The One Thing (25 page)

I could see it.

It was one of those miniature dogs that women carry in their purses and decorate with bows. The kind that yips instead of barks. It lit up a small puddle of light inside the car. I could now see
the dog, my lap, a crunched-up napkin in the console, a blue guitar pick that said
FENDER
, and, as Mason started the car, a snatch of his tanned fingers gripping the
keys.

Suddenly, I didn’t know what to do with my hands. “Is it...is it going to be all right?” I whispered as Mason pulled back onto the road.

He sighed and said, “She. It’s a she. And I hope so.” I could hear something different in his tone. I wondered whether he’d noticed that I’d gone from completely
blind to semisighted once he’d placed the dog in my lap, whether he saw something different in my expression now, whether he was starting to believe me. I had no way of knowing.

The dog shifted in my lap. I went to catch her, to keep her from sliding to the floorboard, and my fingers found her soft muzzle. Long, tangled fur. Skinny legs. She nudged my hand with her wet
nose, saying,
Comfort me, please
.

I swallowed and then ran a tentative hand down her torso, afraid to touch something that might cause her pain. She felt small, ribby, unloved. I swallowed again, this time pushing a huge lump
down my throat. “Where does your mom work? Is it close?” I asked.

“Chester Beach.”

The ride to Chester Beach dragged on forever. I didn’t notice any bloody, twisted limbs or obvious signs of trauma on the dog. But I knew they were there. I could see them hiding in the
labor of her breath and her too-slow heartbeat on my thigh.

The vet hospital was crowded for some reason. Full of people and chatter and healthy animals that didn’t need to be there. Mason’s mom had gone on break, so she wasn’t there as
I stood stiffly at the front desk in a tiny pool of light, the dog cradled in my arms. Mason spoke in a low voice to the people at the front counter. He seemed to know everybody who worked
there—his name floated over my head in a half-dozen different voices, all friendly and appreciative.

A nurse took us back to a room that smelled of rubbing alcohol and bleach. As the vet inspected the dog, I gripped the exam table, my stomach twisted in knots.

“Mason,” the vet said as he worked, “we appreciate your helping us out again.” I couldn’t see the vet’s face. It was just past that dim area where the light
dwindled away. But he had a low, kind voice, the sort of voice that generally doesn’t have the title “Doctor” stapled to it. His hands were wide and freckled, with fat veins
crawling from wrist to knuckle. There was a thin scratch on his thumb. A battle wound, presumably, from working with animals.

The dog looked up at me, and our eyes locked for a terribly long moment.
You’re going to be all right,
I mouthed. Her tail twitched as though she wanted to wag it but she had no
energy left to do so.

Something in my throat was strangling me, so I groped for a chair and then collapsed into it, pulling my legs up to my chest and balancing my chin on my knees. I squeezed my eyes shut. If I
could just make myself small enough, maybe I’d stop hurting.

Seconds dragged into minutes. Minutes felt like hours. I wondered why such a tiny dog had been wandering around by herself. I wondered whether we were the only ones who had ever really cared
about her. I wondered why life was so ridiculously unkind.

I couldn’t deal with this.

I had to deal with this.

Finally, the vet exhaled slowly. I felt the hair rise up on my forearms. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice soft, almost a whisper, “but there’s nothing we can do to
save her.”

Back in Mason’s car, my arms were crossed again. This time, for a different reason. I was trying to hold myself together. I felt as though I’d been turned inside out, all my emotions
scattered across the state of Connecticut.

I’d stood frozen in place in the vet’s exam room as the dog had died quietly in my arms, her tiny bright light blinking away into nothingness. When I’d handed her to the vet,
my hands shaking uncontrollably, I’d felt as though I’d failed her. Which was asinine. I couldn’t have done anything for her. And besides, I didn’t even
like
dogs.

“Can you...can you get me home quickly, please?” I asked Mason, my voice breaking. I closed my eyes and pressed my thumbs into my eyelids, angry with myself for being so emotional
again in front of him.

“Sure,” Mason said, his voice pensive.

I nodded a thank-you but said nothing.
Breathe,
I told myself. The tears were coming regardless, running in huge, fat trails down my cheeks. I could hear Mason’s concern long
before I heard his voice.

“Are you...are you okay?” he asked, touching my hand lightly for the briefest of seconds and then pulling away.

Nothing was okay. Things were so not-okay that my
no
would seem inadequate, flimsy, so I didn’t even bother to say it. And anyway, I was crying hard now in huge, fractured sobs,
so he had his answer.

Neither of us spoke when we arrived at my house. We just sat there for several moments in the uncomfortable silence. I didn’t know what to say to him—
Good-bye
or
Please
believe me about Ben
or
Help me, Mason Milton
. Nothing seemed to fit. For once in my life, I had no words. Just a firestorm of emotions raging through me. A volcano.

Silently, I opened the door, slid out of Mason’s car, and walked slowly into my house.

M
y feet felt as though they weighed a thousand pounds as I climbed the stairs to my old room. Oddly enough, it was the only place I wanted to be
tonight, even though I hadn’t set foot in there in months.

The door stuck a little as I opened it, as though it had been hastily sealed shut with flimsy Scotch tape. The room sighed out in front of me. I stood there in the dead silence, my hand still on
the doorknob, hovering at the entry but not walking through it.

The place smelled stale. Dusty. Like old, musty body spray and sweat-encrusted cleats and forgotten dreams. But even so, it was familiar. A part of me nearly as much as my hand or my nose.

I knew this room. I knew the books crammed into every corner. I knew the glow-in-the-dark stars that speckled the ceiling. I knew the half-dozen soccer balls jammed in the closet. I knew that
memories—full and sharp and colorful—breathed freely in this space. I could feel them there. Even see them there.

I crossed the room and sat on the very corner of my bed, running my hand along the worn blue and green quilt Gran had sewn for me years ago. When I was eight, she’d presented it to me for
my birthday. I’d wondered why she had given me a quilt when all I’d wanted was a handheld video game. But after she died, I treasured that quilt.

I didn’t know why I’d moved into the boxy, functional room downstairs after meningitis took my sight, and I didn’t know why I hadn’t touched this room ever since. All I
knew was that this was the only place I wanted to be tonight. So I fell asleep there, underneath Gran’s blue and green quilt and the slanted ceilings dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars.

T
he next day I felt foggy, sluggish, like I was trapped in somebody else’s dream—some pitiful girl who had lost more than she ever
thought she’d had to begin with, who was about to lose even more. Surely I wasn’t the indomitable Maggie Sanders, that much was true. And yet here I was in that other girl’s body,
woefully tapping out the Chopin-Clarissa tune on my sheets. And then on my desk. And then on the shower stall. And then on the kitchen counter.

It was unrelenting, that melody.

Finally I crept to the basement, an extension cord in hand. My old keyboard—still on the floor, right where I’d left it—kicked to life with a hum of chaotic energy when I
plugged it in. I sat on my knees in front of it, uncertain, and then leaned over and ran my fingers along the sharps and flats until I found middle C.

I pressed down with my thumb. The note sounded rusty, old, like it had been imprisoned in the keyboard for centuries.

I was shocked, actually, that I’d managed to produce real sound. So I stayed like that, hunched over the instrument with my thumb on the key, until the room swallowed up the note. Then I
placed my hands in position.

The basement held its breath.

Originally I’d planned to just tinker with the tune so I could get it out of my head. But my fingers had different ideas. They ripped into the piece as though I’d been playing it
forever—quick, clean, flawless.

I jerked my hands away and twisted them in my lap. It had sounded strange to me. Not like my song. But exactly like my song. It was a hodgepodge of everything that had been stampeding through my
head the past couple weeks. It was something that would make my old piano instructor bleed from the ears. Placing my fingers back on the keys, I pounded out the song once, twice, three times, ten
times, sometimes adding synthesized effects, and sometimes letting the music stand on its own.

Then I sat back on my heels.

The music seemed to hang over me, slightly unfinished—a sentence without an ending. And it picked at me in an indescribable way. Leaning over the keyboard again, I tacked on the descending
base line I’d admired the other day in Big Dough. The conversion was clunky as hell, and I stumbled over it again and again.

“I didn’t know you played.”

I jumped like a startled cat and shrieked.

Mason.

I resolutely turned toward him—like I was trying to prove something. What that
something
was, I didn’t know. That I wasn’t backing down, maybe. That I’d told him
the truth. I said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve played.” It was embarrassing that he’d heard me, but I wasn’t going to let him know that.

Neither of us spoke for the space of several breaths. Finally I lifted my chin and said, “How did you get in my house?”

I heard his boot kicking against the wall.
Lunk lunk lunk. Lunk-lunk-lunk-lunk-lunk.
“The door was unlocked,” he said. “I let myself in. Heard you playing down
here.” He cleared his throat and said, “Listen, can I talk to you about your sight?”

Mason had done some digging. Knowing that Merchant’s would never admit someone who wasn’t visually impaired, he’d called the school to confirm I was a student. He’d
stewed on the information for a few hours before he’d come over, but even so he seemed confused, disconcerted, like he had a lightbulb in his hand but no idea where to screw it in.

“You have to admit,” Mason said, “you can understand why it was so hard for me to believe at first—your hitting your head and then suddenly you can see people who
are...” He swallowed loudly and shifted a little, his leg so close to mine that I could feel the heat coming off of it. We were sitting on the steps of my back porch, where we’d been
for the past hour. He’d probably asked me a hundred questions so far, about my blindness, about my eyesight around Ben, about the others I’d seen.

Having our relationship switch gears so completely and so abruptly was bewildering. What had caused him to confirm my story, I didn’t know—whether he’d noticed my expression
change when he’d placed the dying dog in my lap, or whether he’d seen some sort of truth in me when I’d fallen apart in his car, or whether he’d simply taken some time to
really consider what I’d told him. All I knew was that the huge boulder between us had shifted a little, and I could finally squeeze past. I said, “Yeah. Believe me, I know.”

Was his leg drifting closer to mine? It felt like it. Somewhere in my body was a miniature fire truck, speeding desperately to the three-alarm on the side of my leg.

“It could be something else, though—the reason you’re seeing these people,” Mason said. “It could be a million different things.”

I nodded a wordless assent, not to tell him I agreed with him, but to show him I was listening. I knew I was right. I just couldn’t explain how. The truth was like a cold palm pressed on
the nape of my neck.

“Have you told anyone besides me?” Mason asked.

“An online doctor. And it didn’t go well. He suggested I was crazy,” I said.