The blind girl’s mother had asked for me, had called my sister and requested a visit. The blind girl, not a girl at twenty-nine but a woman, but still a girl to my sister and I suppose the girl’s mother, was briefly in town and would leave in a week or so. I was the only other blind person the girl’s mother knew and it had been suggested to me by others, foremost by my sister, that the mother held me in some regard. I was someone blind since birth and despite that had done well for myself. The most prosperous financial advisor in three surrounding counties. Even in rural backwaters my line of work inspires strong competition. Add to that people’s natural hesitation to invest their life savings with a woman who can’t read a balance sheet, my success comes across as far more impressive than it ought to be. I lived two farms over from where the blind girl’s mother and stepfather lived. My sister elected to drive me but I told her no need, Alonso would be able to drive. He and his son Guillermo lived in a converted barn loft on the property and were available for help on Sundays. I recorded a message voice-to-text and sent it to the girls’ mother, See you this Sunday at 6, Mrs. Hendrix. Though she asked I call her Nina, she was a client, professional habits are hard to break. To her I was Jane but to me she remained Mrs. Hendrix. She was ten, fifteen years my elder and so a certain formalism was called for, I’d been raised that way.
I think that about settles it, I told Alonso, let’s get a move on. I had finished preparing my mother at the table, rehearsing instructions with Guillermo about how to feed her, where to lead her after dinner, how to help her in the bathroom if she needed to relieve herself. Mother could still signal forewarning when a bowel movement was coming, or when she needed to empty her bladder. Dinner and bathroom and bedtime were tasks usually managed by Juby, but Juby had requested the evening off to spend time with her family, birthday plans for her granddaughter at a steak house. Guillermo was fourteen but capable and repeated my instructions as I relayed them. Alonso would be available as well should he need anything, just a text away. The dinner at Mrs. Hendrix’s would last about two, three hours, Alonso would be waiting in the car, should Guillermo ask for help it’d be no trouble to drive over, a five minute drive from the Hendrix place to their own, front door to front door.
From where Alonso and I stood in the mudroom, lacing our boots, pulling our coats on, we could hear the boy talking to my mother, the tentativeness with which he encouraged her to eat what he’d scooped and held before her on a spoon. It was stark cold out and horse-sounds from the barns travelled through the air differently, acoustics thin and brittle. How was Dr. Dusk, I asked Alonso. He was doing better, Alonso assured me. There’d been a bacterial infection on the horse’s right flank and for a week or so Alonso had been worried it might worsen. They’d called the horse vet Betty Castro and she’d come over with her expert eye and medicines. Three steroidal intramuscular injections near the sight of infection eased the pain, application of an ointment and a daily change of bandages healed it. The alpacas were good, Alonso said, the chickens as well. We had ourselves on the farm a gated community cordoned off from the rest of the animal kingdom and for the past six years Alonso had managed the day-to-day operations without issue. Guillermo had grown up around the place and had been around long enough to lose much of his shyness around me. When his father had first taken the job, our first few meetings I could feel the boy’s discomfort in the awkwardness of his answers to my greetings. I was the first unsighted person the boy had met, his father explained. He was also maybe not used to his father working for a boss-lady. For himself, Alonso had to admit, that was also unusual. But he liked the farm and enjoyed helping me run the place.
A short rough drive on gravel, then a bucking onto a smoother line of asphalt. A loping wide to the left then a gradual gliding back to center. After that a slow to stop, tick-tick of the turn signal, then a right onto Deertail Road. A flowing down Deertail for a short bit, veering through meanders right and left, then the tick-tick again, and a slowing to turn another right. Onto gravel and up a hill thumping the SUV every few beats with potholes. Last visit to the Hendrix place had been earlier the previous year, talking business after dinner. I tried to schedule most portfolio review meetings at the office in town, but the Hendrixes preferred home visits, a drive to town was superfluous, they reasoned, since they were neighbors. It was reasoning I couldn’t very well counter without stepping outside the bounds of politeness. The dinners were welcoming and chatty and not overlong. During those visits I tended to keep myself formal and friendly from a distance.
There were dogs barking from all directions when the truck pulled to a stop. How many this time, I asked Alonso. Five? he counted. Six? At the outset of our annual visits we would take count of how many animals rushed the truck when it crested the hill to the house. Pall Hendrix maintained an odd custom, naming them. Each were initialed according to their color and any redundancies were sequenced numerically. W.D., “White Dog”. B.D., “Brown Dog.” B.D.2, “Brown Dog Two”. It could be confusing because the dogs would come and go, some running off or dying, others arriving by natural birth or appearing from nowhere and at random one day among the pack. If Brown Dog 2 ran off or died, a new brown dog would take the old name and for all intents and purposes would be tasked with maintaining it. When truck arrived, the dogs would crowd it. Alonso and I wouldn’t open our doors until the Hendrixes walked off their porch to wrangle them or shoo them away. Often I’d have to stand a good few minutes after stepping from the truck, to let their noses scan my hands and legs, sniffing. I’m sure in their own way they were gathering information about any changes in the animal population over at my place.
I opened the truck door at a crack, to let dogs sniff up and down the edges of it. Usually they’d settle down if I gave them partial access to a hand or leg, while I made them wait. Hello there, Ms. Bull, Mr. Hendrix said. His voice came from a short distance away, three o’clock from where I was sitting, one foot on gravel, the other still on the truck’s floorboard. Afternoon, Mr. Hendrix, I said. He’d long given up trying to coax me to call him Pall. From Alonso’s descriptions of the place across three and a half years of visits, I could map it from where we parked, which was the same place each time, right tires exactly along the right edge of gravel lot, grill of the car aligning exactly at a right angle to the house’s entrance facing east. Neither of us were certain either Hendrix took notice we had carved a reserved parking space for ourselves, repeated past arrivals exactly. Mr. Hendrix knew enough to stand by and not offer a hand on the arm to guide me. Alonso would come around the other side of the SUV to gather the dogs’ attentions while I lowered my cane to gravel and stepped to ground. Mr. Hendrix would coach me every time to “not mind them, they’re just taxing your scent”, which I took as a joke for my benefit, financial planner taxed by dogs. Mrs. Hendrix’s voice would make its way to me through dog-chaos-noises, soft and kindly. It was the sort of voice that had skipped a generation and had been grandmotherly since the beginning. After trading hellos and other pleasantries, after reintroducing them to Mr. Alonso and explaining he would be waiting in the car, but please don’t let that rush the evening, with a discreet left hand I’d trace my way to the front of the truck, then along the grill and hood, then off the hood with cane sweeping lightly before me along gravel. The Hendrixes would small talk their way towards the door, and stepping inside their voices could acquire an acoustical depth. Cane would tap door frame and through sound and feel I would pass through it. Mr. Hendrix would close the door behind me as I followed Mrs. Hendrix down the hall to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the living room. Dinner smells would be abundant and the kitchen oven-warm. Mr. Hendrix would offer to take my coat. Backs of heels edging the base of the couch, I’d lay aside cane and work myself free of the coat and extend it before me where Mr. Hendrix would be waiting to take it. Then I’d ease to sit on the couch and assess where Mrs. Hendrix might be sitting.
The room was different, though, because there was another person waiting. The daughter and blind girl. Out of necessity I tended to have an acute feel for rooms, and often they were most detailed and demanding of scrutiny upon first entrance. Almost as if the living room had restructured itself since my last visit, furniture rearranged, ceiling a few inches lower, corners broader in their angles. There was another person breathing the shared air and one such breath, upon Mrs. Hendrix’s introduction between it and myself, sounded its exhale as a “nice to meet you, m’am.” It was polite and slightly tired. Not bored yet, but uttered from a depleted state. I can’t picture what people look like, because I’ve never been able to extrapolate image from sound, but can compare characterizations as they’ve been described to me. I’ve heard of very tired people before, sick people, people early in their recovery from an addiction. I’ve also heard descriptions of the Hendrix girl by way of unwelcomed gossip, from clients who repurposed Hendrix family shame and hardship for sake of small talk. They would be halfway into the sensationalism of the story before I would have a chance to redirect them to business matters at hand, why they’d scheduled an appointment to meet. These were small town people and I was one of them so knew when the dangers of a fallen culture took one of their own, there was often a confused response, a strychnine mix of tabloid thrill and genuine empathy. I couldn’t judge them because then I’d have to judge myself first. This was in the room also, I’d brought it there. Knowledge of years of labor trying to bring a daughter back into steady sobriety, home first from Las Vegas, then after the girl’s move a year or so ago, hope of a return home from Los Angeles. These cities with half a tongue in the English language, one of the office gossipers had remarked, they take our girls and when they hand them back to us, they’re nigh but unrecognizable.
A pale voice, soft and weak. Long straight brown hair and a “pretty, pretty face”, but “very, very skinny.” I was glad to meet the girl, if to replace her gossip-avatar with an actual living person. She was sitting at ten or eleven o’clock, in a chair new to the room. Mrs. Hendrix was speaking from her usual one o’clock position. Mr. Hendrix sat at three o’clock on the couch next to me. There were soft rock hits from the Seventies playing on low volume from a speaker in the kitchen. Carol King or Linda Ronstadt or Carly Simon, syrupy and bland and not much to the ears of one whose most closely guarded secret as a financial professional is a partiality towards outlaw country and thrash metal. The music might have been playing for the girl’s benefit, something to ease nerves and palliate the senses. Never once during earlier visits could I recall Internet radio playing beneath conversation or dinner.
The girl’s name was Agnese and though I’d previously been hesitant to think “girl” of a twenty-nine-year-old, the tenor of her voice confirmed some rightness to this. I listened to the Hendrixes brief description of the reason for the girl’s return. She’d lived in Los Angeles but had decided to stay on at home after a return for Christmas. She was between jobs and rethinking things, they explained. The girl wasn’t invited to comment on this description of her life at the current moment and didn’t seem motivated to challenge it. I had had a brother at one time and he’d had similar problems. I knew that sort of tiredness and open-ended bottomless defeat and how it could reshape a person to agree with almost anything, so long as it didn’t confront them with immediate responsibilities, to change, to break with old desperate habits, to hold themselves accountable for the next day. I can be hard on matters of sobriety, because I secretly lost a brother from a lack of it. No one about town would know of it, since I was born and raised elsewhere, on the other side of the state. This was nearly a quarter of a century ago, before the girl’s future had even begun to take shape. She’d been raised on this farm, Mr. Hendrix explained. Had helped out as much as any hired hand had. Feeding hogs and cattle, tending to the horses. Watching her from a distance, if I didn’t know her, there’d have been no way of telling she wasn’t sighted.
This last comment, I could tell, was intended as a segue to a most relevant topic yet unmentioned, our shared blindness-since-birth. My first meeting with the Hendrixes this had been discussed and advanced as a reason why, counter to common prejudices about whether a blind person could be trusted with handling an investor’s money, they were impelled to trust me. They knew from experience what quality of character a person such as I must have in order to establish a successful practice and maintain it. More than half the people they knew around county had entrusted their life savings with me, and they’d been surprised I hadn’t reached out to them sooner for a preliminary meeting. Maybe they’d assumed I hadn’t sought their business because we were neighbors. They had at one time asked but I had demured with a polite non-answer. I wasn’t in the practice of poaching clients from competitors, that was true. But I didn’t favor having clients live within walking distance, either. But who was I to turn down their business if they came to the office, asked I help guide them safely and affordably towards retirement?
I’d heard a lot about you, I told the girl. This was only partially true, and not in the ways I would have preferred. It’s nice to finally meet you.
I’ve heard a lot about you too, the girl said. This not coded-irony-among-the-unsighted, but safe, standard. The tiredness of the voice carried the response to term then abandoned it. The room moved in from every direction to help it along into conversation.
We told her about your trip to Colorado, Mrs. Hendrix said. If I wasn’t in professional mode, mention of Colorado might’ve inspired a wince. I tried to keep my private life inaccessible to ongoing town dialogue, but the smaller the town, the more difficult a prospect that can be. One of the hands around the house, Juby or Alonso or Guillermo, I was never able to find out, had let slip to someone I’d been away a few weeks two years before, on a trip to the mountains. Yes, I affirmed to the room and its Hendrixes, I’d travelled to Colorado a couple of years ago with a professional climber on hire, to guide me to the summit of a thirteener. It’d always been something I’d wanted to do and had been planning the trip for a while. No doubt the Hendrixes had described this to their daughter as illustrative of my character but also as evidence of what a person could accomplish if they were determined to forgo conventions forced on them by their blindness.
She’d met Grace before, Mrs. Hendrix said, my sister. Grace would come by now and then to join us on Mahjongg nights. For a bit we had a few ladies around town who were interested in learning, so we’d set up at the kitchen table and play. Other than the other children Agnese had met at the out-of-state school where we’d sent her to learn braille, you were the only other blind person we knew of, and that was through Grace’s talking about you. When Aggie left town for Nevada with her boyfriend, it wasn’t a couple years later you moved here.
You remember Ms. Grace? Mrs. Hendrix asked the feeble-girl-voice two hours to the right of her.
A little bit, the girl said.
They would have their little talks together, Mr. Hendrix said. House full of women, not anything she or I were used to, but Grace would come by her room to check in on her. That’s your sister for you, always looking after people.
Yessir, I told him, she does have that way about her.
How many years older is she?
Three years, sir.
Just the two of you and your mother now?
Yessir. Our mother lives with me over at the farm now full-time and Gracie is in and out of the place a couple of times most days.
She’s working with you now, I understand?
Yessir. My admin person took early retirement earlier this spring, so Gracie stepped in to help out then that seemed to be working so we decided to keep things as they are.
You're the numbers person and she’s the people person, that it?
Yessir, that’d be a right way of putting it.
We’d heard about your mother, Mrs. Hendrix said, we’re sorry about that. Pall’s mother had lived for a while with dementia. We’d taken care of her over at her place a year or so, before we had to move her to a care facility. That can be hard on family. I hope you and Gracie have help.
Yes m’am, we have plenty. We have a part-time in-home care person, Juby, and the two hands at the farm, Mr. Alonso and his son. And Gracie will stay over whenever it’s needed. Mother’s snug as a throw pillow over at the house, I’d say.
Good to hear it, Mr. Hendrix said. The quiet part of the room where the girl sat was either tuned to another channel of thinking or was simply listening.
Dinner was filet mignon and asparagus and scalloped potatoes. Mr. Hendrix insisted I take head of the table, different from where I’d sat previously. It’d have been too much to explain to him how switching chairs would confuse my pre-established mental map of the conversational traffic lanes during mealtime, so I took the seat and thanked him. Among a certain kind of man and father, offering their chair was the highest honor to be conferred upon a guest, and it would be ungracious of me to not take it.
The girl was quiet most of the meal, spoke only when spoken to. There were one or two mentions of Los Angeles, and a question from Mrs. Hendrix about whether I’d traveled there. I’d told her I hadn’t, hadn’t been to California yet in fact, but if I were to go, I’d most likely visit San Diego first.
San Diego’s nice, the girl said, almost to herself. Faintly caught her saying it above the clatter of dinnerware and the elder Hendrixes talking.
Weaving through the dinner conversation was the obvious subtext that the guest was a professional woman who had determined her own path and established a life for herself more demanding of a person’s attentions than most would be able to manage on a good day, even with a pair of perfectly healthy eyes. I was welcomed in their company as an example, someone whom their daughter might reasonably hope to emulate. To what extent they were selling their daughter short, it was hard to tell. From what little I’d been told about her exit from and return to town, she’d moved through more of certain parts of the world than I had. Left with a boyfriend and somewhere along the way phased out of the relationship and moved to Los Angeles and made a living there, though what kind of living I suppose was the relevant question. There was not much talk about what sort of company she kept when she lived in these cities, other than the boyfriend, a local boy whose parents had moved away some years before. There was the sense that the girl who came back was very different from the girl who left. It was nothing the Hendrixes said nor Gracie or our many town gossips mentioned, it was audible in the pauses and trailing-offs between child and mother and father. The politeness of the latter two when involving their guest in conversation about the former suggested as much. I had no business calling any attention to it. I felt it moving between the three of them and extended it the tact it deserved.
Dessert was raspberry sorbet served in minuet glasses with a sprig of mint on top. The girl was offered and declined one, after Mrs. Hendrix softly admonished her for not eating much of what was on her plate. The girl explained she didn’t have her appetite back fully yet, but would maybe eat leftovers later if her stomach let her. Sorry, mom, she said, insecurity and hollowness blending and swirling down the drain of simple apology. Mr. Hendrix cleared his throat either to distract from the emotion in the girl’s voice or to discourage his wife from pressing the matter any further. I busied my hands in touching about the base of the glass, working fingertips up its stem, until exact dimensions of the rim had been measured between forefinger and thumb. Left hand held the glass like so about the rim while right hand brought a spoon to scoop a first taste of sorbet. Doubtless they knew, among the unsighted there were subtler forms of discretion to be cultivated. How to deactivate one’s powers of selective listening while still following the beats of a conversation, in case questions are asked that require sudden refocus, quick and specific answering.
Dessert conversation was marked by this small remonstrance from mother to daughter, and the latter excused herself from the table shortly after Mr. Hendrix concluded dessert with a formal thanks to his wife for the delicious dinner. I added my own thanks from across the table and followed the usual direction of custom thanking her also for inviting me over for a lovely evening. The room had removed the girl to another part of the house and dishes were already being gathered, stacked at the edge of a sink for washing. Mr. Hendrix had left his chair and had been elsewhere for a minute or so before the chair was taken again, a body to my right obstructing and shaping the flow of how sounds reached me.
Jane, it was so nice of you to come, it said. Disorienting, to hear it speak because it wasn’t Mr. Hendrix’s voice but his wife’s, Nina’s. While he’d busied himself clearing the table, his wife had left her seat at the other end and taken his nearest to me. Her voice was lowered, confidential. From the way she thanked me there was the sense a favor was about to be asked. We know this is the first time you and Agnese have met, Mrs. Hendrix said, but she’s heard a lot about you, from Grace, from ourselves. Grace had mentioned that you might be willing, if we asked, to talk to her. She’s had a hard time lately, maybe Grace has told you. It’s been extra hard because we think, the kinds of things she’s been through, she’s embarrassed. Maybe it’s because we’re church people and she think’s we’ll judge her, we don’t know. She won’t even tell us that much. But she’s always been one to remind us we don’t live like her and never could, because she can’t see and we can, simple as that. We thought maybe she’d listen to you? We know it’s a big ask. We’d even pay you a little for your time, if that would help. We don’t know how that would work. We’re just unsure what to do, how to help her, because she’s not begun talking about what’s brought her back home. It’s been the first time either Pall or I have heard from or seen her in six years, not sure Grace told you that either. We’re sorry to press you for this and not tell you outright before you came over. But we’re private people and we tend to keep our troubles to ourselves. We trust you’d be respectful and Pall regards you highly. I do too. She’s upstairs, would you have time for a bit to talk with her?
This was a lot and put a strain on my poker face. First feeling that came through was irritation at my sister Gracie for not explaining this motive outright, when she pitched the dinner invite as a favor I could maybe do for her specifically. She’d said the daughter was home and the daughter was unsighted, and left it for me to assume my presence at dinner was intended to welcome the girl back to town from one who stood more of a chance of understanding first-hand what her day-to-day life was like. Good company. I’d assumed the Hendrixes wanted me around as a model example. But knowing me and especially knowing the stubbornness between us, Gracie had elected to leave the true ask behind the request undescribed. I help families from the outside-in, not the inside-out, I would’ve told her, a saying I often circulate among clients when talk of money troubles edges close to discussion about conflicts between the personalities involved. Mrs. Hendrix’s was an inside-out request, Gracie knew, so she removed the option of an easy “no.” Here was the concerned mother sitting next to me, the exhausted father within earshot at the sink. Surely Gracie had imagined this moment and knew how it would go.
I’m sorry to hear she’s been having a hard time, I told the mother and the kitchen. I’m flattered that you would trust me with talking with her. Since she’d just met me, I’m not sure she would be comfortable or keen to talk. It’s not something I usually do. But she’s yours and you would know. I can give it a try. But I wouldn’t feel right with your paying me, that’s not necessary. I can’t promise anything but can sit a while with her in her room, if I can trouble you with showing me the way.
Their thank-yous were hushed but carried real emotion. I thought then I hadn’t cast enough doubt on their request, to check their hopes.
You can take my arm, here, by the sleeve, if you like, I told Mrs. Hendrix, as I pushed from the chair and stood. A faint pinch about the cloth around my wrist, a tug and the tug held.
It’s this way, the mother-voice told me, a little more nervous than before.
A turn one-hundred-eighty degrees, walking in the direction where my back had been turned. Acoustics feathering about me, mottled like shadows of leaves on a stream. Ceiling and walls and doorways and adjoining rooms, the creaking of floorboards and currents of warm air billowing upwards from heating vents. The leader about my wrist directed a right turn, then a stop and rotation to the right again, shuffle of foot to bottom edge of a stairs. We’ll be walking up stairs now, about twenty, not carpeted, the mother-voice told me closer and quieter than in the hallway. It led me step by step at a careful even pace until the stairs leveled out to a second floor. Another rotation ninety degrees and more steps into more closely-knit acoustics and a soft knock on wood, a door.
Hey there, honey, Mrs. Hendrix said. Ms. Bull’s wanted to visit a bit. You okay with that?
What Gracie did to me, Mrs. Hendrix did then to her daughter, and sadly I was party to it. Requests pitched in such a manner they render a person rude, should they decline.
The story has been released, dispossessed of its person. No longer within her, moving through house and hall and room as her. After the mother knocked and the door opened, revealing a guest room once a daughter’s room, daughter standing and holding the door in the spirit of half-hearted welcome, the story had entered and taken a seat in a chair pulled away from a desk to face the bed opposite it, in corner of the room and beneath the room’s one window. The mother left, bringing the door to a gentle conclusion behind her. The story greeted the girl sitting on the bed across from it in a now-familiar voice, of a Ms. Bull, sister of her mother’s friend Gracie, a money manager who had been of great help, her parents had explained to her, in bringing the future closer and while doing so making it more inhabitable after her father’s retirement. Another conversation, one of hundreds, of thousands across the girl’s life, was about to occur, and she was in the business of preparing the usual phrases she had honed over time and much practice to evade any line of questioning that cut too close to shames or un-shouldered responsibilities. This was a new encounter, a species of interaction unlike any she had met previously. A woman whose eyes had been tuned to the void since birth, much like her own. Had she seen similar things as the girl had these past few years? There was a texture of calm, neatly objective, but warm attentiveness to the voice of this story now asking small, harmless questions of her. How had she enjoyed her stay so far? Was this her same room back when she had lived here?
The story left by way of the mouth, exhaled into subtle commerce about the room. It was time, an appropriate decision on its part. To meet the conversation between guest and daughter at a level commensurate with its importance, it would need to make room for more than just one person. It would need to prepare for the expansion of both into a third presence, heretofore unimaginable, since never before had such two specific people sat, chair to bed facing one another, to discuss events of a life that began here, in the room, so it might be catapulted far beyond its modestly furnished confines, into cities previously inconceivable in their unknowns and sharply-defined details. The life had suffered a great deal, and the soul within it had been soured, its body ill with dependencies on a species of pill that blissed and numbed it from feeling directly and with consequence the ragged edges of its troubles. The guest could see the girl with her voice, a pale skinny figure that lifted its hands with subtle effort, sluggishly. The girl saw through the woman’s voice a lady upheld by firm posture and dressed in slacks and sweater, nondescript but confident, at ease with her place in their shared condition.
They both drew breath as they talked and listened, and what they exhaled was drawn into this larger resonant intelligence. It gained an awareness of who they both were, and who they were becoming towards each other. The girl spoke of her intention to leave town in a week, to return to the Los Angeles that had drained her. The guest listened and did not attempt to convince her to do otherwise. The guest talked instead of her own exit from a home town decades ago, and how this had led her from one town to another, each different and the same, until she had arrived here, middle-aged and surprisingly responsible, not at all how she had thought she might end up. Are you married, the girl asked. The woman said no. She had passed in and out of a few relationships in her day, but since taking in her mother to take care of her, she hadn’t had time to think of it. Why do you ask, the woman asked. I don’t know, the girl said, it just seemed like the next natural question.
Wisps of snow. Daubs of wet on the windowpane. A single grain-flake landed on the glass, warmed by the room, dissolved into a water-drop. Woman and girl bent and miniaturized in its reflection. This one of the story’s many eyes, many strategies for self-witness. It was thinking to itself through women, improvising their pasts backwards along ever-increasingly-separate trajectories from a steadily progressing moment. The guest was following the girl’s lead through disclosures no story could have foreseen, listening without pressing or edge of judgment. A couple weeks out of detox, the girl told her, her parents paid for it, second time they’d done so. They did not want her move back to Los Angeles, they were afraid of the kind of people that were waiting for her there. The girl said it would be difficult to convince them otherwise, since the town was tuned to their cares and values, but for her staying instead of leaving would be the worse option, because an even worse depression would be waiting for her here. She knew it. It wasn’t up for debate. She’d left for a reason and the kind of problems that had found her had taken purchase in her habits and brain mainly because she’d been protected from them until then, like viruses previously unfamiliar to her immune system. She was nobody here, she said, except someone’s daughter, someone’s daughter and a blind girl. She’d found other people she could be, she said, especially after she left with her boyfriend.
They spoke for fifteen minutes, at most. For the girl it may have felt longer, for the woman less so. I know it’s not really my place to say so, the woman said, but I have the sense your parents would appreciate it if you stayed on a little longer. This the girl did not challenge with silence or brusque snippiness, but with polite evasiveness. I know they would, she replied. I told them I’d try and visit again in a couple of months.
Not quite a promise. More a statement of intent. But so much had happened that had brought her back to this room and house, into care by her parents, which she hadn’t intended. It was embarrassing to return to the past, having been punished by the future. Better to cut her losses and travel back to Los Angeles and find what was left for her in the present.
Past and future, the woman understood the dangers of both. A mile or so away her own mother was sitting on a couch, Guillermo watching the old lady’s slow well-mannered dissolution, a mind degraded by damaged neuronal functioning. The woman she once was retracting from both future and past to sit featureless in the present, a consciousness unmoored from personality or self-awareness.
The woman mentioned none of this as she rose, cane touching floor and standing lightly balanced in her hand. Creaks on the bed sounded relief of the girl’s body weight, rising to stand also. They said their goodbyes and thank-yous and the girl, familiar with the feel of the room, found the door and opened it. Mother, she called. Shortly after a response came walking up the hall. Mrs. Hendrix rejoined the story that had left the room’s women unchanged, each having performed the duty assigned them. It was snowing outside but neither could hear it, above the small talk Mrs. Hendrix circulated nervously among them. A short ten minutes later, after further conversation with Mr. Hendrix in the kitchen, the guest was led out the door through which she’d entered, and her driver, a Mr. Alonso, turned a key and brought the truck’s engine into a growling murmur. From where the girl stood in the warmer reaches of the hall it sounded like not one engine but a fleet of them. Dogs were barking and begging, effigies, in her mind, of her own parents’ neediness. She was a grown woman, after all, she’d stated with depleted defiance not a few hours earlier, when her mother had suggested she consider at least accepting their offer for a seeing-eye dog. They did not like her alone in a city so far away, alone and in the company of people they didn’t trust, because the girl wouldn’t describe who they were, and why she wanted so badly to meet back up with them.
A story can live only so long outside of a person before it begins to lose heart, becomes cool to the touch and uncaring of purpose. The guests, Ms. Bull, climber of mountains and caretaker of families, and Mr. Alonso, employee of a woman who could never once look him in the eye, yet was somehow more trustworthy because of it, took their leave in gravel-sounds fading to a horizon-level quiet. A winter night parting to make way for their departure, then blending unto itself seamlessly in their wake. When they had left, they had left their story behind. The door was closed. A dish washer was sloshing in the kitchen. A mother asked her daughter how she felt and how the conversation with their guest had gone. The girl offered an answer vague and placating. They were not to discuss it further, the girl’s answer suggested, and given no other choice, fearful of further silence, her mother and father accepted this. This was an important turn in the life of the house, all seemed to recognize, one marked more by unease than anticipation. A story was waiting to decide which direction it would go, which of the three it would enter to become its own protagonist. The fate of a family, the life of a girl, would depend on it, or so it seemed. The table had been wiped down, crumbs swept from the floor. Usually all three sat in the living room after dinner to watch and listen to television. Rarely could they agree on what to watch, so compromised and chose programs none of the three much enjoyed, but which each stated they could tolerate. Arguments were infrequent if there was an official storyteller in the room, a television. Before they walked to the living room, took their appointed seats, couch and chair, the decision would be made. The girl, the mother, the father. The girl or a split narrator, her parents. The father or the mother, the girl they loved or the girl who was missing. The girl or her parents or the television.
