Beyond the Bear (21 page)

I whipped back around and rode down the escalator. I could feel him right behind me. I got off, walked faster than usual toward the display case I needed to bump into to orient myself in the large, open space, and sure enough, just before I reached it, he grabbed my shoulder.

I yanked out of his grip and whipped around to face him with my cane raised above my head. “Dude! Leave me the fuck alone!” I hollered. I turned to face the customer service desk. “Please,” I pleaded, “could somebody tell this guy to get away from me? That I don’t need his help?” Hearing his footsteps scurry away was a tremendous relief.

Over time I would get better at dealing with situations like that, of well-meaning people, clueless about the ways of the blind, trampling my dignity. People were constantly pushing me this way and pulling me that, as if I were some kind of wind-up toy about to march off a cliff. It happened so often, that if I didn’t learn to shrug it off, I would have become the very thing I never wanted to be—an angry man.

After spending Christmas with her family in Minnesota, Amber came to see me in time for us to celebrate another New Year’s Eve together, a second chance at getting it right. The plan was for her to fly into San Francisco, rent a car, and drive to the Living Skills Center to see the place that was giving me back my independence. From there, we’d spend time at Arboleda, play in the city, and visit my folks in Carmel. Everyone at the center knew all about Amber. I spoke of her constantly. “Amber’s going to love this,” I’d tell my cooking instructor while making eggs Benedict or caramelizing onions for a New York Strip with Burgundy Sauce. “Can’t wait to take Amber here,” I’d tell my mobility instructor after a successful navigation to my favorite Mexican restaurant. Everyone knew about our late-night calls and my plans to move back to Alaska to be with her. So when she came to visit, I wanted to show her off, I admit it, and they wanted to scope her out, they joked, to see if she was good enough for “our Dan.” But by the time she arrived, it was after hours. Disappointed, I figured everyone had gone home for the night.

“We should pop into the office a moment, see if anyone’s still here,” I said as we passed by on our way to my apartment.

We popped in. Amber, dressed in blue jeans and a snug button-up sweater, stopped in her tracks. I could practically hear her face flush and her shoulders stiffen. Just about the entire staff was lined up waiting to meet her, every one of them grinning.

“Hello, Amber. Welcome. Dan has told us so much about you. It’s
so
nice to finally meet you.”

CHAPTER 19

Back to the Future

I wrapped things up at the Living Skills Center in early February
with a round of hugs for the house and the promise to keep in touch. It had taken a little over six months to get where I wanted to be in my quest for independence. From then on, life would be my teacher.

Soon after I’d moved from the center back to Arboleda, Amber flew down for another visit around Valentine’s Day. I’d considered making her a romantic dinner, eager to show her how far my cooking skills had progressed from my pre-blind-school repertoire of microwaved frozen burritos and pizza delivery. Anything I could do for her versus the opposite, I figured, was a point in my favor. Candlelight was out since the risk-reward ratio of open flames doesn’t pan out for a blind guy. Same for wine glasses. It’s like you’re just asking for it, and fine wine served in mason jars just doesn’t cut it. The clincher was when my first solo practice run of the dish I wanted to make her, the New York Strip with Burgundy Sauce, came out more like Boot Leather Strip with Disaster Sauce.

I took her to Carmel instead, to one of my favorite sushi places, Robata’s Grill and Sake Bar, a traditional Japanese inn-style restaurant with paper lanterns, a low ceiling, and a rustic wood interior. Due to poor planning, I called too late to get a reservation, so we were ushered into the overflow section, which couldn’t have been better planning since we ended up with the whole room to ourselves. Amber was stunning that night in a silky, black dress with spaghetti straps and a diagonal hemline that started its plunge just below her left knee. She outclassed the hell out of me in the browns, beiges, ivories, and other dull-but-safe colors I’d taken to wearing to minimize fashion accidents. My black flip-flops didn’t help my cause, either. As I often did in those days, I also wore my amulet, the prayer beads blessed by the Dalai Lama that my massage therapist, Ilene Connelly, had given me.

We ordered vegetable tempura and maguro, hamachi, unagi, and rainbow rolls with yellowtail by the pairs, and just enough hot sake to make everything we said seem funny. “Sake me, baby!” we’d say after draining our tiny cups, with each request for a refill more hilarious than the last.

I’d mastered chopsticks during my middle school years in Malaysia, and was still good enough to wield them in the dark. So I picked up a piece of sushi, and dipped it in soy sauce fortified with enough wasabi to deliver the desirable nasal burn. The moment it hit my mouth, I grasped the edge of the table with both hands, and turned my head to the side. “OH yeah . . . Oh-o-o-O. Whaaoh!” I gasped as I whipped my head back to center. I thumped the table twice with a fist. “Damn! Whoo, boy. That was a good one.”

Amber laughed, then dipped her own piece, popped it into her mouth, gasped, and squished her nose against the palm of her hand until she was able to breathe.

As contemporary Japanese flute played softly in the background, it hit me all we’d been through to get to this point of spending our first Valentine’s Day together. There were still many unknowns in our relationship, but I was living in the moment that night, and my heart felt like it might split at the seams. I leaned across the table, reached for her hands, brought them to my lips, and kissed them. Still holding on, I lowered them, rested my forearms on the table, and leaned in close. And then I just said it:

“I’m so in love with you.”

“Mm, well, I . . .”

“It’s okay, you really don’t have to say anything. I don’t mean to put you on the spot. It’s just that I really want you to know how I feel. So there.”

“Well, thank you. I’m just kind of funny about . . .”

“No, really. It’s okay . . . I mean it. Hey, you’re slacking. My sake cup is hurtin’ over here. Sake me, baby.”

“No, you sake me.”

“That could land you in the burn unit.”

We laughed as Amber refilled us both.

“Cheers,” I said raising my cup.

“Cheers,” she said clinking hers against mine.

I drained my cup, set it back down on the table with a clunk, and visualized her silky dress in a heap on my bedroom floor.

As eager as I was to get back up north to be with her, I gave myself one more month at Arboleda to say goodbye in a way I’d been unable to say goodbye to Alaska after the bear forced me to go. I savored every day, beginning with my early morning songbird recitals over coffee, all the way through the great-horned-owl hooting matches back and forth across the canyon before I’d turn in at night. I thanked and said goodbye to everyone who’d helped me along my healing journey. I thanked and said goodbye to all my favorite trees and trails and benches tucked away in the thickets. I relished the time I had left with
Jeremy; his being there for me had been a godsend.

Besides all the medical duties, appointments, and errands, he helped me dodge countless head bonks, swept up my trail of broken glass, and took me to shows, from Los Lobos to The Dead
.
Even before I was blind, I appreciated how the two of us could sit reading books together for hours without the need to talk.

During my final days at Arboleda, my old roommate from Girdwood came for a visit, to play music and help me pack for my move back up. Jamie pulled boxes from the backs of closets, unfolded their tops, and pulled stuff out for me to sort through, much of it untouched since the move down. We pawed through my outdoor gear, tools, books, CDs, and household this and that. What I wanted to send north, we set aside to be packed into my truck, which my stepdad would drive up the Alaska Highway. The rest went into a Salvation Army pile.

“You got a ton of photos here,” Jamie said in that deep, subwoofer voice of his while mindlessly scratching the back of his unruly head of hair. He’d pulled a large Ziplock bagful from a box and sat there waving it back and forth awaiting my response.

“Just toss them,” I said.

“Huh? Are you sure? I don’t know, Dan, you might want to hold onto these.”

“It’s not like I’m ever going to look at them again. That’s all they’re good for, to look at. I don’t need them. I don’t want them. Really, they’re pretty much worthless to me.”

“Ahh, well, okay. But mind if I take a few?”

“Take all you want. Have them.”

Jamie sat at the dining room table sorting through my life one shot at a time. He weeded out the ones with lousy lighting and those that seemed to have been snapped during some kind of seismic event. He kept the good ones from our Prescott and Girdwood days, including one of my favorites—me on telemark skis with a goofy grin on my face sailing over a ski jump I’d built in the front yard after a big snowfall in Prescott. The rest he set aside for my brother, for which I’d be grateful down the road.

As my departure day drew near, I was both ready and not. After a year and a half in California, moving on would be like shoving off from the safety of my own little island into a sea of unknowns. To get my life back I had to leave this refuge, where stress was banned, music was imperative, and nothing was expected of me other than to heal. I had to leave what had become comfortable and familiar, as well as those who’d been there for me day and night to talk me down from my anxiety attacks, to take me where I needed to go, to let me know my T-shirt was on inside out or that the potato salad I’d pulled from the back of the fridge was green and fuzzy.

What worried me most was my relationship with Amber. She was the major motivation for moving back up. We had hardly dated before the bear, and after, the little time we’d spent together had been on vacation. What if things didn’t work out between us? I had no Plan B.

While I was fretting down in California, she was wrestling with fears of her own up north. “It’s getting closer; Dan will be moving here soon,” she wrote in the journal I’d given her at Christmas. “I am excited and nervous. Things are going pretty well and I’m falling deeper and deeper in love with him. Who’d a thunk it? It is challenging, though. I think I like the phone relationship so much because I totally forget that he can’t see.”

She did not elaborate on that, nor did she commit to writing the depth of her doubts. I know now a lot of questions were gnawing at her, like, what if having a disabled boyfriend got old? What if she grew to resent doing all the driving, explaining all the nonverbal jokes, dealing with all it would take for me to get through graduate school? What if my emotional trauma and anxiety attacks wore her down? What if she fell out of love with me? She’d fallen out of love before. But in my case, how do you live with yourself knowing you’ve hurt someone who’s already been hurt beyond comprehension? Loving someone is a huge responsibility, and she wasn’t sure she was up for the additional weight. She already had a full life—a challenging job as a counselor for Alaska Native high-school students, some straight from tiny, remote villages, a job that had her dealing with everything from college goals to pregnancy, domestic violence, and suicide. She had a lot of friends to keep up with and a high-maintenance dog with selective hearing and an unsavory attraction to the neighborhood chickens. She was afraid she’d have so much on her plate she couldn’t handle a blind boyfriend. On top of all this, she had a case of garden-variety commitment phobia, which, given my track record with her before the bear, I had coming to me.

“It’s just that I’ve been single for so long,” she told me during one of our calls. “I’m not used to having anyone else to answer to.”

As much as I wanted her to feel she could tell me anything, that was not fun to hear. What she was saying without saying it was that she was afraid I was going to slow her down or limit her freedom or take up too much of her time and space. I understood all that, but I can’t say I liked it. I needed to prove to her that I could make it on my own. More importantly, I needed to prove it to myself. I wanted her to be my lover not my caretaker. So the plan was for me to rent my own place, for her to keep hers up in Bear Valley, for us to continue to date, and to see where things went from there.

Living at my cabin in Bear Valley was out. I’d be relying on public transportation, and it was way beyond range. I needed a place within walking distance of a bus stop, a place that would let me have Maya. A month before my move up, Amber found me one—the top floor of a two-story house on five wooded acres, a property shared with three rental trailers off Huffman Road in South Anchorage.

One thing I didn’t have to worry about, at least for the time being, was how to make things work financially. I’d become eligible for insurance benefits at work only days before the bear, and I would eventually push the edge of a one-million-dollar policy. Life insurance, also through work, provided a couple hundred dollars a month in disability pay. Since I was unemployed, I also received a monthly check from Social Security Disability Insurance. Plus I had tenants in my cabin, so I had rent coming in. The Division of Vocational Rehabilitation would pay my school expenses as long as I was going for the express purpose of pursuing gainful employment. Other services would also help me along my way.

The official restart of my life began at the beginning of spring in a place that felt nothing like it. I landed in Anchorage with two bags and my dog, half stoked, half apprehensive about starting over in a slippery, sprawling city with many weeks to go before shedding its winter coat of snow and ice, a city I’d once known well but now couldn’t tell one end from the other. The morning after a steamy reunion with Amber at her house, she delivered me and Maya to my new place, a twenty-minute drive downhill from her own.

“You might want to brace yourself,” she said as we drew near. “Your driveway is kind of insane.” I held onto the oh-shit handle above the door as we jostled and slammed through a minefield of potholes, ice crunching beneath the wheels of her truck. “Your house is definitely an upgrade from your Girdwood place,” she told me, “but the property wouldn’t win any landscaping awards.”

“Do you mind describing it?”

“Okay, so your address is at the top of the driveway spray-painted onto a half-sheet of plywood. There are a couple of driveways off the main one that shoot off to two of the trailer houses. The third one is right across from your house, and it’s classic. Lawn ornaments everywhere—dead vehicles, appliances, and who knows what beneath the snow. It basically looks like your neighbors have one of those perpetual garage sales going.”

“Lovely,” I laughed.

“Oh, and there’s an industrial-size Dumpster at the end of the main driveway.”

To me Dumpster translated to bear magnet. “Guess I’ll need to carry a shotgun when I empty the trash,” I joked.

Amber parked in front of the house, and I let Maya out to explore. The distant drone of the Seward Highway, I noted, would take some getting used to. Amber then guided me up the steps, across the porch, and into the top floor of a house so full of emptiness it made my ears ring. The only things in the place were my mattress and box spring, which Amber had reclaimed from a friend who’d held onto them for me.

After Amber showed me around, we started hitting the thrift stores, where over time we picked up a kitchen table and chairs, a couch, a dresser, and other odds and ends that would turn my bare space into a home. Using some of my Living Skills Center tricks, she helped me mark the settings on my appliances with those raised plastic dots meant for keeping cupboard doors from banging, and with adhesive Velcro cut into different shapes. We added a dot to the start button on the microwave, thin strips of Velcro to mark the various temperature settings on my stove, and another dot so I could tell how far to twist the dial on the washing machine. She helped me organize my clothes to minimize wardrobe disasters. Braille labels told me what was what in the cupboards. Obsessive-compulsive arrangement helped me find things in the fridge—condiments on this shelf, dairy on that, rubber band around the salad dressing, no rubber band around the barbecue sauce.