Blinded

TWENTY-SEVEN

Lauren and Grace arrived home less than ten minutes after Detective Reynoso departed.

Their arrival wasn’t a pretty sight. They had both left the house dressed for a warm fall day, and both were wet from the storm and chilled to the bone. Lauren’s violet eyes had taken on the gray-purple pall of extreme fatigue; whatever she and Grace had been doing since I’d left to meet Sam that morning had worn her beyond whatever limits she possessed that day.

How guilty was I feeling?

With Grace in my arms, I cranked up the heat in the master bathroom and began running a bath for Lauren. Then I took Grace into her room, and got her dry and clean and into fresh warm clothes. My daughter, sometimes a tough kid to put down for a nap, found the sanctuary of sleep moments after her head hit the mattress in her crib. I promised her, silently, that because of her compliance during this crucial moment in our lives, I would overlook at least one moderate-to-severe teenage indiscretion that was certain to occur in her future. She seemed to smile back at me from her sleep, as though she were already planning whatever it was I would need to forgive her for.

I shuddered at the thought.

When I got back to the bathroom with a steaming mug of tea, I found Lauren in the tub.

“No caffeine?” she asked.

“Mint. No caffeine. I’m sorry, I screwed up today.”

“I know you’re sorry.”

“Sam-”

She shook her head, just a little, and asked, “He’s okay?”

I nodded. She forced a smile in reply.

“You didn’t look too good when you came in,” I said.

She lowered herself farther into the soapy water. She was covered all the way to her chin. Her toes and colored toenails, painted a shade of coral that I was sure Grace had selected, popped out of the water at the far end of the tub. “Something’s cooking, Alan. I have brain mud. I’m more tired than Bill Gates is rich, and in case you haven’t noticed, my eyelids aren’t blinking at the same time.”

I tried hard to look her in the eyes but not stare at her eyelids. “So what can I do?”

“Let’s give it a few hours, see what develops. The pin is definitely out of the grenade. We’ll see what’s going to blow up.”

“Maybe it’s a dud. Can I get you something to eat?”

“No, I’m not hungry. Some quiet, okay? Take the dogs, and don’t let me sleep past five. I love you.”

Multiple sclerosis roughly translates as “many scars.”

When a new wound forms on the protective covering of a nerve in the brain or spinal column-apparently caused by the body mistaking its own neural insulation for a gremlin of some kind-symptoms develop. What symptoms? It depends on what nerve is involved. As the wound heals and scar tissue grows to replace nature’s myelin, the symptoms either disappear totally, or they don’t diminish at all, or-and this is most likely-something happens in between.

It’s a total crapshoot.

Lauren and I didn’t often use the word “exacerbation.” To use it had the ugliness of a profanity. But as I left her toweling off after her quick bath-I stayed until then because I feared sleep would take her right there in the bathtub-we both knew that an exacerbation, a fresh wound on some previously unaffected nerve, was what we feared was happening.

If we were right? I didn’t want to think about it. But I knew the list of potential consequences was as long as the list of the body’s miraculous capabilities. Numbness, blindness, paralysis, weakness, bladder problems, GI problems-I stopped myself before the list grew any longer. And it could have grown much longer.

But repeating the litany of potential disabilities wasn’t helpful.

Did I cause Lauren to have an exacerbation by not taking my daughter to her friend’s birthday party?

No. Of course not.

I didn’t. Really.

Really.