The Window (13 page)

Kids start laughing, and a girl says, "She shouldn't be alone."

I bump into another person, a woman who says, "The back of the line's over there." Her voice is bored and thinly hostile.

"This is an emergency," I tell her. "Would you..."

She doesn't let me finish. "Why do you people think you shouldn't have to wait in line like the rest of us?"

The panic I've been fighting to hold in starts to well up.

"Hannah," I call out, "Hannah?"

The loudspeaker crackles, blares out, "First call for passengers to Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Springfield, St. Louis. Your bus is now ready for boarding in lane four."

Lane four ... That means the Albuquerque bus has left. Please, please, don't let Hannah be on it.

Whatever is inside me, despair and frustration, anger, raw screaming panic, it boils up and takes over. "HanNAH!" I shout as loudly as I can, loud, pulling every bit of air from my lungs, "HANNAHHHHHHHHH!" loud, and everyone, everything silences around me.

Silences all for one brief stretching-out-to-forever moment, and I think every person in that depot is holding his breath. Then a titter sweeps around me, a relieved whisper that lets people get on with talking and waiting and saying good-bye to each other, a rising wave of sound that lets them pretend I'm not there.

A
LL
I'
VE DONE
is make a fool of myself.

Someone grabs my arm and I flinch. Who would grab so hard?

Close by my face a voice demands, "What are you doing here?" A voice so angry, so harsh, I almost don't recognize it as Hannah's. "Why did you come?"

"To get you, Hannah," I say. "Ted and I want to take you home."

"I don't have a home." Hannah's words hit hot against my cheek, a tiny fleck of spittle wets my neck. "I don't need your help. Why don't you mind your own business and leave me alone?"

"Why didn't you?" I'm suddenly as furious as she is. "You didn't have to come over, help the blind girl, just because I shouted."

"What, I should have just left you?" she says. "I couldn't.".

"Well, I couldn't either."

Then the ridiculousness of it reaches us both, how we're mad at each other for doing the same thing. It doesn't make things right, but it's enough that we can talk.

When Ted finds us we're sitting together on a bench, and I'm telling Hannah how afraid I was she'd caught that bus to Albuquerque.

"It was full," she says. "But I'm going to take the next one, to there or anyplace else where I won't ever have to see Texas or my so-called family again."

"How are you going to live?" Ted asks, like he's really curious. Like Hannah going off somewhere to live on her own is even an option.

"Look, I'll be all right." Hannah's words are thick and I think her throat must ache with the strain of not crying. She blows her nose. I imagine her sitting up, straightening her spine. "I got a cash advance on my dad's charge card that I'll pay back. Enough to hold me until I find a job."

"Doing what?" Ted asks. "Working in a fast-food place?"

But they've both lost the point. "Hannah," I say, "you do have a home."

"No. I'm not wanted."

I'd like to tell her, "Of course you are," but I realize that if I'm not honest, she won't listen.

So I say, "Hannah, you don't know if your mother wants you or not. Her going ... It might not have anything to do with you. I mean, she left your whole family."

I think of Gwen's mother, tearing up Gwen's letter and then trying to piece the envelope back together.

"Hannah, she may not even know herself what she wants, or who."

"But she's my
mother.
" Hannah makes it both a plea and a question, and I don't have an answer.

So instead I say, "How about your father and brother? You know they want you."

"They'll get along."

Maybe, I think. And maybe not. Maybe her brother needs her as much as Abe needed Gwen. I'm trying to think how to explain that when I realize what it is that I really have to say.

"Hannah, I want you to come back. You're my best friend."

She waits, and I know I must say the rest of it. "And you're the first best friend I've ever had. I need you."

There's this horrible long moment that she doesn't answer. I feel like I'm standing naked in the middle of a million staring strangers, all pointing and saying, "She's never had a friend."

And then Hannah makes everything right. She says, "Best
girl
friend. Remember, Ted's the sensitive type."

We drive away from the city, all three of us jammed in the front seat, me in the middle.

I think, I'm the one who's holding us together.

Ted's whistling "The Eyes of Texas," and I wonder what he hears in his head, and if he knows he is perfectly on key.

Then, when we're almost home and Ted has shifted to Christmas music and is way down in the low notes of "We Three Kings," I get an idea.

"Ted, can we stop by the mall?"

"Never be able to park," he says, but he takes us there anyway, and after driving around for a while, we get a space.

"Let's call your dad, Hannah," I say. "And then ... I need to buy presents. Especially for Aunt Emma. Will you help?"

Christmas morning I wake to a springlike breeze coming in my window. I go over, lean out, listen to the voices of my uncles calling to each other and to the cattle they're feeding. Gabriel must see me, because he calls up, "Merry Christmas, Mandy."

I pick up my mother's picture, imagine a face more soft than I used to see it, and with the beginnings of peace in her eyes.

I run my finger down the airman's picture. Maybe his grin is for me, too.

And then I'm washed and dressed and downstairs, and Aunt Emma and the uncles are squabbling about whether we do presents or have breakfast first.

"May as well get ready to starve, Abe,"
Uncle Gabriel says. "Emma's no more patient than a kid."

Only it's Uncle Gabriel who has made a small carpet-covered jungle gym that he can't wait for me to open.

"What's it for?" I ask, and he puts a kitten in my arms.

It's a little bigger than my opossum was the last time he scrambled up the porch steps to me. He didn't stay even for a whole bottle that time, and it made me realize he had stopped needing me. That he'd learned how to live on his own.

But this kitten—oh, I can love this kitten even when it's all grown up. I snuggle it close while it explores with tiny paws to find out who I am.

Then my aunt and uncles are telling me to circle the tree and feel all the other presents under it. "All the velvet bows, those are all for you," Aunt Emma says. "Open one."

But I rub my face in the kitten's fur. I make my voice stay steady because this is a dumb time to get weepy. I say, "It's your turn now."

I want them to like their gifts. Want so much that I ache.

Uncle Abe goes first. I've made him a tiny circus of toothpicks tipped with colored flags, planted in a surface of plaster of paris textured with dust. Little plastic people sit on a ring of pebbles, watching pill bugs climb a slide. Ted made the pill bugs for me out of clay, after pointing out they weren't really bugs at all but a land-living crustacean called an isopod. Right.

Emma and Gabriel don't know what to make of the circus, and for a while I'm afraid Abe doesn't, either. Then he says, "If you can get a message through to Gwen, tell her thanks for remembering."

Gabriel whispers, "What's all that about?"

Emma shushes him.

Then Gabriel opens his gift, a combination knife and screwdriver. "See," I tell him. "It's got two sizes each of Phillips and slot, and three blades and..."

"And just what I need," he says. "I'm going to keep it right where I can always get at it."

And then Aunt Emma is lifting tissue paper from the sweater I've bought her. "It's for your pleated skirt," I say. "The new one from the mall."

"I'm wearing it," Aunt Emma says. "Mandy, the color match couldn't be more perfect."

"Hannah helped me. I asked her."

And I give Aunt Emma a big hug. Her cheek is wet against mine.

"Don't cry," I say. "Merry Christmas. I love you."

S
PRING
has come, and I leave my window open to it all the time. Open to the wind that blows almost constantly, that Emma tells me I'll wish for, once summer gets here.

Ask me what has changed and I'll tell you.

I'll say how the figure that cartwheeled from the sky lies still and rests now. I think of him and the others in graves beneath budding trees, under yellow sun and blue sky and red tulips.

I especially imagine a lot of red tulips about my mother's grave because she liked to respect her contrasts.

Aunt Emma and the uncles act younger than they did when I first came here, even though Gabriel says I'm giving him more gray hair every day. "Mandy," he tells me, "you think of stuff to do faster than I can think of rules for keeping you safe doing it."

But his only real rule is that I don't worry Aunt Emma.

The opossum doesn't come back anymore, but thanks to Uncle Abe I'm still in the stepmothering business, taking care of an orphaned calf now. Abe named her for me, Mandy Girl, because she was born on my sixteenth birthday. I give her milk from a huge bottle, and one of these days she's probably going to get tired of my kitten trying to get in on the feeding.

And Abe likes to talk with me about Gwen. He's remembering more and more about being a boy, more than his pill bug circus.

Yes, ask me what has changed and I'll tell you.

I have.

I can't pretend everything is OK. I can't see, and in some ways I'm just now beginning to realize how huge that loss is. Maybe it took getting past being angry to know.

And to realize how much more I have to learn.

I'm going away for eight weeks this summer, to live in a dorm with other blind kids and work in a day care center. My caseworker helped set it up, and Mr. Burkhart wrote me a great letter of recommendation. It has me scared, both the job and how I'll get along in the dorm, but I keep telling myself the Great Om wouldn't send me off to something I can't handle.

Hannah and Ted have both promised to visit.

The town I'll be in is just a couple of miles from where Mrs. Welsh is living now, and I think maybe Hannah might try to see her, too.

And Ted's been saving money so he'll be able to call often. He's got this special phone that puts the volume high enough that he can usually hear what's said.

And some things are better than they ever have been, maybe the more important things.

Uncle Gabriel says every person's life has a time when he lives the fullest, the most aware. The army was like that for him, he says, the time he goes back to and longs for, with all its good and bad.

Aunt Emma says nonsense, and she can think of lots of years when she's been quite fully alive, thank you. No one tells her how her voice softens and yearns when she talks about the few months she and Uncle Gabriel lived in Mexico, when she was expecting the baby that died.

So I wonder. I hope my time is still out in front of me, that it will be more spectacular, bigger, than it is now, but ... I don't know. Right now I feel more alive than I ever have.

No, that's not exactly it.

Right now the world feels more alive to me than it ever has, a world for me to reach out to and touch.

And I've changed in one more way.

I've made room for Gwen inside me, and for my mom, and maybe even for Gwen's mother. I know how to feel, and love, for us all.

1. Why doesn't Mandy want anyone's help at her new home and school? Would you want people to help you if you were in Mandy's shoes? Why might people want to help?
   
2. Mandy is used to moving from school to school, but she knows that the difference between being "Mandy the new girl" and "Mandy the new blind girl" is a big one. How could she or her classmates make her first days easier?
   
3. Marissa has a vision disability, too, but why doesn't she want to have anything to do with Mandy?
   
4. Do you think Ted and Mandy make a good couple? How might their disabilities enrich or challenge their relationship?
   
5. Mandy learns to be independent despite her disability. Have you ever faced a challenge that seemed too big to handle? How did you get through it?
   
6. When Ms. Z. reads Mandy's sensory detail assignment, the teacher comments, "You make it seem real.... Being able to remember details is a gift." What details would you use to describe a particular instant or event in your own life, like waking up in the morning, the last day of school before summer, etc.?