A Blind Spot for Boys

  “So guys pretty much fall all over themselves around you, don’t they?” Quattro said as soon as we snagged the only open table, back in the dim corner. His eyes danced in amusement. I shrugged, lifted my coffee mug, then smirked at him over the top. He grinned at me and said, “Got it. You’re the Genghis Khan of heartbreakers.”

  My eyes darted over to Reb, who was so busy drawing in her journal, she might as well have been in Peru already, which called into serious doubt not only her surveillance skills but her chaperoning ones, too. So much for Mission: Extraction.

  “Not anymore.” Time to self-police and keep this conversation on the friendship track. “I’m on a no-boy diet.”

  Quattro tilted his head in the direction of the waiter who was staring at me. “Yeah, so how’s that going for you?”

  “Really well.”

  “That’s cool. I’m on a no-girl diet myself.”

  I couldn’t help myself from asking, “Yeah, so how’s that going for you?”

  “How do you think?” He shot me a roguish grin that—I hate to admit—made me feel all quivery inside, as if I wanted to be the one to make him cheat.

  Fortunately, our food arrived. But after our conversation meandered to safer territory—the Bumbershoot music festival every Labor Day weekend, hiking the Enchantment Lakes—why, oh why, did I have to return to his no-girl diet?

  Shana, stop.

  “With the move and college,” he said, “I just don’t want drama.”

  That, I understood. I wiped a stray drop of coffee off my mug. “I totally get that. You’re so lucky. I’ve got an entire year before college. That’s an eternity.”

  “But then watch out, Milan.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “How’d you know?”

  “It’s in your blog.”

  In the six weeks that Dom and I dated, I don’t think he read my blog once, though he had a ton of great suggestions about how I could build my readership. I bit my lip uncertainly, so thrown off by Quattro’s revelation I was almost glad that Reb was hurrying to our table. How’d she read my signal so quickly? But then I saw her pale face, and it didn’t matter if Quattro figured out she was my backup plan.

  I asked, “Reb, what’s up?”

  She blurted, “My mom just called. Your mom’s been trying to reach you. Your dad’s had an accident.”

  Dad, Mr. Strong and Sturdy, in an accident? Inconceivable. I slung my messenger bag onto my lap to retrieve my phone from the front pocket.

  Five missed calls. Ten texts.

  Worry trickled down my spine. My parents rarely texted. I skimmed the last of Mom’s messages: Come home.

  Home. I called home. No answer.

  Chapter Four

  Later, I wouldn’t remember how I left Oddfellows, just that Quattro placed a hand on my arm outside the café and asked me to call him at his hotel so he’d know I was okay. I remember him insisting on walking back to his hotel on his own. I had nodded distractedly before jumping into Reb’s car and dialing my parents again and finally my brothers… even Max, who I’d been avoiding since Dom.

  No answer, no answer, no answer.

  At my front door, I hugged Reb a hasty good-bye, then slipped inside. Immediately, I noticed there was no Mom singing off tune, no Dad listening to his rock music. They were sitting beside each other at the kitchen table, their heads bowed, holding hands, and a space as wide as sorrow separating them. The halfhearted thump of Auggie’s tail when she spied me was the only sound in the house. She lifted her large head but stayed at their feet, as though she knew my parents needed her more.

  It may sound weird, but my first instinct was to document this moment. I fished out my cell phone and snapped their picture. So lost in their separate worlds, my parents didn’t even notice me.

  “Hey,” I said softly after I pocketed my phone, approaching them at last.

  Whatever they had been discussing had left an oily heaviness in our home. My parents sat back in their seats almost guiltily. Dad’s hand lifted to shield the bandage on his right cheek. His lip was cut and swollen.

  “What happened?” I demanded, alarmed at the drops of dried blood on his T-shirt.

  “Oh, Shana, you’re home,” he said, sounding disappointed. Dad’s fingers now tightened around his trusty camera. He looked dazed and disoriented.

  “What happened?” I asked again as I drew closer with a sense of dread. The last time I’d seen my parents in such wordless despair was three years ago, when Grandpa toppled onto a restaurant floor, dead of an aneurysm. Dad couldn’t possibly have a ticking time bomb inside his brain, too, could he? Still no answer.

  My parents’ Fifty by Fifty Manifesto scrawled on a white restaurant napkin rested between them on the table like an upended tombstone. I clutched the edges of my jacket around me.

  “What is it?” I asked. My voice rose. “What?”

  Dad met Mom’s gaze, avoiding mine. An entire conversation bookended with arguments and agreements had taken place while I blinked.

  Mom started explaining, “Your dad was climbing a ladder and missed a rung—”

  “You did?” I shot a quick look at him, frowning. Dad was one of the most coordinated people I knew. I’d seen him balance confidently on the top rung of a scary-tall ladder that no one’s ever supposed to stand on, just to remove a hornet’s nest.

  “He hit his head pretty hard,” Mom said, sliding her hand atop Dad’s. “So we went to the emergency room and—”

  “I’m going blind,” Dad said bluntly.

  “They think.” Mom’s voice was fierce. “It was just one doctor’s opinion.”

  “She’s right, Mollie. There’s a black dot when I look out my left eye.”

  “But they can fix it, right?” I asked, shaking my head as if I was denying the diagnosis.

  “Retinal neuropathy, that’s the best guess,” Dad said. He played with the corner of their legendary napkin, the list of all the adventures they’d promised each other to take: trekking the Inca Trail, canyoneering in Wadi Mujib, surfing at Puerto Escondido. “There’s no cure.”

  “They’ll know more once they get the blood work back,” Mom jumped in.

  “Six months.” Dad folded his arms across his chest, rocking forward in his chair. “That’s what I have left to see. To see.”

  “We don’t know for sure, Gregor, until we get the second opinion.”

  Dad lifted his head to stare at Mom incredulously. “Mollie, come on.” And then he proceeded to tell me about the genetic disease, which typically strikes men in their early twenties. “I’ve got all the symptoms.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense!” I cried.

  In what universe would it make any kind of sense for my dad, the ultimate photographer, to go blind? And besides, he was in better shape than men half his age. So how could he be getting a disease?

  “Luck of the genetic draw. The only thing that matters,” Dad said tiredly, “is that I won’t be able to take care of anyone in six months.”

  “That’s not true,” Mom protested.

  Dad ordered in an uncharacteristically harsh tone, “Mollie. Stop.”

  The room reverberated with Mom’s hurt, Dad’s hopelessness, my confusion. Mom bit her lip, chastened. For once, her cheerleader optimism failed her. Dad’s tension was a beacon for Auggie, who lifted herself from Mom’s perpetually cold feet to resettle at Dad’s side. Her baleful eyes stared up at Dad until he rested his hand on her head. “It’s okay, girl. God, I blamed the dog for missing the bedbugs over the last couple of weeks. It was me.”

  Dad dropped his head into his hands. His half-dollar-size bald spot—that vulnerable patch of bare skin—made my heart clutch. For the first time, I realized that Dad wasn’t invincible. It was frightening, that thought.

  “Wouldn’t you know it? The twins are settled. Shana’s almost in college. Just when it was almost my time to do what I wanted… I wasted my whole life killing rats. Trapping moles. Gassing spiders.” A shudder of anguish passed over my father, a
nd he wrapped his arms around himself, rocking back and forth. “‘He killed bedbugs,’ for God’s sake; that’s going to be my legacy.”

  “Dad! You were taking care of us,” I told him.

  Mom added passionately, “Providing for us.”

  “And what am I going to do to take care of everybody now?” Dad asked, his eyes wild. “You can’t kill bedbugs if you can’t see them.”

  Guiltily, I thought of all the times my brothers and I swore that there was no way in hell we were ever going to run Paradise Pest Control. Who cared if we were the fourth generation? My future, for one, was taking place in galleries and photo shoots. It had never registered that our paradise was Dad’s purgatory, where he stayed out of duty to us.

  Without warning, Dad scraped his chair back, gouging the hardwood floor.

  “Gregor!” Mom called, standing up to follow, but the resolute bang of the front door made it clear: He wanted to be alone, wanted to be out of our home and this life.

  After some point, I couldn’t stay with Mom, who stood guard at the bay window, waiting for Dad to return. I escaped to my bedroom to read up on his potential condition. Spinning around to grab the computer off my desk, I bumped against the hope chest I had inherited from one of my great-grandmothers on Dad’s side. The lid was lovingly carved with her name: Faith.

  My own faith felt scraped raw. My knee throbbed. I slid to the floor, leaning against the bulky trunk, and rubbed the growing bruise. Then I waited impatiently for my computer to boot. As it did, I checked my cell phone in case Ash had called me back. Or even Max. Where the heck were they? If I were them, I’d be on the first flight home, but Ash was in Boston, probably awake for the twenty-third hour in a row for his residency, and Max was down in San Francisco, being a rock star publicist for a bunch of start-ups.

  At last, the computer finished booting. After sifting through long articles with medical terms I couldn’t understand, my worry spiked when I read one I could. Most people with Dad’s potential condition can’t tell that anything’s wrong since the disease attacks only one eye at first. “Centrocecal scotoma,” that’s the official term for that stealth attack, more commonly known as a blind spot: a permanent or temporary area of depressed or absent vision caused by lesions of the visual system. When the remaining good eye starts getting a blind spot and people lose their central vision, that’s when they finally notice their vision loss. Dad was right about one thing: There is no cure.

  Rearing back from the damning words, my mind bounced to the thousand ways my parents were going to need me. College—was I even going to be able to go far away from home as I’d planned? How could I be off in Milan when Mom might need me here in Seattle to help take care of Dad? And my brothers—would they be willing to step out of their busy lives to pitch in?

  On the off chance they had e-mailed me, I logged in to my account. But there, instead, was a message from Quattro, who must have gotten my e-mail address from my blog. For an insane moment, my heart rate quickened even before I skimmed his words: Hey… You OK? Your dad? I’m in town till Tues, checking out high schools for Kylie: joy. Lmk if you need a bacon maple bar fix.

  Without hesitating, I started typing a response. Clever one-liners burst from my head to my fingertips until I jerked my hands off the keyboard. Dad was far from okay. I had told Quattro that I wanted a clean break from boys. And I was flirting? Confused, guilty, and slightly disgusted with myself, I abandoned my response and exiled the computer to the floor.

  Across from my bed hung a photo of a blackened tree stump, scorched from last year’s thunderstorms. I’d taken that photo right after Dom broke it off with me in mid-August. Unable to sleep, I’d gotten up at dawn, running hard through the wetlands behind our house. I spotted the stump and knew exactly how the tree must have felt: blissfully growing in the sun one day, then blasted into splinters the next. Now my parents were the ones fragmenting.

  I never thought I’d feel this busted apart myself again. My gaze settled on my half-written e-mail. Here was a guy about to go off to college; I was shackled in high school. Hadn’t I learned anything from history? Anything about dating an older guy? Maybe like a strain of superresistant bacteria, I had become immune to all the normal warning signs of a bad boy. Or worse—I’d developed a blind spot for all the wrong boys. I straightened, horrified.

  If I were calling Paradise Pest Control in a panic about an epic infestation, Dad would recommend a complete purge. It was time to end this plague of Mr. Wrong, Wrong, and More Wrong.

  This didn’t require a no-boy diet; it was time for a total and complete Boy Purge.

  Before I would even allow myself to be tempted, I blocked Quattro and powered off my computer. And then I went downstairs to wait with my mother.

  Chapter Five

  A couple of days after Dad’s trip to the emergency room, a neural ophthalmologist confirmed the diagnosis that Dad would be blind in a measly six months. In the week since then, we’d been on a yo-yo diet of denial, bouncing between Mom’s manic optimism and Dad’s stoic silence. Case in point: Dad had insisted on trail running with me this afternoon like everything was normal. Not that I would ever tell him this, but I kept worrying that he was going to trip on some tree root he couldn’t see and knock out his teeth or worse.

  Then, as luck would have it, our next-door neighbor Mrs. Harris—beloved resident watchdog—spied my dad and me returning from our run. Her warm gray eyes disappeared into a frown that compressed her double chin as we walked past her house. A few weeks ago, Mrs. Harris had questioned our goal of climbing Rainier this summer with a “Why on earth would you do that?” Today, she questioned our sanity: “Why on earth would you still want to do that?”

  Who knew that concern could be so suffocating? At her question, I felt the wild rush of colossal unfairness. Here was just one more way our lives would change, one more plan being stripped from Dad. I made a hasty excuse to leave, but in my hurry to get away from her prying eyes, I almost tripped on a box left on our doorstep. My irritation was two seconds away from boiling over until I noticed the logo of my dad’s favorite camera supply store on the label.

  My camera had arrived.

  I cast a guilty glance at Dad, who was still chatting with Mrs. Harris on her porch. How could I have wasted a fortune when he was worried about earning a living once he was blind? I rested the box on my hip as I opened the front door quietly. Without a word, I crept upstairs like I was stashing contraband drugs inside our home.

  “Shana, that you?” Mom called.

  “I’ll be down in a sec!” I answered, leaving the box on my bedroom floor. After I shut the door with a firm click, I trotted downstairs toward the tantalizing scent of garlic. Foil-wrapped baguettes rested on the kitchen counter alongside a pan of roasted Brussels sprouts and crispy pancetta. “Wow, Mom, you went all out.” I examined the half dozen types of cookies tucked in plastic bags.

  “Ginny sent another care package,” she said.

  “That’s so Ginny.”

  Mom leaned down to peer into the oven. “I thought I should start freezing some meals for later.”

  “Later,” I silently translated, meant “after blindness.”

  “Mom,” I said, “we still have months.…”

  “Maybe.”

  Half of Mom refused to believe that Dad’s sight was moving from endangered to extinct; the other half seemed to be hunkering down for war. At the sound of the front door opening, Mom called out eagerly, “Gregor!” But there was no returning “Hey, hey! Where are my best girls?” Instead, we got a sepia version of Dad, bled of color: “Hey.”

  Mom chirped, “Hope you’re hungry!”

  Dad managed a limp smile. In the dim kitchen light, I couldn’t see the last traces of the bruises from his fall, but there was no missing the dark bags pleating the skin under his eyes. Never a great sleeper, Dad looked like he hadn’t managed more than a few hours since his diagnosis.

  “So lasagna and burritos. We might get tired of eating them,”
Mom babbled, “but they freeze really well.”

  Few people are immune to the call of Mom’s four-cheese lasagna, the one dish she can cook reliably well. But tonight, not even this could cajole a real smile from Dad, not when he spotted his camera and their Fifty by Fifty Manifesto alongside a new guidebook, 1,000 Ultimate Adventures, on the kitchen table.

  “Mollie…” Dad sighed and bypassed the table for the living room, where he all but fell into his old, fraying armchair, imprinted with his shape.

  If he thought he could escape Mom, he was wrong. She followed and perched on the coffee table in front of him. “Gregor, listen. I think we should cash out our retirement.”

  Dad stood, shaking his head, and sidestepped around her to the kitchen, where he reached for a beer in the fridge. Now didn’t seem like a good time to remind him that we’d been told alcohol might accelerate his blindness. Mom couldn’t care less that he had his back to her. She plodded on. “Let’s take the next six months and travel. You can do your photography. We’ve got forty-nine places left on our manifesto. So let’s choose the places you want to see the most. And just go.”

  Finally, Dad turned and took her hand, leading her to the kitchen table as though she were the one going blind. He sat at the head of the table and said, “Mollie, I love you for suggesting that, but it’s totally impractical. You know that.”

  Mom’s eyes burned with evangelical intensity. “No, you listen to me, Gregor Wilde. I don’t want us to look back on life and regret that we didn’t do more before it was too late. I’m not going to just sit around for the next six months playing wait and see.”

  “So to speak.” Dad laughed so grimly that I flinched.

  “Aside from money, what’s keeping us?” Mom argued.

  “What are we going to do about Shana, for one? Junior year’s the most important year. We can’t exactly pull her out of school and take her with us.”