Blind (23 page)

When we got to the slopes, we climbed out of the bus and my mom held my arm on the way to the lodge. I missed Spark, who had stayed home with my dad and the little kids.

“This way! This way!” Mr. Crane shouted. We followed him into a ski lodge and locker room, where those of us with no boots or skis rented them and we all put on our ski equipment. I could hear kids asking their parents why all those blind people were there and how we could ski if we couldn’t see what was in front of us. The parents didn’t answer, just shushed the kids, which was wrong and stupid. Why not just answer kids’ questions? The way the parents acted made us seem like unspeakable freaks. “Doesn’t it make more sense to talk?” I said, loud, in the direction of a kid I heard asking about us. “We have a guide who goes behind us and tells us if we’re about to hit anything.”

“Oh,” the kid said, coming a little closer to me—I could hear the volume of his voice increase a bit. “See, Mom? That’s how.” I smiled. His voice reminded me a little bit of Benj’s, and I wondered how old he was, thought about how kids like facts and answers, just like anyone. Everyone acts like reality is unmanageable, which it is, maybe, but putting sugar all over it is also terrifying. Because people, no matter how young, sense both what’s there
and
that they’re being deceived about it.

I sat on a wooden bench with my mom at my feet, snapping on the giant boots that would then apparently be attached to skis, on which I would blindly fly down a cliff. Why?

Sebastian was sitting on the bench next to me, with his boots already on. He reached over suddenly, grabbed my hand, and squeezed it. I had a blaze of nerves that felt like a light display. I wanted to apologize, to thank him, to ask him to forgive me and let me be his friend again. But I was scared to say anything, lest he drop my hand. So I just swallowed and held on.

“Ready?” he asked me.

“I guess so,” I said, and it came out accidentally flat and unfriendly.

“Well, I guess that’s the best I can hope for from you,” he said. Dee came clomping over then. He dropped my hand.

“You ready, Seb?” she asked him. He stood up.

“Wait,” I said, blushing. “Um, Dee? How scary is it?”

“What, skiing? It’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through,” she said kindly.

I had a flash then that I should ask Logan the same question about sex. Or drugs. Or last summer. Any of the things she had done and I hadn’t. “Will you guys come visit me on the bunny hill?”

“Sure,” Dee said, and then maybe she elbowed Seb, because he said, “Yeah, okay.”

When my mom finished snapping and bolting and soldering my boots on, I stood up and stumbled forward and she grabbed me. It felt like my feet were encased in blocks of lead.

“I have your skis right here,” she said, and clacked them together for my benefit, before leading me out into light so bright I could sense it from inside of my skin. I like light like that; I can’t see it, but I can really feel it—it reminds me of what I have left.

“Beginners, over here!” Mrs. Leonard called out. I felt exhilarated suddenly, like I might be able to keep Seb and Dee, and part of myself I’d almost lost, somehow. Like I was actually going to do this thing other-Emma had never even done. Maybe she wasn’t always superior to me in every way.

It was weird to crunch through snow when it didn’t smell cold. We were all led up to the top of a small hill, and when we got there, out of breath, we put our skis on. My mom set the first ski up next to my foot and told me to step sideways onto it, slide my boot in, and then step back with my heel. I tried six times before we heard the click and my heavy boot locked into an even heavier ski. I did the other side in one try. Then I heard my mom sliding her own feet into skis.

“You’re skiing, too?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

Because it was ludicrous, and I didn’t want her to, and having her along at all was bizarre and embarrassing, to name several of the thousands of reasons why not. But we both knew she couldn’t be talked out of it and we both knew why—because she wanted to be holding me up every second, right behind me, on top of me, whipping down the hill in front of me, or wherever she could be, in order to control what was going to happen. I had the unkind thought that if only she’d lavished that much neurotic attention on me before the accident, maybe it never would have happened. But I pushed that away, because it was unfair and untrue, and because if my mom could scoop her own eyes out like ice cream and give them to me, she would.

But she can’t. So she followed me like a crazy shadow, shouting, panting, trying to keep her screams to words of encouragement. I was barely even on a hill, just learning to point my skis down toward the bottom of the hill, and to pigeon-toe them in to brake. It was pitiful, but watching me move down a slope of white must have felt to my mom like a metaphor. She was letting me fall into nothingness, because she knew it was good for me. She had agreed to let me do it because I wanted to, because it was empowering, because she had always liked the idea of my “friendships” with Seb and Dee, because my dad would have demanded that I be allowed to go, and because my former teachers had urged her to let me build my confidence and my “ability to trust people.” She had no choice but to let me go—over and over.

The first time the beginning ski instructor, Kevin, showed me how to ski down the hill, he was tied to me by a rope and harness and, from right behind me, had the ability to pull the rope and save me, literally yank me back away from any danger.

Yet my mom was next to him, shouting, “Go, Em! Good, Em!” and nothing else—no warnings, for example—because Kevin told her that if she shouted orders he’d have to ask her to wait at the top or bottom for us. I could only have one person telling me to avoid the trees.

My mom’s breathing was more frenzied than it should have been from the small exertion of skiing the bunny hill. And her words, although cheerful, happy ones, were like tissue paper over the shrieking fear, which I could hear and feel under even her most convincing cheers: “You’re a skier, Em! Brilliant! Keep it up!”

When my mom had to go to the bathroom after an hour, she urged me to come back to the ski lodge with her. And I wanted to. In fact, I had separation anxiety like Benj used to when he was one; whenever my mom left the room, he would hold his breath until he turned blue, in what my parents called “Benji’s blue fits.” He stopped having them around the time of my accident, when he was two and a half, I guess when he realized he could count on her to come back. I felt on the slope like I could not, must not, follow my mom to the bathroom, but also like if I stayed alone on that fake white hill I might transform backward into a sobbing baby, turn blue, pass out.

And then, furious that I could not do that, would never be able to do it again, I barked at my mom, “I don’t have to go to the bathroom, and I’m not coming. Kevin?” I wanted her to know that I was calling him over, that I was about to plunge straight down the cliff without her. On purpose. She wouldn’t even be watching this time.

“Are you sure?” my mom asked, her voice a mixture of the buzzing insect sound of panic that was always there and a lavender, fluttering sound—maybe pride that I had made a brave choice.

“I’m sure, Mom. You go ahead.”

And she did, because what else was she going to do? Pee our family name into the snow? Refuse to leave her almost sixteen-year-old alone for three minutes on a school trip? I wished I were Logan, smoking, swimming at night, in bed with a beautiful boy like Zach, or that I were Blythe, actually capable of rebelling.

Kevin was making his way over to me. “Hey, Emma,” he said. “Did you call me?”

“Can I go again?” I asked him. “Fast this time?”

“Absolutely,” he said, and he tied us together, and I took a deep breath in and let go. And I flew down that bunny hill so fast that I almost forgot Kevin was there, almost forgot that I had never been skiing, almost forgot who I was and wasn’t, what was and wasn’t possible, that Claire was dead and I was blind.

I forgot for one split of a perfect second everything except the feeling of tremendous power in my legs—and my own wild speed. Almost.

Sebastian was calling my name from somewhere at the bottom when I slowed down.

“That was amazing, Emma. Good work trusting me,” Kevin was saying.

“How was it?” Sebastian asked. He had come up right next to me, and now he put his hand on the sleeve of my hoodie. All the words in my mind were a flurry, so I didn’t speak; just tripped over my own skis to put my arms around Sebastian’s neck. He smelled just like himself, leather and tangerines, and his shoulders were wide and thin, almost like wings, his face warm. I hugged him for long enough that it started to feel strange, and he pulled away, embarrassed.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and then, “Thank you. I mean, not just for today, but for last spring, too, for being so . . . I missed you.”

“S’okay,” he said. It took me a minute to see that Dee was standing there, too, sniffling. Was she crying? And if so, why? There was some other energy blinking in the air. Were they dating? They
were
dating. Why was I hugging Dee’s boyfriend? I backed up, trying not to fall over in my huge boots.

“Dee! How was your skiing?” I asked.

“Good, thanks,” she said.

I hugged Dee, too. “Thank you for inviting me,” I said. “For making me do this.”

She laughed, a short bark of relief, and then sniffled again, so maybe she just had a cold.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Anytime. In fact, how about we all come back next week? They’re open until April.” Then she put her arms around Sebastian and me, and we began to tow each other along on our skis toward the lodge. I pushed some words out of my throat. Because I knew I’d be a new me by tonight, and she would hate the me I was right now if I didn’t say them. Out loud.

“Um, so, you guys, I came to the game the other day because I wanted to apologize for being kind of, you know, MIA this year,” I said. “I guess I was—” I thought about saying how busy I’d been, how tough it had been to start back at Lake Main, how something. And then, instead, I tried for the truth. “I was trying to pretend that last year never happened.”

“Why?” Seb asked. I felt sort of sick, my throat hurting, my head hot. But I kept on, as we pushed the doors open and the heat of a giant fireplace met my nose first, then my neck, my ears. I heard the logs popping.

“Because I didn’t want to be blind,” I said.

“We didn’t blind you, Emma,” Seb said fairly. “It’s not like it’s because of me or Dee or Briarly.”

“I know. I know that. It just took me some time to sort it out.”

“And now you have?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “But I’m trying.” I paused, then said, “I mean, I’ve trained myself not to be a PBK anymore. No sulking. No rocking. And I’m working on doing some brave shit on my own. I need to tell you about some of it. I think you guys will be impressed.”

“Yeah?” Seb asked, interested. “What kind of brave shit?”

I shrugged. “It’s nothing great,” I said. “Nothing like you’ve done with your championships and driver’s ed test and beep ball and saving blind kids like me. But I’ll tell you about it soon. Maybe you can even come visit me in Sauberg and meet some of my friends there.”

“That’d be nice,” Dee said.

“How about the driver’s test?” I asked Seb. “Did you end up telling your parents you were taking it?”

“Yeah,” Seb said, in a kind of flat way.

“Oh. Were they mad?”

“No.”

“Did they let you?”

“Yeah.”

“So, um . . .” I didn’t know what to ask.

“He aced the written part,” Dee said proudly, rescuing everyone.

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

I didn’t make him tell me the rest—about whatever part he’d failed. Why would I?

• • •

The first weekend in March, my dad took me over to Annabelle’s house. In the car, I asked him how many times Mr. Otis had come to our house last year, when I was first blind. I said it like that, “first blind,” and the words had a green, lime taste in my mouth, one I didn’t like.

“He came every day for about two months,” my dad said, “and then once a week for a third month.” I was quiet, surprised. That seemed both like more and less than I had remembered. “How did we start our lessons?”

Now it was my dad’s turn to be surprised. “Do you really not remember?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I was kind of in a daze. Did we start with finding stuff? Or labeling my clothes? Or—”

“You listed your goals, Em. You and Mr. Otis talked a lot about what you hoped you could accomplish, and how you would work toward those goals, one at a time.”

I felt sudden, nauseating fear. I didn’t know who I had been last year, and I had a harder and harder time remembering who I’d been before last year. If I lost track of every past me, who would I be now? Anyone?

“What were my goals?” I asked, and my voice had a layer of frost over it.

My dad took his hand off the steering wheel then and put it on my hand. “Your main one was to get back to school, to be at Lake Main with Logan and your sisters. Do you not remember that?”

“Not really.”

“Well, now that you’ve achieved it, you have new goals, of course, like more independence. Taking the bus, or getting to and from school by yourself,” my dad said. “You and Mr. Otis worked on dressing yourself, pouring things, eating, using the white cane, on listening to sounds that could help you figure out where you were and who was around you, on memorizing routes around the house. Once you acquired those skills, you didn’t need to remember the lessons themselves as much.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

At Annabelle’s, my dad sat and drank coffee with her parents while I walked with her from room to room, feeling the walls, talking about what colors I thought the carpets and fixtures were. She giggled every time I got one wrong, and shrieked when I was right (once, about the bathroom being yellow). “How could you tell?” she asked. “It’s a lemon room,” I said. “Everything about it.” In her room, she showed me her toys, which were in a jumble, and I said I thought we should organize them. We made a line of plastic robots and glass and stuffed animals along the top of her dresser, and I felt inside some of her drawers. She and her mom hadn’t labeled her clothes yet.