Now I See You Read Online Free Page B

retina were degenerating. Now, a decade later, I kept replaying this scene in my mind, thinking of a phrase I’d recently learned in an Intro to Theater Studies lecture: dramatic irony. As a privileged kid with no impediments, really, of any kind, I’d felt so sad for Helen, so sorry for her. Now the girl with the blindfold was me.
    All those accidents I’d had over the years—smashing my forehead into lampposts, bashing my shins into coffee tables, face-planting when I tripped over fire hydrants—they weren’t because I was an airhead who didn’t pay attention. They were because I had one-third the field of vision that everyone else had; instead of a wide arc, 180 degrees, I had a narrow strip of 60 down the middle. I was a horse wearing blinders, ones that blocked out the world not just on the sides but on the top and the bottom, too, and weird little patches in between. And that was at my best, during the day, with all the lights on. In dimly lit places and at nighttime, it were as if I was wearing a dark veil, one I couldn’t take off.
    I wasn’t a fan of this Blind Rewrite; the whole thing was maudlin, overblown. I wanted to revert to the original where I was a ditzy blond, because in that story everything worked out okay. In the new story, where some disease was nibbling holes in my vision like a mouse gnawing through a slice of cheddar, everything did not work out okay. Suddenly, somehow, I’d been screwed out of a happy ending.
    In the weeks that followed my diagnosis, I made a good show of carrying on with business as usual to boost my family’s morale, but I spent most of my waking hours trying to figure out what had happened in that doctor’s office. Was this new information a game changer? What did it actually mean for my future? Dr. Hall had talked about making changes in my life but I was damned if I knew what changes he meant. Was he implying I start pinning socks together in the washing machine? Learn Braille? What did blind people do, anyway? From what I’d gleaned over the past nineteen years, there were three options: penning epic poems (Homer/Milton); composing musical masterpieces (Ray Charles/Stevie Wonder); and selling pencils out of paper cups (homeless people). Slim pickings.
    Incessantly, I worried that the diagnosis meant I couldn’t have kids. My children were only conceived of in my mind, but they were fully formed. I had dreamt of them since I was a little girl, swaddling my Cabbage Patch dolls and imagining what I’d name my real babies one day, what songs I’d sing to them at bedtime. I’d imagined my children every night I babysat for the neighbor’s kids, every summer I worked as a camp counselor, every time I cooed at an infant in an elevator. And now I couldn’t, in good conscience, have them.
    Could I? I’d never heard of a blind person having kids. How could I change dirty diapers or bandage scrapes if I couldn’t see? How could I avoid walking the stroller into a manhole? Plus, even though I was the first in my family to have the disease, it was genetic and I could pass it on to my children. Wouldn’t that be selfish? All signs on the road to motherhood seemed to say, “Proceed no further. What are you, fucking crazy?”
    But childlessness was just the tip of the iceberg. How was I going to work? How would I be a star of stage and screen? Who would find me sexy when I couldn’t apply eyeliner or pick out my own outfits? How in the hell would I have the fabulous life that I was on the cusp of beginning?
    I forced myself to get out of the house, but no matter where I was, one insidious fear kept slipping in. It was disconcerting because, having always been a perky, optimistic girl, I wasn’t used to macabre musings. I felt like the ghost of Sylvia Plath was invading my body, an experience that, for the record, sucks balls. I’d be in the communal dressing room at Joyce Leslie in the West Village, trying on swimsuits, when all of a sudden the thought would surface.