Then, as luck would have it, our next-door neighbor Mrs. Harris—beloved resident watchdog—spied my dad and me returning from our run. Her warm gray eyes disappeared into a frown that compressed her double chin as we walked past her house. A few weeks ago, Mrs. Harris had questioned our goal of climbing Rainier this summer with a “Why on earth would you do that?” Today, she questioned our sanity: “Why on earth would you still want to do that?”
Who knew that concern could be so suffocating? At her question, I felt the wild rush of colossal unfairness. Here was just one more way our lives would change, one more plan being stripped from Dad. I made a hasty excuse to leave, but in my hurry to get away from her prying eyes, I almost tripped on a box left on our doorstep. My irritation was two seconds away from boiling over until I noticed the logo of my dad’s favorite camera supply store on the label.
My camera had arrived.
I cast a guilty glance at Dad, who was still chatting with Mrs. Harris on her porch. How could I have wasted a fortune when he was worried about earning a living once he was blind? I rested the box on my hip as I opened the front door quietly. Without a word, I crept upstairs like I was stashing contraband drugs inside our home.
“Shana, that you?” Mom called.
“I’ll be down in a sec!” I answered, leaving the box on my bedroom floor. After I shut the door with a firm click, I trotted downstairs toward the tantalizing scent of garlic. Foil-wrapped baguettes rested on the kitchen counter alongside a pan of roasted Brussels sprouts and crispy pancetta. “Wow, Mom, you went all out.” I examined the half dozen types of cookies tucked in plastic bags.
“Ginny sent another care package,” she said.
“That’s so Ginny.”
Mom leaned down to peer into the oven. “I thought I should start freezing some meals for later.”
“Later,” I silently translated, meant “after blindness.”
“Mom,” I said, “we still have months.…”
“Maybe.”
Half of Mom refused to believe that Dad’s sight was moving from endangered to extinct; the other half seemed to be hunkering down for war. At the sound of the front door opening, Mom called out eagerly, “Gregor!” But there was no returning “Hey, hey! Where are my best girls?” Instead, we got a sepia version of Dad, bled of color: “Hey.”
Mom chirped, “Hope you’re hungry!”
Dad managed a limp smile. In the dim kitchen light, I couldn’t see the last traces of the bruises from his fall, but there was no missing the dark bags pleating the skin under his eyes. Never a great sleeper, Dad looked like he hadn’t managed more than a few hours since his diagnosis.
“So lasagna and burritos. We might get tired of eating them,” Mom babbled, “but they freeze really well.”
Few people are immune to the call of Mom’s four-cheese lasagna, the one dish she can cook reliably well. But tonight, not even this could cajole a real smile from Dad, not when he spotted his camera and their Fifty by Fifty Manifesto alongside a new guidebook, 1,000 Ultimate Adventures, on the kitchen table.
“Mollie…” Dad sighed and bypassed the table for the living room, where he all but fell into his old, fraying armchair, imprinted with his shape.
If he thought he could escape Mom, he was wrong. She followed and perched on the coffee table in front of him. “Gregor, listen. I think we should cash out our retirement.”
Dad stood, shaking his head, and sidestepped around her to the kitchen, where he reached for a beer in the fridge. Now didn’t seem like a good time to remind him that we’d been told alcohol might accelerate his blindness. Mom couldn’t care less that he had his back to her. She plodded on. “Let’s take the next six months and travel. You can do your photography. We’ve got forty-nine places left on our manifesto. So let’s choose the places you want to see the most. And just go.”
Finally, Dad turned and took her hand, leading her to the kitchen table as though she were the one going blind. He sat at the head of the table and said, “Mollie, I love you for suggesting that, but it’s totally impractical. You know that.”
Mom’s eyes burned with evangelical intensity. “No, you listen to me, Gregor Wilde. I don’t want us to look back on life and regret that we didn’t do more before it was too late. I’m not going to just sit around for the next six months playing wait and see.”
“So to speak.” Dad laughed so grimly that I flinched.
“Aside from money, what’s keeping us?” Mom argued.
“What are we going to do about Shana, for one? Junior year’s the most important year. We can’t exactly pull her out of school and take her with us.”
“Why not? We can homeschool. She’s only got three more months of junior year. Colleges would love that she went traveling, and just think of her portfolio. Right, Shana?” Mom’s gaze slipped over to me as she nodded her head vigorously, willing me to agree. “Right?”
But I was stuck on Mute.
It was one thing to declare to Reb and Ginny and anyone who would listen that I was done with high school. College couldn’t come any faster. And another to pull out halfway through junior year.
Mom urged, “Let’s choose one trip, then.”