slapping me hard on the shoulder.
“Hey!” a kid said, his voice rough.
“What a wimp you are!” another one said, his pitch higher. “You gonna let him do that?”
“I’m gonna beat his ass,” the first kid said.
“I got him with my stick,” Charlie whispered to me. He was the first person I knew who called it a stick.
The bikes skidded out ahead and started rattling back toward us.
“Here’s the crosswalk,” Charlie said. I heard him hit the button. Then he pushed me behind the pole and I prayed for the sound of that song as we huddled together, waiting for the bikes. I didn’t hear any cars. I decided we should run for it: dash across the street to the safety of the school. But I was afraid of moving and of standing still. I didn’t know what to do. As I faltered, the first bike was upon us. I tensed and prepared to jump into the street. I felt my friend lunge away from the road just as the bike approached. The bicycle crashed: bam! A kid yelled.
“Charlie!” I said, panicking.
The other bike crashed. The song came on at the crosswalk. A hand was suddenly at my elbow, pulling me across. Then he swiped my cane from my hand. “Hold on to me,” Charlie said. “We gotta go faster.”
“Are you okay?” I said.
The kids behind us were moaning.
“I poked my stick in his spokes,” he said.
By the end of the day, they traced the broken cane to Charlie. “I’m getting out of here,” he whispered to me in the bathroom that night. “No more Braille Jail. They’re looking for you, but I didn’t tell them who.”
I was terrified they would find me. Charlie was gone the next morning; I didn’t get to tell him good-bye.
By the time I came home for Thanksgiving two weeks later, I’d convinced myself I couldn’t bear the school. I told my parents I was bolder than the other children there. I could do things they wouldn’t do. And I said the teachers kept us inside to protect us. I knew that would get to Dad, the idea that I was being coddled. But the truth was, I was homesick. I missed my pal Charlie. And I was terrified of the kids on bikes; I dreaded going out anywhere, certain they’d track me down. On the Sunday my parents were supposed to drive me back, Mom and Dad sat me at the kitchen table and gave me the choice. I never went back. I named my stick, and every one since, after Charlie.
My parents got me a tutor, Mary Robinson, who helped me with schoolwork every weekday afternoon from first through ninth grade. She taught me Braille. For several years after my blinding, I was bold, even reckless, around my neighborhood, with plenty of bruises and scrapes to show for it. I didn’t use my cane much except at school. I rode my brother’s skateboard while poking my hockey stick out front. Sometimes I rode his bike and crashed into bushes, fences, and walls. I bounced on my pogo stick for hours in place.
By the fifth grade, however, I had gotten left behind so many times by neighborhood kids that I began to turn inward. I also became cautious and quiet as I grew more accustomed to accessing the world through my ears. Listening is not passive; I had to focus and concentrate and invent the world from what I could hear. That was when Mom started getting books on tape from the library, and I started listening to stories whenever I could. I loved books not because they let me escape but because they showed me the world. The Jupiter Jones series got me started; Jupe was a fat kid, an outcast who didn’t have money but was smart as hell. He could fool adults and solve mysteries they couldn’t solve because he thought about things differently.
In middle school, as kids started picking on me more, I kept to myself until shyness became routine. I started wearing dark glasses to cover my scar, and I ditched my cane whenever I could. I avoided going out on my own. Dad pressed me to do things outside, but he was gone all day. It was Mom who helped me in stores, showed me how to open plastic wrappers when I got frustrated, or took me to doctors and specialists. At night, Dad would drill into me how difficult the world was for a boy like me—that was his phrase: “a boy like you.” My parents never used the word “blind.” I couldn’t just be mediocre, he said. I had to excel at whatever I chose. That was the only way I would ever support myself. Even then, I sensed that that was how I could gain his respect, by not being a drain on society.
One afternoon, I overheard Dad demanding that my tutor stop pushing me to use my cane.
“It’s about being independent,” Mrs. Robinson said, “getting around on his own.”
“They make fun of him,” Dad said. “He gets around Greeley fine.”
“He gets around the neighborhood,” she said. “He doesn’t strike out into new places anymore.”
“This is about your movement, isn’t it?” Dad said. “You want to show the world how many people there are without sight.”
“It’s not about a movement,” Mrs. Robinson said. “It’s about Kevin accepting who he is.”
Dad just about lost it then. And my tutor almost lost her job.
Later in Burbank, as I was getting to know Ray, I wondered sometimes, when he grew quiet or distant after he’d been running around only moments before: Had Ray come to us at the same stage I’d been in—those middle school years—when I’d stopped being intrepid? Maybe it was a projection on my part, that parallel between him and me. But the thought always made my heart sink because I didn’t want him to hide inside himself, as I had. And I didn’t know how to help him.
After lunch, the temperature was 104, and Betsy got a quart of oil and a gallon of water. “You think the heat’ll warp the wood?” Patrick said, coming inside the store where we were loitering.
“What is that thing?” a man said, his voice rattling like pebbles. “Looks like a coffin.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. Maybe we shouldn’t have wrapped it so tightly, I thought.
Then Patrick tried to sell him one: “It’s a handmade, one-of-a-kind casket. Everybody’s buying ’em. You can’t get ’em in a funeral parlor.”
Before I got into Betsy, I made the mistake of laying a hand on the coffin’s tarp. I jerked my hand away; the thing almost burned my skin.
“I hate that ugly box,” Isa said. “I can’t even look at it.”
When we were back on the road and the desert furnace came through the windows, my sweat evaporated at the same rate as I perspired. As far as we knew, we were driving until Patrick couldn’t drive anymore, which depressed us all, I think: the hot road ahead. My skin felt tacky and smelled salty. Devon pushed away my leg whenever it touched his, but Ray couldn’t stop moving. He kept bumping up against me with elbows and knees. He had grown some during his months with us, I realized.
Late in the afternoon, just before Phoenix, Isa said she hoped we could stop at her brother’s place in Tucson for a night—which was such good news it even got Devon asking questions. She hadn’t seen Robert in four years, she answered, since before she was clean and sober. No, she didn’t have any other brothers or sisters. Yes, he had a family: June, his wife, and Alexis, his teenaged daughter. Yes, he knew about us; she’d talked to him on the phone a couple of times over the past year. No, he didn’t know we were coming. Then she started mumbling to herself in her thin, anxious voice, asking Jesus something or other—I couldn’t quite hear.
“Enough questions!” Patrick declared.
I was glad to hear Patrick come to her aid.
We were quiet after that. I remembered that Robert was the younger brother who’d badgered her and spied on her as a kid. I knew he was a successful contractor and that she felt inept in comparison with him and his family. But I’d forgotten he lived in Tucson.
We pulled up at Robert’s place after six, but it still felt like 100 degrees as Betsy tick, tick, ticked in the heat. The AC hadn’t kicked on since Phoenix. We hadn’t