Blindsided (15 page)

“Don’t you hate that? I am always misplacing my tail and ears,” Serena quipped.

“Don’t you mean your tail and your
horns
?” Sheldon deadpanned.

The kids laughed, glad that Sheldon had gotten in the last word for once. But Natalie sat quietly with the yogurt container still unopened in front of her.

 

Miss Audra knew something was bothering Natalie. “Are things at home okay?” she asked. “That good friend of yours—Meredith?”

Natalie picked up her folded cane from the floor. “Meredith has a boyfriend now, so I don’t see much of her,” she said. “Between Richie and driver’s ed and getting ready for Homecoming, she’s pretty busy.” She turned toward her cane instructor and smiled ever so slightly. “Miss Audra, isn’t it Ms. Kravitz’s job to pry into my personal life?”

“I’m sorry, Nat. I didn’t mean to pry,” she said, “but I need your full attention today, because you’re going all the way to the traffic light.”

Down the hallway, Natalie focused as she swept her cane side to side in a perfect arc. Outside, Natalie moved her cane against the grass that grew along the sidewalk—shorelining, they called it—and made her way to the big bush, where she turned right and shorelined her way to Nader Lane.

“Are you listening?” Miss Audra asked. “Tell me what you hear.”

Natalie stopped. “A lawn mower,” she said. “Off to the right, on the hillside. Children playing.” She pointed with her left hand. “There, at the nursery school.” Natalie lifted her chin. “And traffic moving.”

“Is it close?” Miss Audra asked.

Natalie shook her head. “No. It’s up ahead.”

“Excellent.”

When Natalie’s cane detected the beginning of a sidewalk to her left, she turned, knowing the walk ran west along Dunbar Avenue. Traffic on Dunbar was steady and brisk. Soon Natalie’s cane hit a metal pole. Vehicles converged from all sides. “We’re at the traffic light,” she said.

“Are you sure?” Miss Audra asked. “Maybe it’s just a stop sign.”

“No. Because if it was a stop sign the pole would feel different—skinnier—and cars would be stopping briefly, before moving on.”

“Good. This
is
the traffic light,” Miss Audra confirmed. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do here?”

“Listen,” Natalie replied. “When traffic directly in front of me has stopped, and when the traffic to my right moves, it’s my signal to cross.”

“Right.”

But there was no way Natalie was going to cross that street. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not ever. “Is it okay if we go back now?”

“Absolutely, Natalie. You did a great job coming this far. But next time, Natalie, I do expect you to cross.”

“Yes, I’ll try,” Natalie assured her. But only to please Miss Audra.

“You can do it,” her instructor insisted. “You’re going to come to a lot of intersections in your life, Natalie, roads and otherwise, and you can’t always just turn around. You have to summon the courage to go forward.”

Natalie nodded again. “I understand.” She was a good student after all. And an excellent faker.

 

A couple days later, Teen Group piled into three different vans and took a field trip to BISM, which stood for Blind Industries and Services of Maryland. At BISM, blind people worked in a huge warehouse mixing chemicals for cleaning supplies. Other blind workers operated machines that cut out thousands of pieces of camouflage material, which were stacked, wrapped, and sent to federal prisons for inmates to sew into U.S. military uniforms. Blind people there also put together office materials for state government employees, and taught classes in cooking, wood shop, and computer technology for other blind people.

When the kids returned to school, Natalie found herself walking up the hill toward the dorms beside Arnab.

“I found that a bit depressing,” he confided as they trailed slightly behind the rest of the group. He paused, waiting for Natalie, and they walked slowly, careful not to let their canes get tangled up.

“Me too,” Natalie agreed. “I wouldn’t want to be working one of those jobs. I mean I know they’re important jobs for a lot of people, but—”

“So boring,” Arnab said.

“Totally.”

“Have you thought—what you will do in
your
life?” Arnab asked her.

“I always thought I’d go to college, but I’m not so sure now. If I do, though—well, I’ve always been interested in government. I volunteered for a professor running for the state senate and I admired what he did. He knocked on people’s doors and talked to them about issues.”

“Ah. A politician!” Arnab said with a lilt in his voice.

“Well, there are
some
good politicians,” Natalie insisted. “I mean they
can
help people.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Anyway,” Natalie said, “it’s just a silly dream.”

“No, no, not silly,” Arnab said. “Our dreams, they keep us going.”

When they reached the top of the hill, the sidewalk split, with one pathway leading downhill to the boys’ dorm, the other to the girls’ residence. There was a bench and Arnab suggested they sit for a moment.

“Sure,” Natalie replied, taking a seat and folding her cane. “What about you? What do you think you’ll do, Arnab?”

“I have always wanted to be a land use planner,” he said.

“What’s that?” Natalie asked.

“Someone who plans how and where we will build our houses and our cities in the future. My father does this. He is a research scientist at the National Center for Smart Growth, at the University.”

“Oh, I see.”

A breeze came through, knocking ropes against the flagpole nearby and sending dried leaves tumbling down the sidewalk and against their legs and feet. The air smelled moist, like rain, Natalie noticed.

“What do you miss most?” Natalie asked Arnab.

“Color,” Arnab answered without hesitation. “Seeing colors. . . .”

“Yeah. That’s a big one all right,” Natalie agreed. “You have no sight at all then?”

He shook his head. “No. Nothing.”

A short moment passed.

“I wonder sometimes,” Arnab said, breaking the silence, “what color are your eyes, Natalie?”

She grinned. “My eyes? Well, I don’t have an iris, so I guess the answer is no color at all. Although I do have a pupil that’s large and black. So maybe you’d say I have two black eyes.”

Arnab didn’t laugh. “You don’t have an iris?”

“No. I was born without them. You know what the iris does, right?”

“Yes, yes. The iris controls the amount of light that enters the eye.”

“Since I don’t have an iris, bright light really bothers me, which is why I always have a hat on, and my tinted glasses.”

Arnab reached over to touch her head. “Ah! I forgot!”

“It gets complicated,” she said, “but basically that’s how I developed juvenile glaucoma.”

“I see. Well . . . I don’t see.” He laughed nervously. “But I do understand.”

Another brief moment passed when neither one of them spoke. Then Arnab cleared his voice. “Natalie,” he began, his voice slightly different, “I wondered if I could ask you something.”

“Sure,” she said.

“I wondered, do you think it might be okay—if I touched your face?”

Natalie turned to him. She couldn’t see him very clearly, but she thought he was looking down, with his good hand gripping one knee. And she knew it had taken a lot of courage to ask.

“My hands are clean,” Arnab said. “Mr. Joe said it’s important that your hands are clean.”

Natalie’s heart dipped. She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “It would be okay.”

Arnab sat up. Turning slightly toward her, he lifted his right hand and put it on Natalie’s arm.

Natalie helped guide his hand to her face, then took her own hand away and remained still—so still she didn’t even breathe.

Gently, very gently, Arnab’s fingers moved across her forehead. He felt the bill of her cap and chuckled softly.

“I told you,” Natalie said.

His fingertips, light as feathers, traced her brows, then brushed one cheek and, crossing her nose, moved up and down slowly to explore the other cheek. He took his hand off her face momentarily, but returned with slightly trembling fingers to trace the outline of her chin, and finally, her lips.

He brought his hand away and sighed.

Natalie wondered what he was thinking, what he expected and what he had found.

“I was right,” Arnab said.

“You were right?”

“Yes, yes. I knew that you were very beautiful.”

“But how can you tell?” Natalie asked in a nervous, joking way. No boy had ever told her she was beautiful. Not ever. Nor had anyone ever touched her this way.

“I can tell,” he said.

A lump rose in Natalie’s throat. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then, summoning her own courage, she reached over and gently squeezed his hand.

F
or two evenings in a row, Natalie took the framed photographs from her bureau and sat, cross-legged on her bed, with the pictures spread out before her. With her lighted magnifier, she memorized every feature in the images by staring, with what minuscule amount of vision remained, until each line, each shadow, each nuance of color was etched in her mind. Not just the proud, happy faces of her parents, but the way her father’s long fingers grasped the narrow shoulders of both her and her mother the night of the Honor Society induction. Gazing at the picture of Nuisance, Natalie thought of how many times she had stroked the long, luxurious white ears on that silky brown goat. Ears, she once thought, that resembled enormous tongues. Ears so long that Natalie had actually seen them blow in the wind.

As she compiled her mental scrapbook, a vague uneasiness gnawed at her insides and a corner of her heart felt pinched. Natalie knew she was preparing herself. If hope was a flame, it was flickering on a short wick.

And still—
still
it came as a whopping surprise. A shock, really, to awaken one Wednesday, an ordinary morning in the middle of November, only to see a solid sheet of—not foreboding blackness—but indecisive gray. A massive, ethereal gray screen, up close, with tiny, flickering splotches of light.

Natalie blinked. Several times she blinked, and rubbed her eyes hard with the palms of her hands, trying to clear her tiny window into the world. But nothing changed. She sat up and turned her head from side to side as though that would shake it loose, but nothing changed. Her heart began to beat faster; she could feel the rapid thumping in her chest, and the tightening of her throat.

Across the hall, Eve’s Carolina wren on the bird clock sang at 7 A.M. When her own alarm went off, Natalie reached over to turn it off, scooped up the pink HOPE stone that she regularly left on the desk beside her at night. Scared, squeezing the stone in one hand, she lay back down, pulling, with a trembling grip, the sheets up to her chin. She clenched her eyes shut and yearned desperately to go back in time, holding her breath until it hurt and she had to breathe again.

Was this it? Would her sight come back later in the day? In the week? She already knew that even on the darkest of days, she would have hope.

Did she need to call the doctor? Her parents? What should she do, she wondered. Tears collected and began to trickle down her cheeks.

And where was God? What happened to the deal? Why did he let her down? If it had to happen, why did it have to happen at school, where she was so far away from home? Maybe there was no God! Because if there really was a God, why would he do this to her?

Bree heard the sniffling, and when the sniffling became sobs, she seemed to know instantly what had happened overnight while both of them had slept peacefully and unaware. She took a seat on the edge of Natalie’s bed and, without a word, reached over and gently took Natalie’s hands away from her face and held them in her own. She leaned in, her forehead touching the top of Natalie’s head, still saying nothing, just letting Natalie know—as only another blind person could—that she was not alone.