Free Blind by Rachel Dewoskin Page B

said, “Leah, take Lily,” and then came rushing over and grabbed the rabbit. She stayed bent over me for an extra second; I felt her hair tumble down—long, curly, red—and she kissed the top of my head. Benj came running in then, his rain boots squeaking across the kitchen.
    “Naomi and Jenna, come with me! We’re taking Bigs to the doctor, Benji. We’ll be right back.”
    Then my mom and Naomi darted outside, with Jenna behind them, still in just her socks, as far as I could hear, leaving the door open. When it didn’t click shut, I felt my way over and closed it myself.
    “Will Bigs have to get a shot at that damn doctor?” Benj asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. I made my way back to him and knelt down, reached out and touched his face, the cold little nose and scrunched eyebrows. Wet streaks on his cheeks. I pulled him toward me: toast with butter, bubblegum toothpaste, and tears. Baby Lily was still crying, too, and Logan was holding her now. Logan’s heels tapped the floor. She was rocking, and her hands went
thump, thump, thump
against the romper on Baby Lily’s hot little back. So Leah must have handed her Baby Lily and gone somewhere. I hadn’t heard her leave, but she wasn’t in the room. Sometimes I have to figure out what’s happening now before I can guess what happened a minute ago.
    When I stood up, Logan handed me Baby Lily, and I rocked her while Benj kept clinging to my leg. If someone else is holding her, Lily feels to me like a puppety collection of little parts: chubby dumpling face, short arms, a leg here or there, and a
voice
—she screams like she’s being dipped in boiling oil. But when I hold her myself, I can feel the weight of her being a whole human being. I kissed her doughy rolls of neck.
    Leah reappeared from the basement in a cloud of laundry steam. “Here, baby, come to Leah,” she said, taking Lily and tucking her into the wrap she must have tied to herself on the way up the basement stairs. As soon as she was in the cloth, Lily started snoring. Babies are like those cars that go from zero to a hundred in under one second. There’s something surreal about their ability to go from screaming to sleeping instantaneously, but also something practical about it. I held Benj’s hand again then, but I didn’t say anything else, because I don’t believe in lying to little kids, and I didn’t think “I have no idea what’s going to happen” or “I think the rabbit’s going to be dead when mom comes back” would be especially comforting.
    After a minute, I smelled fire, heard the flash and splatter of butter, reminded myself to breathe. Leah was shuffling through the third drawer over, the one that jams a bit and sticks when it opens, then sinking a knife through something soft to the surface of a plastic cutting board. Cheese. She was making grilled cheese sandwiches. I smelled bread land in the popping butter. The cupboard opened, and she took out a can; hooked and snapped it into the mounted opener, where it turned a slow, grinding circle until it came open with ragged edges and the opener stopped. The red smell arrived: tomato soup, my favorite. Leah unlatched the can and poured the soup into a pot that was already as hot as the butter, from the splatter of it. Logan was helping while I stood there, listening and working to follow, and when the food was ready, she put ours on a tray and took it to my bedroom, where we sat on my bed, pulling closed the green, filmy curtain and eating our soup in my tent. I left half of mine for Spark and put the bowl down next to the bed where he was resting; listened to him happily slurping and gobbling. I love him so much that when I hear him eating, it makes me feel full. Logan and I sat without talking for a long time. She was lying on her back, with her socked feet kicking the bottom of Naomi’s bunk bed. Metal springs. Creak, kick, creak, kick.
    “Are you okay?” she finally asked me.
    “Not really,” I said.
    “The