2
It was springtime, April, with one month left of her junior year of high school, when Sally Forrest cut herself off from the rest of The Gunners. She stopped speaking to them at school, never again set foot in The Gunner House, would not answer them when they called to her in the hallway or when they tried to approach her as she walked down Ingram Street. She would quicken her pace and lower her eyes and change her route. She would not answer phone calls to her house. The rest of them finally went directly to her home to seek her out, where Sally’s mother, Corinne, said that Sally was unwell, and she would not allow the children to enter.
Sally did not replace the group with new friendships at school; she seemed altogether uninterested in the company of others, taking her lunch outside or to a classroom that was not in use. She never raised her hand in class. Her pale eyes went cool, and her posture was hard.
For several weeks, the others puzzled over the situation together, replaying recent conversations, devising theories, formulating vague and uncertain but genuine apologies. When they could not reach any single conclusion as to what might have caused Sally to turn on them, they began to turn on one another, with accusations and assumptions, resentment and suspicion. The Gunners found themselves behaving like strangers toward one another in the halls of school and the streets of Lackawanna for their remaining months of high school.
Mikey was one grade behind the others in school, and the only one, aside from Sally, who remained in the area.
Mikey moved out of his father’s home after graduating high school, into a tiny ranch house twelve miles north, so that his commute to General Mills, where he worked on the maintenance crew, would be ten minutes instead of thirty. He rented the ranch home from an elderly woman named Louise who had just moved into a retirement center. Louise explained to Mikey that her daughters had both married weasels and she didn’t have any plans of leaving the home to them, so Mikey should go ahead and do as he liked with the place, paint-wise, plant-wise, and pet-wise. Mikey brightened the dull gray-pink walls to a warm cream and planted a forsythia bush out front. He got a black kitten one Friday, and named the cat Friday.
After moving out of his father’s home, Mikey made a habit of going to see his father every Sunday. His father would pour him a beer and they would stare tensely at the TV for a few hours, then his father would get up to take a piss and say, “Lock the door on your way out,” and Mikey would feel a great sense of relief.
Mikey never left the area, or his job at General Mills, although he did receive two promotions over the course of a decade. He never left the ranch home either; he was shocked to find that Louise had actually left the house, and all that it contained, to him when she eventually passed. He hadn’t realized she was so serious about those weasels.
Mikey took Louise’s impressive accumulation of Redbook magazines, erotic novels, and cookbooks to the Salvation Army, except for The Joy of Cooking, which he kept for himself. He paged absently through this book, many of its pages stained with sauce or textured with crumbs, until one day it began to interest him. He learned to baste and blanch and caramelize, poach and macerate and emulsify, learned the quick mental math of dividing recipes into a portion for one. He pored over Louise’s collection from the classical repertoire on cassette tapes, listening to this music while he cooked and late into the evening.
Friday became a dear and happy companion. He was a cat of the highest caliber. He purred when Mikey touched his head, while leaning and arching his back into Mikey’s legs and walking figure eights through them as Mikey cooked, purred in the morning when he moved from the foot of the bed, where he slept every night, to Mikey’s chest, happily and dutifully kneading at Mikey’s neck with his little black paws, purring so rapturously that he gasped and wheezed fishy breath into Mikey’s face. Mikey wondered what had brought him the great fortune of having such a merry and contented cat, who, unlike Mikey, never seemed to slip into dark, pensive, and ungenerous moods.
It was not long after Mikey left his father’s home that his vision in his right eye began to grow worse. Faraway road signs, individual leaves on trees, and tiles on roofs were the first things to go. The change was so gradual that it wasn’t until years later that he finally went to see an optometrist.
The optometrist performed tests and gave Mikey a prescription for his right eye. He inquired as to when Mikey had lost vision completely in the left.
“I never had it,” Mikey said.
“I see.” The optometrist stared back and forth between both of Mikey’s eyes and shone a bright blue light into the right one.
Mikey picked out a pair of wire frames, and reiterated to the receptionist ordering the glasses that he would only need the proper prescription in the right lens.
Several months later, Mikey returned to the optometrist when he could tell his vision in his right eye had already grown worse. He was retested and given a stronger prescription.
A year later, he was back again, for the same reason.
This time, the doctor asked about blind spots. Mikey confessed that he had several and asked what this meant. The doctor explained that he was undergoing early-onset macular degeneration.
Mikey asked him directly, “Will I go blind?”
The doctor answered directly, “Probably.”
“When?”
The doctor compared Mikey’s new prescription with the previous one. “A few years most likely. Although you never know what might happen with technology between now and then.”
Mikey felt an angry and fearful indignation shiver through the cold organs in his belly. He said, “Why is this happening?”
“Are you asking if it’s hereditary?”
“I guess.”
“Possibly,” the doctor said.
Mikey was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “There was one time I looked directly at the sun when I was a kid.”
The doctor smiled gently. “They warn you about that. But it’s almost impossible to cause permanent damage that way. You didn’t do this to yourself, I can assure you of that.”
Mikey started to learn Braille. He started practicing to cook and clean and clothe himself with a piece of tape over his right eye. He also started to catalog images, colors, memories, and he created associations that would make sense to him when—if—he lost his sight. The color red = the smell of cinnamon. Blue = fingers under running water. White = the taste of cream. A full moon is Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 2. The first snowfall looks exactly the way sugar tastes. A tree-lined street with lampposts is Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One.”
Excluding Sally, the rest of The Gunners started up a group email thread within a year or two of graduating high school and going their separate ways. Any ill will among the rest of them caused by Sally’s absence seemed to have been forgotten. Although this was never formally acknowledged between them, they reconnected easily over email, the ongoing thread coming to life every few months, and their contact was warm, often containing a happy childhood memory or an ancient inside joke. With all of them now around thirty, the past decade had seen a great deal of movement and change, all documented through these emails.
Jimmy had come into great wealth since moving to Los Angeles at age nineteen and making wise investments. Sam had been married at age twenty-one in a family-only ceremony, and was now deeply involved with the church he and his wife attended
