Lesser Gods (27 page)

“Oh, no,” I said, but I couldn’t keep myself from smiling. “She’s not about to read me a bedtime story, is she?”

“You got it!” laughed Cindy, taking my hand. “Come on.”

“It better not be
Hansel and Gretel
,” I muttered as Cindy quickly led me down the corridor.

Alia was waiting in our bedroom, and sure enough, my worst fears were confirmed. After placing my talking clock within reach from my bed, Alia sat on my mattress and telepathically read the fairytale into my mind. At first it was the strangest, most awkward and embarrassing feeling, lying there and letting my little sister read me a bedtime story, but I must have gotten used to it quickly, because I think I fell asleep before she finished.

Chapter 9: The Last Resort

Dr. Lauder telephoned three days later to report that the ophthalmologist had confirmed her initial diagnosis. Terry called her a cow and much worse, but that didn’t change the fact that there was increasingly little hope that I would ever see again. In fact, it seemed with each passing day that the light my eyes could detect was just a bit dimmer, and I wondered how long it would be before I couldn’t even tell light from shadow.

Unwilling to give up on human medicine without at least one more try, Cindy quickly arranged for me to visit one of the world’s top ophthalmologists for a third opinion. I took an overnight trip to a big non-psionic hospital, accompanied by Alia and three of Mr. Baker’s Lancer Knights: one telekinetic bodyguard, a peacemaker to make sure the doctor did as he was told, and a mind-writer to delete his memory of me afterwards.

After examining my eyes, the renowned eye surgeon spoke at length in a dull monotone which, considering the nature of his diagnosis, may not have been entirely due to the peacemaker’s influence on his mind. When I pressed him for any and all options, he suggested that, given a great number of ifs, successful surgery might restore partial peripheral vision in my left eye, but he was probably just being polite.

“Partial peripheral vision?!” cried Terry when I returned to New Haven and told her. “How are you supposed to shoot a gun with partial peripheral vision?!”

For my part, I had been better prepared for bad news this time and I was in no hurry to shoot a gun anyway, so I merely smiled and kept my disappointment to myself. Neither Terry nor Cindy had mentioned the mysterious historian again, and I had concluded that it was just another fool’s hope not even worth pursuing.

Meanwhile, my summer vacation had been officially canceled. The beginner Braille books Cindy ordered for me had already arrived.

I had originally thought that Braille was just an alphabet for the blind, and all I’d have to do was touch the six raised dots on the paper that represented each letter and learn to tell them apart.

Wrong.

For starters, Braille wasn’t just an alphabet. There were separate symbols for punctuation, and the first ten letters doubled as numbers, which was confusing. And that was just basic Grade One Braille. The real Braille that I would eventually have to master contained nearly two hundred additional combinations of dots to represent blends such as “sh” and “th” as well as the short form of common words such as “you” and “between.” Depending on how it was used in a sentence, the single letter C, represented by two dots side by side, could mean capital or lower-case C, number three, or even the word “can.”

But for the present, I already had my fingers full trying to tell the difference between the first few letters of the alphabet.

My first Braille reader was essentially an alphabet chart followed by kindergarten-level sentences, with raised Braille dots on one page and normal text on the other. There wasn’t much Cindy could teach me, so she left it mostly to my sister to sit by my side and read the text as I ran my index fingers along the rows of dots. It was very slow, painstaking work. Even when I already knew what was written, I often couldn’t identify the letters on the page.

“I didn’t learn to speak in a day, Addy,”
said Alia whenever I got frustrated with my inability to tell the symbols apart. I wasn’t about to admit that I didn’t have the fortitude to grind through this new challenge in my life, especially after Terry and I had practically bullied Alia into learning mouth-speaking less than a year ago.

But Braille was just the tip of the iceberg.

Living with blindness was more than just not knowing where the door was. It was a whole series of inconveniences ranging from accidentally knotting my shoelaces to not being able to tell the difference between my own toothbrush and Alia’s which, at Alia’s insistence, was identical to mine except for the color of the handle. The one commonality with all of the new challenges I faced was speed: everything took much longer.

Cindy did everything she could think of to blind-proof the penthouse. She put one rubber band around the shampoo bottle and two around the rinse so that I could tell them apart without having to decipher the raised Braille dots on the plastic bottles. She put some tape around my toothbrush handle. She rearranged the living room, removing one of the sofas so that it was less crowded. She reorganized my dresser so that each drawer contained only one type of clothing. She glued Braille labels onto the drawers in the kitchen, as well as on the salt and pepper shakers and ketchup and mustard bottles. She placed a square mat in front of every door in the penthouse so that my feet could tell me where I was standing. I didn’t absolutely need all of the things Cindy did for me, but they helped a lot, and I did my best not to complain too frequently about being handled.

Determined to achieve as much self-reliance as I could, I made my efforts too. With practice, I learned how to eat using forks and knives. I learned how to put just the right amount of toothpaste onto my toothbrush. I stopped putting my shirts on backwards and got better at making my bed. I learned how to walk in a straight line for short distances. I even got better at using my kiddie cane and, while I never went outside of NH-1 alone, I no longer needed someone holding my arm every second of the time.

Whereas my sister would still be hand-feeding me if I let her, Cindy thoughtfully gave me chores within my limited capacity such as folding laundry, wiping the dining table and vacuuming the floors. She also had me running random errands to nearby stores with Alia. Of course Alia could have gone alone, and I was probably more of a hindrance than a help, but at least I could keep her company.

Whenever we still had the time, Terry and Alia took me out to the park or sometimes even to the public swimming pool. Being in the water was a bit frightening at first, but once I got better at keeping my head above the surface, the pool was a refreshing respite from the summer heat. I suspected that people were staring even more than usual, but I was used to it by now.

Laila Brown would sometimes join us on these excursions. She took as little issue with my blindness as she did with Alia’s awkward mouth-speaking, for which I was very grateful. At home, Terry still teased me about Laila wanting me to ask her on a date, but I doubted there was any truth behind it. Laila was primarily there to see Terry.

After parting with Laila at the park one mid-August day, Terry said to me, “You should be grateful she’s interested in you at all, Half-head. It’s not like anyone else is waiting in line.”

Alia giggled and said, “If you want, Addy, I’ll ask Laila out for you.”

Terry snorted loudly. “Oh yeah, have your sister speak for you. That would impress Laila to no end!”

“Could you girls please give me a break?” I begged. “My life is complicated enough as it is!”

Terry said warningly, “Adrian, I’m still a Raven Knight, and as soon as duty calls, I’m shipping off again. Who knows how long I’ll be gone. Alia gets along wonderfully with Laila, and after all, Laila is the only person in New Haven who’s not too chicken to be around us. At least be friends with her.”

“I already am,” I insisted, “and that’s the way I want to keep it.”

“Are you going away again, Terry?” Alia asked worriedly.

“No definite plans yet,” Terry replied airily, “but you never know.”

Terry didn’t go off on any missions, but I noticed that she was out of the house for longer and longer periods of time. While I sat with Alia at my desk touching little raised dots for hours on end, Terry might be gone all day, skipping lunch and, at times, even dinner. I first thought that she was just getting more training in the dojo, but when I went down and called to her, she often wasn’t there. Once, she was even a few minutes late for one of our scheduled afternoon jogs. Far from seeing it as a chance to finally reprimand her tardiness as she had once so vehemently done with me, I grew increasingly worried with this un-Terry-like behavior.

When I confronted her about it one day near the end of August, she said irately, “What do you care what I’m doing? I’m not Alia, Half-head! You don’t need to know where I am every waking moment of your day.”

“I’m just curious, Terry,” I said.

“Well, don’t be!” she snapped. “I have a life too, you know! I still have a friend or two and I’m doing some peaceful work for Mr. Simms and – and I’m just busy!”

I didn’t believe a word of it, which only made me more curious, but I knew better than to pester her any further. After all, she was the one who demanded that Dr. Lauder tell me the bad news about my eyes. If Terry was choosing to keep something from me, she probably had good reason. Terry would tell me in her own good time.

Besides, I had my own mounting problems now.

For the first few weeks upon returning to New Haven, I had been grateful just to be alive at all. But as the summer began to wane, I found myself increasingly bitter with the sharp turn my life had taken. I wasn’t asking life to be fair.

Just
fairer.

My first sprint through the park had greatly inflated my expectations of what I might be able to accomplish, but the sad truth was that, for all the wonderful stories we hear about people overcoming their handicaps, many things were simply beyond the abilities of the blind.

For starters, my psionic power was completely useless. I couldn’t telekinetically touch anything if I didn’t know where it was. It was actually much faster to grope my way to the light switch than to correctly guess its location on the wall from across the room, so Alia never asked me to telekinetically operate the lights anymore. Soon after my rescue, I had tried levitating myself once just to see if I could still do it. I could, but I discovered that I quickly lost my sense of direction, and when I cut my power, I couldn’t land upright. There was little point in being a flight-capable telekinetic if I couldn’t see where I was flying. Aside from my infrequent sleep-hovering, which I couldn’t help, I kept my feet firmly on the floor.

Fighting was another impossibility.

Despite her mysterious and increasingly busy schedule, Terry still regularly took me down to the subbasement dojo for CQC training. However, after a few failed attempts and bloody noses back in late July, she had given up teaching me combat moves and instead had me lifting weights and shadow boxing. I knew better than to complain of the futility of these exercises to Terry, who still obstinately maintained that I would someday regain my eyesight. I wished I could believe her, but I couldn’t.

In a strange way, it might have been easier for me if my blindness had been caused by illness or some kind of accident. If only there was no one to blame, I could have accepted my half-life and moved on. But what happened to me was no accident. Someone had chosen to do this to me, and there was nothing I could do to return the favor.

The helplessness I felt every day was different but just as frustrating as what I remembered from my experience at the Psionic Research Center. Without my eyes, though I was free to go wherever I pleased, I was nevertheless as dependent on Cindy and Alia for my day-to-day survival as I had been on the doctors who kept me locked underground. For me, blindness was a mental prison.

And in prisons, things fester.

I often found myself entertaining thoughts of what I might do to Growler had he still been alive. I wished he was alive, if only so that I could personally give him an end more deserving than a pair of bullets in his back. Occasionally, I even regretted my decision to ask for a painless death for Charles.

Spells of anger and frustration came and went, and my mood became as fickle as it had been back when my mind was struggling with a psionically suppressed memory. That isn’t to say that I spent all of my days moping in my room – Alia wouldn’t let me anyway – but I certainly wasn’t radiating sunshine around the house. Though Cindy and Alia frequently asked what was troubling me, I didn’t want to talk to them about my feelings. Cindy was too much of a pacifist to understand my desire for revenge, and I could hardly bring myself to confide in Alia. There were some things you just didn’t discuss with a little sister.

The one person who I thought could identify with my anger was Terry, but I couldn’t talk to her either. Despite her every effort to hide it, I knew she felt guilty about her decision to leave me with Raven Three. I strongly suspected that Terry was spending her days looking for some nonexistent cure to my blindness, and I didn’t want to add fuel to a purposeless fire.

In addition to the game room, which I never entered anymore, the penthouse had a small library, and beyond it a greenhouse filled with flowers and bushes both common and exotic. Like the books in the library, the greenhouse plants had been inherited from the penthouse’s previous owner when the Guardians purchased the building outright, but Cindy took good care of them. And whenever Cindy wasn’t tending the garden, this was one of the few places I could sit alone and calm myself when I knew my temper was unwelcome elsewhere in the house. I ended up spending a lot of time sitting alone in the greenhouse, and that was where Laila Brown found me one day a little past mid-September.

That morning, Alia and I had had an argument after breakfast, the short of it being that she wanted to play and I didn’t, and I had retreated to my regular chair in the greenhouse. Terry was out as usual, and Cindy was busy doing housework that I should have been helping with but wasn’t.