It was her pupils that gave her away, in the end.
The girl had always been conscious of them, from the moment of her birth, like the opening and closing of her mouth, or the extension of her fingers towards a doorknob. For the first three years of her life, her pupils dilated wildly when she was delighted by fear, too high up on her father’s shoulders, or when the dog sniffed at her face for the first time. They closed to periods at the end of a sentence when she stayed up late into the night, not crying, but not sleeping either. Her surprise was never her own secret to hide, because it spread across her warm blue eyes, and into the rest of her face as her eyes became dark, all pupil.
She had not expected them to invade the entirety of her retinas, to become not black, but a space to be filled, an opening wide enough for more than just light to leak in, wide enough for some part of her to spill out.
By the time she was five, she had learned to get what she wanted. By dilating her pupils, she could ask her parents for anything and they could not help but find their limbs moving of their own accord to accommodate her. She used it only for extra-large portions of cake at birthdays, and a little bit longer before bedtime. She learned she could have anything.
One morning she asked her mother to stay home, pretending to be sick, and showed her the wildness of her large pupils, and the way they fluctuated as she grew hot and flushed (in fact there was not heat or flushing, but the quickness with which she flashed her flaring pupils made her mother insert the symptoms of a fever into here diagnosis) and went too far. Her panicked mother packed her into the family’s small car, and held her head as if it might crack open for the entire ride to the doctor’s office.
If she had not remembered him, had not recognized him on the train, she would not have had this problem at all. If she had never known him. If she had never slipped her hand into the back of his shirt collar, had never pressed her fingers against the bony knobs of the vertebrae that met the base of his skull. If she had never felt him thinking beneath the pad of her fingers while they sat — IF and IF and IF.
The doctor could find nothing wrong, of course. The girl held her pupils still and strong for the whole of the visit, dilating them slowly when a light was shined in her eye, and contracting them as it receded. When informed that the girl was normal, her mother chose to forget what she had seen, unconsciously replacing an absurd explanation with a non-explanation. Nothing had happened. There did not need to be an explanation.
The girl had learned to be more careful.
She practiced the contraction and dilation of her pupils with strangers in the park, and teachers, and competitors in little league sports. She chose people that would disbelieve what they had seen, or that she would never see again. People she would owe no explanation to in case she slipped up. Her mother never suspected that the woman ringing them up at the grocery store was staring in disbelief at her daughter, as the girl let one pupil grow smaller and smaller as the other remained steady and correctly sized. By age thirteen she could move her pupils from the size of the head of a pin to the edges of her retina in a quarter of a second. Not that she ever tried it in front of friends. Not that she ever used it more than to seem a little more wide-eyed, a little warmer than she might have otherwise been. She made her pupils big for the boys with limbs like a baby giraffe’s, all knobs and misplace momentum. She made them small for girls that made her worry about what she would wear to school the next day. She kept them the right size for anyone else, for people she didn’t know and for people she knew too well.
He had found some way to fix her in place, to take her pupils and widen them so that he could jump in and hold them open. He had made her want to stretch her eyes as far as the would open, just to see if she could fit him inside.
While she grew up, in the slow brambles hills out west, her pupils began to fix. High school, packed in between other people about to really become people, she found that a laziness of her mind kept her pupils still. She shied away from questions in class because they piqued her curiosity - when her hand raised through the chalk dust and into the air above her head she inevitably lost a small measure of control, just enough to feel like a hook had stopped in her chest, caught on a rib. So she decided not to hear the question, lest she found herself unable to keep from shouting with her eyes.
He had no hearing. No sense of the tone of music, but a better, almost carnal, knowledge of the rhythm. It was why she had put her hands to his head in the first place. She had imagined the way that, in a canoe, a stick dragging across the aluminum hull made a sound that was not just a sound, but an instance of pressure made vocal. She traced her fingertips across his skull like a treebranch, stiffly, lightly, yielding only at the boniest ridges of his head. She imagined that if she were to do it correctly, that her fingertips might reach him in a way that airwaves did not.
She didn’t graduate because she didn’t answer enough questions. Tests fascinated her because without having heard her teachers, the equation was left unbalanced. Without knowing what should have filled the blank spaces, she was forced to consider all the possibilities. Each theory led to a more exciting one, until one day she found herself clutching her chair, holding on for her life in the nearly-summer light of stuffy dusty classroom. Her eyes were flickering wildly, like the clicking of a movie projector. She dissolved, crying her only option to force her eyes shut, and still and slow.
While she rang the curviture of his skull, she tried whispering, her tongue tracing the shell-like curls of cartilage inside his ear. She said the words, then traced the shape of their letters, spelling out her sounds in a desperate attempt to make him hear her. When she remained unsure that he understood her, she tested her last remaining hypothesis. She put her mouth to his, and placed her words there instead.
She moved to the city. She had to, there was no one in her town who did not know what her eyes could do. The story of her eyes’ unnatural talent was starting to spread through the foothills to neighboring schools, and other towns’ post offices and diners. So she took the biggest bag she could fit over her narrow but perfectly straight shoulders and left town. She took Greyhounds as far as her money went, and managed to find one last long ride into the city with a small old woman in a beat-up silver pick-up truck. Her hair was silver too, and had kept it long and straight for the last fifty years of her life, since her first son was born. It nearly touched the backs of her knees, and when she wore it plaited strangers mistook her for any number of other ethnicities than her Irish forebears, for reasons they would not have been able to explain if pressed. The girl like the old woman because whenever they stopped at the florescent-lit truck-stop diners and gas stations, people stared at the woman while her hair turned translucent. It was a trick of the unnatural light, and it made her impossible not to watch. The old woman somehow never seemed to notice. She always looked just at the person she was speaking to, or vaguely over the heads of the people around her.
The girl would remember exactly three things the old woman said during their drive:
“I let anyone put a hand on me anywhere I didn’t tell them to put it,” (she had had three husbands)
and
“You’ve got such small hands dear ” (the girl did, but no one ever looked away from her eyes long enough to notice)
and
“My sons know where I am all the time. Now that they’re grown I don’t call them on the phone as much as I might, but everywhere I go, I mail them a letter, with a return address of the street I wrote it on. That way they know where I was, but not where I am. Makes it easier to surprise them when I do see them.”
She had watched him grow up, and remembered when he had stopped hearing. They were in third grade, and he was playing football in the parking lot of the grade-school. He was looking where he was going, and tripped over himself, slamming his head against the taillights of a parked car. He woke up three hours later, unable to hear the doctors that were shouting at him, asking if he knew where he was, who he was. He didn’t anymore. He didn’t know who he was if he couldn’t hear.
She remembered how his head drooped in class. The half-hearted gestures of a school-assigned sign language teacher that sat with him, gesturing signs to him that he either refused to learn or would not listen to. Then one day he was gone. “To a deaf school somewhere” she overheard another classmate say. She remembered the angle of his dropped head all those years later, and placed the bridge of her nose under his chin and lifted it. Then she made the mistake of holding it there and looking into his eyes.
After two years in the city, she had saved nearly all the city’s lost and down-trodden citizens. She had saved them from hunger, from bad parents or boyfriends, from themselves. When parachuting into the city with no money, and less of an idea about what she would encounter there, she got lucky. She still looked acceptable, if a little disheveled, and so was able to work as a waitress at a restaurant in the Polish district. Old Polish couples made her feel at home, and left small tips but big favors. She made friends, found couches, cleaned bookshelves and kitchen counters to earn her stay. She disassembled her pieces, and put them back in different places, her shifting tilting eyes the only part of her remaining impregnable.
But the city did act as a salve to her wound. So many people she saw a day, she could let out the fluctuation of her pupils on the train, concentrate on strangers who would never remember her face. Strangers who had not had their coffee yet. She was safe. She had put limits and measures on what she had begun to see as a disease she could not cure, but could control. Some days she needed to let go of control over her pupils in the midst of a crowd, so anyone could see if they had only looked. Almost no one ever looked. She flourished. When she finally learned to look at others, she learned to help them too.
They shattered her. They took her by the shoulders and shook her, and then moved up the muscled curve of her neck and warmed her cheek. They rested briefly on the peaks of her eyebrows, the apex of her surprise. And then the boy’s eyes descended, ringing through her own eyes like a horse-hair bow across a cello. Her pupils widened, past where she kept them, outside of her control, and then cracked. Her eyes were stuck. He had broken her with a look.
She scraped and saved. She felt in control for the first time since she had been a child. Her eyes followed her lead, like a dance partner that had finally learned the steps, and as long as she payed attention she was able to focus the apertures of her eyes with the precision and dexterity of a camera lens. She had trouble figuring out how to buy a plane ticket because she had never done so. She packed her bags (lightly as when she had left home before) and strained with her unwheeled suitcase down into the city subway. Her hair had grown long since she moved to the city, and she had decided to cut it before leaving. It kept it up, out of her face and away from her eyes. She found herself going to stroke or pull on it, and found herself touching her cheek instead. She would blush slightly. It was pleased embarrassment at the seeming nudity of her face. The subway shook around turns, and brought her to the outer rim of the city proper. As she climbed out of the subway station and into the airport terminal, a kind man with a hat helped her with her bags.
“Where do I buy my ticket?” she asked him after he pulled her bags off of the escalator.
He looked at her, seemed to think to ask a question, and then thought better of it. He pointed to the rows of men and women at computers, along the long counter in the middle of the giant room. She looked at all of the signs hanging above them American Airlines, Air France, Lufthansa. She had not known, she realized, that each destination had a separate airline. She decided on Rome. If asked why, she would only have been able to tell you that she knew once it had been the center of the known world. It was not known to her, or even imaginable yet. But it seemed like a place to start. The word itself was easy to say to the woman at the counter, and so seemed right to say when asked,
“Destination?”
The next question was
“Name?”
She gave it, and handed over the passport that her neighbor had diligently helped her acquire a month ago. After a few moments of clattering at the computer keyboard, the woman’s gray eyes turned confused.
“Do you have a flight reservation?” she asked.
The girl’s blank stare answered sufficiently. “I’d like the next ticket to Rome,” she tried to clarify.
It ended up that the next ticket was a day later. It cost more than she had guessed, but having had nothing before it didn’t bother her to nearly return to nothing. She decided, or perhaps never thought to do anything else, not to leave the airport. She spent the next day talking with businessmen who both missed their wives at home, and missed their wives in the past, and so projected both onto the girl talking to them in the uncomfortable metal seats they were waiting in. When they would leave, she would read magazines, and mostly avoided travelers that seemed her own age. She read every part of the paper that day, each at a different newsstand in the airport. She spread her dinner and breakfast over different small courses of plastic bags of dried food at the small shops scattered through the terminal. She watched as families convened, or dispersed, or became larger or smaller. She saw a proposal (without a ring, but on the verge of tears and with a shouted “of course”). She heard every language she knew any words in, but more that she did not understand at all. Even the janitors and flight attendants waiting to move on to different cities noticed her seeming occupation of the airport.
She nearly ended up sleeping through the arrival of her plane, but a bag knocked her in the knee as its owner passed her, and she was awake as the plane taxied to a stop out her window.
The flight seemed quick. Her neighbor was only interested in the movie playing in the seat in front of him, but after a day spent talking to strangers she found herself unusually relieved to be left alone. She fell asleep reading the emergency instructions on the laminated foldout from the seat in front of her.
She woke up in Rome, and walked her suitcase through turnstiles, customs, and crowds. She deciphered signs, gestured to other travelers and finally found her way into a metro car, in an underground train system that wound it’s way around inconvenient ruins, and archaeological sites.
The train car was burnished metal, and shone yellow with the lights that made a line on its ceiling. The windows shone the dark stone walls flashing past, a black drown punctuated by the occasional flash of an underground light that appeared as a white streak flashing into the passengers quiet cabin. And then suddenly they were out into the air. The subway had lurched out of the ground and been born again as a train, and suddenly in the light, she saw him. He was faced away from her, not reading, not even seeming to be watching the train around him or looking out the windows. When sound is gone, she couldn’t help but think suddenly, why would you not look at everything, put your eyes up against the glass and watch the world in the windows?
And she took her hand and pressed it lightly to the back of his head.
She walked forward to put her hand on his shoulder, to get him to turn, to make sure it was him. But it was not where her hand went.
Her pupils opened up beyond the limits of her eyes. They became a space that enveloped them both, that took him in and brought him to her ribcage. The slight pause between her heartbeats was the first sound he ever heard.
