The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [26]
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Tell me one thing you worry about, too,” she said.
He scratched his chin as he tried to unravel his thoughts. “I guess I’m worried I won’t be brave enough to step outside of my comfort zone, but part of me is really excited to maybe learn about where I might have come from. There’s a whole new world that I could be a part of, and that’s exciting and worrisome all at the same time.”
“How so?” she asked.
“That world just might not want me.”
“It will, John. I know it will.”
He set his coffee cup on the windowsill and scratched the thin stubble on his chin. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and the sparse bristles added something to the sense of adventure awaiting them.
SOMETIMES, WHEN THE GIRL grew tired of asking questions, she would just talk while twisting and braiding the three strands of yellow grass over and over and he would watch and listen. He never told her to shut up because he didn’t like the silence of the night either. Once in a while, especially on those nights before they left Nunacuak, he would just say, “Shh,” and just listen for a moment or two. He didn’t want to become so lost in her tales of life before the sickness that he wouldn’t hear someone or something approaching.
The night before they left the village to start their trek up the river, as they curled up in the sleeping bags, she told him something he wished he’d never heard.
“I lost my vision when I was just little,” she started, and he should have stopped her there, but he didn’t. “And I don’t really remember how. But I remember what things used to look like. I remember going down to the river and throwing old black cherry Shasta cans into the swirling water. They never told us not to litter back then, so we didn’t know better. My brothers used to like to throw cans in and shoot them with rifles. I loved watching the cans spin on top of that green water as they sank and the water exploded around the cans with each shot. I still see things like that in my head, you know. I see my memories, but once my eyes failed, they stopped seeing. I don’t remember if they got blurry or if they just went white one day. I remember the clinic flew a woman out here, an eye doctor, a pretty half-Japanese and half-kass’aq woman is what my little brother Yago told me, and she held my face and looked into my eyes and said it was too late, ‘Sorry. I’m just so, so sorry,’ she kept saying, and I remember how sad she sounded, I think because if they could have sent me into Anchorage, maybe even to Bethel, in time I might have never went blind. I remember her hands on my face, though, they were warm and soft, and she told me I would learn to see in other ways.”
The girl stopped for a while, then continued. “And I did. You know? You know how I can smell and hear things you can’t? But sometimes I still think that I see things, too. Even with my eyes open in the summer, I can stare right into the sun and not see the light, but still, sometimes I think that I see things. Shadows mostly, but that doesn’t make sense. If you stared into a black room, you wouldn’t see something move, would you? I remember hearing someone in a movie say once that being blind is like being in a cave. If you were in a cave, would you know someone is out there waiting for you, hunting you?”
“Quiet for a moment,” he said, pretending to listen, but only hearing the wind outside. He didn’t want to imagine shadows moving in the darkness.
“Before the sickness came, I saw something. I never told anyone this. I was sitting on the steps of our house. Plucking feathers from a crane my brother caught. I saw a flash of white and I looked up in the sky. I saw two lines of white light like geese or ducks in a V in the blue sky. Then the white started to fall apart, crumble sort of, and then fall like rain and the light burned my eyes as it fell, so I closed them and when I opened them up my eyes worked again, but only for one blink. As soon as I blinked them everything went black again.”
The girl said nothing for a while, and he thought she’d fallen asleep.