She presses my hand with hers in a meaningful way that I have to sit and tolerate. Then, thankfully, she puts the car in gear. I lean my head back against the seat rest. I’m about to close my eyes and be numb for a while, but as we approach the front of the church I catch a glimpse of someone still outside. Alanky kid, loose in the joints, ambling down the steps, lost in thought. It looks like, no, itfeelslike Mason. He looks up and waves as we pass. Rolling down the window, I whip around in my seat, craning my neck. But he’s gone. No one is on the steps, alive or dead. There are only autumn leaves making their own gentle cyclone, spinning up and up toward the sky, until they finally break free from the invisible forces holding them together and float away.
Arriving home is like going from the depression frying pan into the depression fire.
“We’re home!” I yell, banging the screen door as I come in. Dad is in his usual place in the living room, slouchy in his big armchair, some awful talk radio station in his headphones. He doesn’t greet us. It’s not clear whether he can hear me or not. I think he likes it that way.
My mom walks into the living room and touches his knee. “Dave?” she asks. “I thought the plan was you were going to make dinner today.”
Dad pulls one earbud out. “It’s on the stove,” he says, and goes back to the radio.
“The funeral was great, Dad, and I’m feeling super mentally healthy, thanks for keeping tabs,” I mutter under my breath on my way to the kitchen.
On the stove sits a pan of pierogies, a pot of steamed cauliflower, and some sort of whitefish I don’t love the smell of that already looks cold. White and white with a side of white. Dad wasn’t always this way. And our dinners definitely weren’t. I was sort of ready for the moodiness and withdrawal, but the color palette of our meals has been one of the unexpected casualties of him going blind this year. That’s not right, exactly. He’s actually been going blind my whole life, but it’s like his eyes havebeen headed toward Blind Town and this year they finally pulled up at the station. Like now I don’t need to say “going” anymore, I can just say “is.” He is blind.
He’s got retinitis pigmentosa, RP for those of us in the know. He’s got a cane now and everything. I’m not sure what the point of the cane is, though. He doesn’t really seem to be applying himself in learning how to use it. I think he just carries it so that when we sit down at a table at Denny’s the server is less likely to try to hand him a menu. Although usually they still do. People do all sorts of ignorant things, like hold out their hand for him to shake or silently change positions while he’s talking to them so he looks like he’s talking to empty air. But the most infuriatingly reliable thing people do when they see his cane is just talk to him a lot louder, like deaf and blind are interchangeable. And every time, I think about yelling right back at them. But of course, I never do.
I scoop a big helping of pierogies into a shallow bowl. Avoiding the fish, I pick up two florets of cauliflower with my fingers and put them on the side to meet my mom’s healthy quotient. Then I grab some shredded Parmesan from the fridge and sprinkle it over the whole thing. This is usually how I save my supper from the brink of gross. A large quantity of shredded cheese.
I sit at the tiny table in our tinier kitchen and eat. When Dad isn’t at dinner, we can usually skip saying grace and dig right in. I keep my eyes on my food as a way of transmitting “I need time and space” to my mom. Fortunately, my brother,Nate, comes to the table and starts absorbing all my mom’s attention. He’s six years younger than me, so he’s almost ten now. He’s definitely at an age where he still wants to tell her everything he did in a day. Which she loves, and it takes the pressure off me.
Every once in a while, not here in our town but when we’re on vacation in a big city like Philadelphia or somewhere, I’ll see someone blind out in the world with their cane by themselves, and it seems more terrifying to me than parachuting out of an airplane. I can’t imagine blindfolding myself and then just heading out the door, which is basically what they’re doing. Tapping around in front of you can keep you from falling down a hole, I guess, but that’s about it. What about what’s to the side of you, like a speeding car? What about what’s coming up behind you? I’m gonna go ahead and guess that blind people get mugged a lot.
So when Dad first got a cane, I registered my opposition. Vociferously (vocab points). I told him he should get a guide dog. Because a dog would know when a speeding car was approaching on the right. And a dog would sure as hell know when an ax murderer was sneaking up behind you. And then he could bite the ax murderer’s murdering butt.
I told him all about how a dog would provide full-service protection, and that, added bonus, then he wouldn’t have to be so pathetically dependent on my mom. I didn’t use those exact words, but it may have been implied. My dad replied that he didn’t need to be cleaning up feces on top of everything else,and that he knew what I was up to, that I was just trying to get a pet. That’s how selfish my dad thinks I am.
I didn’t just want a pet. But people are on the lookout for you to be selfish when you’re almost sixteen. Although when I heard there were actuallyminiature guide ponies, I did circle back around and give it another whack. And here’s the kicker about guide ponies: Horse hooves are too slippery to walk on tile or hardwood floors, so the handlers have themwear sneakers. Who wouldn’t want the dedicated assistance of a miniature pony in a set of sneakers? My dad, that’s who.
“And in the third book you find out that the bad guy is actually the main character’s uncle!” Nate is obsessed with this book series that somehow creates suspense by putting every fairy-tale character ever together in the same story. “So he’s trying to get the potion from the fairy godmother, and—”
“Did you get enough to eat?” I’ve pushed back from the table and cleared my place, which has grabbed my mom’s attention. She always asks me this, which strikes me as a strange habit. I definitely don’t look like I’m wasting away. I’m medium-sized, small on top but with strong legs and a butt that might be my best feature. I’ve gotten enough to eat every meal for my entire existence.
“Yep. And I’ve got a lot of homework, so …” I put my bowl in the sink.
“Okay, well, don’t work too hard. Today was a big day. Give yourself a break.” My mom smiles briefly at me and then turns back to Nate’s excited blow-by-blow summary.
I pass my dad on the way to the stairs. He hasn’t moved. I go in and sit near his feet, and put my hand up on his arm. I went to a funeral today, after all. Maybe the darkness in him and the darkness in me can somehow connect. “Hey,” I say.
He takes his earbuds out. “How was the eulogy?” he asks. My dad teaches public speaking at the local community college. He always wants to know about the speeches.
“Really good,” I say. “Mason’s sister spoke. Very specific. It was a little too good, actually.”
He doesn’t ask me what I mean by that. “Well, you know what John Donne said about death.Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty…” He continues quoting some ancient poem, his reliance on other people’s words extinguishing my hopes for a connection. I’m not sure what John Donne meant, but I know it doesn’t have anything to do with me.
“I’ll mull that over,” I say as I stand up.
I try to picture a guide pony standing there next to his armchair, maybe with a bucket of oats around its neck, stomping its sneakers every once in a while. Yeah, there is no way in hell my dad would ever get a guide pony.
Maybe I will, though, because no matter how much I try to pretend it away, I’m going blind, too.
Right now, no one else in the world knows this about me. After all, most of the clues can easily be explained with simpler excuses. The fact that my shins are covered with bruises and scrapes from bumping into edges of low coffee tables and protruding chairs?I’m accident-prone. Always losing things? Absent-minded. And when I don’t see my friends frantically waving at me? I’m just lost in thought.
I know these reasons are convincing because I’ve convinced myself with them for years. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, haha. But things are becoming undeniable.
Undeniable. I open my AP Bio text and turn to the chapter about respiration. When I signed up for AP Bio, I thought it would be like zoology, lots of in-depth information about the habits and family groupings of monkeys in Tibet, or videos about octopuses and how their colors can reflect their emotions. But AP Bio is more chemistry than anything. The chemical equations squat on the page in front of me. One undeniable thing is how slowly I have to read because there are so many little fuzzy obstacles in the way. I can’t take in a whole sentence at the same time. Instead, I have to concentrate on each word, one by one. I lose my train of thought again. I end up reading the paragraph three times and retaining none of it.
The most undeniable thing happened right before school started this year, when the whole Beaver Bunch went camping the last weekend of summer. It was supposed to be girls in one tent and boys in the other to appease our parents, but since Jeff and Lucia were now a couple, they immediately commandeered the smaller tent. That left the four of us in the other one, which felt totally normal. With the level of trust we all had for each other, we were more wholesome than a veggie bowl. Which I think is ultimately why my parents let me go.
My mom had made us a big bag of trail mix. It was a little corny, but I couldn’t be mad about it because trail mix is delicious. While Asha and I did all the work putting up the tent, Nolan and Mason sat on a wide tree stump and went through the bag, picking out all the M&M’s.
