Girl, Stolen(25)

Danielle was relentless. “Aren’t you getting tired of living like a baby? Of having everyone do everything for you? Don’t you want to learn how to do some things for yourself?”

It was true. Cheyenne was starting to feel like a baby trapped in a thirteen-year-old body. Sometimes her dad even fed her.

She kept still for a long time and then, slowly, she nodded. She felt Danielle settle on the bed beside her. Her arms went around Cheyenne. For a second, Cheyenne stiffened, and then she let herself be rocked back and forth while Danielle made sh-sh sounds in her ear.

That was how her dad had found them. Later, after Danielle and her dad told Cheyenne they were getting married, she wondered if Danielle hadn’t somehow planned being found like that. To show that she could take Cheyenne’s mom’s place.

Still, Danielle hadn’t been wrong. And because of her encouragement, Cheyenne had learned how to do a lot of things for herself, more than she had ever thought possible in the first horrible weeks after the accident. Most of what she had learned had been at a residential school two hours from her home.

Many of the people there were like Cheyenne, in shock, wondering what had happened to them. She remembered in particular one guy who kept saying, “But how will I be able to do things if I can’t drive?” After a while, she wanted to slug him. He was forty at least, so he had had a life. He had had his chance. Cheyenne hadn’t even really gotten started. Her mom had let her drive once in a cemetery near their house, but now she would never get to for real. And her mom was buried in that same cemetery. Cheyenne had never even been to her grave.

At first when she was at the school, Cheyenne had felt like an alien who had just landed on the planet. She had had to relearn things that she had known how to do for so long that she didn’t remember not knowing them. How to feed herself. How to dress herself. How to walk without bumping into things.

One of the first things she learned was how to use a cane. Surprisingly light, the cane had a rubber handle like a golf club and a plastic tip. The cane could be folded up into a neat little bundle of sticks. Cheyenne resolved to keep it folded up and hidden away as much as possible. When the instructors told her it glowed in the dark, she imagined how it would give her away at night, the one time she might have a slight advantage over sighted people.

Still, while she was at the school, surrounded by other blind people, she decided to learn how to use it. Danielle had told Cheyenne a Bible verse, “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” Using a cane was like that. Each step was like stepping into nothing until she felt solid ground under her feet again.

It made a tacka-tacka sound. “Touch, don’t tap,” the instructors said. They taught her how to sweep it from side to side like a metal detector, touching the spot where the next foot would land. When she stepped forward to the left, she tapped on the right. If there was a hole, or something in her way, the cane would find it first. Going down stairs, she held her cane directly in front of her and learned to trust that it would tap when she reached the bottom. Through the feedback she got from the cane, Cheyenne learned to feel grates, ups, downs, carpeting, tile, wood, gravel, curbs, grass, and swishing revolving doors.

And she learned that it wasn’t just that the cane could tell her what was directly in her path. If she listened closely, she could tell whether the sound it made was bouncing off a brick wall or echoing in an open doorway or rebounding off an awning overhead. Even without the cane, she could sometimes tell if there was something ahead of her, like a tree or a telephone pole. As a blind person, Cheyenne had to interpret every shred of information she could get from her other senses. Everyone thought the blind had special abilities, but it was really that they had just learned to pay attention. That they had to pay attention.

Now as she lay on Griffin’s bed, Cheyenne remembered the first time the instructors had had her venture out on her own. She had walked down a city street, listening to other people’s footsteps around her, fearful she might hit one of them with her cane. (That was before she realized that a cane was good for crowd control – once they saw it, people usually gave her a wide berth.) She wondered if they were staring. At one point, she thought she heard someone whispering, but she told herself she was imagining it. After a couple of blocks, her breath finally began to come easier.

“Are you blind?” someone asked, startling her. The voice belonged to a young boy.

Cheyenne turned, not sure she was looking in the right direction. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Yes.”

“You must be really bad!” Then she heard the sound of his footsteps running away.