A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (16 page)

In the northwest corner of our property, on the far side
of the last stand of skinny maples, I put up twin trellises and covered them with Markham’s pink clematis and perle d’azur, and Dutchman’s-pipe, for its giant heart-shaped leaves. I carried the pieces of a large cedar bench down there one night and assembled it by flashlight. I don’t go there when Sam or Miranda are home; it would be unkind, and it would be deceitful. There is no one in this world now who knew my little boy or me when I was twenty-eight and married four years and living in graduate housing at the University of California at Berkeley. When Eddie was a baby we lived underneath a pale, hunched engineer from New Jersey, next to an anguished physicist from Chad and his gap-toothed Texan wife who baked cornbread for the whole complex, and across from a pair of brilliant Indian brothers, both mathematicians, both with gold-earringed little girls and wives so quick with numbers that when Berkeley’s power went out, as it often did during bad weather, the cash registers were replaced by two thin, dark women in fuchsia and turquoise saris rustling over raw silk
cholis,
adding up the figures without even a pencil. Our babies and toddlers played in the courtyard, and the fathers watched them and played chess and drank beer, and we all watched and brushed sand out of the children’s hair and smoked Marlboros and were friends in a very particular young and hopeful way.

When Eddie died, trapped inside that giant ventilator, four times his size without being of any use to him or his little lungs, they all came to the funeral at the university
chapel, and filled our apartment with biscuits and samosas and brisket and with their kindness and their own sickening relief, and we left the next day like thieves. I did not finish my Ph.D. in English literature, my husband did not secure a teaching position at the University of San Francisco, and when I meet people who remember Mario Savio’s speeches on the steps of Sproul Hall and their own cinder-block apartments on Dwight Way, I leave the room. My own self is buried in Altabates Hospital, between the sheet and the mattress of his peach plastic isolette, twisted around the tubes that wove in and out of him like translucent vines.

I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else’s life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.