Blind (8 page)

“What?”

“How come you and Logan never want to sleep in our room when Logan is here? Can I play with you?”

I sighed. “We didn’t want to keep you up, okay? And yes, you can play with us. Let’s go have breakfast.”

We headed to the kitchen, where Baby Lily was babbling and shouting and crying. Benj, apparently recovered from the loss of Bigs, was racing a plastic dump truck manned by Champon, a dirty stuffed toy turtle he definitely meant to name Champion but got wrong. Jenna was dancing and singing—kind of beautifully, actually—to a princess video called “Bella Bella Dancerella.”

Naomi hustled over to the fridge and then from there to the electric mixer. Apparently she had lost interest in playing with Logan and me, but I couldn’t tell what she was working on with the mixer; either one of her “science projects,” which usually involve food coloring and cornstarch; or hopefully pancake batter. She used to make me help her with all her experiments and I found it annoying, but now I feel bad that she never asks me anymore.

The phone was ringing and Leah came in from the back door, home early from her sleepover. She kissed our mom hello and said hi to me while mom ran to the phone. The kitchen felt bubbling and orange, and I liked it. Because it’s what I’m used to, because it’s cheerful and tastes like cooking sugar, and because it doesn’t change. Having six siblings has its drawbacks, obviously, but there are good things about it, too, like there being a high likelihood of at least some of us liking each other. If you’re in a room with six other kids, you might be friends with one of them, whereas if you’re in a room with just one other kid, there’s more than a 50 percent chance that the kid will be a total asshole and you’ll hate him—and what if that person is your only sibling?

I listened tightly to my mom’s phone voice, organizing a funeral for Bigs. She was sniffling. The turtle dump truck Indy 500 had stopped, so Benj was listening, too.

“Right,” my mom said. “In the back garden.” She paused. “I can bring one.”

Benj’s boots shuffled over to where I was. “Emma? That rabbit will get bernied,” he told me. He reached up and put his sticky left hand in mine. Spark barked and Logan shushed him. I could feel Benj lift his right hand and use it to wipe his nose—with something he was holding. Champon, probably.

“
Buried
,” Naomi said, from the counter. She had turned the mixer off. “Not
bernied
, Benj.
Buried
.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I knew what you meant.” I squeezed his little hand, and wondered if my being on his side had made Naomi feel bad. She was just trying to be a big kid, showing off her vocabulary. I moved closer to where she was, and smelled butter.

“Are you making pancakes, Nomi?” I asked.

“Yeah, do you want some?” she asked hopefully.

“I would love some, thank you.”

“Buried,” Benj said to himself, practicing, getting used to it. “Bigs will have to get buried.” I felt him tense his body, trying to get the word right, trying not to cry again. The princess music stopped and Jenna came into the kitchen, her feet sweeping—ballet slippers.

“Can I help?” she asked Naomi in a whisper, upset that our mother was crying.

“I’m done with this part,” Naomi said to Jenna. Then I heard Naomi step down carefully; heard the stool squeak, which meant she was probably carrying the giant mixing bowl full of batter over to the stove. “Can I help with the next part?” Jenna asked.

Naomi sighed impatiently.

“Be nice, Nomi,” I said. “And wait until Mom gets off the phone to turn the burner on.”

“I’ll do it,” Leah said, and she touched me on her way to join them. I tensed, waiting for the sound of the gas, the flame catching it, the smell. Logan started clacking plates around, setting the table, and then I heard the gas ignite, the fire turn colors, the batter sizzle on the griddle. I inhaled, exhaled, sat, with Spark at my feet and Benj pulling up a chair on my right, coming closer and closer until he was practically on top of me, then taking my hand again while we waited for our mom to hang up, calm down, come back to us. I could feel the flame under the pancakes, and my mom, dropping her voice to a whisper I’m pretty certain only I heard, said, “Uh, yes, in the freezer.”
Focus in
, I told myself.
Focus in
.
Breathe
. I tucked my head and rocked a little at the table. Was the dead rabbit in the freezer? Had Claire been in a morgue, frozen? Had her parents come to identify her? How did blind people identify their loved ones? Did you have to feel the face of a corpse?

Weirdly, I felt a flutter of colorful hope. Maybe Lo and I could at least talk about something meaningful, like what Claire had done and why, whether there was any way to keep ourselves or each other safe, maybe take some control over our own lives or stories, anyway. Before it was too late and we were adults, with other people relying on us to pretend we could keep them safe.

• • •

Before my accident, I thought I knew a lot. I used to take endless notes in a little book I made, with a pencil holder and an eraser holder and a bunch of paper taped in. I spied on my family, and my parents and Leah and Sarah called me Mata Sasha Silver, after Mata Hari. I hid with my ratty notebook under the dining room table while everyone else was eating and talking and talking and talking. That’s after I was done with my food, and had already asked quietly, “Can I be excused?” And my mom had said, “Sure, Emma, sweetie,” and my dad had said, “May I. May I be excused.” And I had nodded, repeated his words like the sweet, obedient parrot I was. And then slipped off my chair, and vanished. I loved that feeling, of being safely unseen. There are so many of us, and there was always such a storm of chaos; I got to organize a little bit, even if only by recording boring descriptions of my parents. I guess I was trying to understand something about us, even back then. Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe I was storing up information, even though I didn’t realize I would need it. Because I do. The spying trained me to pay attention, and I still have, locked into myself, most of what I learned when I was other-Emma, Emma with my working eyes. I can still see the blur of all my sisters whirling up from dinner into dishes, bath times, pj’s, last snacks, singing, shouting, toothpaste, stories. I’m still listening, even if I can’t disappear beneath the table with its curving legs and toed feet that almost match the ones on our upstairs bathtub. I know those cold bath feet well, and now they’re how I understand white. Our round, wooden table is what brown feels like; the scratch of the couch fabric, gold. There is nothing in our house I haven’t touched, both when I was a spy and now that I’m blind—no surface, no pillow velcroed to the sofa, no part of any wall or windowsill. Now I have to focus in all the time, so my mind and I can stay sharp and alive without eyes. I have no choice.

The tablecloth I used to flutter up and peek out from has dark blue flowers that are an ink-soaked cartoon in my memory. Deep blues can be as scary as water where it drops off to too-deep, but sometimes those same blues are cooked and delicious. Sometimes they’re the hot berries my mom pours over Naomi’s pancakes, when the smell of the room goes indigo.

Some blues have ice-cube edges, and gray itself smells like smoke. Now the lake, which used to be sunny and layered, is all wrong, gray and dangerous. Now our town, which was fresh-cut green before Claire, has a cracked outside and a scarlet, pulsing center. It’s volcanic, like my fear.

Logan said we
should ask Zach Haze to meet us for coffee at the Bridge Café downtown, and ask what he thought about maybe getting some people together to talk. I agreed, of course, because he’s the future love of my life and also reasonable and smart. So she pulled him aside after lunch at Lake Main, and we stood outside the cafeteria for a few minutes. My back was against the wall, which made me feel steadier, safer, slightly less nervous. Zach smelled light blue, clean like chlorine—maybe the pool that morning, or some sky he had carried in with him, or a bleachy T-shirt. There was also peppermint gum, and the forever-chemical-fruit scent of Logan’s hair. People moved in a constant rush down the hall, and as soon as there was a pause, I spoke into it: “So, uh, Zach, we wondered if you wanted to meet us for coffee to talk about an idea we had—about maybe getting some people together for a, um, conversation about . . .” This was a sad imitation of what I’d practiced at home, even recorded and played back to myself twice. I hate speaking. I wanted to open my eyes, check what was happening. I pressed my right palm flat against the wall.

There was a long pause, and I pushed my own “on” button and started blabbering. “It’s no big deal, I mean, it’s just Logan and I were trying to figure stuff out, about what’s going on in Sauberg, and we were wondering—”

“Hey, man!” Zach shouted, because someone had walked by and slapped the back of his head—Carl Muscan, I realized, after hearing him whoop and laugh. I paused, waiting for them to work it out in whatever bizarre way guys do, but Zach didn’t chase him down the hall or tackle him or put him in a headlock or anything, because he’s not that kind of person. Mainly I was just relieved that the weirdness I had sensed—correctly—had nothing to do with me. That’s usually true, I guess; everyone’s thinking about their own problems, not yours. Unless you’re Claire and you drown yourself in Lake Brainch, in which case your drama infects the whole town and everyone has to think about it all the time.

“Okay, cool,” Zach said. “So, you just want to meet at Bridge?”

“Yeah,” Logan said. “And then maybe we can talk. We were hoping you’d help us, you know, get some people together or help lead or whatever.”

She turned and started walking away, probably because the word choice embarrassed her, especially, if I had to guess, the part about “help lead,” which had sounded good when we thought of it but now was a little much. Logan often walks off in the middle of a conversation; it’s a theatrical habit for her, and it works, in the sense that it makes you feel like you want more of her. She’s always leaving before you’re done, because she hates awkward pauses and is worried that if she stays too long people will think she’s pathetic.

Zach called out after her, “So, how about Wednesday, Logan? For Bridge?”

I heard Logan call out, “Perfect,” from ten feet away. And then she didn’t come back; just left Zach and me to be like, “Uh, okay . . . so, see you Wednesday,” which was not generous of her, especially since Spark and I had to run after her and catch up.

“That was good, right?” I said.

“What?”

“That, just now, with Zach.”

“Yeah, of course,” she said. “He was totally Zach about it.”

I asked if she would come to the bathroom and help me sneak a text to Leah asking her to call my piano teacher, Mr. Bender, and pretend to be our mom saying I was sick and couldn’t make my lesson. I can’t go to my lessons anymore because all of a sudden the sound of piano music makes me feel like I can’t breathe, almost like something is pressing the notes into my throat. I used to love piano—I was really good before. And I could read music easily, learn new songs without much effort. Even when I first lost my sight, piano was okay; it was the first thing that made any sense to me after my accident. I could still see the keys in my mind, their straight, dark edges, the little blank spaces between them, the off-white shine of their surfaces. It was a relief, kind of, the opposite of braille when I first started that—no raised cells, nothing to ponder or suffer over; just the smooth, easy feeling of something under my fingers that has always relied on my fingers to make meaning. But now I feel stupid playing; I haven’t been able to learn anything difficult, since I can’t see the music. And if I move at all, I look like I’m trying to imitate Stevie Wonder and am totally self-conscious. I don’t want to think about where to put my fingers or listen for my own notes. My ears are tired.

So I’m adding piano to the growing list of things I can’t do: see, sleep, get anywhere near water or fire, show my eyes to anyone, figure out the truth about things that really matter, listen to or play music. My mom will be devastated when she finds out. Maybe I’m about to start breaking my winning streak in school, skipping actual classes, too. I never skipped class at Briarly, because what else did I have to do there, other than go to class or let Sebastian guide me around and try to make me a better person than I’ll ever have a chance of being?

Sebastian’s name is like piano music. It sends me spinning back sickeningly fast to the feeling of last spring and the wet cut grass and laundry smells of Briarly. To his voice, always in my ear. When he had to write a paper on
King Lear
, Sebastian insisted on reading me practically the entire play out loud. Maybe he thought that since I’m one of a giant litter of children, I might have to compete for my parents’ kingdom at some point and that listening to him mangle iambic pentameter would put me at an advantage. He said his English teacher had told them in class that the point of
Lear
is that “nothing can come of nothing.” I didn’t say anything, and Seb said someday I would appreciate the wisdom of that, even if I couldn’t see it now.

I said, “I can’t see anything.”

And he said, “That’s what I mean, Emma. Something only comes of something.”

I walked away, aware that he meant something about my self-pity, and annoyed enough not to care exactly what it was. Seb disapproved of my negative attitude, because he belongs to happiness like it’s a conversion religion. He’s a year older than me, in eleventh grade now. I wonder how it’s going for him. He told me last summer, before we never spoke again, that he was going to take the driver’s ed test, no matter what his parents said. I wonder if he did.

Seb is a total now, like me. He has no vision left, not even the sliver he had as a kid. So maybe he faked his way through the driver’s ed test. If anyone could do that, it would be Seb.

I wonder what he’s doing now. Probably driving by clicking his tongue and listening to the sound bounce off stop signs. He’s probably running a marathon, getting in a year early to Harvard, starting his own company, and curing cancer. I wonder if he has a new basket case to take care of now that I’m gone. I wonder if he misses me. And if I miss him. I can’t think about it. I have too many other problems to wade through, without remembering Seb or what happened last year.

Once, only once, I was crying at Briarly—I never cried in front of people before my accident, and I hardly wanted to become a sobbing public wreck after it. But I couldn’t find my brailler or my phone and I was groping wildly around my cubby (we had cubbies instead of lockers there, one of the few patronizing concessions they made to our being blind) and I just started crying, and Seb’s hand was instantly on my shoulder and he sat me down in a chair I hadn’t known was there and he found my brailler and my phone, both in the inside pocket of a newish backpack I had hung in the wrong cubby and he had found somehow.

All he said was, “Sit for a sec, Emma,” and that was it. He handed me the things as soon as he found them, and then he walked away calmly as if nothing had happened, leaving me sitting there. Later that day, he introduced me to a bunch of kids as “my awesome friend, Em,” and I rocked wildly and didn’t speak and didn’t listen to—let alone try to learn—any of their names. They were all going skiing that weekend with some teachers from Briarly on a school trip, and Seb begged me to come.

“Are you nuts?” I asked. “I can’t speak for you, but I can’t see anything, including trees or other people in my way, if I’m plummeting down the side of an icy cliff.”

“I know,” he said, laughing his deep tunnel of a laugh. “I’m familiar with that scenario. But they do have skiing for blind kids like us.”

I took the “like us” part and put it away in the place in my mind reserved for festering and denial.

“Really? How do you avoid breaking your neck? Because I’m not available for any more maiming.”

“You have a guide,” Sebastian said. “How about my mom calls your mom and they talk it over, and then see if you want to come? Me and Dee do it every year—they’re open through spring. A bunch of the teachers come, and they have ski instructors for beginners.”

“It’s really empowering,” Dee said.

I didn’t like the word
empowering
. And I didn’t like Dee. I had the sense that she didn’t want me to go skiing, but I wasn’t sure why and I didn’t care. Maybe because she was in love with Sebastian and preferred not to share him. Or maybe because I was unbearable to be around. Both things were true. Lately, I can’t stop thinking about Seb. But I also can’t face him. Or Dee, for that matter. He called me last week and then again this week, both on days when I’d skipped piano, been miserable and scared all day, and couldn’t do anything, least of all talk to him. When I heard my phone say his name, my pulse accelerated so much it was like I’d been running every second since I saw him last. Maybe picking up and hearing his voice might have been a break, breath, rest from the racing. I remembered the way his hands felt, what his laugh sounded like. But I wasn’t brave enough to talk to him; I couldn’t bring myself to, maybe because I don’t deserve it. Or maybe I’m just too ashamed. I can’t be that fragile Seb-Emma and also the new tough person I’m trying to be. So I can’t talk to Seb until I am actually her, until I have something to tell him that isn’t utterly pathetic.

Because Seb, more than anyone else, makes me remember something I’ve been pushing down into my bones, which is where I put things I can’t think about now, things I don’t have facts for, can’t understand or face, can’t say. Something about myself, some kind of truth. He didn’t leave a message.

• • •

Yesterday at school, I decided to test myself. Maybe I’m bored of being so needy. Or maybe I just thought I had a better chance of being awesome at our coffee date with Zach Haze if I had done something, anything brave before it. Like going to the lunchroom without Logan.

Sometimes this happens—an idea or challenge or whatever you want to call it will come to me, and then I’ll feel like I
have to
do it. Once, when I was ten, we had just started building the tree house in our backyard, but not yet put up walls, and I climbed up on the platform and sat there with my legs dangling over the edge. I looked down at the ground. It was only five feet up or so, but I had this terrible feeling that I had to jump, just because the idea of jumping had come into my head while I sat there. I told myself I couldn’t get down unless I jumped, that I wasn’t allowed to use the rope ladder I had climbed to get up in the first place. So I sat there for almost an hour, trying to get my brave on to do it. Finally, Sarah came outside and yelled at me, “What are you doing up there, Emma? Mom wants you to come inside,” and I squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could, and made sure I was remembering to bend my knees, and I jumped. It wasn’t even that bad once I’d done it. My feet and knees hurt a little, but I was fine.

“Are you insane?” Sarah shouted. “Why didn’t you climb down the ladder? You didn’t have to kill yourself to get inside this instant—thirty seconds would have been fine!”

I walked over to her. “I didn’t do it so I could hurry. I just wanted to see if I could.” She sighed as if I were stupid, but later, when I told Leah, she was like, “I totally do that sometimes. But you should let yourself off the hook if the thing is really scary or dangerous. Come and tell me if you think of something and start to convince yourself you have to do it. I’ll help you do it if it’s a good idea, and I’ll talk you out of it if it’s a bad one.”

But Leah was somewhere in class, and all I had to do was get to the first floor alone; it didn’t seem like a bad enough idea to warrant looking for Leah or even talking myself out of it. So as soon as Ms. Mabel left, I pretended I was going to wait for Logan like I usually did, but then I quickly steered Spark and my white cane out the door and down the hall and into the first door, which led to a stairwell I didn’t usually use. There was such a rush of people that I lost my focus and my way. My heart was banging around and coming loose inside me and I thought I might cry. I didn’t want to ask anyone where I was, so I listened and held the banister and got out at the first platform, pushing through what I assumed were the second-floor doors. I walked a bit, holding the wall, until I heard flushing, and made my way to the door of a bathroom, which I determined from some high voices was the girls’ room. I slipped in, locked myself and Spark into the big, handicapped stall, found my cell phone, called Logan. I listened to it ring, praying she would pick up, trying to block out the deafening smell of the air freshener, cheap perfume, contraband cigarettes, and Lysol, the rattle and bang of people coming in and out. Lo picked up.

“Em! I’m in the cafeteria. I can’t be on the phone. Where were you? I went to Ms. Spencer’s, but Amanda said you’d already—”

“I’m in the bathroom,” I choked out.

“Which bathroom?”

“I don’t know. Second floor?”

Three minutes later, she was there. Maybe she ran. Maybe she heard in my voice that I was sad or scared. I don’t know, because I didn’t say anything about it and neither did she. She just knocked on the stall door and I opened it and then she took my hand and led me quietly down to the cafeteria, where I bought a sandwich in the cold lunch line while she waited. Then we sat at a table together somewhere, and I didn’t ask who was near us or next to us or even if there was anybody we knew or anything happening. Usually Logan tells me who’s saying and doing and wearing what, but she stayed quiet, too. We were surrounded by a lunchtime so loud in my ears that the room might as well have been filled with indiscriminate screaming. I unwrapped my sandwich mechanically, took several dry bites, felt around for a small plastic package of mustard, tore it open, and squeezed it onto a piece of bread I had worked to place flat up in my hand. When I bit into the sandwich, it was covered with mayonnaise, which I hate but thankfully Spark loves. Logan held my hand after, as we walked down the hall together, and I knew she was trying to make me feel better, because she spent an eternity telling me what everyone was wearing, and I half listened, half detached and floated up above us.