As soon as Blythe and I got to the art room, Mrs. Fincter, alternately called by everyone Fister, Sphincter, or Spinster, pulled me aside to say, “I heard you were going to be in this section. Do you think you can handle a regular art class?”
As opposed to what? Not handling it? Dying? Taking an irregular art class? I waited as long as I could. Mrs. Fincter knows my family because my mom is an artist, and even if she weren’t, she’d still be famous, just for rocking her Old Mother Hubbard vibe so hard. But I didn’t know if Mrs. Fincter liked my mom or not, or how she thought of us.
“Um, yeah,” I finally said. “I hope so. I have—”
I was going to tell her that Ms. Mabel could help me, but she interrupted. “I guess we’ll have to come up with an individual plan of study for you.”
Blythe was probably still nearby. I wondered if she was listening to me and Mrs. Fincter, hoped not.
“Okay,” I said, wanting the conversation over. I wasn’t able to tell whether my individual plan of study was a happy challenge for her as an artist, teacher, and person, or a horrible inconvenience. But since I had actual problems to deal with, I put Mrs. Fincter’s feelings about me where they belonged: under who has time to give a shit about this? I just let Ms. Mabel help me get my supplies ready so I could participate absently in our first free-drawing session. I felt the waxy ridges of the crayon create raised lines on my paper. I ran my fingers over the page, felt my drawing take shape while Fincter talked about how we heal through art and blah blah we could work out our grief through projects blah. I was thinking it would be nice to heal through someone actually telling the truth once in a while, when a girl’s voice asked, “Is that your dog?” and I jumped.
I didn’t know who had said it, or whether she meant Spark or my picture, because I was drawing a dog. Or even for sure if she was talking to me, although the voice was so close to my right ear that I assumed she must be. I nodded silently. Don’t rock.
“It’s pretty good,” the voice said, so she must have meant the crayon work. “That’s amazing that you can do that.”
“Thanks,” I said, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask who I was speaking to. Ms. Mabel didn’t say anything. Maybe she thinks I have to get my social life together on my own. Or maybe they only pay her to help me with my academic struggles.
Last year at Briarly, a blind girl named Dee said I should just ask who had come up to me, or who was talking, or whatever I couldn’t figure out myself. She said no one would mind, not even sighted people. We had just had this nauseating conversation because I asked where she’d gotten these delicious Korean pastries she was sharing with me and Sebastian, and she said, “My mom brought them back from Korea.” I asked what she’d been doing in Korea, even though I didn’t really care. And she was like, “Well, she was visiting my grandma, who lives there, because she’s Korean.”
My mind reeled backward and forward at the same time. I asked, “So your mom is Korean, too?”
Dee laughed. “That’s generally how it works, Emma,” she said.
“Are you Korean?”
“I’m half,” she said. “My dad is black.”
“Wow. I guess I’ve never seen you,” I said, and she laughed again, like we were bonding, but my throat started to burn, because I hadn’t meant it as a joke. In fact, it set alight a new dread in me, one that was hard to name. I knew nothing. How would I ever find out anything about anyone again? Without having to ask questions no one is supposed to ask?
Dee was someone I wouldn’t have been friends with at Lake Main, and I can’t even explain why this is, or what point there is in it, but since my accident, I can’t stop dividing the world up into things I do “because of it,” and things I “would have done anyway,” like there’s some ethical reason for me to do only things the “other Emma” would have done. But everything I’ve done since was something the new blind me had to do. So I can’t win.
Asking people who they are is obviously something I would never have done. And I don’t want to start now. So I said nothing to the mystery girl in art. I just ran my fingers along the lines I’d drawn again and again, unsure what color my sad crayon dog was, wanting to ask Ms. Mabel but not asking, dying to rock but not rocking. Maybe people make too much of having to know everything all the time. Maybe I can do fine without knowing who’s talking to me or crying in what class, who’s here and who’s gone.
One thing I know, maybe the only thing, is that I’m here. Claire is actually gone, in the permanent dark. Which is not the same as my dark. My dark is complicated and sometimes lovely. I have to keep reminding myself. I can hear and smell and feel the people I love, which is the opposite of absolute nothingness. I’m still alive. I’m still me—just this other me. It’s going to be fine. Right?
I said nothing in any of my classes, or the hallways, or the lunchroom, where I ate my clammy sandwich in a whirl of activity that felt dangerous. Logan translated the entire time, even told me who was eating what, but eventually I had to tune her voice out. All day I felt twisty and dready and alternately so hot I thought I might be feverish and so cold I was immobilized. I listened and tried not to listen, waited and tried not to be waiting, since what was I waiting for?
The final horrific event of the afternoon was a mind- and butt-numbing mandatory assembly. Logan and I sat together, and in a miracle coincidence, Zach Haze sat with us. As I parked Spark and my white cane at my feet, I couldn’t help thinking, If only. If only I was the old me, Emma of the working green eyes, sitting with Zach and Logan, I could endure anything, even this performance about how shocked we all were, how a loss like this, how a scholar athlete, how as a community, how healing. How grief counselors. How “available to us.” How the hows made Principal Cates’s voice into the lowing of cattle in a field I was driving by. How none of it told us anything real about Claire, about who she had been or what had actually happened. We knew that our parents and teachers were calling Claire’s death an accident, but Principal Cates didn’t come near any words with actual information in them. What kind of accident? Had Claire killed herself? Slipped into the lake alone? What could she have been doing there by herself?
I sat as still as I could, focusing in and, for some reason, imagining reds: Twizzlers, lipstick, traffic lights, blood. Logan passed me a sticky, already unwrapped Jolly Rancher, whispered, “Not a germ on it!” and I tasted the joke and the pink bloom of fake watermelon in my mouth at the same time. Logan and Zach whisper-bantered about the bullshit assembly, school, the bright world they were still part of. While I listened. While I felt terrified, like Claire’s and my tragedies—even though they’re not related and hers is worse—melted together into one dark.
Then it was three fifteen. Leah swept me up from Logan at my locker, and carried me home on a wave of my sisters. Leah asked me a million questions about my day, her voice full of awe and joy. I complained about the assembly and Mrs. Fincter. Leah grabbed me into such a violent hug that I thought Spark might attack her. “You made it through your first day, though! I knew you could do it! What did people say? Did they stare? How was Logan? How was Ms. Mabel? Did you see him?” She dropped her voice to a whisper, even though she didn’t even say Zach’s name out loud.
“I didn’t see anything,” I said, and she laughed her howling belly laugh, which made me laugh until I almost felt like it had been kind of funny, even though nothing had seemed at all funny while I was still at school. Leah always puts me somewhere other than where I’ve been. On the roof of my life. I wish I could do that for Naomi, but I don’t know how. Especially now.
Leah darted into Jenna’s kindergarten room and came out with Jenna, both of them singing “Down by the Bay,” Leah terribly, ear-wreckingly out of tune, and Jenna with her shocking, little-kid glass voice, her own verse, all the notes lining up just right: “Have you ever seen a fish stick wearing ketchup lipstick?” She and I are the musical ones; she has perfect pitch and I can hea
r it. I used to love piano, singing, any music, really. And now Jenna does.
Naomi came out of her fourth-grade homeroom with a drawing she’d been working on all day. She kept holding the open notebook, coloring as she walked out of the school and down the eleven front steps. Leah said she should wait until we got home to keep working on her picture. Naomi said, “Emma gets to walk without looking. And it’s a comic.”
“My bad,” Leah said, “but please stop working on your comic while we’re walking.” I don’t know if Naomi obeyed or not. At the bus stop, Benji bounced off the preschool bus like a Super Ball, terrifying Spark. I could feel us rolling home like a force, a five-star Silver parade, missing only Sarah and Baby Lily. Naomi was now busy directing Benj and Jenna to stomp on all the cracks, and to guess how many steps we were from home, while she counted to see who was closest. I wasn’t allowed to participate, because I had the advantage of having figured out how many steps there are between most places in our house, so I was “too good at it.” Naomi is a busy person, always making crafts, rules, or games; she never slows down. She’s the leader of the little kids, but lately she’d rather be one of the big kids. I get that, since there are so many things I can’t do that I sometimes don’t know if I count as an actual big kid anymore.
Our walks home are how the slow hours of that first day morphed into a week and then that week into two and three and a month, and even I settled surprisingly into the dim lull of school. Everyone wanted something: good grades; a starring part in the Lake Main Players’ production of Annie Get Your Gun; someone to go to the first football game with; someone for the second game; an escape from parents, from church, from whatever was eating away at your particular insides; to get a driver’s license; to get a car, a boy, a girl, someone else’s lips or body pressed against theirs. Meanwhile, I just wanted to make it from room to room, not to get hit by a car or pitied too much by anyone but myself. To keep doing well in school, which used to be easy for me, but maybe won’t be anymore, with Ms. Mabel and my brailler and my ears. I just want to stop thinking about forever in the dark and my endless, claustrophobic tunnel of a future. Because I’ll never drive or get a job, or get married or lose my virginity. Maybe I’ll never even kiss anyone.
Because how will Zach Haze—or anyone—fall in love with me now? I’m definitely not invisible anymore. Everyone has noticed me now that I’m “famous,” as Logan says. But having everyone know who you are isn’t fabulous if it’s because you’re the star of a gruesome tragedy. Or because you’re disfigured. The way people stare and fuss makes me feel like I’m trapped under a magnifying glass, gasping and sweating, in danger of catching fire. Again.
-2-
Because that’s what happened. The summer before I should have started ninth grade at Lake Main, I went to a Fourth of July party with my parents and my sisters and Benj. It wasn’t quite dark out yet, and we were standing on a stretch of green lawn, clutching paper plates imprinted with stars. My mom spread out a blanket, but my dad and Leah and I stood waiting for the first fireworks. It must have smelled like barbecue, wet grass, summer, dogs. I didn’t notice, because I didn’t have to care about smells then. There were people everywhere, our neighbors and friends, carrying flags and balloons, laughing and chattering. In my memory, it’s like the “before” picture of my life and our town. And then the sky darkened and the show started and maybe Leah went to throw our plates away or something, but my dad and I were still there, holding the rope they’d strung up like a boundary, watching.
I loved the way the giant booms sent out wheels of spinning pink, red, yellow, and orange. I loved standing there dizzily, everywhere hot rocket smoke, colors shooting up and exploding into art that disappeared almost instantly. Even then, I got what’s so thrilling about beauty we see briefly or only once, the kind we can’t hold on to. Maybe I jinxed myself by thinking that? Because I tilted my head back to watch, like I was drinking the magic of each explosion of color, waiting for the next and the next. My dad had his hands on my shoulders, and he pulled me toward him a little. I took a step backward as he said, “Maybe we should—” and then I felt the spray of heat and pain across my face and my hands flew up to catch it, stop it, protect my eyes from whatever the sharp, shocking hot, melting, screaming blaze was, but then there was nothing.
My dad never finished his sentence. Maybe we should . . . what? Back up? Duck? Cover? Run? Not have come to this place that will ruin our daughter’s life in 3, 2, 1. Well, there wouldn’t have been time to count, or he’d have gotten at least the next two words out. Lie down? Move back? Who knows what he would have said if a rocket hadn’t blown backward and shot into the crowd. Right where I was standing. I’ve tried to stop wondering why the tiny band of my eyes—that one spot in the universe—was the place it hit, because, as my therapist Dr. Sassoman likes to say, that kind of wondering is “unproductive.” I used to ask obsessively, what were the chances? Chances are funny, though, because now that it happened, they’re 100 percent.
Sometimes the accident seems like the beginning of my entire life, because I can’t fully remember who I was before. Even though—or maybe because—I work so hard to keep what I used to be able to see: colors, light, shapes, my mom’s and Leah’s and Benj’s faces, even the way those fireworks looked.
I found myself in a cold, blank, metal-smelling hospital. That’s where I woke up, where I first heard my mom crying and my dad talking in his doctor voice about sockets, scarring, loss, regaining. Where were my sisters? Benj? Where was I? Was I awake?
I remember thinking, I can’t be waking up, because waking up and opening your eyes are the same thing and I couldn’t open my eyes. But then, all of a sudden, I knew I was awake. And that my eyes wouldn’t open. That they were sewn shut, or something; something was wrong. It was after that realization that I felt shrieking, amazing pain. How had I not felt it first? Nothing happened in order. I reached up, but my hands found only band after band of cotton pads, fabric, tape. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t think. I used to believe that seeing and thinking were the same thing.
“Emma,” my mom said. “You’re awake.” I don’t know how she could tell. Her cool hand arrived somewhere near my forehead; it must have been on a patch of skin uncovered by the bandages, but I couldn’t tell exactly where. Was it near my eyes? Where were my eyes?
“Where am I?” I screamed. “What is—Take this off!” I tried to peel the bandages, to tear them off, to see where I was, but someone held my arms down—I don’t know who. One of my parents? A nurse? I’ll never know, because then I was out, and then I was me again, thinking, screaming.
Whoever came up with the words “out like a light” knew something terrible. Because even when I was on, I felt out, off, gone. I could not calm down, could not stop shrieking about the pain and where my eyes were and where I was. My parents were a desperate loop, trying to answer, trying: “You had an accident; you’re in the hospital; you’re awake; you’re okay, you’re Emma. Emma. Emma.”
Then everything—the words, the rustle and scrape of the hospital, the robotic reports of machinery I couldn’t see, even the air—would go gauzy and soft. Like curtains, fluttering in the sort of light that’s about to turn into nighttime. There were needles in my arms. Someone pushed buttons. I heard beeps, and the room drowned out until I was awake again, screaming. That’s how it was then, when I was a prisoner in the hospital, in that metal dark. I couldn’t have said if ten minutes or ten months had passed until the day someone peeled the tape and then lifted off the cotton and cloth from my eyes. I asked if I could open them now, but they were already open; I knew because I reached up and felt my right eye. It was open. And I saw nothing.
“What do you see, Emma?” someone asked me.
“Who is that?” I asked, trying not to yell, not to panic.
“I’m Dr. Walker,” he said, and put his hand over mine. It felt to me like a cooked steak, a heavy piece of warm meat on my cold hand. I shuddere
d.
“It’s Dr. Walker,” my dad said. As if we all knew each other, or that might mean something to me.
I screamed, “Why can’t I see?”
For a few days, they held out hope for my right eye, but then Dr. Walker wasted no time in declaring that neither eye’s sight was going to “be restored.” So I lived those weeks in the hospital learning to be alive without my eyes. That’s when Dr. Sassoman showed up, talking about “therapy,” smelling like vanilla lotion, holding my hands, and putting whispered questions into my ears, where they stopped and stayed. I did not answer “how are you feeling?” or “what do you remember?” My parents talked noisily, far away from my ears, but in a buzz somehow around my head, about how great Dr. Sassoman was, how she was “the best in the business.” She was going to help us “get through this,” and I saw a tunnel. If I could just gasp and squeeze through a tunnel, I thought, maybe I’d be able to see. Light at the end. I said nothing. And Dr. Sassoman, as lovely smelling and whispery and practical as she was, wasn’t a magician. She still isn’t. She just guided me around the hospital and objected—like my parents—whenever I said I was going to die “without my eyes.” Like it mattered what the hell I said.
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