CHAPTER 5: Learning to Be Blind Again

The hardest thing I have ever done is wake up the next morning and pretend the sun didn’t exist.

It came through the curtains at six, a thin gold line across the ceiling, and my eyes went to it the way a flower turns, automatic, hungry, three years of darkness lunging at the light. I caught myself. Made my face go slack. Stared at nothing the way I’d trained myself to stare at nothing for a thousand mornings.

Beside me, Alexander stirred.

“You’re up early,” he mumbled.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Bad night?”

“Just one of those.”

He rolled over and his arm came around my waist, warm and heavy and casual, the arm of a man who had no idea his wife had spent the night memorizing the shape of the ceiling she wasn’t supposed to be able to see.

I let him hold me. That was the first lesson. You let them touch you. You don’t flinch from a hand you’ve decided to hate, because flinching is a thing eyes do, and I didn’t have eyes anymore. I had a part to play.

“I’ll get the girls up,” he said, and kissed my shoulder, and the kiss landed on skin that had gone to stone.

Performing blind turned out to be harder than being blind ever was.

When you can’t see, your body learns. It builds the house in your head and walks the rooms without thinking. But now I could see, and I had to make myself wrong on purpose, and that took a kind of concentration that left me shaking by lunch.

I reached for my coffee cup and my hand went straight to it, clean, certain, and I had to stop my own fingers an inch away and let them wander, patting the table, searching for a thing I was looking right at.

I walked toward the kitchen and nearly turned the corner before I remembered to put my hand out, to brush the wall, to hesitate at the doorway like a woman who needed to feel for it.

I caught Lily’s eye across the room and almost smiled at her, almost, because she was making a face at her cereal, and I had to drag my gaze off her and let it go flat and middle-distance, and the not-looking at my own daughter was the worst part of the whole morning.

“Mommy, what’s wrong?” Lily said.

“Nothing’s wrong, baby. Why?”

“You look funny.”

My stomach dropped. “Funny how?”

“Like you’re thinking really hard.”

“I’m thinking about what to make you for lunch.” I kept my voice easy. “What do you think? Cheese or ham?”

“Cheese.” She was already gone, swinging her legs, the question abandoned.

But Luna was looking at me.

Luna, who’d come down without a sound and slid into her chair, was watching my face with that still, serious attention she gave to things that mattered. I felt it land on me. I made myself not return it. I kept my eyes loose, unfocused, aimed somewhere over her head.

She didn’t say anything.

She got up. She crossed to the counter. She poured a small glass of water, careful, both hands, and she carried it back and set it down in front of me, exactly where my hand would find it without reaching.

Then she sat back down and picked up her spoon.

I had to look at the table for a second. Just the table.

She’d been doing that for months, I realized. Setting the glass where I could reach it. I’d thought it was instinct, a child copying what the adults did. It wasn’t. She’d been taking care of me. She’d seen something was wrong in this house long before I let myself see it, and she’d been quietly closing the distance between me and the world one glass of water at a time.

She was four years old.

“Thank you, baby,” I said, to the air above her.

“You’re welcome,” Luna said, to her cereal.

Elara came down at nine.

I heard her before I saw her, the quick light step, the bracelet, my mother’s bracelet, clicking against the banister as she came. I kept my face turned toward the window and let her walk into a room with a blind woman in it.

“Morning, everyone,” she sang. “Oh, Clara, you’re already up. You should’ve waited, I’d have helped you down.”

“I managed.”

“You always do.” She said it warmly. She said everything warmly. She pulled out the chair across from me and sat, and I could see her now, in the edge of my vision, the cousin I’d loved, smiling at the wife she thought couldn’t see her smile. “Did you sleep alright? You look a little pale.”

“I slept fine.”

“You sure? You can tell me if something’s bothering you. That’s what I’m here for.”

I turned my face toward her voice. I made my eyes go soft and lost and grateful, the eyes of a woman leaning on the only family she has left.

“You’re so good to me, Elara,” I said.

Something flickered across her face. For half a second I thought she’d caught it, the lie underneath, and my heart kicked. But no. She just smiled wider, pleased with herself, soaking it up.

“You’re family,” she said. “Of course I am.”

The salt was by her elbow. I reached toward it, vague, fingers spread, searching.

“Oh, here.” She picked it up and pressed it into my hand before I’d gotten close. “There you go.”

“Thank you.”

“Anything you need.” She squeezed my fingers. Her skin was warm. The bracelet was cold against my wrist where it touched. “Anything at all. You just ask me.”

Under the table my other hand had closed into a fist so tight my nails bit my palm. Above the table my face was open. Soft. Empty. Perfectly, completely empty.

I had spent four years learning to live without my eyes.

I would spend however long it took learning to lie with them.

Dinner was the test. Alexander home, Elara staying, the four of us and the girls around the table, and me in the middle of it performing a woman who couldn’t see the looks passing over her head. I felt them. Everyone. The glance he gave her when he thought I was facing the wrong way. Her hand brushed his as she passed the bread. The whole secret language of two people who believed they had a deaf, blind audience of one.

I ate slowly. I asked Alexander to tell me what was on my plate. He did, patient, gentle, the perfect husband, and I watched his mouth move and his eyes go to her between sentences and I memorized the exact blankness of a man who had already left his wife in every way that counts and just hadn’t told her yet.

“You’re quiet tonight,” he said.

“Long day.”

“You should rest more. You push yourself too hard.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I will.”

After the girls were down and the house went dark and Elara’s footsteps faded off to the guest wing and Alexander’s breathing went slow and even beside me, I got up.

I went into the bathroom. I shut the door. I turned on the tap.

And I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself for the first time with no one watching.

The stranger looked back. Older. Thinner. But the eyes were mine. The eyes worked. The eyes saw everything now, and everything was a great deal.

“You don’t act in anger,” I told her, quietly, under the running water. “You don’t act too soon. You wait. You watch. You let them get careless.”

She nodded.

“And when you move,” I said, “you make sure they can’t get back up.”

The woman in the mirror didn’t argue.

She didn’t need to. We both already knew.

I turned off the tap. I dried my face. I opened the door to go back to bed.

And Alexander was standing in the dark hallway, three feet away, watching me.