Blind Page 9

  I interrupted Logan’s Lake Main fashion monologue to ask if she wanted to come to dinner, but she said, “I can’t,” and then went quiet. Which she never used to do, but lately does a lot. Like she didn’t want to tell me about the Halloween party she went to. Which is my fault, because I didn’t want to go, but I kind of thought she’d describe it to me later.

  Then I remembered she had driver’s ed. The idea of everyone in the world getting their licenses in the next few months isn’t something I want to chat about. My regular shrink appointments are Friday afternoons, interspersed with occasional Dr. Walker appointments to look at my scar, so when I’m on a table with hot lights and hands all over my blank face, or sitting on Dr. Sassoman’s couch, talking about forever in my dark, Logan has her hands on the steering wheel of a car, with a teacher in the passenger seat and bright, laughing friends in the back, waiting for their turns, looking out the open windows at whatever is still there for everyone who can see: house, house, tree, tree, playground, runner, sunlight, flowers, 3-D life, the way that movement looks. On Fridays, I sit still. And try to remember to breathe.

  So maybe Seb is right and this is the kind of self-pity that nothing will come of, but never being able to go anywhere myself or have the same freedom as Logan and everyone else gives me a dropping feeling, like the forever of being dead. It’s just such a long time not to be able to drive. Not to grow up for real. I can’t tell anyone. I mean, Seb still skis and plays soccer and “beep ball,” which is baseball with blindfolds and a ball that beeps. Even after he gave up on getting me to ski, he invited me to come and at least “watch” one of his beep ball games, but I never did. Because I didn’t want to watch what I couldn’t see. And unlike him, I’ll never take the driving test. But Logan will. And Naomi and Jenna and Benj and even Babiest Baby Lily.

  • • •

  After my accident, only Logan told me the truth. My parents asked both her and my sisters not to read me the stories about me, but Logan did it anyway. I was the “local girl” with the “horrific tragedy.” I was Job and Oedipus. My tragedy was “biblical,” my accident “freak,” my loss “blinding.” I was unlucky and tragic; every single article called me “disfigured.”

  Logan had to tell me. We have a rulebook called L&E, which we made when we were little and still try to live by. Leah always told me that the most important thing was to be nice to other girls, because people love to lie about how girls are competitive, jealous bitches caught in an endless cycle of catfighting and competing. (“And for what?” Leah always asks me. “Boys? Limited positions of glory in the world?”) Leah says there are plenty of boys or girls or jobs or trophies or whatever you want in the world, so share. She says it’s our job in a family of so many girls to help correct the stupid beliefs people hold about girls. I don’t know how Leah figured this out, or why Sarah never did, but Logan and I wrote it down like a girl bible. We vowed to be one person, with indivisible hopes and happiness: If one of us did well, we both felt joyful. If one of our hearts was broken, we were both devastated. And Logan kept her part of that deal; she almost died when my accident happened. Sometimes I’m surprised she didn’t actually gouge her eyes out.

  We wrote that we would tell each other the straight truth all the time, although the L&E book has helped me get why an occasional white lie or omission isn’t always a bad thing. Like the time in seventh grade when I overheard Blythe Keene and Amanda Boughman talking about how Logan twitched her butt so much when she walked that she looked like “an epileptic pony,” and of course I told Lo right away because it was the loyal L&E imperative, and anyway I thought if Blythe and Amanda were talking about me that way, I’d want to know. But leaving the actual pony part out might have done the job just as well, without ruining everyone’s friendships for an entire year.

  I guess Logan could have left out some of the worst parts of those reports about me. Or maybe she did. Maybe they were even more horrible than I know. I just thanked her for not patronizing and lying to me like everyone else did. I said it would have been worse not to know what everyone was saying. I said that people could write whatever they wanted, but no one would ever get to see my disfigured eyes again.

  “But you have to leave the house someday. And see people again,” Lo said quietly.

  I said, “I can’t see.”

  She never made that mistake again; just stopped using the words look, see, or burned, and started buying me “Emma Silver Star Glasses.” And once I put the first pair on, I never left my room without sunglasses on again.

  Because my left eye is closed, and there’s a scar along the lid that runs in a diagonal line from the top to just underneath my eye. I’ve only asked about it directly one time, and it was the last time anyone has said anything about it to me. No one is allowed to mention it ever again. Because on an odd and awful night almost exactly a year ago last fall, I woke up thrashing and stumbled into the kitchen to get some water. My mom had forgotten to leave a bottle on my nightstand, because we didn’t have any systems yet. I went without sunglasses or Spark or my cane, feeling the wall, trying not to trip or cry. I thought it was the middle of the night because I had fallen out of space and time. I was so thirsty and so scared that the thirst and fear felt confusing, like they were the same feeling.

  Then I heard breathing, and my mom’s voice said, “Hi, sweetie,” and my hands flew up to my eyes. I smelled something thick, muddy, chemical.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, jittery and still covering my eyes, even from her.

  “I’m having a glass of wine,” she said. “Why are you up, Em?”

  So that was the smell. Why was my mom having wine in the middle of the night? “I can’t sleep,” I told her. I was glad she’d mentioned the wine, because I wouldn’t have liked it if she was hiding things from me just because I couldn’t see them.

  She asked, “Would you like a sip?”

  “Of wine?”

  “Yes, wine. Here.” She stood up and I heard her getting a glass down. Then I heard the pouring, a thick, purple sound, and the smell came closer to me. She put her hands on my shoulders, pulled a chair out, and helped me into it.

  “Try a little,” she said. “It’s better than that Manischewitz Passover crap, that’s for sure.” She laughed a deep, sad, throaty laugh that made me feel very scared.

  “Are you drunk?” I asked.

  She laughed again, but this time it was her real laugh. “No!” she said. “Certainly not. I’ve had about four sips of wine. I’m afraid even I have more tolerance than that.”

  “I thought you said Jews don’t drink; that self-medicating is for anesthetized WASPs.”

  “You heard that?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed.

  “Why are you drinking?”

  “Having a glass of wine once in a blue moon isn’t drinking,” she said.

  “But it’s the middle of the night,” I said. “And you’re alone.”

  “It’s ten o’clock, sweetie. I’m waiting for your dad to get home from the hospital and have a glass of wine with me. And I’m not alone. You’re here with me, and I’m glad.”

  I took this in. I had never considered the possibility that my parents sat at the table late at night, drinking wine, either alone or together. In spite of myself, I felt left out. And then stupid for that. I mean, this was last year. It wasn’t like I was a baby. I drank a big gulp of my wine, and it tasted sour, made my tongue sweat.

  “Yuck,” I said. “I like the Manischewitz better. This tastes like coins. Or”—I pushed my lips together—“Band-Aids?”

  My mom laughed her real laugh again then, and I felt less sad, less scared.

  Then I sat right next to her at the table and asked, “What does it look like?”

  And she didn’t ask me what, because she knew I was talking about my left eye.

  She just said, fast, “It’s much better, Emm
a, sweetie. Not so livid as it was.”

  That word, livid, for something on my face, my eye, made my throat close with fear. Even though she was using it to make the point that the scar wasn’t livid anymore. My mouth was thick with the choking taste of the wine, but I made the shape of livid again and again, silently, pressing my tongue up against the back of my teeth. I was trying to make livid lose its meaning, the way repeating a word can. My mom was still talking when I came back from the work of undoing her stupid adjective. The scar had “calmed down now,” she was saying, and I looked like I had “as a baby, when I was asleep but about to wake up, with one eye closed and the other one open.”

  “You always looked a little suspicious when you were a baby, and that’s how this looks now, too. You look beautiful, vulnerable, strong,” she said. “You look just like yourself.”

  I wasn’t going for it. “The scar is disgusting,” I said, pushing my chair back and standing. “You’re lying. It’s thick and ropy and red and purple and horrible.” Because that’s how it felt to my fingers, crazy and jagged and maybe like a multicolored, furious, mountainous ridge jutting off my face. “I’m a sickening, livid monster. Why can’t you ever tell me the truth about anything?”

  I leaned in then and put my hands on my mom’s face, to see if she was crying. Wet, yes. Tears. I had put it meanly to make her cry, and it had worked, and now I felt the meanness bubbling, boiling inside me. But I said nothing to fix it; I couldn’t. I just stood there. The skin on my mom’s cheeks felt thin and fragile, the tears toxic, like they might eat away at her face. I let my hands fall back to my sides hopelessly, and thought about salt, how weird it is that tears contain it, that our eyes produce something they hate.

  “Nothing about you could ever be disgusting,” my mom said. But I knew she was wrong; I was ruined inside and out. I went back to my bed, forgetting to get water. I lay there, dying of thirst.

  • • •

  Our Bridge date with Zach was on November 2. It was so rainy and windy that leaves swirled like cartoon tornadoes and the lake roared, wanting to swallow us all up. I knew I would never get near water again. It seemed impossible that summer had ever been to Sauberg, that any of us had ever swum in Lake Brainch, seen sunlight, watched actual clouds move across the sky like spun sugar. It should have been beautiful. Claire should have been alive. I should have been able to see the leaves. The leaves should have been red and gold and yellow, but they were nothing but a wet smell, dirty, decaying. What I could feel of them, under me, sinking into the ground, was a reminder of the wrong, worst things. When I picked up a handful of leaves, hoping to feel the red and gold of them, they disintegrated in my hands. What about leaves raked into crisp piles? Why were these so soaking, peeling from the ground in only the most furious gusts of wind, sticking to our jackets? On our way to Bridge, Logan screamed when a muddy leaf pasted itself to her face. It felt like the world was ending. And I’m aware that having no control over how to fix the world is a typical human predicament, but it felt desperately, uniquely urgent to me.

  Zach and I both got hot apple cider and muffins and Logan got coffee. We sat at a corner table in the back of the café. Spark was shivering. I took my jacket off and put it over him where he was lying at my feet. He did the funny thing with his paws where he pats them on the floor like he’s dancing or running in place. This seems to warm him up. Maybe Zach was cold, too, because he left his jacket on and sat very still, and it wasn’t until we had already started eating that I heard him unzip his coat and shrug it off. I was relieved, like this meant he would stay for a little while.

  He finally said, “So, you guys wanted to talk? What’s up?”

  I leaned my leg into Spark’s body on the floor next to my feet, while Logan said we just wanted to talk about what was going on at school and in Sauberg in general—you know, with Claire and our parents all being crazy and strict and the school acting like we were talking about it but not really talking about it, and what the fuck. She went on for a long time, and I knew she was nervous. I was grateful that she took over, but also felt left out. I wished, as I do more and more, that I could be Logan for a few minutes. But not that she would have to be me, because why would I wish that on her?

  Zach was quiet again, for a long time, the way he is, which makes me nervous, even though I know he’s just collecting his thoughts. I’ve noticed, since I have no choice but to listen, that people who think before they speak say better things than the ones who open their mouths and let the words go without choosing which ones will matter and which ones might as well be clutter, dust, or puddles. Go figure. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people either haven’t realized it yet or just can’t turn off the faucets of their mouths in time to save everyone from drowning in floods of stupidity.

  “That sounds really good to me,” Zach finally said, and I warmed up like a heater. “Do you guys just mean people from school?” Zach asked, slowly, his voice a golden color. “And where would we do it? Maybe here?” Zach asked.

  “I was thinking somewhere more private,” Logan said. “So people feel like they could say whatever they wanted. What about the Mayburg place?”

  “That’s a great idea,” Zach said, quicker than usual. I was shocked that Logan hadn’t run this terrible idea by me. The Mayburg place is an abandoned house at the mouth of I-92, between Lake Street and the outlet mall. It’s set back from the road, close to Point Park Beach, which Leah says they’ve cordoned off. The path to the Mayburg place is so overgrown with plants and trees that you have to hack your way in there. I’ve only been in the house once, two years ago in the daytime with a bunch of girls after an afternoon school picnic. It was me and Logan, Amanda, Blythe, Claire, and this girl Melanie Glass, who moved away the summer of my accident. We did it on a dare, and the place was full of old, ruined things, including a calendar from twenty years ago, clinging to a rusted nail on the wall. We all took one look, touched the door to prove we’d done it, screamed, and tore out of there. Except Claire. She went all the way in and took an old bowl as a creepy souvenir. I remember she and Blythe showed it to all the boys and how they were impressed.

  “The Mayburg place? Won’t people be afraid to show up?” I asked. And right away, all the blood from my limbs went straight to my face. I became a piece of humiliated chalk. And Logan made it as bad as it could be by saying, “Of course we’ll help you in, Em.”

  One of the main L&E rules is that Logan and I never fight in front of other people, so I just said, in a voice so fake not-angry that I sounded even more medical than my dad, more pastel than my mom, “I meant other kids, not me—just, you know, younger kids or whatever.” I planned to shout at Logan later for betraying me and making Zach think I was a disabled basket case.

  “Of course,” Logan said, realizing her mistake. “Good point. Maybe we should meet up at Cock Dick or something, and then walk over in a group. If anyone’s scared we can remind them they’re totally safe as long as we’re all together, looking out for each other. And without adults. In a way, it will be a chance to enact our goal of being there for each other or protecting ourselves or whatever we talked about at your place, Em.” Good, so at least Logan was embarrassing herself, too.

  Cock Dick is the statue on Lake Street; it’s of this guy named Thomas Johnson, who apparently founded this tiny strip of an uptight place and therefore got a stone version of his body and face made for everyone to look at (and touch) for the rest of time. The statue is wearing tight hunting pants, and has a shotgun slung over its shoulder, but mainly, the crotch is out of proportion and shiny from everyone touching it all the time, especially for a town where most people never talk about sex, and we have no sex ed at school, and no one is allowed to wear short skirts. Maybe that’s why everyone wants to fondle Thomas Johnson. And apparently John Thomas is also a word for that, because most words mean both what they mean and also something else, usually something dirty that you can’t guess i
n advance of some asshole being like, “Oooooooh! You said Peter—ha-ha!” And you’re like, “But your name is Peter.”

  Zach was saying, “So what if we each choose five or so people to invite, make lists . . .” Then he waited again and I could feel Logan struggling to keep quiet, to resist filling the silence. “Let’s say five people—that would be fifteen, eighteen with us. And we won’t say much; just that we’re meeting at the Mayburg place on Saturday night. Should we say ten?”

  Ten o’clock. We were going to ask fifteen people to weedwack their way out to the Mayburg place after dark so we could talk in private about our dead friend? It seemed certifiable. I wrapped my arms around myself and said, before Logan could respond, “Ten sounds great. It will help show who’s actually interested enough to come.” Spark whined for a minute at my feet, as if he knew I had betrayed us both and was about to get us into trouble. I wondered how much trouble, and threw him the rest of my muffin.

  We made our lists based on who was most likely to be into the whole idea, and brave enough not to tattle or panic. We all agreed that Zach would ask future Supreme Court justice Coltrane Winslow, because he was perfect for this sort of thing, whatever it was, and I would ask Deirdre Sharp, for her huge math and science brain. Amanda Boughman would be helpful getting more people, because she was a popular butterfly. Elizabeth Tallentine was shy and weird, but I’ve liked her since third grade, when we were voting on which cause to support with money we made at a “restaurant” we had in our classroom, where we served bread and water to our parents for cash. Everyone was like, “Let’s do animals,” because they’re cute and furry and we love them, but Elizabeth shocked us by disagreeing. So our teacher, strict, mean Mrs. Jackson, made Elizabeth stand up and give a speech about why she didn’t think our cause should be animals. Elizabeth’s face was a shiny balloon. She said, “I love animals, too. But some people have cancer—some kids, like my cousin Max. He’s four. And doctors need money to do science so they can save him.” She gulped a bunch of air. “So, um, maybe if we can save kids like Max, then more animals will get saved, too, because kids love animals.” I looked up at Mrs. Jackson and her eyes were sparkly and tears poured out of them, and we all had the stunned revelation that she was a human being, that teachers could cry. I think I’ll remember that moment forever, and I’m glad I saw it. We voted to give our restaurant earnings to cancer research. And when Elizabeth was absent for three weeks in fifth grade, we all made cards to say how sorry we were that her cousin had died. Apparently the fifty-four dollars we collected at our “restaurant” wasn’t enough to make the difference. When Max died, I cried, too, even though I hadn’t known him, hardly even knew her. I knew then, like I know now, that we hadn’t done enough.