Love and First Sight(47)

I can’t help but laugh, too.





CHAPTER 22


On Wednesday, I ask Cecily to drive us to Mole Hill Park so I can witness my first sunset. She guides me up the million stairs, and we sit down in the grass in the same spot where we sat after the homecoming dance.

Once we are settled, I finally open my eyes and discover the usual visual mayhem—colors smashing into one another, lines colliding in a noisy fight for my attention.

“Is the sun setting yet?” I ask.

“Not yet.”

“So what are we looking at here? The entire city?” I ask, blinking rapidly, as if by fluttering my eyelids I will bring the view into focus.

“Basically,” she says. “It’s a good panorama. I mean, it’s a small city. Someday you should go up in the Hollywood Hills and look at Los Angeles at night. I’ve gone there with my dad before. But anyway, the diminutive skyline of Toano, Kansas, will have to do for now.”

“Can we see my house?”

“No, but we can see mine.”

“Really? Where?” I ask.

I’ve still never been to her house. So this will be my first chance to experience it, and I will have the chance to do so with eyesight as we sit here on this hill. I wonder if her blinds are open? I hope so. I want to be able to see in through the windows. I want to look into her room and find out how she’s decorated her walls.

“Oh, it’s… well, you probably wouldn’t be able to see it. Don’t worry about it.”

“No, I want to.”

“I know you do. But… I live in a pretty crappy house.”

“I don’t know what a house is supposed to look like. You could tell me it was a palace, and I wouldn’t know the difference by looking at it.”

“All right,” she agrees. “How do I point it out to you?”

“Just wave your hand in a circle around it,” I say.

“My hand? It’s way smaller than my hand.”

“Your house is smaller than your hand?” I ask, confused.

“Are you joking? Oh, right… perspective. Sorry,” she says. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking—”

“It’s fine,” I say, embarrassed that I still get confused by these things.

“Well, yeah, from this distance, my house is tiny. Like a little speck. All you can see is a black dot, which is the roof.”

I’m still a bit curious about whether I would be able to see through her windows, but from what she’s saying, I guess the answer is no. And I don’t want to ask because, well, it’s impossible to make that question not creepy.

“No problem,” I say, giving up on seeing her house, at least for now. “Besides, there’s something I’d much rather look at.”

“What?”

“You.”

She giggles. Or coughs. Or something.

I turn my head to face her. I am kind of hoping something deep inside, like my heart or whatever, will be able to identify her through pure emotional instinct. Everything else in the world may be blurry and confusing, but her face will jump out in instant high definition, radiant with beautifully articulated and meaningful lines. But this doesn’t turn out to be the case. Instead, I see only the normal ocean of shifting colors, currents of hue riding into my brain via my eyes.

“Well?” she asks quietly.

“I do see a lot of green,” I say. “I guess that’s the grass? Unless you are green?”

“No, I’m… not green,” she says, as if it had been a serious question rather than a joke.

“Wiggle your head around so I can see it,” I say.

I hear a swoosh of hair, and as I do, a swirl of colors lights up in front of me: Yellow and tan and pink and light brown…

This is Cecily. This is her face.

“Okay, I see you,” I say. “Do you mind if I, um, invade your personal space?”

“Yes, you can invade my personal space.”

I move toward her so her head fills most of my field of vision. She holds her breath like she’s nervous.

A face is a complicated thing. Even before the operation, I appreciated that. It has many parts: rippling contours shaped by the bones underneath the skin, many small spots of hair—eyebrows, eyelashes, sometimes a beard or goatee—and so many different parts—a mouth, a nose, eyes, and ears. Of course, I can’t make out any of this on Cecily. I know what each of these things would feel like if I reached out my hands and touched her. But the gaze of my eyes reveals no such detail. Just unrecognizable sensory data, a jumble of shapes and colors.

Even though I don’t know how to connect this visual to the physical knowledge I have about faces, I can connect the sight to the knowledge that this is Cecily’s face.

I reach a hand up, and it lands quietly against her cheek. With the touch of my fingers, the cheek identifies itself to me. I slide my hand over to her nose, and it immediately stands and declares, I am a nose. In that moment, my eyes make out a triangle of skin-colored light pink. Her nose.

I bring up my other hand and run my fingertips around her eyes, which she shuts in response to my touch.

But her eyes, those windows into the soul, as they say, are the territory of her face I am most desperate to explore. Using my hands like two bookmarks to keep from losing my place, I put my pointer fingers on her eyebrows and my thumbs on the top of her cheekbones.