Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(48)

Because, what if you find that you need all that food and kindness and acknowledgment?

Particularly if you might, maybe, need food and kindness and acknowledgment from someone like Evan, whose messy hair and crinkles and absurdly long arms and firm hip are growing on me.

“Just the same,” I try, choking the impulse to put my arms around him and melt into his neck and ask him to rub my hair, “I’ve been stupid.”

He just keeps looking across the courtyard, like something was going to sprout out of the middle of it any minute, and shakes his head. “No.”

“No?”

“I think it’s probably impossible for you to be stupid.”

“Why?” I blurt, but before I can tell him that never mind, seriously, I’m not fishing for compliments, he throws his handful of potato chips behind the wall and turns his body fully toward me.

“Do you know what I wrote in my notes, the very first meeting we had?”

I think of how I had sat, slouched in my chair and refusing to look at him when he did my intake. “I probably deserve to know.”

He leans over and tips his head so I am looking into his eyes. The winter light shines through his blue irises and makes them look silvery. His cheeks are flushed. “You do deserve to know. I wrote, fiercely intelligent. It was the very first thing that I wrote, right at the top of your chart notes. Basically, the exact opposite of stupid. I knew you were angry, sad, but what I noticed, what was noticeable over absolutely everything else, was how goddamned smart you are. I thought about you the entirety of the week after our intake and before your first visit. I wasn’t sure, actually, that I would be up to giving you anything you needed, that I had the skills or the smarts to match you.”

I think I make a noise, of absolute protest, or embarrassed distress, but Evan just leans in closer and puts his index finger on my elbow, so I can feel the points he’s making, a little press with every word he says.

“I knew I was going to f*ck it up for a while, is what I’m saying. I knew I would have to follow your lead. You’re not”—he tips his head up and looks at the sky, shaking his head—“you’re not stupid. I’m learning, too. I’m not ahead of you, you’re ahead of me.”

“The blind leading the blind,” I say, before I think better of it.

He laughs. “Maybe. But that’s the other thing. Right now, today, you’re not blind, whatever that means. You have a limited field of vision, you have vision differences, but all those brains, God, you showed us today that you’ll never, ever fail to see.”

And now I can’t look at him. I can’t.

Because I still won’t cry in front of Evan.

I grab the potato chips, instead, and then reach in for a big handful, and they are the most delicious potato chips in all the world. We eat all of them.





Chapter Four


Second Inch


I crank the heat as soon as I get home from therapy with Evan. The wind hasn’t died down, and I think the snow has picked up, but it’s hard to tell when it’s so windy. It’s two buses from my place to the huge medical center, and I almost fell asleep in the second one.

The one-block walk from the stop to home wakes me up, but my muscles feel stuporous and heavy and my eyes are gritty—from the wind and from the crying I didn’t do, probably.

More good tears than sad ones, though.

My brain is worked up, however, buzzing, from the session with Evan. From our lunch in the courtyard.

What he said.

How he looked at me, like I was going to get this, all of it.

As we ran through his exercise a few more times before we ate, I couldn’t perfectly capture that first epiphany but it was all still so good, that feeling of turning a theory on its head with observable evidence—like yeah, I “know” my other four senses are effective in gathering information about my environment, maybe even as effective as the one that’s limited, but there’s such a universe in that half turn from “know” to evidence.

Beautiful evidence, lighting up dark places in my brain, and then those new, lit-up areas start positing theories of their own, suggesting glorious experimentation, reassuring me that maybe, maybe, that what made me me was possible to prove in a number of different ways.

Like, how we know a virus is in the body because of the unique symptoms it produces in the patient and because of a titer of that virus we can count in the blood and because our own immune system produces brand-new antibodies against the virus that we can find in the blood, too.

All the same virus, proven different ways.

Closing my eyes, no vision at all available to me, the sight I depend on and that delights me so much, I felt so unlike myself that I had wanted to cry.

I mean it when I say that nowhere else, except nearly with Evan, not with my mom or Dr. Allen or coworkers or friends have I cried. Or gotten angry. And Evan hasn’t really seen me cry. He’s seen some stray, frustrated tears. And yeah, he’s seen my anger and noncompliance.

He’s tried to train me to use night-vision-adaptive equipment that I won’t even pick up off the table, he’s sent home CDs of software I’m supposed to install on my computers at home and at work so that my computers recognize my voice and they’re still in my purse.

I think I could draw the pattern of fake wood grain from the tabletop in the therapy room from memory, so often have I stared at it and traced it with my finger instead of doing whatever it is he wants me to do.