The Witch and the Huntsman (16 page)

It’s there somewhere, I think. It has to be. I can feel it. So hot. So alive. The sun isn’t quite directly above. But it’s before me, clearly above the apartment buildings that I know are across the street. There are some trees there, too. Old sycamores. I can see them in my mind’s eye, trunks twisting and flowering into massive mushroom clouds of green leaves, heavy with the dust and grime of downtown Los Angeles.

But I can’t see them. And I can’t see the sun. Not even a hint of it. Nothing. There is only blackness. Complete and total blackness.

There shouldn’t be blackness, of course. There should have been the burning orb of the sun, hanging there in the sky. I should have been able to see it and a smattering of clouds that I suspect are up there, too. I should have seen birds flying and cars whipping past. I should have seen the gentle slope of the street that led up to my apartment in one direction, and down into Echo Park in the other.

But I don’t. Because I can’t.

Finally, I turn away, pulling down my baseball cap and, sighing, lightly snap on Betsie’s harness. We continue away from the stairs, walking carefully along a path that I know circumnavigates the busy apartment complex parking lot. Betsie knows the path. She seems to always know the path, wherever we go. She seems to read my mind, too, which is spooky and exciting and sad.

Betsie keeps to a slow gait, never pulling and always alert to my slightest commands. I love that dog more than life itself, and that is not hyperbole.

As we walk, I use my other hand to reach out with my walking stick, swinging it back and forth like a metronome. It grazes the flower planter on my right and a pole to my left. At least, I think it is a pole. It could have been anything, quite frankly. Still, I remember a pole being here, right here, in the parking lot, back when I could see.

There is no wind. The day is searing. Sweat begins to form on my brow, along the bridge of my Dodger ball cap, and between my shoulder blades. I am hyper-aware of my skin—and of anything that touches my skin, including the heat of the sun, a soft breeze and my own sweat.

My probing walking stick hits something solid and I find myself now standing in some shadows. I know this because the temperature has dropped, perhaps five degrees. Betsie stops, letting me know I have reached a roadblock. In this case, I know it’s the wrought iron fence that keeps us all so safe in our apartments. I reach out with my hand, letting my walking stick dangle from a loop on my wrist, and find the doorknob and turn it.

Betsie, without any urging from me, is through first. She pauses just beyond, while I step through and shut the door silently behind me. It is a routine we have done thousands of times.

Once I’m through, Betsie is moving again, down the hill, in the same direction we always go. No mind-reading here. We do this every day. Not quite like clockwork, as we go at different times. But usually, it’s in the morning. In another time, another life, I would have often turned right, and gone up the hill, to the park trails that wander throughout Elysian Park, trails that few Los Angelenos even know about, trails that overlook the brightly lit downtown skyscrapers and wander behind big, beautiful old homes. Hidden homes.

Someday,
I think.
Someday, I will walk those trails again.
 

With Betsie, of course.

Always with Betsie.

The sidewalk is wide enough, but if I come across anyone coming up, or moving down quickly past me, I will never know. I can neither see them, nor hear or smell them. For all I know, Betsie and I are alone on the cement path; but that can’t be, not truly. Surely we pass people. But I never know it.

We continue down steadily, carefully. My probing stick alerts me to irregularities in the sidewalk, of which there are many: steep angles where driveways cut through, pushed-up sections from tree roots, buckled sections where earthquakes have hit hardest. There’s always the oddity, too: A toy left on the sidewalk, or a bike, or a skateboard. Any of which would have me hitting the ground, fast and hard. Again. Each fall is a painful lesson learned.

Now, I move slowly, carefully,
seeing
the path with my lightweight aluminum four-foot walking stick. A tool that is truly an extension of me. My eyes, my ears, my hands, my everything.
 

I walk in silence. But that’s not quite true, is it? There is a faint ringing just inside my ear. A ringing that is always there, and may always be there, according to the doctors. The sound isn’t very loud and often I forget it’s there…but it’s enough.

Enough to drive me mad.

In the months following the accident, as my body healed and morphed into something new, something forever challenging, something forever damaged and broken and suffering, I kept waiting for the ringing to go away. As the weeks turned into months, I was faced with another challenge, perhaps the greatest of them all:

To keep my sanity.

The ringing. Just inside my destroyed ears. A soft hum. Never varying, never rising or falling.

And never going away.

Ever.

I had to find a way to get used to this, to accept this. And it wasn’t easy. Sometimes, it’s still not easy.

So, no, I’m not walking in complete silence. There is the ringing. Right there, just inside
my ears. I’m not entirely sure the ringing was a result of the blast that nearly killed me, the blast that I often wish
had
killed me. These days, I wish this less and less. Early on, not so much. Early on, I placed a handgun near my bed, inside the bed table drawer in fact—never very far out of reach—a handgun with one single bullet meant for me.
 

It’s still there by my bed, although I open the drawer less and less these days.

But it’s there.

Just in case.

In case of what, I don’t know.

No,
I thought, as Betsie and I continue down the broken sidewalk, over misaligned cement slabs but mostly over a straight and narrow path. No. I know what it is for.
 

It’s there in case I grow so mad that I never return to myself, am never the same again. I only hope I’m not so mad that I will forget the gun is there.

I don’t know how many steps I take to Chango Coffee at the bottom of the hill. I don’t even know how long it takes me to get there. I suspect no more than fifteen minutes. Probably ten or less if I was sighted. Now, as I sense that I’m getting closer, I involuntarily tense up. My already careful steps shorten. The intersection is not chaotically busy. Here, Echo Park Avenue is only one lane in each direction. But the coffee shop lies within a three-way stop. Cars are in a hurry here. They often whip through the intersection. Often recklessly. At least, that’s my memory of it.

I continue slowing my pace, and Betsie slows with me. Never pulling, always alert and aware of my needs. She is a saint. My angel. My gift from God.

Of course, a true gift from God would have been to return my sight to me. Or my hearing. Or my speech. Or my sense of smell. Or to return my dead partner to me.

Betsie pauses, and I pause, too.

This is the tricky part. There is no crosswalk here. Nothing to suggest that the intersection gives a damn for pedestrians, let alone blind and deaf pedestrians.

Betsie cost nearly $30,000, a big chunk of my life savings. She has been worth every penny. Her training involved only crossing when there is a gap in traffic. How they trained her, I don’t know. She is so smart, so special, and so I wait for my little girl to see me through, to cross when it’s safe, to use her best judgment.

I sense no one, hear no one, am aware of no one. But I know that can’t be true. This is a fairly busy intersection, the halfway point to the apartments and homes on the hills, and the businesses down below. There are rows of shops here, too. Busy place.

I stand on the corner of Morton and Echo Park, or what I assume is the corner, my guide dog’s harness in one hand, and my aluminum walking stick in the other. Rarely, if ever, does anyone help me across, and they don’t do so now. I might as well be alone in this world. Or, at least, alone at this one intersection.

Now, Betsie is moving and I am moving, too. Trusting her. I have, after all, no other choice.

No, I do have a choice. I could sit at home and do nothing. Except, of course, I do enough of that already. Not to mention, I love Chango’s coffee.

When I’m about halfway across the intersection, in the crosshairs of where the three streets intersect, I know I am fully exposed. So is Betsie. She would never leave my side. Should a car not see us, should a driver be texting now, we would be hit and there would be no way to avoid it.

But today, the drivers are alert and soon, my walking stick touches the far curb. I measure its height quickly with the tip of the stick, and step up into the cool shade under the awning at Chango.

Betsie leads me inside, where, luckily, the staff knows me well.

Chapter Two

I sit outside with Betsie, holding the hot to-go coffee cup with both hands. Betsie is leaning on my ankle, panting in the heat, her heaving body pulsating against my own. Her weight is comforting. Her touch gives me peace of mind and a small amount of happiness.

There is still no wind. I miss the wind. I hunger for the wind. And for the rain. I realize all over again that I am, perhaps, living in the wrong part of the country.

But I can’t move. Not from here. I know this area. A snapshot of it is forever imprinted in my mind. Forever and ever. I live in that snapshot. How could I live where I don’t know what the view is like from my balcony, or from my front door, or up and down my street? I couldn’t, and I am afraid such a change would be the end of me. The end of my sanity, too.

I suspect that eyes are on me, but I do not know. I suspect young ones want to pet Betsie, but her vest clearly says: “Working dog. Please do not touch.” At least, that’s what I’m told it says.

Betsie does not need to be petted or touched and fawned over or played with. She is a working dog. She is always alert, ever watchful, her head constantly swiveling. I can feel it, even know it, that she is watching, watching.

She knows what her job is and she does it well for me.

At least, that’s what I believe, and I am sure I am not far from the mark.

When the coffee begins to cool enough for me to sip, I do so. Perhaps one of the few luxuries that remain is my ability to swallow food and drink, although both must be done very carefully. If either goes down the wrong pipe, I am in trouble. It’s very difficult to cough up through a tracheal tube, which I’m breathing out of now.

And so, I sip slowly, carefully, ingesting just a small dose of the coffee.

Yes, one of my few luxuries is taste. I do have it, albeit in limited form. After all, part of my tongue had been destroyed, too.

The coffee is only really a hint of coffee. I will take a hint. In a life where so much was taken from me, anything at all is a blessing. Early on, I couldn’t recognize my blessings. Early on, I was all too aware of what had been taken from me, stolen from me. It has taken me years to appreciate what I still have. And what I have is a hint of taste buds…taste buds that still worked. God bless them.

I taste the crap out of this coffee now, savoring it, swallowing it oh-so-
carefully
.
 

My scarred and destroyed throat is of little use. But it still remembers how to swallow. Thank God I can feed myself.

Another gift
, I think.
 

I am about halfway through my coffee when Betsie sits up. She moves away from the shade and the pressure on the harness suggests she is standing alert. Then again, what do I know? One thing is certain: there is someone next to me. I can feel them now, sense them in my own way. Betsie does not growl. Betsie is not aggressive. That had been trained out of her as a puppy. But she is alert and letting the stranger know that I am well protected.

Turns out, it isn’t a stranger after all.

Chapter Three

We are in my apartment.

I am sitting in the corner of my couch, my hands in my lap, my knees together. A docile pose. An unassuming pose. I do not know why I sit like this these days. Perhaps I am afraid to spread out. To expand. To touch something unfamiliar. To get hurt. To be embarrassed. So now, I sit in an upright fetal position, so to speak. Touching no one. Touching nothing. As alert as I can be, which isn’t saying much.

With me are two people. My ex-boss at the LAPD, Captain Paul Harris of Robbery-Homicide, and a sign language translator named, I think, Rachel. The translator is sitting next to me. My ex-boss, the gruff-but-fair Captain Harris is sitting opposite me. I know this because I can feel only one person on the couch. And if I am alert enough—and I often am—I can even feel the floorboards beneath me give way ever so slightly, signaling that my plus-sized ex-boss is sitting in the recliner.

If they are speaking, I wouldn’t know it. Sometimes, I can detect speech by the way the cushion around me might bounce as the speaker gesticulates with hands and arms. There’s no gesticulating going on now, probably because we were only now getting settled. I felt Betsie at my feet, where she would be, I knew, for the rest of her life, God bless her canine soul.

I raised my hands and signed: “To what do I owe the pleasure, Captain?”

Small movements next to me. The translator was relaying my signs into speech. A pause. Now, small movements. If I have to guess, the translator is nodding, and if I have to guess further, I suspect that Captain Harris is getting straight to the point, as he is wont to do.

I wait, hands folded once again in my lap. Betsie is asleep on my left foot. Her breath is hot on my bare ankle. I am in shorts.

And now, something happens that doesn’t make sense to most people at first. The translator takes my right hand carefully. I know what’s coming next, and so I open my palm. Below, Betsie looks up, undoubtedly assessing the situation, determines that all is well, and rests her chin once again on the top of my shoe.