Endless Possibility: a RUSH novella (City Lights 3.5) (4 page)

“So?” I leaned forward. “She got it, right?”

“She did.”

Fierce pride swept through me. “Good for you, baby,” I murmured under my breath.

“She will be departing for Europe in four days,” Lucien said.

My head shot up. “Four days? The violin won’t make it in time.”

“I thought of that,” Lucien said. “Charlotte arrives in Vienna next week but the tour doesn’t begin for two weeks after that. It is quite possible that we’ll have secured the violin by then, and can send it prior to her first concert on July 2
^nd
.”

“I wish I could just put it in her hands myself,” I muttered. “I’m happy for her, but goddamn, she’s going to be so far away.”

“Yes,” Lucien said. “Quite the whirlwind tour from what she told me. Seventeen cities in a month and a half.”

“Which only proves my suspicion that had I gone with her, she’d spend all her time dragging my ass around instead of concentrating on her music.”

“Mmmm.”

“But I’d like to hear her play,” I said, talking mostly to myself. “I’d really like that.”

“I have taken the liberty of researching a facility that will help you live independently,” Lucien was saying. “The Helen Keller Foundation. In Brooklyn. Quite reputable.”

“Uh, what? Oh, yeah. Okay.”

“Perhaps you could spend the summer studying, and then fly to Vienna to meet Charlotte on your own. Show her you have put the time and effort into fulfilling your promise by putting your newfound skills to the test.”

“What? Alone?”

The idea seemed preposterous. And frightening. I’d spent the better portion of my adult-non-visually-impaired life navigating the world’s cities and their airports. It was often a challenge as a sighted person. To do it blind? Impossible.

But as for the rest, I asked Charlotte to wait for me, but wait for what? And for how long? If I wasn’t going to make the effort to learn how to live blind, why the fuck did I leave her?

I waved a hand. “Yeah, go ahead. Sign me up. Classes, Braille, all of it.”

“Wonderful,” Lucien said. “I will make the arrangements this minute.”

I sighed. “Wonderful.”

That evening, I lay in the guest bedroom, listening to Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 on my phone when Lucien knocked.

“This arrived for you,” he said, and I felt the bed dip. “It’s the software Charlotte recommended. With it, you can read and write on a computer, and even go online and peruse the Internet. It will read the screen for you. Quite extraordinary technology!”

He sounded so excited about it. I managed a thin smile.

“Sounds great.”

“Quite!” Lucien said. “And you’re enrollment at the Helen Keller Foundation is complete. Classes begin next week, so there is time to squeeze in a visit to New Haven. Your parents are anxious to see you.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Noah?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m proud of you.”

The door closed and I sank back down on the bed. He was proud. I was as conflicted as ever. Classes at the Helen Keller Foundation. Whoopee-fuckin’-doo. It still felt off to me, though I couldn’t see I had any other option.

Back in the day, when I was still working for
Planet X
and some article wasn’t coming together the way I wanted it to, I’d just start typing. Anything and everything about the subject I was working on, just off the top of my head. Riff writing, someone called it. And when I was done, I’d go in and pick all the best, truest parts and organize those into the article.

I needed that now. To be able to just spew all my feelings and thoughts about what it would take to fulfill my promise to Charlotte so I could analyze them. A jumble of words, maybe, but some of those would float to the top and I’d have my answer.

I called Lucien back into the room and asked him to set up the software Charlotte sent me on his laptop, as mine was still in the townhouse. Lucien was pushing seventy-five, but he was still sharp as a whip. He got it up and running, and showed me how to speak into it, and how to have that read back to me. Then left me to it.

I toyed with the mic for a good ten minutes, feeling supremely stupid. But the question needed answering.

You want to learn how to live blind? Then fucking learn, snowflake. There is no other way.

Except that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t
want
to learn to function blind. I didn’t want to be blind at all. My grief wasn’t deep or poetic. It was sinister in its simplicity. I wanted to see again and I never would. That was my torment: two implacable forces, smashing up against one another like tectonic plates along a fault, waiting for the other to give. My blindness couldn’t and I didn’t want to, so I remained caught between them. And it was crushing the life out of me.

“I don’t want to be blind,” I said aloud.

Tell us something we don’t know, genius.

Apparently, my inner editor had become an asshole since the accident.

But it was the crux of the problem. It
was
the problem. I didn’t want to be blind. I wished I’d never fucking jumped off that cliff. Or that I had jumped at the right time, or a different time and suffered a different injury. Something that wasn’t so goddamn life-altering.

Without realizing it, I began to speak, soothing my bitter anguish with an alternate reality. A fantasy of what might’ve been…

I dove too late. I know it even as my feet leave the rocky outcropping. I have time enough to think ‘This is going to end badly’ and then I’m in the water, curving into the dive. The water tosses me and I slam against the rocks. Pain explodes up my right side. It feels as if a giant steel trap has snapped over my leg from ankle to hip. Or maybe a shark bit me. The pain is both the deep agony of shattering bone and the burning fire of torn flesh. Panicked, I nearly inhale ocean water as I claw my way to the surface.

Local divers haul me to the shore. I suck in deep breaths to calm myself and then nearly lose it all over again to see my right leg. It’s a fucking horror show, there’s no other way to put it. Bent and twisted, skin torn away, it looks like I have three knees instead of one, and blood is seeping into the sand. The sun is hot on my damp skin, but I begin to shiver.

An ambulance arrives and I’m whisked to the naval hospital, then airlifted to UCLA Medical Center the next day. Three surgeries later, I wake up to Lucien and my parents around me, all of them trying really hard not to look at my leg. I don’t want to look at it. It’s caged in metal scaffolding from my ankle to just above my right knee. Steel pins from the scaffold penetrate my bloated, bruised skin in eight different places, holding my bones in place, though I have more titanium rods than bones now.

I want to vomit, but the doctors tell me that while it looks godawful, I’ll be able to walk and run and live a normal life again, given time and a shit-ton of rehab.
      

“It could’ve been worse,” they tell me over and over.

It could’ve been worse. A-fucking-men.

When I’m able, they fly me to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City for another few weeks, until the pins come out. My imprisoned leg is free, and then I head to White Plains for physical therapy. My therapist is a great guy named Harlan Williams. We talk and joke around—nothing serious—as I work to get my leg back to where it was.

Two weeks later, I’m in an ankle-to-hip leg brace and hobbling around on crutches. The brace can’t come off for another six weeks, so my parents lend me their townhouse in New York City and Lucien hires me an assistant to help me out around the house. Some guy named Trevor. He’s okay, but I don’t give him much to do. I want to regain my independence as fast as I can and get back out there for Planet X. Yuri, my editor, is griping that he needs me back and I’m more than happy to oblige.

But I still need to recuperate, and I’m bored as hell cooped up in the townhouse. Some buddies of mine from PX stop by and we head out to a brunch place on Amsterdam Street my assistant sometimes orders from.

Deacon, Logan, Polly, Jonesy and I take a table in Annabelle’s Bistro, and settle in for a good two hours, running our waitress ragged. She’s a cute little brunette doing her best to stay cheerful for us while we give her a hard time with endless coffee refills, loud laughter, swearing, and general obnoxiousness.

Her nametag says Charlotte, and Deacon calls her “Sweet Charlotte” and ogles and teases her, sometimes inappropriately. She has pretty eyes, I muse, but otherwise pay her no mind. I have my leg up on a chair in the corner, leaning back, as if I haven’t a care in the world. And I don’t. I’m going to make a full recovery and pick up my life right where I left off.

Finally, a manager with a severe hairdo and too much makeup, politely, yet pointedly, inquires if there’s anything else we need, and we take the hint. We gather our shit and Deacon picks up the tab. We file out, through the maze of tables, and I’m last, hobbling slowly on crutches.

I’m halfway out when I realize I left my Yankees baseball cap on the table. I return to get it and find the waitress staring at the check with tears in her eyes. She snaps the black leather book shut when she sees me and hurriedly turns away.

“Forget something?” she asks with false cheer and a shaky smile.

“My hat,” I say. She’s short and I’m tall. I tower over her. “Did Deacon leave a shitty tip? He does that.”

“Oh no, no, I mean…it’s fine,” she says, turning away to wipe her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I just…um, kind of a rough month. You know how it is.” She glances me up and down in my expensive jeans and designer shirt. “Or maybe you don’t.”

The waitress realizes what she said, and another round of apologies bursts out of her as she begins stacking our dirty dishes. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Really. I have this bad habit…blurting. I don’t know why I said that. Anyway, um…”

I laugh, and fish into my back pocket for my wallet. “Don’t worry about it. And take this. For your trouble.”

I offer her forty dollars and her eyes widen. Up close, her eyes are even prettier—large and luminous, but sad too.

A blush turns her skin scarlet “Oh, no, I couldn’t. No, please. It’s fine, really.” She bustles even faster now, not looking at me.

I shrug and drop the twenties on the table. “I hope your month improves.”

She stops and stares at the money, at war with herself.

“Okay. Thank you,” she says finally, her voice cracking. She takes the money and stuffs it into her apron.

I feel sorta bad, poor girl.

“Have a nice day, Charlotte,” I say, and start to hobble away.

She calls after me, “I hope your leg gets better soon.”

That was big of her, considering what ginormous bastards we’d been to her all morning. Or maybe she’s just doing her job.

I wave a hand to her without looking back, and leave Annabelle’s.

Time heals me. I go back to work. To Planet X. To the world and all its thrills and beauty. I don’t go back to my parents’ townhouse; hell I’m hardly in NYC anymore. I don’t go back to Annabelle’s and I never see—or think about—that cute waitress with the sad eyes ever again.

“Fucking hell,” I whisper as the machine reads the last line of what I’d ‘written.’

I feel sick. Disgusted.
Terrified.
My own imagination took my ‘just a broken leg’ fantasy and carried it on a terrible tide to a fucking terrible conclusion.

When my nerves stop jangling, and I’m able to pull myself away from the awfulness of that manufactured alternate reality, clarity hits me like a breath of fresh air.

I knew what I needed to do. I needed to live up to my promise to Charlotte, but spending a sweltering summer in a classroom in Brooklyn, trapped behind a desk and thousands of miles away from her wasn’t the way to do it. I wasn’t sedentary. I was a world-traveler and always had been. Now that my ass was out of the townhouse—thanks to her—moving slowly was better than not moving at all.

I had to keep moving. Always. To her. She was at the end of a long, dark road where I was going to be beset with impossible obstacles, and maybe even danger, but I had to make that journey. I had to do everything possible for Charlotte. Everything and anything.

Because the idea of failure, of living without her in my life, was a nightmare worse than blindness.