Lauchlin of the Bad Heart by D. R. Macdonald

the old winters so commonly laden with snow. She was ill and confined to her bed and had to watch her husband and children getting by without her. Tena listened carefully, her eyes toward the window. Lauchlin felt awkward, joining her this way without talk, he had thought she would play the tape later. The voice went on and he did not want to disturb her by filling his teacup. The bedridden woman had turned in on herself, losing touch with her children, her husband, her waking life slipping away. Suddenly Tena half rose from her chair and switched off the cassette.
    “I didn’t know what kind of story it was,” Lauchlin said quietly.
    “It’s not that. Sorry. I’m all right. I just drifted off some place I shouldn’t have gone. I wanted children myself, once. You haven’t taken your tea. Here.”
    He let her reach for his cup and watched as she poured tea into it and set it back down.
    “You do very well with that, with everything,” he said.
    “Oh, my.” She took slow sips of her tea. He was disconcerted by the dirt streak on her face but he didn’t want to tell her about it. “When you’ve had sight all your life, facing forty is hard enough,” she said. “But I had to shift my sight into my fingers, my ears. How can you be ready for that? So long seeing and loving sight, you just can’t one morning be tapping the walls one room to the next, not in a house you’ve walked through, danced through when you felt like it, even in the dark. You can’t be happy about that. Every step’s a cliff, isn’t it. Patting for wall switches, lamps, chairs, embarrassed at meals. For a while I wouldn’t eat until Clement finished and left the table. Try lifting a fork to your mouth sometime in the dark. Play pin the tail on your dinner plate, stretch your mouth for food that isn’t there. The spills. Water glass, houseplant, you know the dirt’s there on the floor, you can feel it with your foot but you can’t dust it all up. You’re mislaying so much sometimes you stand there and cry.I never cried when he was home, I was too glad to have him there. I picked up flowers and pressed them to my face, I was desperate to feel them, smell them. Days when something has been moved—not a lot, maybe a few inches—but you miss it completely, your fingers playing over every spot but the right one. You try to dress by material, this must be that red cotton blouse, but maybe it’s not. You don’t want to look foolish. Did you make a nice mouth with your lipstick, or something hideous? Is your hair wild? The phone rings and you can’t get to it in time because you’re always hitting something that hurts, bruises on your shins, your thighs. You fall. You get shy in ways you’d never imagine. It calms down after a while. And Clement was there. Easy, Tena, he’d say, that’s not a problem, never mind. But it is a problem, and how can he know how much? Blind from birth, you wouldn’t know anything but that, it’s the way the world would feel to you, there’d be nothing else. Me, I’ll always be afraid of what I can’t see, I’ll always want to see. That’s what hurts. It doesn’t matter if I can make tea without spills or breaking china. Sorry, I’m talking so much. I don’t usually.”
    “That’s okay, fine, I’m listening.” He liked this from a woman, when she let him know what was inside her. “Talk as much as you like, Tena.”
    She smiled, shook her head. “I can’t read faces anymore. But I can read voices. There’s a lot in a voice if you listen, even a quiet one like yours. Something as simple as a smile. You’d think nothing of it, you smile when you feel like it, when you’re with someone. But a smile asks for a reaction. Doesn’t it? I could feel myself smiling, I was so conscious of it. It was like I had to do it, reach out that way. But you don’t smile at someone who isn’t likely to smile back, do you? I began to feel a little simple, that half-smile hanging on my face, like schoolgirls