My sister couldn’t see till she was seven, after we’d moved across town for the fifth time because all our landlords “had it out for us,” as my parents said, and the new place was in a better neighborhood because my mom’s boss owned it and had cut us a deal on rent, so we were zoned at a better school that was more equipped to deal with my sister’s seizures than our old school had been—though since she’d switched to phenobarbital the year before they weren’t so bad, just absent spells where she’d stumble like the floor had quaked and sit there staring for a while, but still, at our old school they’d always pulled me from my class and into hers, where I’d go sit with her on the carpet and hold her hand till she woke confused and sobbing—but because the teachers at the new school had their own protocol, plus classroom aides with special training, they never came for me, and I never knew if she’d seized or not, or who had calmed her down, so at home, when my parents would ask me if she’d had one, I was too ashamed to tell them that I didn’t know, and felt like I had been demoted, or that my knowledge wasn’t good here, so I’d either say, “No, she didn’t,” or “Yes, she did,” and pluck false details from my memory to prove I’d been beside her, claiming things like, “It didn’t last long but she grabbed my shoulder,” or, “She was upset when it stopped but I took care of her,” or, “She hasn’t had one all week,” until one morning, early in the fall and not quite cool yet, the school nurses brought the two of us in for routine tests (routine was their word, not ours) to check our ears and gums and scalp and eyes, and when they checked my sister’s eyes they found that she had 20/400 vision—I remember the number, thinking it was large and daunting—meaning she was legally blind without glasses, so they called my parents in and asked if they had been aware, asked if she had glasses, and my mom said, “She doesn’t need them, it’s not like she walks into walls,” which was true, she always looked me in the face, always reached for me when I knelt beside her, but the nurses drew a line between truly and legally blind, and said of course she sees but what she sees is not enough (enough for what? I wondered), and then they said, “Also, you know she had three seizures yesterday,” and suggested that maybe we should up the dose or outright change her meds, so my parents looked at me like I had failed, and I had, I knew—failed for not knowing, after all this, that she couldn’t see what she could touch, and for sitting beside her on the ground so many times and never discovering what these nurses had found in only a minute or two—so, when we drove to the ophthalmologist that same day, I told my sister I was sorry, and she nodded gravely, in part because, I could tell, she was frightened, but also because (I knew) she agreed that I had failed her, and—after the ophthalmologist pushed her down into his monstrous leather chair and stung her eyes to dilate her pupils, then puffed air into them to check for pressure and forced her to follow different objects in the air, hovering opaque panes above her nose, while asking her to read and call out shapes (all while my mother told her to shut up and sit still), and after she collapsed from the chair onto the tile, then suddenly came to again, confused on the floor as all of us towered over her—I knelt beside her but she pulled her hand away, refused to cry, stood defiantly and sat back in the chair, so I knew she really did blame me, and once the doctor regained composure, adjusting the sleeves of his shirt, asking if he should continue, watching us with nervous eyes when everyone said yes, he finished the tests and ordered her a pair of glasses, which, when they arrived a week later, ignited alien questions in her, like, “Why are there leaves on the trees?” because till now she’d only seen them on the ground, only after they’d fallen from the branch, brown, brittle, the trees themselves having blurred this whole time into indistinct patterns, and, “What are those rocks?” because she’d never actually seen the bricks of our house—and then not even questions, but, when she could stomach it, just incredulous and terrified stares into our eyes, we who’d become suddenly textured, and I thought ours must be like faces risen from the sand, and worried that, to her, my face would never match my voice again, or that I’d never grow used to how the thick lenses had exaggerated her eyes into swollen fearful nodes, enlarged to nearly half her face, every vein twisted harshly across the whites, every jerk sharpened, terrible, so that when we drove to Jacksonville the next month to see her neurologist and he suggested (because the glasses only brought her to 20/80) that she undergo surgery, which would not only reduce the thickness of her lenses but also fix the drift in her left eye, I perked up before I noticed that my sister looked sick and leaned into her knees—scared to be cut into—and when my dad took his own glasses off and my mom mumbled that it wasn’t possible at this very moment but hopefully soon it would be, “Right now it’s just a little tight,” my sister sighed a breath of relief, and afterward, at the pharmacy, as we waited for her new prescription, I wondered if she’d been scared of the surgery itself or the idea that the world might sharpen even further, become even stranger, more distinct and separated, but in the end it didn’t really matter because by her second or third week on Tegretol she’d become less scared of everything, more brazen, a worse temper, and wanted nothing to do with us, so she and I began to fight over everything unimportant—the clicker, or how to pronounce furniture, or whose room was better (because we each had our own now, and we had always shared before)—and because by this point her seizures had altogether stopped, I could never find a way to be near her except when we sat beside each other in the backseat of the car, which is where I first noticed that I could smell the medicine through her skin like a dull-sweet sweat, or that her knuckles seemed to have grown beneath the surface, until one morning at home I realized I didn’t recognize her at all—large-eyed with big hands and a temper—and I couldn’t tell if the medicine and the glasses were erasing the person I’d known or helping her emerge into who she really was, who she’d always been beneath, not unlike the way the glasses had, in her eyes, surfaced who I’d been all along—a complete stranger—so, both of us now strange, it was no surprise to me that around this time our parents began speaking to us less, and would call us by our names instead of by our nicknames as if we’d only recently met, and then became strange even to each other, quieter people who lived by separate clocks and slept in different spaces—my dad in the humid laundry room on the cushions he pulled from the couch—and I began to worry they might never look at each other the same way again, or look at each other at all, might never see us again, either, and then to make things worse my dad’s glasses broke beneath a cushion one night when he fell asleep, so the skin beneath his eyes began to sink and swell and grey like a bad oyster, and he grew tired, more clumsy and drunk, as if he’d lost touch with his hands, until finally one day, after my mom left for work, he asked us if we’d like to stay home from school with him because he wasn’t feeling well, and we said yes, and he told us to keep it our secret and we agreed, but then around noon or so, he dropped his liquor on the floor and fell asleep on the spot near the spill, so I put a tape into the stereo and lay beside him, where I also fell asleep, not quite touching him, but almost (so close that I could feel his body’s warmth), till the two of us woke up soaking wet, and I stood, sopping, and crawled over to the couch while he just sat there and pressed his hand into the carpet as water filled the gaps between his fingers, shook his head and reached to turn off the stereo, at which point I heard a noise in the bathroom, so I walked back and saw the tub spilling over its edges, and my heart dropped because I couldn’t see her head, but when I approached, no one was inside it, so instead of turning off the faucet I walked back into my sister’s room where she was sleeping on her bed, arms twisted beneath her torso like an idiot, dumb to what she’d done, and sick, I thought for the first time, repulsive, and so I woke her, yelling that she’d left the bath running, and she began to cry, frightened by my voice, which made her worse to me, face red and bloated, hideous and pathetic, so when she stepped off her bed into the swollen carpet toward me I slammed her door and wouldn’t let her out, even as she pounded and screamed, until my dad came back and turned the tub off, asked me, very gently, to move out of the way so he could sit beside her on the bed and whisper, “Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” her face against his chest, before my mom came home and screamed when she walked in the door, demanding to know what had happened and why, because, like all of us, like me, she was scared to move again, scared to lose our home, which was the same reason that, instead of calling her boss, we all stayed home the next day and tore the carpet up together, ripping staples from the fabric to reveal the sodden wood beneath it, which I was shocked to learn had always been there, winding grain and all, below that which I had thought to be the floor but which was in fact just a passing layer over the actual floor, this molding wood, and I was so bothered by this that in the weeks before my mom lost her job and we moved again, this time without my dad, and returned to our old school, I’d wake up past midnight to stick butter knives into the seams between the wood and the wall, convinced as I have been convinced again by every home I’ve run to since that just beneath me lay some other floor I cannot see.
Keenan Walsh is a writer and teacher living in Iowa City, where he studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.