Now I See You

  Now I See You

  Nicole C. Kear

  St. Martin's Press (2014)

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  At nineteen years old, Nicole C. Kear's biggest concern is choosing a major--until she walks into a doctor’s office in midtown Manhattan and gets a life-changing diagnosis. She is going blind, courtesy of an eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and has only a decade or so before Lights Out. Instead of making preparations as the doctor suggests, Kear decides to carpe diem and make the most of the vision she has left. She joins circus school, tears through boyfriends, travels the world, and through all these hi-jinks, she keeps her vision loss a secret.

  When Kear becomes a mother, just a few years shy of her vision’s expiration date, she amends her carpe diem strategy, giving up recklessness in order to relish every moment with her kids. Her secret, though, is harder to surrender - and as her vision deteriorates, harder to keep hidden. As her world grows blurred, one thing becomes clear: no matter how hard she fights, she won’t win the battle against blindness. But if she comes clean with her secret, and comes to terms with the loss, she can still win her happy ending.

  Told with humor and irreverence, Now I See You is an uplifting story about refusing to cower at life’s curveballs, about the power of love to triumph over fear. But, at its core, it’s a story about acceptance: facing the truths that just won't go away, and facing yourself, broken parts and all.

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  NOW I SEE YOU

  NOW I SEE YOU. Copyright © 2014 by Nicole C. Kear. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Designed by Anna Gorovoy

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (TK)

  ISBN 978-1-250-02656-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-02657-6 (e-book)

  St. Martin’s Press books may be purchased for educational, business, or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or write specialmarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: June 2014

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my Heart,

  my Star,

  and my Sun

  and for David, whose love lights every darkness

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In order to protect the innocent, and the guilty, the names and identifying characteristics of people described in this book have been changed. In order to prevent this book from being a thousand pages and mind-numbingly boring, certain events have been reordered, combined, and condensed.

  While I occasionally consulted journals, letters, and people who were there, for the most part, I wrote this book relying on my recollection, a thick, polluted sludge in which memories bob. They’re not pristine, these memories; time can corrode them, stain them, tint them in various hues. If others dredged up their memories of the same events, they might look different. If that is the case and you feel so inclined, I invite you to write a memoir. Just change my name and, if you don’t mind, make me a redhead.

  It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

  —ancient proverb

  NOW I SEE YOU

  PROLOGUE

  My disguise was missing something.

  “Almost ready,” I told Esperanza, the small, dark-haired woman standing next to me. “Just one more minute.”

  I’d already jammed on the black knit toboggan reading BROOKLYN in block letters and pulled it low over my forehead. I’d zipped up the shit-colored ankle-length coat borrowed from my grandmother and raised the hood. Now only my shoes were visible, and my face.

  The sunglasses: that’s what I’d forgotten.

  I fished a pair out of my coat pocket—Prada knockoffs that I’d bought on the street near Astor Place—and slid them over my ears. They were big and black and glamorous, very Jackie O. But I felt more like Stevie Wonder.

  “I can’t see a damn thing with these on,” I complained.

  “So take them off,” Esperanza suggested, unperturbed by my getup or my bad language or my acting like a big old baby. “You don’t need them.”

  That was not exactly true. She was right that I didn’t need them to shield my eyes from the sun, since it was an overcast afternoon in March. I didn’t need them, either, to shield the world from the sight of my eyes, which were normal-looking, pretty even; a forest blend of umber and olive, speckled with yellow. I did need the sunglasses, however, desperately.

  “I’m trying to go incognito,” I explained, “in case I run into someone I know.”

  “I don’t think there’s much risk of that.” She laughed. “We haven’t passed a single person since Third Avenue.”

  Esperanza had met me at my apartment on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn, expecting, I guess, that we’d conduct our business right there on my block. Instead, I’d led her for fifteen minutes downhill, away from the well-maintained Park Slope brownstones where my friends lived, away from the bright playgrounds my kids frequented, into the no-man’s-land by the Gowanus Canal.

  Now, we stood on broken sidewalk, flanked by abandoned warehouses, inhaling the stink of refuse. Whole minutes passed without a car whizzing by. It was the kind of spot a mobster would choose to shoot you at close range.

  “This is where you want to do it?” she’d asked, her eyebrows raised.

  “Yeah, this is perfect,” I’d replied.

  Then she’d asked if I was ready, which I wasn’t, not by a long shot. But I’d suited up with hat, hood, and glasses, and at her direction, I’d taken the package she’d given me earlier out of my bag, rooting through boxes of animal crackers, broken crayons, and wet wipes. It was a tight white bundle roughly the size and shape of a microphone, though it weighed less, its five tubular pieces made from ultralight aluminum and held together with a black rubber band. I clutched it tightly in my right palm, as if it might come to life at any moment and attack me.

  I was still not ready. I was, however, out of stalling techniques.

  I’d been putting this moment off, not just since Esperanza picked me up a half hour before, but since I was nineteen years old. My arsenal of weapons for beating back the inevitable had been extensive: there’d been the distractions—sex and drama and later, the business of having babies; there’d been the denial that it was happening; and after that had become impossible, there was the hiding it from everyone else.

  But now, after twelve years, I couldn’t postpone it any longer and here was Esperanza, sent over by the New York State Commission for the Blind to teach me how to use a mobility cane.

  I didn’t see why formal training was necessary anyway; as far as I could tell, the whole process was pretty self-explanatory. Take a long stick and swing it around in front of you. If it hits something, don’t go there. If it drops into a gaping abyss, don’t go there either.

  “I don’t need this, you know,” I informed Esperanza as I fiddled with the cane’s rubber band. “I do fine without it.”

  “I know,” she assured me. “But you may find it useful at nighttime or in crowded places, when your vision is at its worst. And—”

  She paused, her voice dropping into a softer register: “Many people find it helpful to be trained on the cane while they still have a bit of usable vision left.”

  No matter how gentle Esperanza was administering my bitter pill, it still tasted like shit. I wanted to spit the nasty medicine out, just toss the cane into the canal and make a run for it. But running is precisely what I’d been doing for more than a decade and it wasn’t working anymore. My diagnosis just kept catching up with me.

  For th
e kids, I reminded myself. Vanity, pride, and fear were formidable opponents but my sense of maternal duty was stronger.

  I pulled off the rubber band and the cane unfurled itself, the equal pieces snapping into place like a magic trick. I raised the sunglasses off my eyes to take a closer look. Apart from the handle, which was black, and a length of red at the tip, the cane was pristinely white, not a speck of dirt or grime anywhere. Of course, I hadn’t been able to discern speck-sized details in years, so what did I know?

  I lowered my glasses down again. The cane, and the world behind it, went dark.

  “Maybe it’s a good thing that I can’t see much with these on,” I observed to Esperanza. “It makes this more authentic, right? Makes me seem more blind.”

  Esperanza said nothing, but she was standing close enough that I could see her press her lips together in a polite smile, which said it all.

  You are blind. You’re only pretending not to be.

  PART I

  TIPS FOR THE (SECRETLY) BLIND

  Tip #1: On receiving bad news

  Do not be duped into believing that youth, or optimism, or adorable lacey underthings will protect you from bad news. These things will only ensure that the news comes as a big, fucking surprise.

  1. THE MESSENGER

  This is some Park Avenue bullshit, I fumed, slamming shut my copy of 100 Years of Solitude. I’d been sitting in the well-appointed waiting room for almost an hour before the doctor called my name, and then it was only to squeeze some dilating drops into my eyes and send me back into the waiting room while they took effect. That had been a half hour ago, at least I guessed as much. Now that my pupils were fully dilated, I couldn’t make out the numbers on my watch, or the print of my book, either. Which left me nothing to do but stew.

  The whole thing was a massive waste of time. There was nothing wrong with my vision apart from near-sightedness; my regular ophthalmologist, Dr. Lee, had said so before she referred me here, “just to be extra sure.” It had seemed like a fine idea at the time, but that was before I’d pissed away the better part of a summer afternoon in a waiting room.

  Of course, I had nowhere else to be, really. Having just returned to New York for summer break after my sophomore year in college, I had nothing lined up until my acting apprenticeship started at the Williamston Theatre Festival in a few weeks. I’d spent the last few days bumming around the city, sleeping late in my childhood bed, seeing old friends, and taking care of annoying bits of business like this doctor’s visit. That, and crying uncontrollably.

  Not a day had passed since I left Yale that I hadn’t broken down in tears, weeping with the kind of brio only a teenager can manage. The crying was very time-consuming, and once you factored in the hours I spent rereading old journal entries and tearing up photographs, really, there weren’t enough hours in the day. Of course, breaking up is hard to do, especially for the first time.

  I’m gonna call him, I decided as I stared at the blurry blue book jacket on my lap. But by the time I located a pay phone, near the bathroom, my belated sense of dignity showed up and stayed my hand. Plus, I didn’t have a quarter.

  It’s pointless anyway, I reasoned, a familiar lump forming in my throat. I’d called him yesterday and the day before that and always, the answer was the same. The romance had run its course. Frog Legs and I were through.

  Frog Legs earned his name after my grandmother saw Sam in his boxers one morning when he was staying at my parents’ over spring break.

  “Il Ranocchio!” she attempted in a whisper. Nonny’s whispers never really pan out; she is permanently set on town crier mode, like she’s got a built-in megaphone in her vocal cords. I shot her a reprimanding look, which triggered her giggling, which blossomed into a guffaw, until that crazy Italian had to take a seat so she didn’t have a heart attack from the exertion of howling with laughter.

  “What’d she say?” asked Sam, smiling. Having been raised by psychologists, in a home where respectful communication reigned, it didn’t even occur to him that my grandmother might be openly deriding him.

  “Oh, she’s just razzing me, you know, about having a boyfriend.” I ran my fingers through his dark, wavy hair and glared at Nonny.

  After that, the big joke in the family was that my boyfriend had lady legs. A few months after our breakup, I was able to see the humor in this, but at the beginning of the summer, when the heartache was still fresh, every mention of Frog Legs had me bawling like a kid whose ice cream fell off the cone. Yes, Sam was my double scoop of ice cream with sprinkles, except that he hadn’t fallen off the cone; he’d jumped.

  I’d met Sam in a Shakespeare scene study class required for our theater major and we’d fallen hard for each other while rehearsing the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene. Just like those star-crossed lovers, though, our relationship was intense but brief. After four months together, Sam broke up with me at the end of sophomore year. We’d been fighting for a few weeks but the final nail in the coffin was when I sneaked into his email account while he was in the shower. I was shocked to discover an email he’d written to a friend in which my beloved had described me as “high maintenance” and “clingy.” When Sam came out of the shower, I was in tears, begging him for an explanation.

  “You read my emails?” he asked, shocked. I guess that was a first for him.

  “Just this once,” I sputtered. “Hardly ever.” I saw his face set, like a decision had been made. I started talking fast: “But that’s not the point. Let’s stay on the subject! Which is, I just love you so much! I mean, these have been the best four months of my life!”

  “Okay, listen,” he said, sitting next to me on the edge of the bed and putting his hand on my arm. “You’re great—”

  “No! I won’t listen to this! I DO NOT ACCEPT THIS!”

  “Nicole, come on, let’s—”

  “Please!”

  “Can you just—”

  “Please!”

  Because, as everyone knows, men dig batty broads with no self-respect.

  When it was clear he would not be caving to my charm, I collapsed on the floor and wailed, full-on blubbered—with drool, so much that I choked on it from time to time, sending me into a heightened paroxysm of agony because I realized full well that Sam seeing me choke on my drool probably ruled out getting back together.

  It was a shining moment for womankind.

  Back in New York for summer break, I was continuing my meltdown at a low simmer. Every little thing I saw—pumpernickel bagels, Dr. Zizmor ads on the subway—reminded me of Sam. Even the MEN’S BATHROOM sign in the doctor’s office triggered a Sam flashback. He used to use public restrooms. God, how I loved him. I fought back tears as I regarded my blurry reflection in the women’s room mirror.

  My hair was beyond help; the heat and humidity had wilted my fine, shoulder-length locks until they hung lifelessly off my head like yarn. I fluffed up the hair on the top of my head with my fingertips but it sunk back down instantly, limp and defeated. My mascara was smudged from the inordinate amount of sweating I’d done on the short walk from Victoria’s Secret and there were circles under my eyes that concealer hadn’t concealed. But in between the circles and the mascara, my eyes themselves were resplendent.

  The pupils had been dilated so much, the irises were eclipsed; all that remained was a thin ring of hazel around the perimeter. It was just an accent, a border separating the black of my eye from the white. The unbroken black reflected the light so that my eyes shone, as if they were a source of illumination themselves. Big and round and colorless, my eyes were nothing short of hypnotic.

  I wish Sam could see me like this, I mused, He’d totally take me back.

  I’d made it a whole ten seconds without thinking of him: a record. I commended myself as I walked back to my seat in the waiting room to resume staring at the wall.

  I should have rescheduled this crap. I’m in no state, I thought. Damn Dr. Lee and her extreme thoroughness.

  I’d been seeing Dr. Lee for ye
ars, ever since I failed the standard high school eye exam when I was thirteen. Dr. Lee was a colleague of my father’s, like all the doctors I’d ever been to, and her office was around the corner from his cardiology practice in Brooklyn Heights, where my mother was office manager/physician assistant/consigliere. The location was convenient considering how fond my mother was of crashing my doctor’s appointments. She claimed that she showed up to secure me VIP treatment (“Or else you’ll waste all goddamned day in the waiting room!”) but I think she was experimenting with how much humiliation a teenager can withstand before requiring psychiatric intervention. I had grown accustomed to her bursting through the door of the exam room when I was at the dermatologist’s, calling him by his first name and telling him to please explain to me that if I just stopped eating chocolate, I wouldn’t have any blackheads at all. So it didn’t even register on the embarrassment spectrum when she acted as armchair ophthalmologist during my first eye exam, offering an unending commentary as Dr. Lee wrote out a contact lens prescription.

  “It’s just so strange, because everyone in our family has great eyes—none of us wear glasses—although you know what? I told her that if she kept on reading in the dark it would ruin her eyes. This one, with the books! I mean, don’t get me wrong, reading is good, of course, but you can take a good thing too far, for God’s sake! I hate to say it, I really do, but I was right. I mean, was I right, Eleanor?”

  “She’s just a little near-sighted.” Dr. Lee smiled. “She’ll pop in contacts and be perfect again.”

  Every year, I’d check in with Dr. Lee to keep current with my prescription and eventually, my mom stopped crashing my visits (she had two younger daughters to mortify) and I came to actually enjoy my annual checkup. The office was inviting; a light floral scent lingered in the waiting room and it was always the perfect temperature, even on the most sweltering summer day. I genuinely liked Dr. Lee, who was young, smart, and soft-spoken with a low-key approach and a chin-length black bob that never grew any longer. I was interested in anecdotes about her two little kids and she always wanted to hear about what I was reading. The last time I’d seen her, over spring break, I’d mentioned something I’d been wondering about.