing. They have some awesome programs for the visually impaired. Your mother is dead set on
Missouri State.”

I heard Mom’s phone snap shut. “I’m not dead set on it, Steve,” she interjected. “The choice is ultimately up to Maggie.”

The way she spoke about me—it was like I wasn’t even here.

Maybe I wasn’t.

I said, sort of loudly, “Why do I even have to think about college right now?”

My mother sighed tiredly, as though I was intentionally being difficult. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I’ve been blind for seven months and I still basically suck at it,” I said. “What if I never really learn how to get around on my own? What if I never
understand how to make it across a school campus without breaking my face? What if I can’t go to college?”

“Maggie, we understand it’s been a big adjustment for you,” my mother said, her words forced and stilted, like she’d been practicing them. “But once you try, once
you get out there, I’m sure you’ll be surprised by how much you can do.” This little spiel of hers was over the top, and frankly, over the top wasn’t Mom’s style. She
sounded an awful lot like she was quoting some book like
How to Help Your Child Adjust to Blindness
. “Maybe you should schedule a couple extra sessions with Hilda?”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“No. I spend plenty of time with Hilda.”

Her voice slightly wooden now, she said, “Well, your counselor at Merchant’s said that some extra O and M sessions might help you.”

Twisting my napkin in my hands, I said, “My counselor has spoken to me exactly twice, and one of those times it was to ream me out for the prank. He’s hardly an authority on what I
need.”

She cleared her throat. “Well, maybe you’d benefit from talking to him a little. He could probably help you...you know, sort out some of your issues.”

I felt my face flush. She somehow managed to forget that she was one of my biggest issues, that she was the fault line running underneath every small, uncertain step I’d made over the past
several months. “I’m fine,” I said, effectively ending the conversation.

By eight forty-five, all I wanted was to go to bed. Just curl up in a little knot under my covers and forget about this entire evening. Somewhere in a dark, dusty corner of my chest was the
excitement I’d once had about applying to UConn. It crushed my lungs like the weight of a planet. I leaned back and tried to inhale, tried to force my lungs to expand, and in doing so I saw a
flash of something green in the vicinity of the window beside our table. For a moment I thought I’d imagined it, just some strange hallucination of a troubled mind. Still, the shock must have
shown in my face, because Dad said, “Mags? What’s wrong?”

Before I could answer, an ancient, stooped man wearing a jade-colored polo shirt shuffled into the restaurant, lighting up a small, muddy radius around him.