Chapter 27
I step through our front door, keeping my hand on the storm door so that as the spring contracts it doesn’t slam closed.
My dad hates that slamming sound. He’s gotten a lot more sensitive to loud noises since he lost his sight.
Last month, he sent my brother to his room in the middle of dinner for laughing too loud.
I hear my dad now, washing his hands in the powder room. I know it’s him and not my mom because it’s pitch-dark in there—he doesn’t turn on lights anymore. I think of all the things Mason must have wanted to say to his mom but didn’t when he had the chance. Maybe I should give it another shot.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hi there, Henrietta.” He shuffles his way into the living room and we sit, him in his big chair and me on the rug.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask.
“She’s picking up Nate from a friend’s. They’ll be back shortly. What do you need?”
“Nothing, just curious.” I pause. “Hey, I didn’t ask before, is Dr. Porter your eye doctor, too?”
“No.”
“But isn’t she the best in the state?”
“That seems to be the consensus.”
“So why don’t you go to her, too?”
He inhales through his nose like he’s doing an anger management technique. “Until there’s a cure, I don’t really see the point of the drive.” His face is darkening. I can tell I’m losing him. This isn’t what he wants to talk about, like ever. But instead of switching the subject, I talk faster.
“Well, Dr. Porter said there was a lot of promising research, clinical trials and studies and stuff. There’s injections and tiny robots—a lot of possibilities that are, like, straight out of a sci-fi series.”
He clears his throat. “To be clear,” he says, “the medical field has been saying that a cure was about five years away for a very long time, twenty years at least. And the initial treatments won’t really be cures—they’ll just stop your eyesight from getting worse.
That’s an important step, and could be really significant for you.
But unfortunately”—he shrugs—“won’t have much of an impact on me. ”
“I get all that, but what about just going to see her to be ready for when something breaks? You know, stay in the loop.”
They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, which really blows, because it means that when you have a blind dad there’s no way in.
I want to look hard into his eyes, to tell him without words that we’re in this together, that I want to be close, or at least closer.
But his eyes are a dead end, and the rest of the muscles on his face have built a wall.
“You seem to be quite the expert all of a sudden,” he says, and there’s a meanness in his voice that I usually only hear when he’s criticizing a politician on TV. It feels like shame.
“What, me? No, not at all. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot since I went to see her. I don’t know.”
“No. You don’t.” A stony silence follows. There’s nowhere to go from here. My shoulders hunch as the tendons on my neck twist into little knots. The air in the room is suffocating, and all I want now is to go back in time three minutes and not have this conversation. I stand up.
“Okay, Dad. Sorry I said anything.” I say it because it’s true, but it comes out sounding sarcastic.
I’m halfway up the stairs when he says, “Hattie. Wait.”
I turn to see him in the doorway. He holds his hand out, palm up. I come back down and put my hand in his.
“I didn’t mean to speak sharply.” He wants to smooth this blip over. Conflict is not tolerated with my dad. The unwritten rule is that if you can’t resolve it immediately, you’re at least supposed to pretend it’s resolved. Fake it till you make it, or just fake it indefinitely.
But faking isn’t possible for me anymore. There doesn’t seem like much left to lose. I pull my hand away.
“You did, Dad. Which sort of sucks when I’m trying to help.
” He starts to say something else, probably about me being disrespectful, but I talk over him.
“We should help each other. I’ve got it, too, remember.
So you should be helping me. Not lecturing me.
Helping me not be scared. Helping me deal.
Because you know what it’s like. And because you—you gave it to me. ”
That last sentence pierces him. He takes a step back, then runs his hand along the wall until he feels the banister. He eases himself down to sit on the stairs and rubs his chin hard enough to make it red. Oh, shit, is he going to start crying?
“I didn’t mean that, Dad,” I say, backtracking, panicked. “It isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you can do about it. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, Hattie. It’s all right. And I am so sorry that you’ve inherited this from me. It’s difficult to even think about. And if I could cure one of us, I would choose you without hesitation. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I have deep regrets that I can’t set an example for you. I can’t be the resource you need. Don’t do what I’ve done, Hattie. You’re young, you have so much more potential. You can take this on and still excel, I know you can.”
“Oof. No pressure,” I say, but my shoulders relax. It’s a relief to at least hear him say something that’s not stilted.
“No pressure,” he agrees, as if I wasn’t being sarcastic.
“I’ve been too rigid, for a long time really, maybe always, but not you.
That’s something you haven’t inherited from me.
For me—when my eyes started getting bad, it was like Pandora’s box.
I didn’t know how to think about it, to reflect on it, without it drowning out everything else.
It was all or nothing. So I tried to put it out of my mind as much as possible.
I had to manage to still get up and go to work every day. ”
I hadn’t thought about that. That despite the world disappearing, he still figured out how to keep doing his job and getting a paycheck. The difficulty of that hits me like a blast of cold air.
“Look, Hattie, I know you’re scared. I would take it away if I could. But I think I’m going to learn a lot from you. I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I am not proud of me, so I can’t quite take that in. But I’m glad that we’re talking, finally. It feels like I’ve been waiting sixteen years for him to talk to me.
Even the silence feels better now. I move to sit next to him on the stairs, our arms touching.
We sit there in the almost darkness for a minute or two, slightly swaying back and forth, listening to the quiet of the house.
He’s not a big strong authority figure right now.
He’s just a person, a powerless little boy, even.
For years, I’ve blamed him for not getting me, for not even trying to.
But what have I been doing? Arguing with him about nearly every aspect of what’s been happening to him, service dog or cane, the reason he was destined to be blind in the first place, and on and on and on.
Bringing up stuff that was painful to him.
He doesn’t get me? Sure, okay. But I haven’t gotten him for a long time.
“Mason has been coming to visit me,” I say suddenly.
“In your dreams?”
“No, like, for real. While I’m awake. Like a legit ghost.” I hold my breath, waiting to see if he goes straight to the phone and dials 911.
“He’s been visiting me, too.”
I jump up. “What?! He has?!”
My dad smiles then, shakes his head. “No. I was just kidding.”
“Dad!” I guess he’s not too concerned, if he’s able to joke around. Which is pretty wild. I plunge ahead.
“For some reason, I feel like it’s RP related. Like the parts of my eyes that don’t work right are picking up other things. You think that’s possible?”
“Anything’s possible, Hattie.” He rubs his face again, less hard this time. “Is it scary?”
“No, I like it.” I think about the day I was driving. “Most of the time, anyway. You don’t think I’m crazy?”
“Hattie, I went to Catholic school for twelve years. Our teachers gave us prayer cards to pray to our own personal guardian angels. And there’s the Holy Ghost, the very core of the trinity.
These things are essential for people of faith, and I think it’s primarily because they provide comfort.
So if you can find something akin to that, I think that’s great. ”
“You know I don’t believe in God, though, right, Dad?”
A playful expression crosses his face. “Henrietta, perhaps you can give your father a small reprieve and save your ‘I’m an atheist’ announcement for another day. Would that be all right?”
I laugh. “Sure, Dad.”
“Much appreciated. And no, I don’t think you’re crazy.”
Even though I don’t believe in them, I get his point about angels. I had kind of forgotten that people believe in things that can’t be explained all the time.
My mom and brother are on the porch now, my mom jingling her keys out of her purse. I stand up and put my hand on my dad’s shoulder. “Okay, Dad. Thanks for the talk.”
“Of course. And Hattie?”
“Yeah, Dad?” I say as I head up the stairs.
“I’ll see Dr. Porter if you want me to.”
“Okay. We can go together if you want.” That might make being in the Holding Cell of Pathetic Blobs a little less pathetic.
“Great.”
He said he was proud of me. But for what, exactly?
If I were going to be proud of me, and I’m not saying that I am, but if I were, it would be for continuing to exist. I’ve had to say goodbye to the life I thought I was going to have.
But I’m still here. Still brushing my teeth and tying my shoelaces and going to class.
I keep thinking I’m a different person now.
But really, I’m still just me. Or maybe I am different, but not worse.
I still don’t buy Dad’s bit about how we need an untreatable disease to keep us humble, otherwise we’d be too superior for the world to even handle us, but maybe there’s a way that RP is making me think more.
About what I want, what I appreciate, what’s important to me.
Honestly, maybe that’s what Dad meant in the first place.