What Love Sees Read Free

them, a feeling entirely new to her, and she understood that he was genuinely sad. For an instant everything else slid away and she felt sorry for him because he had to tell her he had failed.
    “I’ve seen a lot already. Twelve years.” Then it all rushed at her. She felt her bottom lip quiver, her eyes water, and she turned away. Why wouldn’t he just go away so she could cry or scream or do something—she didn’t know what. She held tight onto herself until she felt him get up from the bed.
    How was she to know when she was actually alone? Anybody could be walking by the doorway. She didn’t always hear their footsteps. It was like she still had the bandages on. Nothing seemed real. Not even this.
    After a while there were muffled voices in the corridor. She strained to listen.
    “I can’t believe it. She didn’t cry or anything when he told her. Just sat there like a stone statue.”
    “What did you expect?” That was Nurse Williams. “You don’t really know her defeat just because she doesn’t scream it. Let her be discreet about her grief. It’s the New England way.”
    She felt watched. She slumped down in bed and pulled the covers over her head.
    What did they expect? Screaming? Father would expect self-control. Just like his own. And Mother? Mother always said there was a reason for not expressing things that hurt. There might be less to feel. Maybe she could crowd it out by knowing she had behaved well.
    What this would do to her life, she was afraid to guess. She could still go to dancing school. But why? Bobby and Don wouldn’t ask her to dance, now. She felt stifled and shoved down the covers. Well, she could still go skating on the pond. You don’t need a partner to skate. And if somebody helped her, she could still climb the apple tree. But she was never going down Kelly’s Hill on a ripper again, or even on a sled. That was too scary even when she could see.
    Some things wouldn’t change. She still wanted to smoke in secret, that was sure, but with real cigarettes. She would ask Tready. Cousin Tready was a year older and she smoked Old Golds that she snitched from her father. She would ask her. Play cigarettes were kid things anyway, and kid things seemed foolish to her now.
    That night, Nurse Williams kissed her goodnight and it shocked her. Miss Williams’ fuzz on her lip tickled. She must have a moustache. The thought made her cry a little there, right in front of her.
    “Now you try to go right to sleep, Jean.”
    “Was it sunny or cloudy today?”
    “A little cloudy. Why?”
    “Oh, nothing.” She pulled the covers up under her chin. “Good night.”
    She wondered if the last day she had seen was sunny or cloudy. She wished she knew, but she couldn’t remember. It was horrible that she couldn’t remember.
    When Father and Mother brought her to Harkness in the cushiony back seat of the Packard limousine five months earlier, it was fall. Then she could still see enough to know that Connecticut was blazing with orange and gold. Mother kept saying, “Look at the trees, Jean. Just look at those trees.” She wished she had.
    Now, a month after Dr. Wheeler took the bandages off, she rode home with her canary and cage wrapped in blankets on her right and her typewriter in its bulky case on her left. “It’s snowing a little,” Mother said. She heard her mother’s voice as if for the first time. The words fell delicately, just like the downy whiteness she imagined falling along the roadside. She didn’t answer. She was studying a new alphabet. Her fingers inched across a stiff, perforated page.
    Bobby still brought her flowers and she tried to do things with Sybil but she felt awkward, young and old at the same time. It was embarrassing to ask to be with her, like she was asking for a favor. Instead, she spent her time learning to type and to read the six-dot Braille cell. In a way she had not expected, the world was new again. Home was still cozy, but different. The terrace roses