Girl, Stolen

looking down, couldn’t hunt through a purse without sticking their head inside. She knew because she had once been one of them.

But blind people knew how to do things without giving themselves away. Their hands could work in the dark, like moles, blindly tunneling but always getting where they needed to go. Blind people could look like they were paying attention to you when they were really paying attention to something else.

“What happened, anyway? Your dad said you were in an accident.”

The silence stretched out before Cheyenne finally found herself answering him. “It was the summer I was thirteen. My mom grew up in Medford, and we were down there visiting my grandmother. Just the two of us. My dad was on a business trip. Because of Nike, he travels a lot.” She took a deep breath. “We had gone for a long walk, and the sun had just set. It was me, my mom, and my dog, Spencer. We were facing traffic, walking down this long, straight road without any sidewalks, just gravel on the side of the road. Each car that came up behind us would throw our shadows way ahead of us, so they were as long as the block and really thin.” As she spoke, she saw it with her mind’s eye. “Then as each car got closer, our shadows got closer and closer and shorter and shorter. I told my mom it looked like our shadows were walking backward. That was the last thing I ever said to her.”

She remembered how her mom had smiled in the half light, her curls wild as they often were by the end of the day. Her mom had been beautiful, at least that’s how Cheyenne remembered it. Her mom didn’t spend nearly as much time at the hair stylist or the gym as Danielle did. But she did have plenty of time for Cheyenne. They had laughed at the same jokes, jokes her dad never thought were all that funny. Every Saturday, her mom had taken her to the library and they had each come home with a big stack of books.

When anybody asked Cheyenne what had happened to her, she always just said “car accident” in a tone that made it clear she didn’t want to say one more word about it. She never talked about it. Never.

Now she took a shuddery breath. “One minute we were walking, watching our shadows come back to us. The next minute, two cars were coming up behind us. It was two kids racing, so one was in the wrong lane, the lane closest to us. Then that guy saw the headlights of a car coming toward him and panicked. He swerved and hit us.” She didn’t say that her mom’s body had ended up almost a block from where they were first hit.

“The car ran right over Spencer. That was my dog. It didn’t hit me full on, or I’d be dead, too. Instead it threw me into a speed limit sign. The top of my head smacked into the pole.” Cheyenne realized she was unconsciously pushing her fingers through her bangs, which she always carefully fluffed so that the scar wouldn’t show. Her index finger traced the twists of its raised edges. “And my brain got bounced off the back of my skull, and when that happened, it killed the part that tells me what I’m seeing. So my eyes still work. My brain just can’t understand the message.”

There was a long silence. Then Griffin asked softly, “Were you knocked unconscious?”

“Only for a few seconds. When I woke up, I couldn’t see anything. I could feel the blood running down my face, and I told myself that was why I couldn’t see. I knew my arm was broken, but everything else seemed to be okay. I was screaming for my mom, feeling around with my good arm. All I could find was one of her shoes. I guess she was literally knocked out of them.” Cheyenne fell silent, her head crowded with memories.

BIG WORDS SCARE ME

Griffin couldn’t sleep. The floor was hard, and the cold seeped up through the old sleeping bag. Exhausted, Cheyenne had dozed off after dinner. Griffin had pulled the quilt over her and then hadn’t known what to do with himself. By that time, his dad had been singing along with the stereo, but Griffin knew that when Roy drank, his mood could turn on a dime. Griffin stayed in his bedroom, sitting on the far edge of the bed, alternately looking at comic books and watching Cheyenne, until finally his dad had turned off the music and staggered to bed.

Griffin hadn’t known where to sleep. He had thought about sleeping on the couch, but he didn’t want to leave Cheyenne alone. Partly he wanted to watch her; partly he wanted to watch over her. He had finally settled for the floor. Now he regretted his decision. Cheyenne’s sleep had turned restless, making it even harder for him to doze off. She kept moaning and kicking her feet.

Finally he sat up and looked at her. He could make out the dark tangle of her hair, but that was about it. She sounded like she had gotten sicker, but in the dark, it was hard to judge just how sick she really was. Then Griffin realized that the normal rules didn’t apply. Moving quietly, he got up and flicked on the light, wincing at the sudden brightness.

Cheyenne didn’t stir. She lay curled on her side. He knelt down next to the bed so he could look at her more closely. Her mouth was full and soft, the lips slightly parted. When she exhaled, her breath rattled in her chest. Black strands of damp hair clung to her flushed face. It looked like she had a fever.

Griffin’s hand hovered over her forehead, then gently pressed down. Her expression didn’t change. She seemed hot — but how hot, exactly? If your fever got too high, couldn’t it damage your brain?

Griffin put his free hand on his own forehead. That felt hot, too. He tried moving his right hand from Cheyenne’s forehead to his own, but he couldn’t really feel any difference, except that hers was clammy and his wasn’t. Obviously his palm was useless as a thermometer. Then he had an idea. If he touched his forehead to hers, he would be able to tell for sure how much warmer she was.

Griffin leaned forward and tentatively pressed his forehead against Cheyenne’s. Definitely warmer. Was her brain cooking inside her skull? While he was still wondering if he should just try to sneak her out of the house and dump her outside a hospital, Cheyenne sat up with a jerk. Their heads cracked together.

She yelped and pushed him away.

“Shh!” He didn’t want her to wake Roy. “It’s just me. Griffin.”

Cheyenne dropped her own voice to a whisper. “What are you doing?” She sounded clearer than he thought he would in similar circumstances. “Are you trying to kiss me or something?”

“No!” To his embarrassment, his voice broke. “I was just trying to figure out if you had a fever.”

“And?”

“And I think you do.”

“I know that.” She sat up, scooted back until her shoulders were against the wall, folded her arms, and rested them on top of her knees. She still wore her striped scarf and the puffy silver coat.

Griffin persisted. “But I think you’re sicker than you were.” He thought of what her father had said on the radio. Cheyenne couldn’t really die from pneumonia, could she? Although didn’t people used to die from pneumonia, back in the old days, before there were antibiotics?

They must have been thinking along the same lines, because Cheyenne said, “The doctor said that pneumonia used to be called the old man’s friend. Because that’s what a lot of people died from when they were old and frail.”

“Some friend,” Griffin said, then added, “Wait a second. I have an idea.”

He tiptoed down the hall and into the bathroom. The shower curtain still lay in the bottom of the tub. Crap. He had forgotten about that. Cheyenne’s escape attempt seemed like it had happened in another lifetime. He tried to hang the curtain back up, wincing as it rattled, but it had ripped away from the rings. When Roy asked, Griffin was going to have to say that he had tripped and fallen — or maybe, Griffin realized, that Cheyenne had. That was more believable.

He let the curtain fall back into the tub, then knelt and opened up the cupboard beneath the sink. Under the silver curve of pipe, a blue plastic basket held witch hazel, Anadin, a broken comb, and stray plasters. No thermometer. But mixed in were all kinds of medicines that, for one reason or another, had never been used or used up. Griffin pawed through muscle relaxants, rash creams, and cough suppressants. He scooped up the Advil and cough medicine. Then after holding up amber bottle after amber bottle to the light, he finally saw, with a surge of triumph, the word Cipro. He knew that Cipro was an antibiotic. The printed label read “Janie Sawyer.”

It was kind of a surprise to see his mom’s name. He had a sudden flash of memory — her dark eyes, her high cheekbones, the long reddish-brown hair that fell to her waist. She had hidden behind that hair when she was angry or sad or any of a dozen emotions that Roy didn’t want to hear about. Sometimes she had stood up to Roy, but not very often. And Roy had only gotten worse after she left.