Love and First Sight Read online

  After crossing the state line, we stop at the Colorado welcome center for a bathroom break. Nick, Whitford, and I sit on a bench inside the lobby while Ion calls her parents, who are apparently flipping out.

  “Hey, Whitford,” says Nick, “see that desk that says TOURIST INFORMATION?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll give you a dollar if you walk over to the old lady sitting there and ask, ‘Can you tell me about some of the tourists who visited here last year?’”

  Whitford cracks up, and so do I.

  “All the people visiting here today are, uhhhh…” I struggle to find the most appropriate word.

  “Fat?” says Nick.

  “Sad?” says Whitford.

  “I was going to say white. Like, Caucasian. Am I seeing that correctly? I haven’t noticed a single African American here.”

  “No, you’re right,” says Nick. “Not many of Whitford’s kind in this part of the country.”

  “Kansas is five percent black,” says Whitford. “We came to Toano because PU was looking for nonwhite professors like my parents to increase its diversity. Otherwise, you can bet we’d get our black asses out of here.”

  “Technically, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” says Nick. “But Colorado has similar demographics.”

  “Interesting,” I say.

  “But, hey, that’s rest stops for you. Some of the only places in America you can see a cross section of society,” says Nick.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “All the other places you go—where you live, what stores you shop at and restaurants you eat at, whether you go to public or private school—these decisions are basically determined by your family’s income and socioeconomic status. But interstate rest stops are the great equalizer. From time to time we all have to drive places, and, while doing so, from time to time we all have an urgent need to take a dump.”

  “Going number two: the number one common denominator of America,” says Whitford.

  “Jeez, I step away for one second,” says Ion, walking over to us, “and the conversation has already devolved into pooping?”

  “Had you heard the context of our conversation,” says Nick, “you would know that we were in fact analyzing important socioeconomic and racial demographic issues.”

  Ion snorts, unimpressed.

  “How’d it go with your parents?” asks Whitford.

  “Eh, okay,” she says. “I think I held them off for now. They still think I’m at Kelly’s house. They’ll probably kill me when they find out. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we drive!”

  “You may take our lives,” Nick intones loudly in a Scottish accent, “but you’ll never take our freedom!”

  We stand from the bench and cheer wildly.

  “Is everyone looking at us now?” I ask out of the side of my mouth.

  “Yeeeeeep,” whispers Whitford. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We return to I-70. I point out that I can feel us making turns as we drive, something I had not noticed in Kansas.

  “Interstates in Kansas are straight and flat as far as the eye can see,” says Whitford. “Colorado is more curvy.”

  “Kind of like your mom! Oooooooh!” says Nick. His gag, however, results in no audible fist pounds or laughs. “Nothing? Jeez. Tough crowd. Anyway, it’s true. Driving across the state of Kansas is like running on a giant treadmill for eight hours.”

  “Can’t say I’ve ever seen what a treadmill looks like,” I say.

  “Sorry, bad metaphor. The point is it’s really monotonous.”

  I also notice a line at exactly eye level where the green of the ground and the blue of the sky intersect. This, I assume, is the horizon. But the farther we move into Colorado, the less straight this line of the horizon is.

  “What’s wrong with the sky?” I ask Nick.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There,” I say, pointing my finger. “That’s the horizon, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It used to be a straight line. Now the sky is all bumpy.”

  “Those are mountains. Welcome to the Rockies.”

  “As in, the Rocky Mountains? But they’re tiny! I thought the Rockies were supposed to be, like, huge.”

  “Don’t worry. They’ll get bigger.”

  It reminds me of what Cecily taught me about perspective. I guess the mountains will grow as we get closer.

  Eventually I see another interruption to the horizon. But unlike the uneven bumps of the distant mountains, this is a series of parallel lines, long rectangles cut out from the blue sky. Nick tells me it is the skyscrapers of downtown Denver. My first city skyline.

  As we get closer to downtown, the road becomes more crowded with cars. Eventually the buildings are so tall I have to roll down my window and stick my head out to be able to see the tops.

  “The Rockies are bigger than these buildings?” I ask. “It sure doesn’t look that way right now.”

  “Just wait. They’re crazy big. You’ll see,” says Nick.

  After we pass through Denver, I hear the engine downshift to a lower gear and feel us angle back in a slight uphill climb. And sure enough, the mountains rise up from the horizon until they loom imposingly above the dashboard. I ask Ion to switch seats with me so I can watch them more carefully. We pull over, and I hop in front. The mountains are still only the size of my hand if I hold it close to my face, but they now take up all the background space visible beyond the front windshield, so I know they are massive. Their color is fascinating. Green along the bottom, then gray, and eventually they all turn white before tapering off into the sky.

  Soon the ground around us becomes white, too.

  “Is that snow?” I exclaim.

  “Yep,” says Whitford.

  “When will we get to the top?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure I-70 goes to the top of anything,” says Whitford. “Roads are built on the path of least resistance, which means going in between mountains whenever possible, rather than directly over them.”

  “I’ll look into it,” says Nick, pulling out his phone.

  A few minutes later, he reports, “We won’t reach any summits on I-70. But we go right by Highway 40, which would take us to the top of Berthoud Pass. Elevation: eleven thousand three hundred feet.”

  “So it would be a detour,” says Whitford, more as a statement than a question.

  I share his concern. I mean, the faster we go, the sooner we find Cecily.

  “How long will it take?”

  “Like, an hour, tops,” says Nick. “But how often do you get to be on top of the Continental Divide? If you stand there and pee in one direction, it ends up in the Atlantic Ocean, but if you turn around and pee in the other, it goes to the Pacific. How many people can say they’ve peed into two oceans with a single stream of urine?”

  “How many people want to?” says Ion, clearly not convinced this would be an accomplishment.

  “Will?” asks Whitford.

  “Let’s do it,” I say. It will delay us, but I remember what my mom said about seeing everything while I still can.

  “At this rate we’re never going to make it to California,” laments Whitford.

  “Hey, it’s only twenty-four hours of total driving time, and we’ve got two weeks off school. We’re fine,” says Nick.

  I don’t say it aloud, but the goal here is not to kill two weeks of vacation time. The goal is to find Cecily.

  It’s a good thing they don’t give driver’s licenses to people like me, because I would never be able to make sense of Highway 40. Back in Kansas, the interstate was straight and gradually tapered off into the horizon in a little point, like the street in the van Gogh painting at the museum. But Highway 40 is constantly disappearing and then reappearing after we pivot around a curve. I’m impressed with Whitford’s ability to keep track of all these corners despite the many distractions—other cars whizzing by in both directions, the gigantic mountains out the windows, sno
w everywhere, and the fascinatingly complex dashboard in front of him.

  I feel us slide a few times as we climb the road to Berthoud Pass. Whitford curses, reminding us how dangerous this is, wondering why they don’t plow this more often, and suggesting we turn back. Honestly, it does seem dangerous. I don’t know how Whitford and the other drivers can tell where the road ends and the mountain terrain begins. To me, it all just looks like one continuous plane of snow. But eventually we reach the pass and stop in a snow-covered parking lot.

  The effort to step out of the car and shut the doors gets all four of us out of breath.

  “The air is so thin here!” says Ion.

  Every time I exhale, the mountains go dim and blurry for a second. I breathe in and out, watching the phenomenon. This, I decide, must be what people mean when they say they can “see their breath.”

  My friends are impressed by the view. I can tell because, well, they all shut up and just stand there for a while in the cold, no sarcastic statements or quips. And I’ll admit, it is pretty cool. But to me, all views are pretty cool. To me, seeing mountains in every direction is no more and no less interesting than the circular brown hay bales that dot the endless farmlands of Kansas or the skyscraping glass towers of downtown Denver or the glowing dials of a Volvo’s dashboard. But I know Cecily would appreciate this view. She’d want to see what a sunset looks like at this altitude, with this landscape.

  We eventually return to I-70 and continue west. We pass three ski resorts—Copper Mountain, Vail, and Beaver Creek. From the car, the trails look like crisscrossing white lines cutting through the dark green alpine forests.

  Night has fallen by the time we stop at a hotel in Grand Junction, Colorado, near the Utah border, and when I wake up in the morning, I look outside to find that I can no longer see the mountains. Have I gone nearsighted? Is this the first sign that I’m reverting to blindness?

  “It’s a blizzard out there,” says Nick, joining me at the window. “A complete whiteout.”

  I hope he doesn’t notice my sigh of relief.

  I put on my coat and go out to stand in the thick of it, feeling the snow land on my hair, face, and outstretched hands. I hold a flake up to my eye and watch it turn to an icy-cold drop of water.

  One of the main sensory cues I’ve always relied on is the volume of a sound. Generally speaking, the louder something is, the more significant it is. Snow is counterintuitive. It’s pouring down around me so heavily that I can see no more than a few footsteps away. The snow is presumably piling up on the ground, bringing delight to skiers and despair to motorists. Berthoud Pass is probably closed. But the falling snow emits not a single note. It falls silently, it lands silently, it melts silently on my tongue.

  Whitford refuses to drive while it’s snowing, and we waste precious hours watching TV in the hotel until noon. Then we cross the border into Utah and head south. The terrain is different here. Gone are the mountains and foothills lined with green pine trees. The horizon is flat again, but with clusters of orange rectangles standing at right angles.

  “Are those skyscrapers, too?” I ask, gesturing out the window.

  “No,” says Nick. “Rock formations. Most of this on our left is part of Arches National Park, actually.”

  It’s dark outside by the time we reach Grand Canyon Village. We get two rooms at Bright Angel Lodge, and in the morning, the four of us set out for the viewing deck at the south rim of the canyon.

  I still walk with my cane, but I rely on it less than I used to. I’m now able to see the ground moving beneath my feet and time it with the rhythm of my steps.

  “Guys, I have a confession to make,” says Nick. “I’m kind of afraid of heights.”

  “Awwww, poor Nick,” teases Ion. “You need me to hold your hand?”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” says Whitford.

  We reach the deck, and we have to drag Nick to the edge to get him to look.

  “Will’s probably not afraid of heights. Are you, Will?” asks Ion.

  “I don’t really know. I’ve never looked over anything tall and steep before.”

  “Well, you’ve got a mile drop in front of you right now. Are you afraid?”

  I peer over the edge, leaning on the rail.

  “Can’t say I feel any fear, no,” I say. “It looks awesome—and I mean that in the literal sense—but I don’t… the depth doesn’t really register for me.”

  I gaze down at the canyon and out across the panorama of reds and browns. It’s a feast for the eyes; that much I can understand and appreciate.

  The Grand Canyon, I decide, is kind of the opposite of the Colorado Rockies. Whereas the mountains jutted above the horizon, carving triangle-shaped peaks against the blue sky, the horizon here is basically flat, with all the terrain having been chiseled out below it.

  Even though she still hasn’t answered my texts, I think about how I wish Cecily were with me to see this. I pull out my phone to take photos—it’s a feature that I’ve never actually used before. My hope is that after we find her, I can show her the things we saw.

  We return to the road. Our path will take us near Las Vegas, and Nick insists that we get off the interstate so I can see the Vegas strip lit up at night.

  “How long will it take?” I ask. We are only hours away from Los Angeles, and the closer we get, the more eager I am to be there already.

  “Will, I need you to trust me on this one. You can see replicas of the greatest wonders of the world in Vegas,” says Nick. “Stuff you’d have to travel the entire globe to see otherwise.”

  I hate to delay us, but it occurs to me that if my eyesight regresses, I’ll never get to see any wonders of the world. This might be my only chance. Even if they’re just replicas. But what difference does it make, if they look just like the real thing?

  So I agree, and we make our way to Vegas.

  He points out the attractions in front of the casinos as we drive south. First we pass two pirate ships floating in a small harbor.

  “How do you know they are pirate ships and not, like, sailboats or navy vessels?” I ask.

  “Those all look really different from each other. And basically all old ships look like pirate ships,” he says.

  At the next block we see a casino surrounded by water, like the Italian city of Venice, I’m told. Next, a casino with stone sculptures and giant pillars modeled after ancient Rome. I find the sculptures kind of creepy. To my untrained eyes, they look too much like real humans. I keep expecting them to hop down from their pedestals and start talking or walking.

  One block later we reach a casino with a Paris, France, theme.

  “Can you guess what that is?” asks Nick, pointing.

  “The Eiffel Tower?” I ask.

  “Yep. An exact replica, built at half scale.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Probably the closest I’ll ever come to seeing the real thing.”

  “What do you mean? Maybe you’ll go to Paris someday. Who knows?”

  I try to stifle a wince.

  We keep driving past a casino replica of New York City. Nick points out the towers of the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building. Then we get to a half-sized model of the Statue of Liberty.

  “It looks so much like the real thing that a couple years ago the US Postal Service accidentally issued a stamp with a picture of this sculpture instead of the real one in New York,” said Nick. “They ended up printing billions of those stamps with the wrong statue.”

  “Billions?” Whitford laughs.

  “For real. Look it up,” says Nick.

  We pass a casino shaped like a castle, and finally reach one named for a city in Egypt.

  “It’s a triangle,” I say, thinking of Cecily.

  “A pyramid, actually,” says Nick. “Which is like four triangles laid—”

  “I know what a pyramid is,” I interrupt. “I just don’t always recognize what I know.”

  “My bad. Well, here’s something you probably won’t recog
nize: In front of the pyramid is a model of the Great Sphinx.”

  “Half scale?”

  “No, actually. This one is double the size of the original.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “You don’t get to be captain of the academic quiz team without an ability to store an endless number of useless facts.”

  We stay in a cheap hotel in the old downtown that night.

  In the car the next morning, Ion asks, “You nervous?” Today’s the day we reach LA.

  “About Cecily?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Terrified.”

  “I don’t blame you. It’s a big conversation.”

  “I just hope I say the right thing.”

  “It’s not about what you say, Will.”

  “What’s it about, then?”

  “Listening.”

  I nod. “I guess.”

  She continues, “And it’s a good thing you can see now, because listening is about a lot more than just what you do with your ears.”

  “Thanks. Just what I need. More stuff to worry about,” I say.

  “You’ll be fine,” says Ion. “Just remember: Don’t talk. Listen. With your ears and your eyes and your heart.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m already soaking up everything I can with my eyes these days.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  I look around the car. “There’s something I haven’t told you guys.”

  I close my eyes and run my fingers across my eyelids, wishing there was something I could do to get rid of the swelling behind the corneas. “My body is rejecting the transplant. There’s a good chance I will go back to being blind.”

  “Oh, man,” says Whitford.

  “Will, I’m so sorry,” says Ion. “What are the chances—”

  “Fifty percent,” I say. “A fifty-fifty chance I go back to the way I was before.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” says Nick.

  I start to protest that it does matter quite a bit whether I can see or not, but he catches his own poor choice of words.

  “Sorry, that came out wrong. What I mean is, it doesn’t matter to our friendship whether or not you can see. We were friends before, we’re friends now, we’ll be friends whatever happens.”

  “Thanks, man,” I say, reaching for his shoulder. “That means a lot.”