Girl, Stolen(24)

Using a cane had been the first skill Cheyenne had had to learn after the accident, and the hardest. Her dad hadn’t wanted to let her go to the residential program, but Danielle had persuaded him. That was before Cheyenne’s dad and Danielle started dating, before Danielle became her stepmother, back when she was just one of the voices of the nice nurses who cared for Cheyenne.

Although in Danielle’s case, not so nice. Danielle hadn’t believed in spending too much time mourning what was lost. Instead she wanted Cheyenne to focus on what she had, on what she could do.

For the first two months after the accident, Cheyenne was basically in bed. First, it was because her broken body needed to heal. After the initial ten days, when she was out of danger, the hospital recommended that she be sent to a nursing home to recuperate. Her father wouldn’t hear of it – his thirteen-year-old daughter surrounded by old people with strokes and broken hips? Instead, he paid for private-duty nurses to be with her twenty-four hours a day. One of them was Danielle.

Once Cheyenne realized that she would never see again, she shut down. What was the point? The world was a scary place. The physical therapist wanted her to go to a special school where she would learn how to be blind. Cheyenne said no to everything, and her dad didn’t argue. She didn’t like to get out of bed. There was nothing around her, and how could she walk on nothing? If Cheyenne had to go someplace, she slid her feet as if she were on roller skates, so that she could still have one foot on the world.

All she had left for sure was her body, trembling and sweating. The churning in her stomach, the pounding in her temples, the sounds of her breathing. She no longer knew anything about the world. All she knew about was herself. Her world had shrunk to the edges of her skin.

Every time her dad encouraged her to get up, Cheyenne complained that her head ached or that she felt dizzy. Sometimes it was even true. Sometimes she didn’t know if it was true or not. Mostly she stayed in bed and listened to music. Her dad would stand in the door of her room watching her – she could hear him, even if he didn’t always say he was there – and Cheyenne would just turn her music up louder.

Then one day Danielle popped the headphones out of her ears.

“Hey!” Cheyenne protested. Her hands scrabbled over the bedcovers, trying to find them.

“Listen,” Danielle said, her voice brisk and matter-of-fact, “this is going to be one long, boring life if you don’t learn how to function independently. At this rate, you might as well be dead.”

Cheyenne had held it together so well for weeks, but now she snapped. She was tired of sympathy, but this woman’s expectations were way out of line.

“Might as well be dead? I am dead! I’ll never see anything again – not a movie, not a person’s face, not even my own face.” She got bogged down thinking of all the things she wouldn’t see – flowers and dogs and the colors of her clothes and sunsets, leaves turning, TV shows and books, concerts, cute boys, cute actors, cute babies, what exactly was making a strange noise, the colors of gelato and the shiny metal tubs they were lined up in, cracks in the sidewalk, people laughing at her.

Danielle’s voice remained calm. “You’re only thirteen. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

“Don’t give me any of that crap about how I’m only thirteen. My life is over. I’m never going to drive a car, I’m never going to go on a date, and I’ll be lucky if I get a job in some shelter for the disabled.” Cheyenne made her voice singsongy, furious that she could still hear the tears underneath. “I’m sick of people saying ‘you’re still young,’ ‘you’ll adapt,’ ‘God never closes a door but he opens a window.’ Well, that’s all BS! I won’t adapt. I’m blind. My mom’s dead and I’m blind!”

There was a long pause. Then Danielle said quietly, “You’re right. But it is what it is, Cheyenne. You can’t change it, so you have to deal with it. You have to figure out how to do things for yourself. You can make a life. And it can be a good one. But you have to try.”

From outside Cheyenne’s closed door, her dad called, “What are you girls talking about in there?”

“Go away!” Cheyenne shouted. She didn’t want him to see her with tears spilling out of her useless eyes. Then he would start crying too. She didn’t want another pity party. She just wanted to forget. She just wanted to go to sleep and wake up and have it all be a bad dream.

She waited until she heard her father’s footsteps turn away. Then she said softly, “But it’s too much. It’s just too much.”