Free Helen Keller in Love by Kristin Cashore

resentment rising like steam. As she came closer I sensed her twin desires: to be free of me, and to be even closer, forever.
    “Come on.” Annie led me to a small clearing where the sun fell directly on my skin. She lay down on the blunted grass and pulled me down, but when I reached across the grass, Annie was too far away to touch.
    My breath came shallowly; Annie stiffened further. In desperation I reached out to touch her rough linen dress, and my finger found one ragged hole at the waist.
    “What is it? What’s wrong?”
    But Annie ignored me. Finally she said, “It’s Peter. It drives me crazy to have him in the house. He doesn’t clean up after himself, he leaves the dirty dishes in the sink, making more work for me.”
    “Then I’ll do the dishes.”
    “That would make things even worse.” Annie stood to go back to the house.
    I reached for her hand. “Peter will be watching out for me from the back porch.”
    “My nemesis,” Annie said.
    “Your nemesis? You hardly know him.”
    “How right you are. I haven’t spent every minute of the day with him, mooning over him. I haven’t disobeyed my teacher, the one who raised me, in order to be with him. You are so right, Helen. I don’t know him, and I am sorry to say at this moment I don’t even know you. But I do know one thing. I know men.”
    “You knewJohn.” The minute I said it I knew it was a mistake. Since he’d left we rarely said his name.
    “You’re right. I knew John. I knew him so well that even though I married him, and he befriended you, he walked out after draining us of as much money as he could get.”
    “Is that what’s wrong? Has John contacted you? Does he want to give the marriage another chance?”
    “No,” Annie said, tracing her hand in mine. “You forget. He’s not a giver. He’s a taker. That’s all.”
    “That’s not true. He typed my manuscripts all night when I couldn’t. He taught me about Socialism, when everyone else thought I had no right to think or write about anything but blindness. He opened up the world to me.”
    “He opened up our bank account. He drank our profits, took
your
money, Helen, to go to Europe for four months while you and I dragged our sorry selves across the country giving yet more talks. And he left us. He’s gone. Staying in a rattletrap room in Boston that he set on fire that last time we visited—too drunk to put out his lighted cigarette. And we’re still paying his expenses, my dear girl. Wake up. John was no good. This one”—she gestured toward the house where Peter stood—“won’t be any good either. Helen, wake up.”
    Who was it that woke me up to desire? John Albert Macy, Annie’s husband. It started the day of my Radcliffe graduation in 1904 at the Tremont Temple in Boston. The old century creaked behind us. I heard it. I was a woman now. “Stay still,” Annie tapped into my palm. She sat dressed in black beside me. All ninety-seven girls waiting for our new lives to begin. I stood on stage inhaling dust, chalk, and theater grease. And just before I walked out to get my diploma I felt the strange, haunting echo of new things to come.
    JohnAlbert Macy sat in the front row, watching. He had married Annie the year before, and become part of our lives. Lived with us in our seventeen-room farmhouse. Built me a stone wall so I could walk freely in the woods. Strung a wire across the trees so I could daily walk free—free! As far as I’d ever gone on my own.
    Nights he stayed in his study writing his new book. I stayed up late, too, typing fresh pages of my autobiography, then tearing pages out of the typewriter to show him. When we were finished for the night, exhausted, I would go upstairs, put on my nightgown, and get into bed. Under the covers I felt his tread move past my room, a man-tread, heavy, thick, so it ran up the floorboards to my bed where I lay awake. The floorboards suddenly still between our two bedrooms.
    I pictured him taking off his shirt, his