Carley understood perfectly about adjusting to the emotional aspect of a catastrophic event. When she’d been told that the tumor removed from her face had been cancerous and that nothing could be done to reconstruct her lost bone and tissue, she’d gone into a deep depression. She’d wept for days, even though her doctor had tried to console her with the news that he’d cut out all of the tumor and that after chemotherapy treatments she shouldn’t have to worry about the cancer ever returning.
At the time, they’d shaved her head, operated, and stitched her up so that black sutures ran in long lines over the top of her head and around her nose. With time, her hair grew back and the suture lines faded. But the deformity remained. Her face looked sunken on the left side, her nose scrunched, her eye half closed. She was ugly—no doubt about it.
“Well, I’m hoping his doctors can fix up this guy so that he won’t be blind,” Carley told Linda, forcing herself away from painful memories.
“I hope so too,” Linda said.
Carley started her therapy thinking more about Kyle and his problems than her own broken leg. She wanted the best for him. She just didn’t want to be in his line of vision when, and if, his bandages came off.
“Hi, Sis. Whatcha doing?” Janelle breezed into Carley’s hospital room, shopping bags in each hand, her purse slung over her shoulder.
“Bowling.”
Janelle laughed. “I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
Carley was sitting in a recliner chair, her leg outstretched. She tossed down the magazine she was reading. “Where’s lover boy?”
“Jon’s coming; he stopped down at the snack bar.” Janelle plopped the bags on the floor, leaned down, and hugged Carley, then grabbed another chair and pulled it closer. The bag tilted and spilled books onto the floor. “You’ve got homework in every subject.”
“That brightens my day.”
“Tell me what’s happening. Mom and Dad want a full report.”
Carley described her physical therapy session.
“Did it hurt?” Janelle asked.
“Like crazy. But you know what they say: No pain, no gain.”
“Jon says that all the time.”
“Remind me never to use that phrase again.”
Janelle eyed Carley narrowly. “Be nice.”
“Do I have to?”
“Why don’t you like my boyfriend, Carley?”
Carley didn’t know exactly how to answer. She hadn’t meant to sound so caustic. She hedged. “Jon’s okay.”
Before Janelle could press for more of an answer, Jon walked into the room. He carried a sack from the snack bar in one hand and a giant cup of cola in the other. “How you doing?” he mumbled toward Carley, careful to avert his eyes from her.
“Doing just great,” she said.
“You want to sit by us?” Janelle asked.
“No,” he answered, much too quickly. “I’ll just drag a chair over here.” He indicated the small table on the other side of the room. “Mind if I turn on the tube?”
“Help yourself,” Carley told him.
“I thought you came to visit.” Janelle sounded irritated.
“You girls want to gab. I’ll stay out of your way.” He opened the sack and extracted a hamburger, fries, and a pile of ketchup packets. He switched on the TV.
Janelle turned toward Carley and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I thought he’d be more sociable.”
“I’m used to it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. I’m just saying it’s all right if he does his own thing. He’s your boyfriend. I wouldn’t expect him to get excited about coming to the hospital to see me.”
Janelle frowned as if she knew something wasn’t quite right, but since Jon was in the room she couldn’t make Carley talk about it. “Have you heard from any of your friends from school?”
“I don’t have friends like you do, Janelle.”
“What about that Dana girl?”
“We haven’t been friends since Thanksgiving.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“When the guys started noticing her, she dropped me like a hot potato.”
“Well, that was mean of her.”
Carley sighed. Janelle was wrapped up in her own social life. Not that Carley blamed her. Janelle was in her senior year and planning on college. Plus, she was pretty and popular and outgoing. “I’ve forgiven Dana. Why should she be saddled with a social liability like me?”
“She’s petty. And you’re not a liability.”
“She’s normal,” Carley corrected.
“Well, have you made any friends here? A few days ago you were still groggy from your surgery, but surely you’ve poked around by now.”
Carley told her about Reba and Kyle.
Janelle sucked in her breath when she heard that Kyle was blind. “I’d hate to think of a guy with his whole life ahead of him being blind,” Janelle said.
“His blindness may not be permanent. His doctors aren’t sure yet.”
“That’s a relief.” Janelle tipped her chin forward and studied Carley thoughtfully. “Do you like him?”
“Of course I like him. Why wouldn’t I?”
“No, I mean like him, like him.”
Carley blushed under her sister’s keen scrutiny.
“You do, don’t you?”
“I hardly know him. We’ve had maybe two conversations.”
“So what? I knew I liked Jon the first time I laid eyes on him.”
“Well, Kyle’s never laid eyes on me. And believe me, if I have my way about it, he never will.”
Five
That evening Carley had just finished supper when her phone rang.
“It’s me,” Kyle said.
Her pulse fluttered crazily. “Hello, ‘me.’ ”
“I dialed the phone just like you taught me. Got it right on the first try.”
“I’d applaud, but I’m holding the receiver.”
He laughed. “Doing anything?”
“Counting the flowers on the wallpaper.”
“Want to come visit me?”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Sure. Let me grab my crutches and hop over.” He wanted to be with her! She forced herself to calm down. After all, he was trapped in the hospital and didn’t have anything else to do. Plus, he’d never seen her face.
She went to his room and found him sitting in a vinyl armchair at the small table in the corner of his private room. “You’ve made progress. You’re out of bed.”
“Yeah. You missed all the excitement. I spilled my lunch tray all over the floor. My mom was just walking in the door when it happened and she pitched a fit because no one was helping me. I told her that the nurses were busy and I shouldn’t have gotten impatient. Besides, I don’t like being fed like I’m some kind of baby.”
Carley was sympathetic to his feelings. She said, “Being helpless and feeling helpless are different things.”
“Exactly. Anyway, Mom nailed my doctor and he sent someone who works with the visually impaired to see me. She taught me some things about how to negotiate in a seeing world.”
“Like what?”
“Come sit over here and I’ll show you.” She watched him fumble for another chair. “I’ll get it,” she said.
“No.” His voice was firm. “I need to learn how to handle things like this.”
Slowly, he caught the arm of the second chair, stood, and pulled it out from the table. His movements looked choppy, but he did get the chair for her. She lay her crutches aside and sat down, propping her broken leg on another chair. “I’m impressed,” she said. “The last time a guy pulled a chair out for me was in seventh grade.”
She didn’t add that it had been done as a cruel joke. As the boy had pulled it out, he’d turned to his buddies and said, “Freak alert.” They’d all laughed and she’d felt humiliated.
“Okay, so I might not have offered if I wasn’t trying to show off,” Kyle admitted.
“I’m glad you’ve learned some things to help you take care of yourself. Nobody likes to feel useless.”
“I guess you would understand.”
“What do you mean?” She caught her breath. Had someone told him what she looked like?
“Your broken leg. I guess people are always rushing to help when you want to learn to do things for yourself.”
She let out her breath slowly. “That’s right. I’ve had to knock people over with my crutches in order to get them to let me do things for myself.”
His brow furrowed, then he grinned. “You’re joking.”
“Must not have been much of one.”
“It’s just that it takes me longer to catch on to things because I can’t see people’s faces and read their expressions.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“This being blind is hard stuff. My doctors are saying that if the chemicals that burned my eyes were acids, then I have a good chance of recovering my sight. But if they were alkaline, I may never get it back.”
“Don’t you know what chemicals you used to make the fuel?”
“I’ve been trying to remember, but my friends and I were mixing lots of stuff that afternoon.” He shook his head. “All I know is that I want to see again. I have to, Carley. I just have to.”
She heard passion in his voice. She, too, had felt that same kind of longing. She craved to have a normal appearance, but no amount of wishing for it could restore her looks. Beauty was for other girls. It couldn’t belong to Carley. “Well, until you can,” she said cheerfully, “at least you’ll know how to manage.”
Kyle leaned back in his chair, his palms flat against the table. She wondered if touching something made him feel grounded, more connected. “One of the worst parts is being bored,” he told her. “TV is a waste. I tried to listen to one of my favorite shows, but I couldn’t make sense of it.”
“I can see and I can’t make sense of most of them.”
He rewarded her attempt to lighten his mood with a smile. “I realized that a lot of the show’s humor depended on visual gags, on the actors’ expressions. Anyway, I had a hard time following, so I turned it off.”
She had a sudden inspiration. “You need to borrow some of my Books on Tape. You have a cassette player, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll loan you some of my books.”
“What kind of books?” He sounded skeptical. “Not romances, I hope.”
“I have those, but I won’t force them on you. I also have mysteries, thrillers, fantasies—in fact, if you have any lit books you need to read for school, I could probably find a few of those titles too. Sort of like Cliffs Notes for the ears.”
He laughed. “How about chemistry and physics books?”
“Get a grip. I’m talking entertainment here, not instant tranquilizer.”
“You wouldn’t mind loaning me some of your tapes?”
“I offered, didn’t I? You’ll like them, and listening to them will take you right out of this place.”
“You can’t imagine just how much I’d like to be out of here.”
She recalled wishing the same thing when she was going through her facial operation. Once they told her that removing the malignant tumor would leave her face deformed, all she wanted to do was run away, escape. She said to Kyle, “Don’t you wish you had the power to turn back time? To go back to before your accident and start fresh and avoid the things that led up to it?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I can’t believe how much you understand stuff, Carley. It’s as if you can read my mind.”
“It’s easier to understand something once you’ve experienced it.”
“You mean about your leg? Like you’d turn back the clock to before your accident and not do the same dumb stunt that led to breaking it?”
She was referring to her sense of loss over her looks, but of course he had no way of knowing about that. “Sure, I mean my leg. Who wants a broken leg with an infection in it?”
“And if I could start over with that rocket fuel, I would do things differently. I’d at least have put on safety glasses.”
“Why don’t you leave rocket-fuel concocting to NASA?”
“I will from now on.”
She gazed at him in open admiration. Kyle was tall, good-looking, easygoing and, more than likely, popular—just the type of boy she’d always sneak peeks at in the halls at school. Just the type of boy who’d never notice her existence. Or worse, turn away in revulsion once he saw her face. But here, in the hospital, with his eyes bandaged, the scales of social acceptance were balanced. He couldn’t loathe what he couldn’t see. She could be at ease with what she couldn’t change.
“Carley? Are you okay?”
She started. She’d been so deep in her thoughts, she’d almost forgotten they’d been in the middle of a conversation. “Whoops—sorry. I guess I had a temporary brain freeze. My mind wandered.” She whistled, snapped her fingers, and called, “Here, mind, here, mind. Come back now.”
Kyle broke into hearty laughter. “You’re so funny. Most girls I know don’t crack jokes like you do. Give me your hand.”
“I’m still using it,” she kidded, but held her hand out toward him.
He reached, caught her palm, and laced his fingers through hers. “There, that’s better,” he said.
She stared in fascination at their entwined fingers. “How do you mean?”
“I wanted to touch you. Hold on to you. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No,” she said, hoping the word hadn’t tumbled out as fast as her heart had begun to beat. “I mean, it’s fine with me.”
“Can I ask you something personal?”
“How personal? My IQ is a closely guarded secret.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
Caught totally off guard, Carley was momentarily speechless. No one had ever asked her that question before.
“Um—not really.”
He grinned. “That’s good.”
She squirmed self-consciously before realizing that he couldn’t see her discomfort. “How about you?” she asked boldly, not sure she wanted to hear his answer. “Any special girl?”
He shook his head. “Basically I’m shy,” he said. “I can’t ever get up the courage to talk to girls. My tongue gets all tied in knots and I come off sounding like a jerk.”
She found his confession hard to believe. “You don’t seem shy to me. You talk to me.”
“You’re different.”
If only you knew how different, she thought. She asked, “So, what makes me different?”
“I don’t know exactly. But when you wandered into my room and started talking to me, I knew you were different. You really understand what this is like for me … this … this being blind.”
“I know it’s got to be tough.”
“My doctors keep preparing me for being impaired. And so did the woman who worked with me this afternoon. Even if my sight comes back, it probably won’t ever be the same.”
Carley didn’t know what to tell him. She didn’t want him to think his situation was hopeless, but she didn’t want to ignore the seriousness of it either. “Well, don’t dwell on the downside. Just work hard at becoming self-sufficient. It’ll make waiting around for the outcome easier.”
He squeezed her hand. “You have a way of saying the right thing to me.” Suddenly he pushed back from the table. “What time is it?”
Carley glanced at the clock on the wall. “Almost seven.” She was amazed at how the time had flown since they’d been together. “Why?”
“My parents are coming any minute now. I want you to meet them.”
Panic gripped her. She couldn’t let them see her. “Oh, I can’t.” She grabbed for her crutches.
“But why not? What else is there to do around this place?”
She thought fast. “Reba,” she said, struggling to her feet. “Remember, she’s got surgery tomorrow and I’
ve got to go visit her and make sure she’s all right.”
He nodded in understanding.
Carley bolted for the door, moving as fast as she could on her crutches, afraid to glance down the hall toward the elevators in case Kyle’s parents might be headed her way. Afraid they might see the girl with the twisted face leaving their son’s room and ask questions about someone he thought was normal.
Six
Carley didn’t visit Reba because her friend’s room was crowded with relatives. So she marked time in the visitor’s lounge, keeping her head ducked so that her long brown hair would help conceal the left side of her face. When it was after nine o’clock, she cautiously returned to her room and quickly shut the door. She called Reba and said she’d be pulling for her during her surgery.
“You still friends with Kyle?” Reba asked. She’d been given medication to help her sleep and her voice sounded slurry.
“We talked for a couple of hours tonight.”
“That’s nice. Did you mention your face?”
“No way. I’m enjoying him thinking I’m a regular girl.”
“Someday he might see you.”
“Not if I can help it. Think about it. Once my infection clears up, I’ll go home and he’ll make friends with someone else. If he’s even still here.”
“So you won’t see him again when he’s out of the hospital?” Reba’s voice drifted.
“No,” Carley said. “I won’t see or talk to him again.” She paused, sensing that Reba was fading fast. “Go on to sleep,” she told her. “I’ll see you as soon as they put you back in your room.”
“ ‘Honesty is the best policy,’ ” Reba mumbled.
“What?”
“My … grandfather says … that …”
Carley sighed. “I’m changing the policy. Good night.”
She hung up and lay staring at the ceiling until the nurse came to hook her up for her evening dose of antibiotic. With her thoughts on Kyle, she drifted into a dreamless sleep long before the medicine was finished dripping.
The next morning Carley gave several of her Books on Tape to Kyle. “Can you stay?” he asked.
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