Run(8)

“I know.”

“I’m sorry you can’t come, sweetheart,” she said. “I know you were looking forward to it. I had no idea your sister would be packing so much. There’s just not enough room. Believe me. If I could replace one of those boxes with your butt in the backseat, I would. But Gracie—”

“Might kill you. I get it. It’s okay. I’ll see y’all tonight.”

“Okay.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Love you, Agnes.”

“Love you, too.”

Outside, Daddy honked the horn. Mama ran to the door and hurried out, hollering, “Lock it behind me,” over her shoulder.

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Lock the door? Mursey was hardly a dangerous town. My parents never even locked the garage door, so it wasn’t something they were real worried about before. I doubted there were kidnappers waiting out in the bushes to take a blind teenager. But I didn’t argue with her.

I never argued.

I tried to keep myself occupied once they’d gone. I turned on the TV, but there was nothing on besides sports, kids cartoons, and some bad movies from ten years ago. I got one of the braille books Mama had ordered for me last year, and tried to read, but I was rusty. I’d gotten so used to reading enlarged text or using magnifiers that it took me twice as long to understand the raised dots on the pages. My mind kept wandering, and I had to rescan each line, my fingers sliding slowly along the page. Ten pages in, and I wasn’t even sure what I’d been reading. I sighed and put the book back on the shelf.

Outside, I could hear a bobwhite whistling. I walked to the back door and pressed my face against the sun-warmed glass. Everything was washed in a blurry white haze. Like the brightness had been turned up way too high on the TV. I blinked a few times, trying to force my eyes to adjust. It was a pretty day, not cloudy at all, and with the summer fading fast, the temperature wasn’t too awful. Warm, but not humid like the last three months or so had been.

It was a waste to stay inside on a day like this. I grabbed my cane and stepped onto the back porch. I stood on the top step for a long moment, shielding my eyes from the sunlight with my free hand. I wished I could’ve worn sunglasses, but I’d never found a pair that wasn’t too dark for me to see through. Too much light was easier on my eyes than too little.

I wasn’t even sure what to do now. Christy would tell me to lay out and get a tan while I still could, but my skin just burned and peeled anytime I was in the sun too long. Mursey was pretty rural, so there was nowhere to go besides the old woods behind the house. And Mama had always made me stay out of those woods. She said all the trails were grown over and it was too easy to get lost.

It was an old rule. One she’d made when Gracie and me were in elementary school and liked to play pretend in the backyard. Gracie was always the princess, and I was always the servant girl. If Mama hadn’t warned us, I’m sure my sister would’ve sent me out into the woods to fetch her something she needed to save the castle, better known as our garage.

But today, staring out at the trees, that old rule seemed awful silly. I was sixteen now, and I could walk in the woods if I wanted. Didn’t matter that there was nothing back there but deer stands and old dirt-bike trails. If I couldn’t go to Lexington, get out of Mursey, I could at least get out of the house. Mama couldn’t be too mad about that.

And … I never had to tell her.

It was that thought that propelled me, cane in hand, down the back porch steps and out toward the woods. Under the cover of trees, my eyes adjusted a bit. My depth perception was still off and all the greens and browns bled together, but I was able to get my bearings and make out more than I had before. I managed to navigate through the thick brambles and high grass until I found one of the old paths that wasn’t too overgrown yet. It was wide, like it had been used for four-wheelers before. I moved along slowly, swishing my cane back and forth, making sure not to trip over any tree roots.

Around me, I could hear all sorts of birdcalls. In the distance, a woodpecker was hammering away at a tree. Squirrels squeaked and bees buzzed around wildflowers so bright even I could see them. And not too far off, I heard twigs cracking beneath feet that were too small and fast to be human. The smell of grass and bark and dirt filled my nose and I inhaled it, glad for the fresh air. Nothing about the woods was unexpected—I knew what I’d find back here—I just didn’t realize how peaceful or nice it would be.

I followed the trail for a while until it split into two narrower paths. I picked one at random and followed it until it split, too. I didn’t think much about which way I was going. I was too taken with all the sounds and smells. I’d never really thought of myself as an outdoorsy person, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was something to all those poems Mrs. Hartman made us read about the beauty of nature. I couldn’t see much of it, but I could experience it. I ran my hands along tree trunks and smelled all kinds of flowers, wandering my way down the different trails until, all of a sudden, the sun hit my eyes again, and I found myself in the middle of a large, grassy clearing.

The grass was unkempt, nearly up to my knees. I laughed and spun around in it for a minute, like a little girl in a movie, my hair swept up in the wind. It was silly, I guess. But I felt free. Like a dog who broke its chain. I was only in the woods behind my house. It was a small rebellion against a rule that hadn’t been spoken in years. But it still felt good. Maybe better than it should’ve. So I spun and spun until I was so dizzy I could hardly stand up.