Page 88 of Happiness for Beginners

“I know that.”

“But you can’t see.”

“I can see. It’s just blurry. Anyway, I know your voice. And your gait.”

“My gait?”

“It’s very distinctive.”

“Are you hurt?” I asked, still crawling closer.

“Not much.”

“I’m going to help you.”

“Okay.”

“Deep, slow breaths.”

He did a few of those and, while he was at it, I reached him. As soon as I was in arms’ distance, he grabbed me and pulled me the last couple of feet like a drowning man grabs at a life preserver. He put his arms around me crushingly tight and pressed his face into the nook between my neck and my shoulder. The air pushed and pulled against me as he panted exactly the way you do when you’re terrified of something. I couldn’t imagine what he had to be terrified of, but in that moment it didn’t matter.

I slid my hands up and down his back, patting and soothing the best I could. “It’s okay,” I said, over and over. “I’m going to help you.”

We stayed like that for a good while, the sky fading, the evening air losing its warmth. As I held on to him, his breathing slowed and settled.

After a while, I said, “I thought you had a strap to keep your glasses on.”

“I did. But we used it to hold Caveman’s boot together when it came apart on a day hike.”

“There was nothing else you could’ve used?”

“Not at the moment.”

I shook my head. “Always the hero.”

“I’m so stupid,” he said then, into my neck.

“You’re not stupid,” I said. “You just lost your glasses.”

“I shouldn’t even be here,” he said.

I thought about how he’d faked his medical report. “Well,” I said, “that might be true, actually.”

He leaned back a little, and looked down at his hands. “Do you remember how I signed up for this trip—but then I canceled? And then I signed up again?”

“Sort of,” I said. Not really.

“I canceled because I was having trouble with my eyes. And after several exams and a bunch of tests, it turned out that I have an inherited vision disorder that can’t be fixed.”

“You mean like the night blindness?”

“That’s part of it.”

I waited.

“Over the next few years,” he said then, still looking down, “I am going to lose—” Here, he took a deep breath, hitching at the height, and let it deflate slowly before he finished: “—my sight.”

All I could do was echo. “Lose your sight?”

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