Griffin’s mouth fell open. Five million? Geez, why hadn’t his dad just asked for five hundred zillion quadrillion? Five million was impossible. Even if it was all in fifties, that would still be – he thought about it for a second – a hundred thousand bills. They would need a forklift for that.
“We’ll be in touch,” Roy said, almost jauntily. He clicked off the phone and gave Griffin a grin. His anger seemed to have evaporated. After seventeen years of living with him, Griffin knew that looks could be deceiving.
“That wasn’t even my dad you had me talk to,” Cheyenne told Roy. “Do you know that? That wasn’t even my dad.” Tears shone on her cheeks, but her voice didn’t tremble at all.
Roy shrugged. “It was probably a cop. I heard a clicking on the line. They’re probably trying to trace the phone. That’s why I hung up, just to be on the safe side. Next time I call, I’ll tell them to put the money into a bag and drop it off someplace we can watch to make sure that nobody’s followed it. After we get the money, we’ll check it out to make sure there’s not a tracking device or dye on the bills. And then we’ll let you go.”
Cheyenne nodded. She looked like she didn’t believe Roy.
Griffin didn’t think he did, either.
For the first time, he had an unsettling thought.
Roy would eventually let Cheyenne go – wouldn’t he?
WORKING IN THE DARK
Cheyenne swam out of a dream where she had been lost and running into things.
“Are you hungry?” Griffin asked from the doorway.
It took her a minute to orient herself. She was in a room in an old house in the middle of nowhere. Only four people knew where she was. And they were the ones who were holding her captive.
“Are you hungry?” Griffin asked again.
She wasn’t hungry. She wasn’t anything. She was empty. After her escape attempt had failed, Cheyenne had pinned her hopes on the idea that Griffin’s dad was setting up a trade. She had told herself that she might even be home tonight. She had tried not to think about the details too much, intentionally kept them fuzzy. The only concession she had made to reality was to admit that maybe it might not happen until after midnight.
When Cheyenne still didn’t answer, Griffin continued on as if she had. “I’ve got to get some food into my dad to balance out what he’s had to drink. There’s some frozen pizza I can heat up. How about that and some orange juice?” Griffin was forced to shout over the music that thumped in the living room, some kind of heavy metal that made her head hurt.
Cheyenne nodded. She pulled the quilt back over her and closed her eyes. She didn’t need to do that for it to be dark, of course, but it was a way of signaling that she didn’t want to talk anymore.
She half dozed until Griffin sat down on the edge of the bed and lifted the quilt away from her. “I thought I would eat in here with you.”
As she pushed herself into a sitting position, Cheyenne could smell herself, the rank scents of fear and fever. It was strange how quickly things could become normal, she thought as she took the plate from Griffin’s hand. She didn’t like to be dirty or cold, she didn’t like people telling her what to do, but here she was, feeling almost like it was an expected part of her routine. The same with the cord knotted around her ankle. She didn’t even really notice it anymore. At least someone had turned down the music to a more tolerable level.
“There’s a glass about six inches to the left of your elbow,” Griffin said. “Um, at ten o’clock.”
She picked up one of the two slices on her plate and took a bite. Pepperoni, tasting mostly of salt and fat, with a big, pillowy crust. Danielle was really into healthy eating. She would be horrified by this pizza.
Cheyenne took another bite. Maybe she would be home by tomorrow. Maybe in twenty-four hours she would be just getting out of the shower and sliding between fresh sheets.
Griffin spoke around a mouthful of food. “What’s it like being blind?”
“Do you think about what it’s like to have hair every second?” Cheyenne blew air out of her nose. “It’s just who I am now. I try not to think about it all the time.” Which was true. But it didn’t work. She never really forgot that she was blind. And even if she did for a minute, she could count on there being a reminder. Usually painful. She sighed. “At first, it feels like someone has thrown a blanket over your head. Some days you just want to scream, ‘I’m inside here! Doesn’t anybody out there see that? Doesn’t anybody remember me? I’m still the same person!’” Cheyenne fell silent. She knew the last sentence wasn’t true, even if she wanted it to be. She wasn’t the same person. “Being blind gave me a whole new life. I didn’t ask for it.” She licked the grease from her fingers. “That’s why I’d rather talk to someone on the phone or computer. Because then we’re the same. We’re equals.”
“What do you mean, equals?”
Cheyenne tried to put into words what she had never before said out loud. “Think about how much of talking has to do with what you see and not what you hear. When you meet new people, you can tell a lot about them even before they’ve opened their mouth. Just by their clothes, how they stand, the expression on their face. But I don’t see any of that stuff anymore. Plus, in real life I’m always talking to people who have already walked away, or I answer people who aren’t really talking to me. But when I talk to someone on the computer or the phone, we’re at the same level. We know exactly the same amount of information.”
While she spoke, Cheyenne slipped her hand into her coat pocket and felt the piece of glass nestled in the kibble. It reassured her a bit. The glass was like a secret weapon. She ran her finger lightly along one edge, even as she spoke without a pause. She knew Griffin had no idea what she was doing. Sighted people always had to look, even at things their fingers were already telling them about. They couldn’t find what was in their pockets without looking down, couldn’t hunt through a purse without sticking their head inside. She knew because she had once been one of them.
But blind people knew how to do things without giving themselves away. Their hands could work in the dark, like moles, blindly tunneling but always getting where they needed to go. Blind people could look like they were paying attention to you when they were really paying attention to something else.
“What happened, anyway? Your dad said you were in an accident.”
The silence stretched out before Cheyenne finally found herself answering him. “It was the summer I was thirteen. My mom grew up in Medford, and we were down there visiting my grandmother. Just the two of us. My dad was on a business trip. Because of Nike, he travels a lot.” She took a deep breath. “We had gone for a long walk, and the sun had just set. It was me, my mom, and my dog, Spencer. We were facing traffic, walking down this long, straight road without any sidewalks, just gravel on the side of the road. Each car that came up behind us would throw our shadows way ahead of us, so they were as long as the block and really thin.” As she spoke, she saw it with her mind’s eye. “Then as each car got closer, our shadows got closer and closer and shorter and shorter. I told my mom it looked like our shadows were walking backward. That was the last thing I ever said to her.”
She remembered how her mom had smiled in the half light, her curls wild as they often were by the end of the day. Her mom had been beautiful, at least that’s how Cheyenne remembered it. Her mom didn’t spend nearly as much time at the hair stylist or the gym as Danielle did. But she did have plenty of time for Cheyenne. They had laughed at the same jokes, jokes her dad never thought were all that funny. Every Saturday, her mom had taken her to the library and they had each come home with a big stack of books.
When anybody asked Cheyenne what had happened to her, she always just said “car accident” in a tone that made it clear she didn’t want to say one more word about it. She never talked about it. Never.
Now she took a shuddery breath. “One minute we were walking, watching our shadows come back to us. The next minute, two cars were coming up behind u
s. It was two kids racing, so one was in the wrong lane, the lane closest to us. Then that guy saw the headlights of a car coming toward him and panicked. He swerved and hit us.” She didn’t say that her mom’s body had ended up almost a block from where they were first hit.
“The car ran right over Spencer. That was my dog. It didn’t hit me full on, or I’d be dead, too. Instead it threw me into a speed limit sign. The top of my head smacked into the pole.” Cheyenne realized she was unconsciously pushing her fingers through her bangs, which she always carefully fluffed so that the scar wouldn’t show. Her index finger traced the twists of its raised edges. “And my brain got bounced off the back of my skull, and when that happened, it killed the part that tells me what I’m seeing. So my eyes still work. My brain just can’t understand the message.”
There was a long silence. Then Griffin asked softly, “Were you knocked unconscious?”
“Only for a few seconds. When I woke up, I couldn’t see anything. I could feel the blood running down my face, and I told myself that was why I couldn’t see. I knew my arm was broken, but everything else seemed to be okay. I was screaming for my mom, feeling around with my good arm. All I could find was one of her shoes. I guess she was literally knocked out of them.” Cheyenne fell silent, her head crowded with memories.
BIG WORDS SCARE ME
Griffin couldn’t sleep. The floor was hard, and the cold seeped up through the old sleeping bag. Exhausted, Cheyenne had dozed off after dinner. Griffin had pulled the quilt over her and then hadn’t known what to do with himself. By that time, his dad had been singing along with the stereo, but Griffin knew that when Roy drank, his mood could turn on a dime. Griffin stayed in his bedroom, sitting on the far edge of the bed, alternately looking at comic books and watching Cheyenne, until finally his dad had turned off the music and staggered to bed.
Griffin hadn’t known where to sleep. He had thought about sleeping on the couch, but he didn’t want to leave Cheyenne alone. Partly he wanted to watch her; partly he wanted to watch over her. He had finally settled for the floor. Now he regretted his decision. Cheyenne’s sleep had turned restless, making it even harder for him to doze off. She kept moaning and kicking her feet.
Finally he sat up and looked at her. He could make out the dark tangle of her hair, but that was about it. She sounded like she had gotten sicker, but in the dark, it was hard to judge just how sick she really was. Then Griffin realized that the normal rules didn’t apply. Moving quietly, he got up and flicked on the light, wincing at the sudden brightness.
Cheyenne didn’t stir. She lay curled on her side. He knelt down next to the bed so he could look at her more closely. Her mouth was full and soft, the lips slightly parted. When she exhaled, her breath rattled in her chest. Black strands of damp hair clung to her flushed face. It looked like she had a fever.
Griffin’s hand hovered over her forehead, then gently pressed down. Her expression didn’t change. She seemed hot – but how hot, exactly? If your fever got too high, couldn’t it damage your brain?
Griffin put his free hand on his own forehead. That felt hot, too. He tried moving his right hand from Cheyenne’s forehead to his own, but he couldn’t really feel any difference, except that hers was clammy and his wasn’t. Obviously his palm was useless as a thermometer. Then he had an idea. If he touched his forehead to hers, he would be able to tell for sure how much warmer she was.
Griffin leaned forward and tentatively pressed his forehead against Cheyenne’s. Definitely warmer. Was her brain cooking inside her skull? While he was still wondering if he should just try to sneak her out of the house and dump her outside a hospital, Cheyenne sat up with a jerk. Their heads cracked together.
She yelped and pushed him away.
“Shh!” He didn’t want her to wake Roy. “It’s just me. Griffin.”
Cheyenne dropped her own voice to a whisper. “What are you doing?” She sounded clearer than he thought he would in similar circumstances. “Are you trying to kiss me or something?”
“No!” To his embarrassment, his voice broke. “I was just trying to figure out if you had a fever.”
“And?”
“And I think you do.”
“I know that.” She sat up, scooted back until her shoulders were against the wall, folded her arms, and rested them on top of her knees. She still wore her striped scarf and the puffy silver coat.
Griffin persisted. “But I think you’re sicker than you were.” He thought of what her father had said on the radio. Cheyenne couldn’t really die from pneumonia, could she? Although didn’t people used to die from pneumonia, back in the old days, before there were antibiotics?
They must have been thinking along the same lines, because Cheyenne said, “The doctor said that pneumonia used to be called the old man’s friend. Because that’s what a lot of people died from when they were old and frail.”
“Some friend,” Griffin said, then added, “Wait a second. I have an idea.”
He tiptoed down the hall and into the bathroom. The shower curtain still lay in the bottom of the tub. Crap. He had forgotten about that. Cheyenne’s escape attempt seemed like it had happened in another lifetime. He tried to hang the curtain back up, wincing as it rattled, but it had ripped away from the rings. When Roy asked, Griffin was going to have to say that he had tripped and fallen – or maybe, Griffin realized, that Cheyenne had. That was more believable.
He let the curtain fall back into the tub, then knelt and opened up the cupboard beneath the sink. Under the silver curve of pipe, a blue plastic basket held witch hazel, Anadin, a broken comb, and stray plasters. No thermometer. But mixed in were all kinds of medicines that, for one reason or another, had never been used or used up. Griffin pawed through muscle relaxants, rash creams, and cough suppressants. He scooped up the Advil and cough medicine. Then after holding up amber bottle after amber bottle to the light, he finally saw, with a surge of triumph, the word Cipro. He knew that Cipro was an antibiotic. The printed label read “Janie Sawyer.”
It was kind of a surprise to see his mom’s name. He had a sudden flash of memory – her dark eyes, her high cheekbones, the long reddish-brown hair that fell to her waist. She had hidden behind that hair when she was angry or sad or any of a dozen emotions that Roy didn’t want to hear about. Sometimes she had stood up to Roy, but not very often. And Roy had only gotten worse after she left.
According to the label on the bottle, the prescription had expired six and a half years ago; one year to the day after his mom had filled it. But what were the chances that a medicine suddenly gave up the ghost exactly 365 days later? They probably had to put that date on for legal reasons. Or to give them an excuse to sell you some more. Griffin opened the bottle. The white capsules looked okay. He sniffed. They didn’t smell like anything in particular.
The directions said you were supposed to take one pill three times a day for seven days. There weren’t that many pills left – maybe eight or nine – but it would be enough to give Cheyenne a start.
In the kitchen, he filled one of the glasses he had washed earlier. Back in his bedroom, he softly closed the door behind him and then said in a half whisper, “Since you can’t go pick up your prescription, I thought the prescription should come to you.”
Cheyenne looked confused. “What?”
“Cipro.” Griffin rattled the bottle. When she still looked blank, he added, “It’s an antibiotic.”
“But don’t they use different kinds of antibiotics depending on what you’re sick with? What if this one doesn’t work for pneumonia?”
“I don’t see how you would be any worse off.” Why didn’t she appreciate the effort he was making? “Look, it probably can’t hurt and it might help.”
“But what if it only half kills the pneumonia bacteria and the rest of them come back stronger? We’ve been learning about antibiotic resistance in biology.”
Griffin sighed and sat down on the bed. “What is it with you? Does everything have to be an argument or a dis
cussion?”
She answered him seriously. “Yes. Yes, it does.” Her roughened voice made her sound older.
“Well, take one anyway. Plus, I’ve got Advil for your fever and medicine for your cough.” He pressed the pills into one hand and the glass into the other. Would it help if she doubled up the number of antibiotics? He realized he could tell her the package said whatever he wanted – that she was to take them ten times a day with wine, or once every two weeks, even that they were some different drug entirely.
Instead he said, “Where are you taking biology? Are you going to a special school for blind people?”
Cheyenne shook her head. “I’m mainstreamed. I go to Catlin Gabel.”
Griffin snorted. “Mainstreamed! Even I know that’s a fancy-pants private school.”
Cheyenne flushed. “Well, it’s not some special school for the disabled, anyway. I’m the only blind person there, which can be kind of hard. Sometimes teachers forget and point at things or write stuff on the board and don’t say what they’ve written. It doesn’t happen so much now that I’ve got Phantom. It’s like he’s a visual cue. ‘Oh, right, Cheyenne’s blind.’” She put the pills in her mouth, took a sip of water, and tipped her head back. He watched her throat move up and down.
“What other classes are you taking besides biology?”
She set the glass on the dresser and rubbed her face. “Advanced placement history, German, junior-level English, and trig.”
“Oh,” Griffin said. He felt stupid, the way he used to feel when he still went to school.
She didn’t seem to notice. “Since I’m blind, I have to take extra classes. I have a computer class in a special room they set up for me. The computers at school and at home have a program that can read to me, although sometimes it pronounces things wrong and the voice is really flat.” Cheyenne said the next few words like a robot. “And it reads every word I type so I know right away if I make a mistake.”