Free What Is Visible: A Novel by Kimberly Elkins Page A

drops my hand and I know he is telling everyone at table. Papa shows his immediate displeasure by jiggling the whole table.
    I lift my shoulders in a shrug and then point toward heaven, letting them all know that the matter is out of my hands and in God’s. God gave me to Doctor and so I am Unitarian. I remember from when Mama would dress me up and take me to the little church down the road that the Baptists do more singing and clapping. My memories of those services are filled with a kind of joy that I admit I do not approach at the Institution’s services, where there seems to be almost no noise, no tensing and shifting of the floorboards. But for now, I must trust Doctor.
    Asa smears jam onto a biscuit and holds it to my lips. I don’t think Doctor would like me to have the jam with sugar, but I take a little taste. I like the way it’s sticky on my tongue, but basically it just makes for a wet biscuit.
    Asa takes his leave suddenly right after dinner. Addison says he made a mess at the table, trying to fix things to tempt me to eat, and Papa asked him to leave. My own family doesn’t care if I eat, and they throw out the only one who tries? I would’ve wolfed down every morsel, snuffled every crumb from the tablecloth if I had known. Addison feels my hand tremble in his and he knows how angry I am. He strokes my cheek and then pats my head over and over, and I know he is trying to comfort me—how I loved that touch when I was a child—but now I feel I am being treated like a dog. Pet the doggy and it will wag its tail and roll over and be good. No! I walk toward the heat from the fire where Papa likes to sit in his big horsehair chair after dinner and read the paper. I am not allowed on that chair. I kneel beside him and put my hand on his knee, and he shakes it in irritation. Papa doesn’t like for me to touch him, but I am determined. I tap hard on his knee and point at the door and make my noise for Asa. I make the noise again, louder, and this time he nudges me with his boot. He doesn’t kick me; only once he kicked me and that was when I’d wrapped myself around his legs and wouldn’t let go. Poor Papa, he’d dragged me round and round the room before he finally got me off. I don’t remember why I’d held on to him so fiercely. That was before Doctor came. Now he nudges again, and then Addison’s strong hands are under my arms and lifting me away. His chest is hard and I feel his heart beating. How wonderful it is! I will let Addison and his heart take me away, though I am still angry with Papa.
    Addison deposits me back in the kitchen and tells me that I must help Mama with the dishes. Usually I enjoy this task, but not tonight. Mama hands me the drying towel and then a bowl and I do nothing, just stand there, holding it, so she finally shoos me, gives me a marble to play with. Doctor let me hold a marble, a big one, to show me the shape of the eyeballs I lost. Think of that: pretty, round eyeballs with all their uses for good and evil, heated by the fever until they turned to liquid oozing down my face. I have never asked Mama, never held her accountable, but now she turns out my friend and gives me a marble . Does she care about me at all? I pull at her skirts until she gives me a soapy hand.
    “How could you lose my eyes, Mama?” She twists away. Did you hurt them, did you mash them, did you know what they were, your baby’s eyes, half her use and fortune in this world, or did you just wipe them away like snot? I fight for her hand. She won’t let me write; she doesn’t want to know. “Try to save them? Try to put them back?” I pound across her back until Addison pulls me off. I pummel his arms with truth: “Could’ve pushed them back in.” Even if she had to hold me down, screaming, my head in a vise, and poke and plunge and stuff with her fingers; maybe if they could just have stayed in until the fever went down, even if they had lost their purpose, even if they had become a maddened