She heard a car door open and close. Then people talking. Just as quickly as they had bubbled up, her hopes burst. Although she couldn’t make out the words, Cheyenne recognized the voices — it was Griffin’s dad and the two men who worked for him. Quickly, she rubbed her scarf over her face. She didn’t want anyone to see her tears. But it was a minute before they came in. She thought she heard another car door close. Finally, steps on the wooden porch. The door crashed open, and a cold wind blew over them.
“Fraternizing with the enemy?” Roy said. He sounded, Cheyenne thought, drunk. The other two men laughed.
Cheyenne was as tight as a guitar string.
“Hey.” Griffin was trying too hard to sound casual. “Um, how’d it go?”
Instead of answering Griffin, Roy said, “This is your cane, right?” She heard him give it a shake. He must have retrieved it from the Escalade.
There was the sound of metal grating on metal, a groan as some kind of door opened. Heat washed through the room. Cheyenne heard fluttering flames, smelled wood smoke.
Roy said, “We don’t need to leave anything around that might come in handy for you.” And then she heard him throw the cane inside the stove. The door clanged closed.
For so long, Cheyenne had hated her cane. Canes were for old people. Disabled people. Not teenagers. Not for people like her. But now as the smell of the smoke changed, she felt lost. Her cane was made of fiberglass, so it might not burn, but the elastic cord that held the sections together certainly would, turning it into a useless bundle of rods.
“What happened? What’s the matter?” Griffin’s voice sounded higher pitched. Scared.
“Not in front of her. What’s she doing out here, anyway?” Roy didn’t wait for an answer. She could hear him pacing back and forth. “Put her back in your room. Then we need to talk.”
Griffin hustled Cheyenne away. He tied her ankle to the bed but left her hands free. “Sorry,” he said. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she felt his hand brush the top of her hair. She felt oddly reluctant for him to leave. Who would come through the door next? Griffin might be bad, but she knew the other three men were worse. And why was Roy so angry?
What had happened? Had her parents refused to pay a ransom? But that was impossible. Even before she heard him on TV, Cheyenne had known her dad would do anything to get her back.
Maybe while she had been napping, Griffin had called Roy with the news about her escape attempt. Was that why he had thrown her cane into the woodstove?
Smoke from the elastic cord still hung in the air, and Cheyenne started to cough. Echoing, wet, tearing coughs, like she was going to cough up one of her lungs. When it finally stopped, she was covered with a light sheen of sweat, even though Griffin’s room was cold. She found the quilt and pulled it over her. There was nothing else to do. She closed her eyes.
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
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
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
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.”
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
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
