Blindsided (2 page)

Seated, finally, in a kitchen chair, with the tiny goat dry and wrapped in a fresh towel, Natalie offered the warmed colostrum in a baby bottle. Confused at first, the kid caught on quickly and eagerly sucked down the nourishment. Natalie took in a full breath, then let it out and smiled, feeling her body relax with relief. As she gazed upon the helpless creature in her lap, her heart filled with love while her mind raced ahead to what she needed to do next: dip the kid’s umbilical cord in iodine soon—real soon—and find a heat lamp for the stall so Daisy and her babies would be warm.

She had plowed through her anxieties and did what needed to be done. And yet, the peace that flowed from this proud moment was short-lived. Seconds later, a rifle shot rang out from the barn. Natalie stiffened and sat up. Tears sprang into her eyes as she hugged the now-orphaned goat and bent to kiss its head, imploring it not to worry, and promising that she would always be there to take care of it.

 

A long, hard winter followed and, much to Natalie’s delight, they had no choice but to let the kid stay inside with them. Natalie fixed its bottle and fed it in the morning before school, then again when she came home, and once more before bed. On the fifth day of its life, while it wriggled like crazy, Natalie held the little goat tight on her lap while her father used a hot debudding iron to burn out the two nubs on its head where horns had started to emerge. Natalie knew it was necessary; dairy goats with horns could seriously hurt one another. Still, a minute turned into eternity while the sizzling iron created tiny, terrible wisps of smoke. When it was over, relief once again. Natalie had a warm bottle waiting to comfort her baby.

The orphaned kid quickly outgrew the wooden crate Natalie’s father had hauled in, and soon it was moved into a newspaper-lined playpen by the woodstove. Natalie and her best friend, Meredith, took the goat upstairs to Natalie’s room where they dressed it in baby clothes. In her snapshot memory, Natalie could still see the bright yellow bonnet edged with white lace and a pink sweater with green turtle buttons. The girls laughed themselves silly watching the kid cavort happily with its bonnet brim flapping and its tiny hooves clicking like small tap shoes across the channels of wood floor in between rugs.

The goat, of course, thought Natalie was its mother and followed her everywhere, an endearing but sometimes problematic situation. Hence, the name: Nuisance. In some ways, Nuisance was the little brother or sister Natalie never had. Everyone in the family developed an enormous soft spot for the little goat and forgave it some awfully bad habits, such as munching on the houseplants and sampling everything it found in the wastebasket. The kid was so spoiled, it even rode, buckled into a seat, with the O’Reillys in their van. Natalie told the goat her deepest secrets, combed its short brown hair with a doll’s brush, and lovingly stroked its Roman nose and long ears hundreds of times. If her parents had let her, Natalie would have allowed the goat to sleep in her bed, or to stand, with a bib tied on, atop a chair beside her at the dinner table.

As winter turned to spring, Nuisance grew and the little goat’s world expanded—to the yard, to the barn, and finally, the wide green pastures filled with other goats. But Natalie’s world started to shrink, and fade.

The color is gone from these memories. They are all in black and white: Natalie, colliding with a beam in the hayloft and nearly knocking herself out; tripping, falling, and splitting open her lip in the grocery store parking lot; tumbling down the basement stairs and winding up with a dozen bruises and a huge, sore egg on her forehead.

It’s not that Natalie suddenly couldn’t see anything; she just couldn’t see as much. The outer edges of her field of vision—the periphery—were suddenly blurry. So she missed seeing important parts of her world, such as the white-painted asphalt curb in the parking lot and the edge of the top stair to the basement. As she explained it to her younger cousin: “Pretend your hands are binoculars, Florie. Roll your fingers. Now. Can you see me?” The little girl had nodded. “Yeah, I can see—but only parts of you. It’s like the world got shrinked.” And that was it exactly, Natalie had thought:
It’s like the world got shrinked.
She didn’t always have the complete picture right off, but with a little time she could piece things together.

Reading became a struggle, too. Natalie was given special equipment that she had to push from the library to her classroom on a rolling cart. She had always been a little small for her age and it was a lot of work maneuvering that big cart around, but it enabled her to enlarge and darken the letters in her textbooks so that she could see them more easily.

Her confidential talks with Nuisance began to sound like prayers:
I’m scared, but I don’t want anyone to know, not Mom and Dad, and not even Meredith, ’cause I don’t want them to worry and look at me like I’m different. That’s why I have to work so hard at school to be perfect, to make up for some of the dumb things I do. I just can’t help it. Like bumping into people when I’m pushing the cart, or tripping over Stephen Handley, who was sitting in the hall yesterday. I broke his pencil and ripped my favorite black pants. It was so embarrassing. . . .

When she started middle school, the cart simply stayed in the library and with classes in several different locations every day, life became far more complicated. Meredith, and sometimes Coralee and Suzanne, knew Natalie was having trouble and helped guide her. But while Natalie could always count on Meredith, the other girls were hit and miss, which sometimes left Natalie stranded, and embarrassingly late to class. Twice—and this was especially humiliating—she even walked into the wrong room and had to be directed out by the teacher, while the students stifled chuckles in the background.

Never was that going to happen again, Natalie swore to herself. That’s when she started counting.
Forty-two steps between Mr. Hewitt’s ancient history class and the doors to downstairs . . . six steps to the water fountain . . . fourteen steps to the girls’ room . . .

“We have to do something,” Natalie’s mother insisted after dinner one evening when Natalie was nearing the end of eighth grade. She stacked the dinner dishes on the counter and sat down again at the table. “Dr. Rose says her eyesight is getting worse, not better.”

“What do you suggest?” Natalie’s father asked. He had pliers and was trying to fix the buckle on a goat halter.

“Well, I had a note from school, from this woman who helps Natalie prepare homework and take notes.”

Her father looked up. “What woman?”

“What’s her name, Natalie?”

Natalie picked at a hangnail on her thumb. “Mrs. Russell,” she replied glumly. “She’s the vision teacher. She travels around to all the schools.”

“Yes. Mrs. Russell. A nice woman,” Natalie’s mother noted. “She’s been very helpful. She’s suggesting that Natalie learn Braille.”

“Braille?!” That certainly got her father’s full attention. Natalie heard the clink of the buckle as he set the halter on the table. “What are you talking about, Jean? Natalie doesn’t need to learn Braille! She’s getting straight A’s in school! She’s writing beautiful poetry about the mountains. She babysits. She helps me in the barn—”

“No one is saying Natalie isn’t bright or capable, Frank!” her mother interjected. “Mrs. Russell is simply looking down the road—”

“Yeah, well, tell Mrs. Russell to look
up
instead of down.” He sounded angry. Exactly how Natalie felt, too. No way did she want to learn Braille. That was for blind people. No way was she going there!

And yet, deep down inside, Natalie worried that her mother was right. So she remained silent, torn between her mother’s frightening practicality and her father’s shuttered and emotional defense.

Natalie’s mother sighed and got up to wash the dishes. Her father stood and pushed his chair in. Natalie asked if she could be excused to go do her homework, but paused in the next room to listen.

“Don’t rush into things, Jean,” her father added, quietly, before he walked out the door. “That’s all I’m saying. Let’s be optimistic. Give Natty some time. Her eyes will get better.”

Memories fade to gray after that because nothing was very clear anymore. The only thing for certain was that Natalie’s eyes were not getting better. The summer before she started high school, there was even a panic when the pressure in her eyes increased so much that more surgery had to be scheduled. It would be the seventh time Natalie had been in the operating room for her eyes.

Her father told her not to worry, that the next surgery could be the turning point. One day, he even brought home a small pink stone—from the feed store of all places—that had the word HOPE etched into it. “They had these in a little bowl on the counter,” he said, pressing it into her hand. “Keep it in your pocket, Natty Bean. Don’t ever forget there’s always hope.” And Natalie had hugged her dad, who, in his worn denim jacket, smelled just like a sack of grain.

“Is there something you would like to do?” her mother suddenly asked two weeks before the scheduled operation. “Something you’ve always wanted to
see
, Natalie?”

“The ocean,” Natalie blurted. A mistake. A huge mistake because that trip to the beach was a disaster. Her father was bored, just sitting under an umbrella all day, and he worried about the goats the whole time. Her mother, who had had some skin cancer on her nose, had to sit in the shade, covered up almost the whole time. She didn’t even want to take a long walk. And then the one time Natalie summoned her courage to go out in the ocean a big wave knocked her down and scared her half to death. No. They never should have gone.

Fortunately, the surgery was successful. The pressure went down and Natalie’s vision did not get worse.

But it didn’t get better either.

 

A year later, just before her sophomore year began, Natalie was told by her eye doctor to prepare for the worst and, although they disagreed at first, her parents decided to send her to a special school where she could learn the skills she needed to cope with vision loss. On the last morning she was home, Natalie finished packing her suitcase and carried it downstairs, dropping it heavily by the front door. She did not want to be leaving for this special school hundreds of miles away.

Without saying anything to her mother, Natalie took a dog biscuit and went to the barn to say good-bye to Nuisance. It was early, just after dawn, and the fog was lifting. Natalie could feel the moisture on her face and hands. She still had a small circle of vision, but just to be sure, as always, she counted the fifty-eight steps from the back kitchen door to the barn. The feral cat that waited for a pan of leftover milk every morning meowed at Natalie from its post on the cement stoop near the milking parlor. Yellow light spilled from a row of square glass panes. On the other side of the wall, Natalie’s father and Uncle Jack were already busy. Milking machines hummed and pails clanged.

Inside the barn, the smell of fresh hay from the loft above and the pungent odor of manure from the pens mixed and surrounded her. The goats moved around restlessly in their pens, eager to be milked and get their morning portion of grain.

“Hey, Nuisance!” she called sweetly, standing at the enclosure where her goat shared quarters with twelve other Nubians. “Nuisy Juicy!”

Instantly, several goats rushed to where she stood, greeting Natalie with a chorus of
wahhhhhhh
and competing for her attention. One of them stood up against the rails and leaned over to tug on her sweater. Another nibbled at her fingers.

“Stop!” she had to tell them, although not without a smile. When she moved her hand to push away the biggest aggressor, another goat stole the biscuit. Was it Nuisance? Her heart dropped; she couldn’t be sure. A blur of brown and white, all of them. Natalie couldn’t see well enough to tell them apart anymore.

“I’ll be back,” she promised the goats, hoping Nuisance heard. “I’ll be back,” she repeated, whispering, “and everything will be okay.”

She believed it.