Blind (18 page)

I didn’t help her.

“So, okay. So I wanted to tell you, but, okay. I should start with—I lost it.”

It took me a minute to recover, but then I said, “Congratulations, Lo. You . . . last night, you mean? With—? I mean, that’s great. I’m happy for you.” It fell to the ground like a body. I was shuddering.

And she said, “No, no, not last night, not—it’s kind of complicated. I mean, it’s a disaster, actually.”

“What’s a disaster?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral, trying to imagine what it would be like to be Logan, to be having secret sex with Zach Haze, gobbling up the gorgeous world with my eyes.

“The sex thing,” Logan said. We’d been planning this conversation for years, planning to fall in love at the same time, with best friends (Trey and Zach, for example), losing our virginity on the same night, feeling identical, telling each other everything. Did anyone have that friendship? How did other girls work out their secret differences?

“I totally regret it,” she added.

“You totally regret what?” I repeated like a feverish parrot, confused, trying to remind myself that this was about Logan and not me. I had walked her up onto an embankment, and she came around the other side of me.

“Losing it,” she said. “I fucked it up, because this guy from Pendleton, Brian, I—”

“Who’s Brian?”

“He’s no one. Just this guy.”

“You lost it to him?”

“Kind of.”

“But then you and Zach—why ‘kind of’?”

“Because I didn’t tell, you know. I didn’t tell . . .”

“Who, Zach?”

“I don’t want any of the guys to know. I was hoping they didn’t know, so they wouldn’t think I’m—But I am. I’m—” She made a noise that was worse than any real word could have been, a collection of a’s, c’s, g’s, and h’s that didn’t belong together. I recognized what it was without effort or thought: it meant disgusting and ruined, and I got it so clearly I might as well have made the sound myself. It was how I felt about my left eye, but I would never have felt or thought or used it about Logan—or anyone other than myself.

She was chewing her hair. “I don’t know. Last summer, Brian and I were—”

I tried to think. Last summer. When I was finishing at Briarly. When she was begging me to come back to Lake Main. When Claire died. Who was Brian? She had had sex with someone last summer? When? Was that what David Sarabande meant when he’d said “like mother, like daughter,” and why Zach flipped out? And if so, did everyone else on the planet know more about Logan than I did? I stopped walking and tucked my head down for a moment, rocked, dug my elbow into my side to stop the weird feeling that was threatening to topple me.

“Emma? Are you okay? Why do you keep doing that?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want . . . It was an accident; it didn’t count.”

I couldn’t help myself. “So you didn’t tell anyone?”

She didn’t say anything. Everyone knew. Except me. She hadn’t told me because I would have been a babyish, jealous PBK about it. I was inexperienced and pathetic; how could Logan confide her tortured, sexy secrets in someone like that?

A tiny switch in me flipped. “Run,” I said to Spark, and I took off, with my white cane bouncing in front of me and Spark by my side, also running. The white cold air hit my lungs like smoke, and froze me from the inside out. But I kept running. I didn’t need to hear the rest of whatever Logan was about to tell me. Once, we had never lied to each other, and now? What did any of it, even our whole history, even mean? The pavement rose up and pounded the bottoms of my boots. Spark galloped, pulling the leash in my right hand taut while my graphite finger scratched furiously in front of me, as if it would save me from something in my way. Maybe it wouldn’t have. But there wasn’t anything.

I made it to my house alive, gasping the freezing air, and feeling, in spite of my tremendous rush of fear and sorrow and the real danger that running put me in, proud. My mom was flying down the front steps as I came up the walkway.

“Emma! Jesus!”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Logan just called, she said I had to come and find you, that you were running by yourself, that you, I was just—”

“I’m fine, Mom. I just felt like running.” I had only been three blocks away, and the fury started to rise up my body. Did she think I couldn’t survive a three-block run alone? Because I could. I just had.

“By yourself? Logan was so worried,” my mom said.

“You mean
you
were worried,” I said meanly. “But I’m fine. As you can
see
.”

The phone started ringing and my mom went back inside, hurt. I headed straight into my bedroom and slammed the door. The Mayburg place? Meetings about Claire? How stupid had I been to think that I could do anything, have any effect on anyone? I pulled back the green curtain and climbed into my tent bed, hid. I would never go out again, I decided. Two seconds later Logan knocked, but I stayed in bed, half hoping she would go away and half hoping she would come into my room and never leave and say something that could undo the whole thing, make it all right. Except, what would that be? She came in, pulled the cold lime curtain open, and sat with me. I thought, for some reason, of the moon. Its broken surface and green curtain color.
Focus in,
I told myself,
and please don’t cry
.

“Emma, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about Brian. I know it broke the rule, and it was totally wrong of me, but please, I’ll tell you now. It was just because I was embarrassed, or . . .”

I didn’t tell her that I had lied about Mr. Hawes’s pen, about actually thinking her mom was a terrible mom, about Seb or the way his face felt. I didn’t say I wished for last year again, to be back at Briarly.

Had we both changed so much that we couldn’t know each other for real anymore? And either way, why shouldn’t she get to be the love of Zach Haze’s life, someone I couldn’t know, let alone be?

“Are you in love?” I asked, hoping this was a deeper question than the one burning at the surface, which was whether they had had sex last night while I sat in a pool of my own chills at home, too scared to sleep over at Deirdre’s, a blind crybaby? When had they started? Just now? Last night? At the concert? Last summer? Right after Brian?

She paused, then asked, “Me and Zach?” in a quiet way that reminded me more of my voice than hers.

“Yeah,” I said, too loud. “Are you in love with Zach Haze?”

“What do you mean by
in
love?” she asked.

I did the math fast. “That’s fine, that’s okay,” I said. “I don’t like him anymore anyway. My thing was just . . . whatever.”

“Really?” Logan asked, and the relief in her voice almost made me take it back.

“Yeah,” I said. “I like someone else.”

“Seriously?” she asked, fake happy.

“Yeah. I have for a long time.”

We both sat there. She didn’t ask me who, and not even because we both knew it was a lie; just because she didn’t get to ask for my secrets anymore.

And that’s how the L&E rules shattered into a web of windshield glass. Because even if we hadn’t both been lying to each other unstoppably, our other big rule was we had to tell each other what we were thinking and feeling. Which I could obviously no longer do—ever again.

For the two
middle weeks of December, it snowed all over Sauberg, just like last year. And just like last year, I couldn’t see the flakes as they twirled and blew around, as they landed on the frozen surface of the lake, Lake Main, our yard, the Sauberg cemetery, everyone’s eyelashes—or, in my case, sunglasses. I’ve been wearing plastic ones because my metal pairs are too cold now.

I listened to everything everywhere go silent; the listening gave me images of the places I couldn’t see. I thought and tasted white. Hanukkah happened, and I performed the motions, which my parents and Dr. Sassoman giddily called progress. Progress was me, at sundown, smelling candles without blacking out, opening presents: audiobooks, a deck of braille playing cards, a new collar for Spark, a beaded necklace Naomi and Jenna made me, fur boots from Leah. Progress was me handing my sisters presents my mom had bought and put my name on.

Days, I went to school in a numb white daze, one that felt like snow. Nights, I lay awake listening to Naomi’s sleepy breathing, thinking how a steady diet of tragedy teaches you to rank what matters. I told myself that how I felt about Logan mattered more than how I felt about Zach Haze, and that fifty years from now, unless we’re dead, Logan and I will still be friends, and neither of us will be dating Zach Haze. So who cares which one of us gets to date him now? Because even though I’m young and most people think that being young means you have no perspective and are stupid about what things will matter in the long run, I’m aware that Logan and Zach being in love isn’t the end of the world. Because I’ve seen the end of the world twice—when I stopped seeing and when Claire stopped being alive. So I can fake that it’s okay even though it’s not. And I can try to convince myself that my experiences—even the accident and Claire, and Zach loving Logan—will eventually add up, the way dots in their proper cells do, into a structure I can understand. Maybe even something “worth it.”

I was in my room, working on my clay memoir, when my mom confronted me. The sculpture was now a clay dog and a disposable chopstick that I’m turning into a white cane with surgical tape and a small marble. I was sitting at my desk, surrounded by my treasures: a rock I had found once in the lake and spun in our rock polisher until it felt like a jewel; some plastic, hollow rubber grapes that Leah had popped off the string they had hanging over the produce in the supermarket and that she had then given to me. They feel green and purple, give me colors. And Mr. Hawes’s pen, my journals, my L&E notebook, some notes Logan had written me over the years, even the Zach valentine. Two pictures: one of me holding Benj when he was first born, and one of me and Leah and Sarah in a play garden that was outside our apartment in the city. I can’t see them, can’t tell which is which, but I also can’t give them up.

“Em?” my mom said, and it sounded like maybe she’d already said my name several times. I turned toward her.

“Yeah, Mom?” I felt a tumbling in my chest. Maybe she knew something. About the Mayburg place? Or Logan? I wondered how she’d feel about my having set up two meetings at the Mayburg place, one of them in the middle of the night. Probably hysterical. The thought gave me a surge of defensive pride, like the running had.

But instead she asked, “Have you been skipping Ms. Spencer’s class?”

That was it? “Maybe a couple times,” I said. I’d been skipping for a week straight, since we got back and Ms. Spencer assigned us
The Inferno
, which was clearly as terrible an idea as the Ouija board. It’s typical that no one thought to revamp our educations toward maybe preventing us from dying of fear. I mean, a terrifying journey through hell? During our “memoir” coursework? And when we were already unable to sleep and living in cold-dread fear of death and ghosts and Claire and our town and ourselves and each other?

“Ms. Mabel called me. She’s worried. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.

“Nothing’s going on,” I said.

This was so obviously untrue that my mom and I both sat there for a moment, wondering what to do about the lie.

She sighed. “Em?” she said. “If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to, but please go back to class tomorrow. Please. Spare me a meeting with Principal Cates and Ms. Spencer.”

“Ack, blah, effff,” Baby Lily said, as if she’d been listening the entire time and only now felt that it was appropriate to contribute to the conversation. I reached my arms out gratefully and took her. She felt twice as heavy to me as she had two days ago. My misery lifted a bit.

“Hi, big girl!” I said to Lily. “How’d you get so big? How did you, big girl?”

“Blarp bun doot!” Lily said to me, grabbing at my sunglasses and trying to tear them off so she could shove them in her mouth. I gave her my hand instead, and she put my fingers straight into her slobbery beak and chomped down.

“When will she talk?” I asked my mom.

“She is talking,” my mom said.

“Right, I get that, but I mean, when do the words become actual words?”

“Benj didn’t talk until he was two,” she said, “but you had words at ten months.”

“So only three months left for you before
ark
and
ack
and
blurp
become English, you big baby,” I told Lily hopefully, and she laughed her fat belly laugh.

“Do you think Baby Lily is like me?” I asked my mom.

“I think she’s the most like you of all my girls,” my mom said. “But also herself.”

“We’re reading
The Inferno
in Ms. Spencer’s class,” I said.

“I know, honey. I got you the audio—oh.” She thought for a moment. “Is that why you’re not feeling up to going?”

“Ms. Spencer keeps asking what we think of it,” I said.

“What do you think of it, Em?”

Baby Lily was making a
pfzzing
noise with her drooly lips and stuffing my hand into her mouth. I leaned in for a big baby kiss and then wiped my mouth on the back of my other hand.

I decided to tell my mom the truth, which was that I had listened to the
Inferno
CD and the words “my heart’s lake” on the first page of the first canto had electrocuted me with terror. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to forget the way those words sounded or felt, and I couldn’t undo them, like the
livid
of my scar. I didn’t want to talk about any of that in class.

After I said I hated “my heart’s lake,” I added, “I think we’re all shadows. And that we’re vanishing bit by bit, especially me.” I handed Baby Lily back to her. This was the most I’d said to her about my secret inside life since the accident, and the worst and the weirdest. My mom knows I’m weird, and she’s weird, too, and there are good and bad weirds, as she’s always told me. My parents don’t love normalcy, like everyone else in Sauberg, who are all, “My kids are so average, it’s fabulous!” Still, I try not to say things that freak my mom out, now that she’s a fragile person who slashed her own paintings and needs my dad to take care of her. But she’s always asking me everything, and for some reason, lately I feel less like sparing her. Maybe she’s getting better and can take it more. I don’t know.

“What do you mean you’re vanishing, Emma?” Of course she would land on that. She sounded desperately unhappy.

“I just mean when someone dies, they’re gone. So Claire vanished, and so did part of everyone who knew her. And I already lost my eyes, so it’s like, I don’t know, I’m being erased every time some new terrible thing happens, and they keep happening. Like the rabbit. And other things. It’s like I’m losing pieces, disappearing, kind of dying, even if it’s, whatever, gradual.”

I don’t even know if I meant to make it better or worse, but my mom stopped breathing, and I kept on, picking up speed. “Now all that’s left of Claire is a conversation no one can even agree on—and a huge pile of meaningless junk: trophies and notes and photos. And that’s what it will be for all of us. Some pens and plastic grapes and diaries or whatever. It’s like we’re already ghosts stumbling through our own useless
stuff
. I mean, that’s it. That’s what gets left from our lives! Who cares how you live or who you are if it adds up to balls of clay and boards you formed into walls and a roof? And it does. That’s what I mean by shadows. That we’re all going to be utterly gone
forever
, so how real are we even now?”

“But Emma,” my mom almost shouted, “we’re alive! And my god, what about love? What about family? Joy? And why is stuff meaningless?” She was panicking. “Objects help! They’re not meaningless, and we make them
because
they outlast us,” she went on, missing my point so wildly that I actually imagined her swinging naked into the conversation from some incredibly weird angle and crashing into what I had said. She was thinking of her sculptures, of course, trying to make everything better, but I didn’t want her to make it better. I just wanted her to hear me.

“Stuff helps people when we lose each other. It’s not meant to replace human life, but to represent it, to memorialize. We need graves, shrines, art,” she said.

I hadn’t been to Claire’s grave. Maybe it was covered with snow. Frozen lilies, teddy bears, goggles. I thought of Claire underneath all the stuff, alive. She ran into class once, late, flushed, her face all blotchy, almost as multicolored as her hair. I thought of her putting melty pink pills on her tongue, and then her tongue, also pink in my mind, like taffy. I saw her drinking, or doing whatever it was that made people say she had a problem—dizzy Claire; smart Claire; night-swimming, dancing-naked-on-the-roof-with-Blythe Claire; betraying-her-parents, taking-the-ghosty-bowl-that-day-from-the-Mayburg-place-when-we-were-kids, washing-up-dead-in-the-lake Claire. Which Claire had dragged her down to the lake and thrown her in? Which Emma might drag me into the water? Had Claire been terrified of herself?

Baby Lily started crying, and I realized it was because I was crying. My mom reached out for me, but I pushed her hand away, recovered. “I’ll go, Mom,” I said.

“That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll even write a note excusing you from the discussion if you—”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I already have people throwing special-needs favors at me day and night. Do you think I want to be considered mentally ill, too?”

“Emma,” my mom said. “Everyone agrees that you’re doing brilliantly, in school and out. I mean, look at what you’ve accomplished, and it hasn’t even been two years! There’s no reason to throw barbs like that.”

I almost told her about someone leaving the skateboard in front of my locker, because I knew it would be exponentially more painful for her than it had been for me. I almost told her about Logan and Zach. But I settled on a different and equally successful attack: “Yeah? Everyone agrees? Even Dad?”

My mom swallowed hard, and Baby Lily’s crying turned into straight shrieking. I put my hands over my ears, saw flashes of the screaming, like lights in my mind.

“Especially your dad,” my mom said over the screaming, loud enough for me to hear. I felt bad for her.

She carried Babiest Baby Lily downstairs, and I pulled the wire glasses out of my new hideous lump of wet clay, rolled it back into a ball, and stuck two big, round plastic grapes in where the glasses had been. Then I taped surgical X’s over the grapes. Eyes. Isn’t it weird that in art, crossing out your eyes equals death?

• • •

My mom must have said something to him, because first thing the next morning, my dad came and found me in her studio, where I was shredding paper. He asked if I would go to the hospital with him. It was Sunday, so I was surprised.

“To work?” I asked.

“I don’t have to work, but I want to take you there. Would you mind?”

I said of course I’d go, and felt excited and honored, even though I thought it was probably a trick of my mom’s to make me feel excited and honored. Sometimes placebos work even if you suspect they’re placebos.

In spite of the thrill of being asked to go somewhere alone with my dad, I felt so tired in the car that my head kept falling down onto my chest and then snapping back up. My dad was telling me a story about a colleague of his who thought a patient had one disease but then it turned out she had some other disease. Then he asked me about school, about Logan, about Mr. Hawes, about my LFTB presentation, about gym, English class,
Antigone
,
The Inferno
.

I felt like I couldn’t really respond. “You tired, Em?” my dad finally asked, and I felt him turn away from driving, toward me, and the car swerve a little. I reached up involuntarily and grabbed the bar above the window. “Why don’t you rest a little bit and I’ll wake you when we get there,” my dad suggested.

But I didn’t want to. Even though I didn’t want to answer his endless questions, I also couldn’t remember the last time I’d been alone with my dad, except on occasional doctor visits and once when he took me in for my final surgery. But I could hardly remember that, and I had been too afraid and miserable to think, let alone enjoy his company in the car. Now here I was, in the front seat, going to work with him for some reason other than my own tragic health, and I was too tired and distracted to absorb it.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t want to sleep. Tell me why you wanted me to come.”

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” my dad said.

“A doctor?” I asked, my hope sinking.

“No,” he said. “A child, actually.”

“What’s his name?”

“Her name. Annabelle,” my dad said. “She’s nine.”

“Why do you want me to meet her?”

“Because I think you might be able to help her,” he said, and I was surprised. I was used to my parents taking me to people who they thought might be able to help me.

“Really? How?”

“Wait until you meet her,” he said. “I think you’ll understand each other.”

By the time we pulled into the parking lot at the hospital, I felt both accomplished and also wrung out, like I’d just taken a standardized test. And, as always, unsure of whether I’d passed.

The smell inside the hospital made my pulse quicken, and the birds inside my body started flying in opposite directions, pulling my ribs and lungs apart. I held tightly to Spark’s leash with my left hand, and my white cane with my right. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and guided me to the cafeteria, where I said “no thanks” to food or a drink but he bought two muffins and two juices anyway, and a little bag of Swedish fish, so I would have something to take to Annabelle. I began to feel nervous that I would be a disappointment to her, and therefore also to my dad. When he’d first asked me to come with him to the hospital, I thought it was a favor to me, but in the café, when he was buying the Swedish fish and asking me what else I might want or thought a nine-year-old might want, I began to feel like I was actually doing him a favor. And I didn’t mind, but I also didn’t want to get it wrong.