The One Thing (9 page)

By the time I wandered into the living room, where Gramps and Dad were listening to an ancient Beatles album and swapping conspiracy stories about John Lennon’s death, I was complete
wreckage. I felt compelled to see Ben again, which then made me feel guilty because he was just a good-hearted ten-year-old kid who didn’t deserve to get used just so I could see, which then
made me feel frustrated because currently I
could not see
one freaking thing, which then made me long to see Ben again, which then made me feel guilty for wanting to see Ben again, which
then made me realize why I usually ignored my goddamn feelings. I groaned quietly and buried my face in a couch pillow.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Dad asked.

I was so close to telling him the truth—honest, I was—but the words seemed too twisted to make sense coming out of my mouth, so in the end I replied that everything was fine, that I
had a headache, and I walked back to my room and shut the door.

I paced a little. Sat on the edge of my bed a little. Listened to the radio a little. And then I lurched up, unloaded in front of my computer, and signed on to Dr. Darren’s website.

This wasn’t the first time I’d turned to Dr. Darren. I’d always skewed a bit toward the hypochondriac side of the wellness scale. Back in the fourth grade I’d had
imaginary thumb cancer for a while. And then flesh-eating disease of the ankle. In middle school I’d acquired a touch of fabricated tuberculosis, which, given my track record for medical
misadventures, my parents had not taken seriously. I’d therefore done what most paranoid quasi-tuberculosis sufferers would do: I’d signed on to the Ask Dr. Darren website and requested
advice.

From what I remembered of his website photo, Dr. Darren was a gray-haired, leather-skinned man who had long, scraggly eyebrows that must’ve grown tired of lying down flat because they
stuck straight out of his forehead. He had a strong, direct manner of answering questions—a convincing sort of approach that always managed to help me sort out my preoccupations. And that was
what I needed right now.

It took me forever to navigate through his website. When I finally located the Q and A section, my fingers hovered over the keys for a moment before I typed in my question: “Hello, Dr.
Darren. I was wondering whether it’s possible for a blind person to get their sight back from a head trauma?”

I gnawed on my thumbnail while I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Jerking out of my chair, I paced back and forth in front of my desk, shaking out my hands and trying my best to keep from becoming too optimistic. Finally: a little ding of an incoming message.
I collapsed in my seat and tabbed down the screen to find his reply: “Good evening, Maggie. I’m afraid the answer is no.”

I rubbed the back of my neck for a moment and then typed my response: “Not even part of their sight?”

Dr. Darren: “Part of their sight?”

Me: “Just around one person. Like, if I hit my head and then afterward I could see someone.”

Dr. Darren: “If you hit your head and you’re suddenly seeing things, you’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury and you are hallucinating. Or”—the screen reader
paused for some time, so long that I bolted to my feet again and crossed my arms—“you have a psychiatric disorder.”

I collapsed on my bed and threw my forearm over my eyes. This was exactly what I’d feared would happen if I turned somewhere for answers. I was on my own.

T
he feminine hygiene aisle in Target wasn’t the best place to be marooned. Gramps was in the store somewhere. He’d shoved me into this
aisle, muttering that “the sort of things” I was looking for were right in front of me. And then he informed me that he’d be right back, that he needed fishing supplies and also
something that had sounded like toenail clippers, but I couldn’t be certain. His words generally came out a little muffled, so half the time I didn’t know what he was saying.

In contrast, my other grandfather, Grandpa Brian—whom I called Repeat Grandpa because everything he said came out of his mouth twice (“How was school? How was
school?”)—made his words difficult to miss. Repeat Grandpa lived in California and was not very grandpa-ish because he was tall and skinny, and he rarely cussed. In order to be a
grandpa, you should be old and grumpy and bald and opinionated and fat, like Gramps. Or at the very least, you should have a big potbelly, the tendency to grouse about people who drive too fast,
and an affinity for the phrase “goddamn it all to hell.” But that was just me.

Gramps had been my best friend since I lost my sight. He offered me a couple of things that girls my age could not. One, he didn’t feel sorry for me, and two, he wasn’t about to
treat me differently because I couldn’t see. I could not say the same for my old friends.

Anyway, a half hour earlier, Gramps had hollered into my room, “Going to Target. Need anything?” At the time, I’d been camped on the Internet for a good three hours, first
trying to figure out the Big Secret by, as Tommy X had suggested, looking “beyond the surface” (i.e. going all the way back to the band’s first official website post and then
picking through it for clues), and then, after coming up empty, moving on to listening to my screen reader recite entries from an online encyclopedia. I’d started with the
D
s rather
than the
A
s to pay homage to the Dead Eddies. Back in the day, the Dead Eddies were the band that had first gotten me into music. I mean, their song, coincidentally enough called
“The Beginning of It All,” was singularly responsible for transforming my life. And so: the
D
s, out of respect. At any rate, I was cursing Tommy X and perusing the
D
s
when Gramps came into my room and asked me the Target question. Naturally, I was in dire need of some girly things. And naturally, Gramps wasn’t about to set foot in the girly aisle for me.
So I’d had to go along.

Gramps drove a Ford truck that was so old it had probably driven Moses to church. But he refused to replace it. He claimed the old stuff was sturdier than the new. Which was probably a good
thing, because Gramps’s driving skills were a little on the sketchy side. Just last year, he’d gotten into a fender bender with his barbershop. As he’d pulled into the
shop’s parking lot, he’d hit the gas instead of the brake. It had ended up being a very expensive haircut.

“Mom at work?” I asked Gramps as we pulled out of the driveway.

“Yup,” Gramps said. “Left at dawn and said she’d be working late tonight.”

My chest knotted up reflexively, like it always did when Mom spent long days away from home. It was childish and paranoid, but ever since she’d disappeared while I was in the hospital, I
wondered whether this would be the time she wouldn’t come home, whether my blindness had scared her away for good. I cleared my throat and said, “What about Dad?”

“Left for work at five thirty.” This didn’t surprise me. Dad got up with the chickens to commute to Manhattan. He was an intellectual property lawyer. Whatever that was.
He’d dutifully explained it to me one day, and I’d dutifully forgotten.

It took only a couple of minutes in Gramps’s passenger seat for me to start to yawn. When I first lost my sight, I spent a lot of time yawning, and in turn I spent a lot of time wondering
why I was yawning, which just made me yawn all the more. It took a doctor to explain this phenomenon: I was yawning because of my sudden lack of visual stimulation. My brain thought that nothing
was going on, so it figured it must be nighttime. In other words, my life was so freaking boring that my brain thought it was time to sleep.

I figured that I was yawning now because all Gramps talked about was the weather and the weather and the weather some more. And after that he gave me an update on his trick knee, which, for
those who do not speak Prehistoric Doofus, is not a magical knee but a knee that locks up once in a while. Finally he said, “So. Why are you hanging out with the crippled kid? A bit young for
you, if you ask me.”

Gramps didn’t have a batter-up circle for his thoughts. He just opened his mouth and struck out. Swing and a miss. No political correctness whatsoever.

“Gramps,” I chastised, suddenly the moral one in our relationship. “He’s not crippled—he has spina bifida. And as far as his age goes, he’s actually pretty
mature.”

Gramps harrumphed. “I hear he sucks at swimming.”

“Who told you that?” I asked, feeling weirdly protective of Ben.

“Hank.” Hank was Gramps’s friend. Without fail, the two of them met for coffee and donuts every morning.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I said, “How would Hank know about Ben’s swimming?” Though I already knew the answer to this question. Hank was the town gossip.

“Hank’s mailman’s son told him,” Gramps said, and I rolled my eyes. “The whole family has had a rough go. The older boy? Mason? A hothead. Suspended from school a
couple years back. After his dad died. In some local rock band called the Squeaky Guns.”

“The Loose Cannons,” I muttered, not appreciating the reminder of Mason.

I was quiet for the remainder of the ride. And now, as I stood stranded in Target, Mason Milton was still on my mind. Which was to say that I was standing there like a complete mindless idiot.
Huffing out a monstrous gust of air, I reached up, miscalculating the location of the shelves and knocking what sounded like a thousand boxes off the Great Wall of Tampons. I squatted to pick them
up, grumbling under my breath. Gramps’s dumping me off here felt more than a little premature. Hilda had yet to teach me how to navigate in stores. Hell, I’d barely walked down the
sidewalk yesterday without breaking my face.

Footsteps rounded the corner behind me. And then a girl’s voice: “Oh wow. That’s...wow. Want some help picking those up?” There was an awkward pause in which I
deliberated whether to decline the offer, a pause just long enough for her to discover she knew me.
“Maggie?”
she said, clearly surprised.

Now, if I were the observant type, I would have already recognized Sophie’s voice. Lord knows I’d heard it a million times out on the high school soccer field, and a million times
before that. It brought back memories of normalcy. Memories of slumber parties and laughfests and summer camps.

Sophie and I had known each other for what felt like an eternity, but I was reasonably certain we were seven when we first met. It was during our first soccer practice for a coed league, where
all great friendships are born. That day, one of our teammates, Trevor Wilson—a boy with tumbleweed-looking hair and one lazy eye that had spread to his entire body—kept tripping
Sophie. He and his friends thought it was funny. A game. But I did not. I have this thing about bullies. They infuriate me. So after he tripped her a half-dozen times, I marched up behind him and
tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned around, I kneed him in the groin. That was the end of the tripping thing and the beginning of Sophie and me.

Sophie was exceedingly tall and exceedingly red-haired, and she had these slender fingers that she drummed against her chin when she was trying to figure something out. I knew this because
I’d seen her do it, oh, a thousand times on the soccer field when our plays went awry. I suspected that she was tapping her chin right now. Which was exactly why I felt the urgent need to
escape.

“Hey, Sophie,” I said.

“Um, hi,” she said.

Painfully long pause.

The only sound was Dad’s favorite Foreigner song, wandering out of the overhead speakers. I clung to it, desperately bouncing my heel to the beat.

She blurted, “God, I haven’t seen you since...I mean, I haven’t seen you in forever. You look great.” That was the thing about Sophie. She was nice. This was why
I’d liked her. Back in the day, I’d informed her of this. And she’d told me that she liked me because I was not nice. Whether that had been a compliment or an insult, I’ll
never know.

“Thanks. So do you,” I joked. She was quiet for a beat too long before she laughed. And her laugh was screechy. All wrong.

We stood there for a moment in thorny silence while the conversational walls closed in. I shifted my weight. I’d never been good with small talk. It had always been sort of painful for me.
Made me feel as though I were trying to shove a boulder through a funnel. And generally, all that came out of my funnel was the sort of dust that made me choke. Besides, talking to Sophie just
didn’t feel natural. Not that it felt natural to talk to anyone these days. Except for Ben, of course. The long and the short of it was this: my lack of eyesight made people uncomfortable.
Self-conscious.

Awkward.

Sophie plowed on, her voice muffled as she picked up the boxes for me. “Um,” she said, her voice shaking a little. “We haven’t been the same without you.”

By “we” she’d meant “the soccer team.” We’d all been friends. Usually when you’re on a soccer team, there are one or two players who are too girly or
too fake or too gossipy or too irritating, but I’d honestly liked everyone on my team. When I first got out of the hospital, my friends told me they wanted to stand beside me while I adjusted
to my sudden blindness. We were a team, for Christ’s sake. One for all and all for one and all that crap. But without my eyesight, my friendships spun off-kilter. They were unpleasant.
Everyone felt it. But I was the only one with enough balls to do something about it. I started brushing off their phone calls, their attempts to visit, and their invitations to get-togethers,
claiming I was too busy to spend time with them.