But that was before Sarah.
It was a visit I dreaded and desired since hearing that my friend's granddaughter had lost both optic nerves by a gun badly handled. I'd last seen Sarah in passing, as she kissed her granny through the car window, her bleached bangs screaming wild. The way news of family filters through friends, I knew her as the wayward child. What would I, mother of sons, think to say, or do, in the presence of this newly blind young woman?
She was resting, down the hall, as we came and sat and wrapped our hands around wet glasses. Her mother's even keel belied her taut vigilance, bound to the sudden, changeable winds. What choice did she have in a home with a child who wasn't always keen on living?
Someplace within the lull of our murmurings, Sarah had joined us. She was curled in a bundle of gray hoodie, jeans, and black converse sneakers. We talked around and past her for awhile, swirling our best intentions her way like dervishes on tiptoe. When we lighted on braille and her new teacher, the tools came out and Sarah showed us the fingerwork she'd practiced.
It was really Sarah who broke the ice. "Show Susan the notebook, Mom -- maybe we can do the thing with random pages." I inched toward the lovely girl with auburn hair and dark glasses, starstruck by her grit and grace.
So we did the drill. She took each page I handed her and went to work, tenderly teasing the alphabet from tiny bumps, accepting me like the great aunt who passes through town on business. But this was not my business, it was hers, and she had her plans.
"After I learn the braille, I want to get good at cane walking and how to cook and do laundry so I can help my mom around here. I'll probably go to school in Pittsburgh -- I think it will be good to meet some other blind people. I don't know anyone who's blind."
And neither did I, but now, it seems, I do.
Something in Sarah reminds me of Dave, best friend of one of my boys. Dave ROTC'd his way through college, served and blogged his way through an Iraq tour and ended up, miraculously, alive. Both of them exude a sort of ironic alertness to the present, tense as it may feel from the fallout of choices they did and did not make. Their words carry the intelligent lilt of skepticism; their humor takes you in stride.
Her mom brought her a crisp new dollar, which Sarah began to fold and crease and fold again as talk turned to watches that speak and pills that dull the relentless pain of bullet wounds. Maisie, the golden mutt, bellied up for scratches on the braided rug. Voilà! Sarah's origami creature, a wee elephant that couldn't be spent in a million years, landed in my palm. "Every waiter says the same thing when I leave a row of these on the table," she says, pleased and weary. "I'll never be able to spend that tip."
It was time to go, my pachyderm a gift to cherish, a parting sack of chocolate eggs in shiny foil tucked in Sarah's pocket. We stood and hugged and said the normal things. "So good to see you, Sarah."
And Sarah said, "good to see you too, as the saying goes."
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