Blind (21 page)

The next morning, I took the L&E book, the clay lump with its X’d out button eyes and wire glasses, the dog and stick I’d made, and a bunch of cutout paper I’d been gluing into a book of tiny braille notes and headed to the kitchen, still quiet. I chucked everything into a paper lunch bag. I grabbed a small rectangular box from the middle drawer, where my mom keeps the secret cigarettes we all pretend not to know she smokes. I went out into the bright morning and stood at the edge of our backyard. My fingers prickled and then ached. I felt the heat of my breathing, changing the air around me, and slipped a stick out of the matchbox; felt its scratchy red bulb like the glitter on Zach’s valentine. I held the other end between my index finger and thumb. Then I whisked it along the side of the box and heard the thump of the tiny flame, smelled the sulfur, and felt my heart swell and ignite in my chest. It was the first time I’d lit a match. I said, out loud, “Focus in, Emma,” then set the paper bag down and held the match to it. Immediately I felt and smelled the fire, heard the crackling as the bag went up, saw the flames, the smoke, the end of my shitty project, the pretense that I could create “memoir art,” our rule book, the paper bag, Logan’s and my childhoods. I stood, wondering if I might throw up, inhaling the smoke, thinking,
This is what fire looks like to me
, waiting to see if it went out or burned me and the entire town to the ground, thinking,
How afraid am I now?

“Emma?”

Benj was there, and I heard splashing, popping. He was pouring water on the flames, which sizzled so quickly I knew they had been a joke, not even a dangerous, real fire. How afraid had I been? And of what?

“Benj?”

“What are you doing, Emma?”

“I was making a little fire,” I said.

“I ended that fire,” he said, scared. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. It was a good idea to put it out.”

“It’s cold,” he said. He bent to set something on the ground, a watering can, maybe, or pitcher—whatever he had used to pour the water on my embarrassing fire.

I reached down and felt his little face as he stood back up. Then I slid my hands down to his neck and shoulders, realized he had on nothing but cotton pajamas and a cape.

“You’re right. We should go inside, Benj. You’ll freeze.”

“That’s why you made a fire, right, Emma? You were cold?”

“Sort of. Actually, I made it because I was feeling kind of blue,” I admitted.

“I’m feeling blue, too,” he said.

“Why?”

“Do you remember that rabbit, Bigs?” he asked. We began walking toward the house. I held his hand, felt him move Champon the turtle into his other hand and then flop the raggedy thing against his face.

“Of course I remember Bigs. We all remember her.”

“She eated that plant and died and we had to bury her and later she was going to be another rabbit but she never was and we never saw that rabbit. And then we also never seed Bigs again, either. That made my heart blue.”

“I know,” I said. “I can see why you feel blue.”

“Why are you blue, Emma?”

“It’s something smaller than Bigs,” I said, and Benj laughed his noisy, shouting laugh.

“Smaller than Bigs!” he said, having moved from devastated to hilariously cheerful in under one second, still a baby, still able.

“You made a joke, Emma,” Benj reminded me.

“I get it. Smalls. Your blues are Bigs and mine are Smalls.” He laughed again, but this time it was a forced
ha-ha-ha
. Even Benj had to humor me. “But why do you feel blues?” he asked. We walked up the back porch steps and into the house, kicked our boots off in the mudroom next to the kitchen.

I settled on, “Logan and I are in a kind of fight.”

“Your friend Logan?” Benj asked.

“Right. My friend Logan.”

“Logan is your best friend,” Benj told me. “Like Taylor and Sophie and Paolo are my best friend.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe you can have a playdate and you’ll share better then,” he suggested.

“That’s an excellent suggestion,” I told him. “Thank you for helping me with my blues.”

“But what about my blues?”

“What about them, Benj?”

“You didn’t help me with my blues.”

“I guess that’s true,” I said. “I have an idea, though. Do you want me to take you to visit Bigs’s grave?”

“What’s a grave?” he asked. “Is it like a grandma?”

Benj is on his way to being weird, like me and Naomi. Maybe the kids in our family will eventually be divided almost evenly between outsiders and people who can blend seamlessly in with the rest of society: Sarah, Leah, and Jenna will have normal lives, whereas Naomi, Benj, and I will never escape our own freakishness. I guess Baby Lily will shoulder the burden of being the tiebreaker.

“A grave is the place where you and your best friends and your teacher, Nancy, buried Bigs. Remember? Do you want me to take you to Bigs’s grave? Maybe we can even bring something that she liked.”

“Bigs liked me,” Benj said. “I was her favorite boy. Just like I’m Mom and Dad’s favorite boy.”

We walked into the kitchen, where people were up having breakfast now. I could hear my mom shuffling around in the fridge. It’s funny how even when the sky falls around us, people still have to make pancakes.

“Is it in the cabinet?” Sarah asked my mom. Syrup, probably.

Benj tugged on my hand. “Emma?”

“Yeah, Benj?”

“Do you think I would still be Mom and Dad’s favorite boy if there were other boys in our family?”

“I can’t speak for Mom and Dad, Benj, but you would still be mine,” I said.

I went straight to my room and turned on
Antigone
. She was reburying her dead brother and I was taking notes in my brailler when someone came in without knocking. “Naomi?” I asked, taking my headphones off.

“It’s me, Emma,” Leah said. I was losing track of who was who, even among my sisters.

“I think you should apologize to Sarah,” she said, coming to sit on my bed with me. She put her hand on my back, started to make the motions of “X marks the spot,” which we used to do when we were little. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d done it.

“Whatever. Everything I said was true,” I said.

“Maybe so,” Leah said, “but why hurt her feelings?”

“She hurts my feelings all the time,” I whined, knowing even as I said it that it wasn’t exactly true anymore.

“Come on, Em,” Leah said. “There’s so much horrible shit going on—just be generous. I mean, she’s a mess and you’re a champion.” I thought of Principal Cates. Champions are made in the mornings. Champions are blinded in the summers. I felt my brain clicking and locking in the wrong places.

“Do you hear yourself?” I asked, angry. “I feel like I’m going to die. Look at my life!”

“It’s been a brutal stretch, no doubt,” Leah said, and she didn’t even know about Logan. “But do you really not know what I mean about you and Sarah?”

“I’m not sure I do,” I said.

She sighed. “Sarah can hardly survive a hangnail, Em. You know that.” She lowered her voice. “Whereas you get blinded and are going to be fine. She can’t pass a math test to save her life, and you can’t even see anymore and are acing your way through school without even thinking about it. You don’t even notice, because school is so easy for you. It’s impossible for her. And you’re Dad’s favorite, his hope, the one he takes to work to save children. You can acknowledge that or not, but you should say you’re sorry.”

“Can you do ‘X marks the spot’ for real?” I asked.

She put her fingernails inside my T-shirt, tracing the figures out on my back as she spoke: “X marks the spot, with a circle and a dot. Spiders crawling up your back, stabbed the knife so hard you crack. Blood pouring down your back. Cool breeze, tight squeeze, makes you get the shiver-ies.”

I saw the circle and dot like they were 3-D—glowing, moving—and the spiders and the blood. I saw the cool breeze across my back and the lake, and thought of my dad saying I’m a warrior, Leah saying I’m a champion.

But I didn’t apologize to Sarah, because my dad and Leah are wrong about me.

• • •

I surprised my mom and myself by saying yes when she asked if I wanted to come to a concert with her on Valentine’s Day. She was going to the city to hear some chamber music, she said, and did I want to bring a friend? We could pick Logan up on the way, she said, but I told her I wanted to bring someone else. I had no idea what Lo was doing on Valentine’s Day, and I didn’t want to know.

When we got to Annabelle’s house, her mom led her to the door, holding her hand the entire way. She put Annabelle’s coat on her, and said, in a very shivery, nervous voice to my mom, “Are you sure you can handle watching her for the night? I could try to—” It was funny; she sounded like my mom, making my mom sound like someone other than herself when she responded, “It will be just fine. I’ll hold Annabelle’s hand and Emma does okay on her own. We’re just going to the Symphony Center and we’ll park right in the lot and walk into the hall and listen and then I’ll text you when it’s over and drive her straight back.”

“Thank you again for doing this,” Annabelle’s mom said, and I had the terrified feeling she might cry. I wanted to leave before that happened, to rescue Annabelle.

“Bye, Mom,” she said in a whisper, and reached out. My mom grabbed her hand and helped her down the porch steps. I wondered if they had hired Mr. Otis, or someone like him.

“Do you have a mobility coach?” I asked Annabelle.

“No,” she said. “My mom mostly helps me.”

“How do you get dressed and get to school and stuff?”

“My mom drives me. And she picks my clothes.”

“I could come over and teach you some tricks, if you want,” I said. “I don’t have to, I mean, but if you think it would be fun or whatever.”

We were climbing into the backseat together when I said this—my mom had moved the car seats out of the way in honor of our hot concert date with Annabelle, and my mom stopped buckling Annabelle’s seatbelt to give me a grateful squeeze. I don’t think Annabelle noticed or felt it. I nodded at my mom.

“I’ll call your mom, Annabelle, and maybe we can make a date for Emma to come over and help you label clothes and locate shorelines.”

When my mom said
shorelines
, I cringed down into my bones. She sounded like an old person trying to be cool. But then I realized there’s nothing cool about knowing the word
shorelines
, and that made me realize, the way I often do, stumbling into it from a seemingly unrelated thought, that I’m a blind kid.

In the car, we talked about Annabelle’s favorite book, which is
Charlotte’s Web
. She told me she’d watched the movie and listened to the audio, but it was in an old man’s voice and she didn’t like it. She said she wanted it in her mom’s voice, so her mom had made a recording of herself reading
Charlotte’s Web
so Annabelle could listen whenever she wanted to. She said she was dying for a dog, but her mom had told her she had to prove she was responsible enough to take care of a living thing before they could get something as big and complicated as a dog. Apparently she had a cactus now, and if she was able to keep it alive for six months, she would graduate to a fish, and then from there to a turtle, and then a hamster, and maybe by the time she was my age, she’d have her skill set and her dog.

When we arrived at the Symphony Center, we were underground first in a parking garage that smelled like concrete and sounded like danger, engines, and oil, in a black swirl around me. I missed Spark terribly, but the Symphony Center was apparently one of the few places where they distinguish carefully between legitimate guide dogs and K9 buddies, and they didn’t want Spark barking along to Tchaikovsky. As we walked from the car to the escalator up to the street, my mom talked about some composer who was still alive and had written the other piece the quartet was going to play, and the whole time I tuned her out I was thinking in a claustrophobic way that I would have to add being underground to my growing list of what terrifies me.

Annabelle seemed okay, though, walking quietly, holding on to my mom’s hand, and listening to her talk about music. My mom was the happiest and most excited I had heard her in a long time. She loves live classical music, and I realized she hadn’t left the house in the evening even once since my accident. This was the first time she’d left Baby Lily at night with anyone, and it was my dad.

The concert hall was warm and shiny. It smelled red and gold and black, and I could hear the kind of light that comes off of chandeliers, reflecting into rainbows all over the walls. People were everywhere, in expensive coats that smelled like fur and mothballs, clicking in heels along a marble hallway my mom told Annabelle and me was lined with photographs of the musicians. I’ll never see a photograph again. My white cane finger kept track of the floor and the depth of each step on a winding staircase up to a room with ceilings so high it felt as if the roof had blown off. The place bounced with voices and echoes.

“This is just a quartet, girls,” my mom said. “It’s my favorite.” Her voice sounded like a string instrument, running up and down the notes of the words, all vibrato. I felt bad for all the piano lessons I had been skipping and bombing even when I showed up. I vowed to start practicing again. My mom ran her hand through my hair and then fluttered the pages of a program. She read us the biographies of the violinist, cellist, and pianist; told us the places they’d been, awards they’d won. “There’s a part in the Moravec that’s played by a bass clarinet,” she was saying. “Caliban, the villain part. The song is based on
The Tempest
. The violin is Ariel.”

The room hushed. “They’ve dimmed the lights,” my mom whispered. “Here come the musicians.” And then she finally stopped talking, as a line of people walked out onto the stage, women’s heels, men’s shoes, men’s shoes, men’s shoes. I couldn’t tell after that because they were drowned out by clapping. I could almost feel the heat of whatever lights must have been shining onstage, and the silence of the audience was dark and oddly safe. I sat back against my seat, listened to the few lonely, hopeful tuning notes shudder out into the giant cave of a room and then vanish.