Blindsided Read online

  “No one is saying Natalie isn’t bright or capable, Frank!” her mother interjected. “Mrs. Russell is simply looking down the road—”

  “Yeah, well, tell Mrs. Russell to look up instead of down.” He sounded angry. Exactly how Natalie felt, too. No way did she want to learn Braille. That was for blind people. No way was she going there!

  And yet, deep down inside, Natalie worried that her mother was right. So she remained silent, torn between her mother’s frightening practicality and her father’s shuttered and emotional defense.

  Natalie’s mother sighed and got up to wash the dishes. Her father stood and pushed his chair in. Natalie asked if she could be excused to go do her homework, but paused in the next room to listen.

  “Don’t rush into things, Jean,” her father added, quietly, before he walked out the door. “That’s all I’m saying. Let’s be optimistic. Give Natty some time. Her eyes will get better.”

  Memories fade to gray after that because nothing was very clear anymore. The only thing for certain was that Natalie’s eyes were not getting better. The summer before she started high school, there was even a panic when the pressure in her eyes increased so much that more surgery had to be scheduled. It would be the seventh time Natalie had been in the operating room for her eyes.

  When will it end? Why is this happening to me?

  Her father told her not to worry, that the next surgery could be the turning point. One day, he even brought home a small pink stone—from the feed store of all places—that had the word HOPE etched into it. “They had these in a little bowl on the counter,” he said, pressing it into her hand. “Keep it in your pocket, Natty Bean. Don’t ever forget there’s always hope.” And Natalie had hugged her dad, who, in his worn denim jacket, smelled just like a sack of grain.

  “Is there something you would like to do?” her mother suddenly asked two weeks before the scheduled operation. “Something you’ve always wanted to see, Natalie?”

  What? Is Mom afraid I’ll come out of surgery with no sight at all?

  “The ocean,” Natalie blurted. A mistake. A huge mistake because that trip to the beach was a disaster. Her father was bored, just sitting under an umbrella all day, and he worried about the goats the whole time. Her mother, who had had some skin cancer on her nose, had to sit in the shade, covered up almost the whole time. She didn’t even want to take a long walk. And then the one time Natalie summoned her courage to go out in the ocean a big wave knocked her down and scared her half to death. No. They never should have gone.

  Fortunately, the surgery was successful. The pressure went down and Natalie’s vision did not get worse.

  But it didn’t get better either.

  A year later, just before her sophomore year began, Natalie was told by her eye doctor to prepare for the worst and, although they disagreed at first, her parents decided to send her to a special school where she could learn the skills she needed to cope with vision loss. On the last morning she was home, Natalie finished packing her suitcase and carried it downstairs, dropping it heavily by the front door. She did not want to be leaving for this special school hundreds of miles away.

  Without saying anything to her mother, Natalie took a dog biscuit and went to the barn to say good-bye to Nuisance. It was early, just after dawn, and the fog was lifting. Natalie could feel the moisture on her face and hands. She still had a small circle of vision, but just to be sure, as always, she counted the fifty-eight steps from the back kitchen door to the barn. The feral cat that waited for a pan of leftover milk every morning meowed at Natalie from its post on the cement stoop near the milking parlor. Yellow light spilled from a row of square glass panes. On the other side of the wall, Natalie’s father and Uncle Jack were already busy. Milking machines hummed and pails clanged.

  Inside the barn, the smell of fresh hay from the loft above and the pungent odor of manure from the pens mixed and surrounded her. The goats moved around restlessly in their pens, eager to be milked and get their morning portion of grain.

  “Hey, Nuisance!” she called sweetly, standing at the enclosure where her goat shared quarters with twelve other Nubians. “Nuisy Juicy!”

  Instantly, several goats rushed to where she stood, greeting Natalie with a chorus of wahhhhhhh and competing for her attention. One of them stood up against the rails and leaned over to tug on her sweater. Another nibbled at her fingers.

  “Stop!” she had to tell them, although not without a smile. When she moved her hand to push away the biggest aggressor, another goat stole the biscuit. Was it Nuisance? Her heart dropped; she couldn’t be sure. A blur of brown and white, all of them. Natalie couldn’t see well enough to tell them apart anymore.

  “I’ll be back,” she promised the goats, hoping Nuisance heard. “I’ll be back,” she repeated, whispering, “and everything will be okay.”

  She believed it.

  DAY ONE

  From the very first day, Natalie wanted all the students at her new school to know she was not like them—and never would be. It’s not that she was being mean. She just wanted to establish some boundaries.

  So when she moved into her small, spare dormitory room, Natalie immediately planted a small forest of framed pictures on her bureau: Natalie, candle in hand, with her mom and dad the evening she was inducted into the National Honor Society; Natalie and Meredith, dressed like cats for Spirit Day—fuzzy ears glued to headbands, stuffed black panty hose for tails, whiskers painted on pale cheeks with eyeliner. There was the photograph—the one that ran in the newspaper—of Natalie campaigning door-to-door with Professor Brodsky from the nearby college, a candidate for state senator. And there was the rhinestone-studded frame surrounding Natalie, light brown bangs brushing her eyebrows, a smile dimpling her lightly freckled cheeks, as she cuddled, head to head, with floppy-eared Nuisance.

  The pictures confirmed what Natalie couldn’t exactly say out loud: I am a normal person. An excellent student with big dreams. A typical teenager with friends who are cool—and normal like me.

  While her mother settled a suitcase on the extra bed (thank God there was not a roommate, Natalie thought) and zipped it open to unpack, Natalie rushed to tape a Western Allegany High School pennant to the bland, beige wall over her bed. Then she filled the four drawers of her single bureau with brown sweatshirts, sweatpants, T-shirts, and shorts that all bore the same orange letters and snarling cougar, her high school’s mascot. A brown and orange cougar mug was placed in a prominent spot on her desk. And a brown and orange cougar baseball cap was on her head at all times.

  Lest they think otherwise, Natalie wanted to be sure all the students knew that she was temporary, here only long enough to learn what she needed—just in case—whereupon she would return to finish high school with her friends. “An insurance policy,” her father called it the night before when Natalie was feeling down and wouldn’t eat dinner. Her mother had already left the room, her own meal barely touched. Natalie heard the kitchen door close, and then the sound of her mother’s footsteps down the back stairs as a current of cool air seeped into the kitchen, stirring the pained silence. Natalie’s father reached across the table to cover Natalie’s hand with his own large one. “Don’t blame your mother,” he said. “Just go and learn everything you have to, Nat, and hope you never need it.”

  Hope, yes. That was the bedrock of her soul, wasn’t it? She squeezed the pink stone in her pocket and ran her thumb over the engraved letters.

  “Hey there!” a voice startled Natalie. She whirled around to see a girl in a wheelchair parked in the doorway of her dorm room. “Hi, I’m Paula,” the girl said.

  “Oh—hi,” Natalie replied cautiously. She noticed the girl’s head was bobbing around in a strange way.

  “I heard you were new.” Paula smiled. “I just wanted to say ‘welcome.’ ”

  Not long afterward, a girl dressed all in black wandered over from the room across the hall and leaned against the same doorway. “Yeah. So my name’s Serena. If you need anything le
t me know.”

  And it hit Natalie with a thud. Duh. She felt so stupid. All the work she’d done to decorate the room in a way that identified and protected her was for no one’s benefit other than her own. Not a single other student could appreciate it. Because none of them could see.

  A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

  Natalie didn’t think she’d ever fall asleep that first night, but she must have because in the morning, she awakened with a start. The ocean dream again. A nightmare actually, with water and darkness engulfing her. Why did it haunt her this way? Disoriented, her heart pounding, she scrambled to turn on the light. Instead, her fingers bumped into the smooth, cold base of the new lamp on her desk at school, and the reality of where she was washed over her like a huge, stomach-churning wave of nausea.

  A strange institutional hum came from somewhere outside the room. Natalie rolled over and pulled the blankets over her head. How long did she lie there? Did she fall back asleep? A knock at the door awakened her a second time.

  “Natalie, do you need some help this morning?” The voice was an older woman’s, possibly the dorm counselor she’d met the day before.

  Natalie whipped the blanket away from her face. “No!” she called out. “No, thank you!” Accepting help meant she needed assistance and that would be admitting to a problem. “I’m okay!” she added before pulling the covers back over her head.

  “All right, hon. Just to let you know it’s seven o’clock. We’ll gather in the lobby to go to breakfast in half an hour.”

  She could stay where she was, Natalie thought, gripping the edge of the blanket. Just stay in bed, hiding out. But there were no locks on the door, so they would come in, wouldn’t they? They would force her to go to class, then she’d be embarrassed and they would call her parents and her mother would get all upset and ask Natalie if she’d already forgotten everything they talked about. What’s going on? If her mother got upset, then her father would get upset, too. We shouldn’t have forced her to go, Jean. . . . Stop it, Frank! You know she needed to do this! And everything would get off to a really bad start. Natalie did not want things to get off to a bad start.

  Sighing, she pushed the covers off and forced herself to sit up. She reached for the tinted eyeglasses she had left on the desk beside her and groaned when she saw again with her small circle of vision how she was awash in all that beige—walls, floors, doors. The bathroom was ten steps to the right of the small shag rug beneath her feet. The tile floor was cold. She winced and walked fast.

  Seven o’clock. Her dad would be in the barn milking goats. Her mother would be cleaning up from breakfast, putting a few scraps in the old pie tin for the cat. Natalie wished she could be the one taking the food to the cat; she’d been trying to make friends with it for weeks. Instead, here she was, plucking underwear out of a strange dresser drawer hundreds of miles away.

  She felt around and grabbed a pair of Peds, then pushed the top drawer shut. T-shirts were third drawer down, sweatpants in the bottom. She dressed quickly, did her eyedrops, and pulled her straight, shoulder-length hair into a ponytail. Finally, she put on her baseball cap, fishing her ponytail out through the back opening, and found the pink stone, which she’d left beside her hairbrush, and pushed it into the right pocket of her sweatpants.

  Pressing the little button on her watch—it was impossible to see those tiny numbers—she held it to her ear and listened: The time is . . . seven . . . ten . . . A.M.”

  Twenty minutes left. Natalie put her pajamas away, then quickly made up her bed and sat on it, staring at nothing, just using up time, wondering what the day would be like and trying hard not to think of home again.

  Twenty-nine steps from Natalie’s bedroom to the lobby, with a left-hand turn after eighteen. She had counted the steps last night after the dorm meeting as a kind of backup so she could find her way without asking for help.

  “Good morning, Natalie,” the counselor greeted her in the dorm lobby where the other girls had gathered. It was a different counselor from the one last night, but Natalie didn’t care enough to try to remember their names, or do all the work of moving her head around and mentally piecing together the small bits of vision to see what the person looked like. “We’re going to have you do sighted guide with Serena today. You’re both in the same classes. Are you familiar with sighted guide?”

  Weakly, Natalie nodded. “Yes,” she said. Sighted guide meant taking another person’s elbow and letting them lead. But she didn’t need it. Didn’t want it would be more to the point. People here would get the wrong idea. Should she speak up?

  There wasn’t time. The others were on the move, most of the girls swinging canes in front of them. Natalie had to step out of the way.

  Serena sidled over to her. “I’m not awake yet,” she mumbled. “I’ll try not to lead you astray.”

  Natalie turned to her. “I’m not blind,” she blurted.

  Serena sniffed. “No,” she said, shrugging. “I’m not either.”

  Natalie frowned. “But—”

  “Come on. I need coffee,” Serena said.

  Confused, Natalie took Serena’s left elbow with her right hand, swallowed her pride, and let the girl lead her out the dormitory door and down a cement sidewalk toward the dining hall.

  Somehow, Serena knew where they were supposed to sit and threaded their way between tables to the right one. Slowly, other teenagers joined them. Some used canes that they folded and put on the floor, underneath their chairs. A couple mumbled “Good morning,” but most simply sat down without a word.

  “They’re setting a platter of French toast on the table, Natalie. There’s also hash browns and eggs. And you can always have cold cereal instead.”

  “French toast is good,” Natalie said. She felt her stomach rumble. She hadn’t eaten much dinner the night before after her mother left.

  Serena handed her a plate from a stack on the table, then set a container of maple syrup in front of her.

  “Do you want coffee?”

  “Can I just have water?” Natalie asked.

  “Sure.” Serena pulled a pitcher of water across the table. “There’s a stack of cups right there, in front of you.”

  Natalie busied herself with breakfast. The French toast was thin and tasted funny, not at all like her mother’s. And the maple syrup was the imitation kind with a gummy texture, not like the real stuff they made themselves back home. Natalie ate it all anyway, washing it down with two cups of water.

  “So you thought this place was just for the blind?” Serena asked after they’d finished eating. She sipped her coffee and held the mug in her hands. When people stayed in one place long enough, Natalie could get a pretty good look. She noticed how Serena was dressed in black again and that the long-sleeved shirt she wore had holes toward the end of each sleeve where her thumbs popped through.

  “I did think this place was for the blind,” Natalie replied. “I mean, this is the Baltimore Center for the Blind, isn’t it?”

  Serena smiled. “Yeah, it is.”

  “But you can see, too?” Natalie asked.

  “Yeah, I can see,” Serena replied. She set her coffee down and with one thumb and a forefinger she pulled a few strands of red-streaked raven black hair toward the corner of her mouth while seeming to keep a cool, steady eye on Natalie.

  “I can see some anyway. But only out of my left eye.”

  It seemed rude, suddenly, to be asking someone if they could see or not. Natalie shook her head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy—”

  “No, no, it’s okay. I don’t mind. I mean, not everyone talks about why they’re here, but it’s pretty obvious. Just that some people are more sensitive to it than others. We’re not all totally blind, no way.”

  Serena beckoned for Natalie to come close, then leaned toward her and lowered her voice again behind her hand. “Okay. The kids at our table?”

  Natalie glanced around, best she could.

  “Right across from you, that guy? The tall one? Tha
t’s Sheldon,” Serena said. “He has Leber’s disease, where you lose the central part of your vision, but you can see around the edges. And next to him, that’s Jerome—JJ we call him. He’s totally blind and has been since he was really little. The other boy who looks Indian—he’s new. Arnab. He’s cute, isn’t he?”

  “Arnab, yes. I met him yesterday at a reception,” Natalie said, recalling how her mother had introduced them to a couple families, despite Natalie’s desire to skip the event. She remembered that Arnab was handsome, even though he held one of his arms across his chest in a funny way. And he spoke so precisely, with an accent. “I am very pleased”—which sounded like plea-said—“to meet you, Natalie.” Arnab’s mother wore a colorful sari and had leaned toward Natalie, whispering that Arnab lost his sight in an automobile accident. “He is such a smart boy. Such a good boy,” she’d murmured softly, before her voice cracked.

  “I don’t know anything about him, but he must be a brain,” Serena said. “I hear he wants to take calculus.” Serena’s voice grew softer. “Okay. Eve, next to me over here? The girl with the ponytail? She’s never had vision. Her little brothers used to steal her food. That’s why she’s hunched over and has her arm wrapped around her plate. But you can’t tell her that no one’s going to rip off her food here. I mean, why would we?”

  Straightening up, she stopped whispering. “Us kids in the academic program, we’re sort of like a parallel universe here. We’re in the minority, anyway. There’s only, like, twenty-five of us.” She ran her index finger in the remaining maple syrup on her plate and licked it, and Natalie could see that the wires in her braces were black, too.

  There were only twenty-five of them? Natalie glanced around the large room at the other tables.

  “Who else is here then?” Natalie asked.

  “A lot of younger kids and—”

  A loud wail suddenly pierced the air, interrupting Serena.