The Window Read online

  The Window

  Jeanette Ingold

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Reader Chat Page

  Chatting with Jeanette Ingold

  Look for Jeanette Ingold's

  Other Books by Jeanette Ingold

  Pictures, 1918

  Airfield

  harcourt, inc.

  orlando austin new york

  san diego toronto london

  Copyright © 1996 by Jeanette Ingold

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,

  or any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of

  the work should be mailed to the following address:

  Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida, 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First Harcourt paperback edition 1996

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ingold, Jeanette.

  The window/Jeanette Ingold.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When she comes to live with relatives on a Texas

  farm, fifteen-year-old Mandy encounters the grandmother

  she never knew and begins to come to terms with her blindness

  caused by the automobile accident that killed her mother.

  [1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Blind—Fiction.

  3. People with disabilities—Fiction. 4. Family life—Texas—

  Fiction. 5. Ghosts—Fiction. 6. Texas—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.I533Wi 2003

  [Fic]—dc21 2002191957

  ISBN 0-15-204926-6

  Text set in Fairfield Medium

  Designed by Camilla Filancia

  Printed in the United States of America

  H G F

  This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, organizations,

  and events portrayed in this book are products of the author's

  imagination. Any resemblance to any organization, event, or

  actual person, living or dead, is unintentional.

  For my husband, Kurt

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of the teachers and counselors who answered my numerous questions and who read and commented on the manuscript: Fred Bischoff, Judy O'Toole-Freel, Bob Maffit, Dennis Slonaker, and Dr. Karen Wolffe; of willing readers Jamie and Kristy Maffit; of students at the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind who reviewed the manuscript and talked about it with me; and of my good friends who gave varied and valued help: Peggy Christian, Hanneke Ippisch, Wendy Norgaard, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, Greg Patent, and Carol Soth. I especially thank my editor, Diane D'Andrade.

  Chapter 1

  STAY SEATED, Mandy," the flight attendant says. "When the other passengers have gotten off, I'll come get you."

  Right. She should try staying seated herself, when everybody else is standing up and the guy by the window wants out and stuff's tumbling from thé overhead bins and you get bumped half into the aisle.

  A man says, "Watch it," and some other man says, "Hey." Suddenly there's a pocket of hot silence. Everyone around has just realized I can't see.

  "Those must be your folks. They've got a sign with MANDY on it."

  Then a woman is hugging me, Aunt Emma I guess. Her front is soft and she's shorter than me. She laughs, flustered. "I knew you were fifteen, but somehow I hadn't pictured ... I mean, I thought of you younger..."

  A man hugs me, and another, hugs of wool jackets and aftershave, clumsy big hugs, and their voices rumble.

  One tells me he's my uncle Gabriel. Great-uncle Gabriel. They're all greats, for that matter, Great-uncles Abe and Gabriel and Great-aunt Emma, who is Gabriel's wife.

  "So, Mandy," he says, "I hope you're going to liven up our gloomy old house."

  "Gabriel, hush," Aunt Emma whispers. "It's too soon."

  "Don't worry about me," I say. "It's OK."

  And even if it's not, I can take care of myself.

  That's my gift. Other girls get blond hair and nice families and brains that tell them the right things to say. I've got knowing how to take care of myself, and how to face what I have to face.

  Like that night I woke up in the hospital and heard the nurses talking about whether they should take me to my mom. One said, "I hate for her to see," as if there was any way I could through bandages over eyes that had stopped working.

  Besides, did that nurse think I couldn't imagine how my mom was? That I couldn't guess what happened to people when they got thrown from cars and smashed against utility poles?

  I fussed until she put me into a wheelchair, took me to another floor, to intensive care, and I was too dumb to wonder why I was getting to go there now when they hadn't let me for days and days.

  "Here's your mother," the nurse told me, and I had to take her word for it. The only sounds in the room were machine sounds.

  I found my mother's arm, reached for her face, but the nurse moved my hand away. "You'll dislodge the tubing."

  I listened for Mom to make some noise, even to just breathe out loud, but all the room became one steady, tiny monitor blip.

  "Hey, Mom," I said, "you sure we can afford the rent here?"

  I could feel the nurse get uptight, knew she was thinking: Hard case; people like these don't have feelings like they should.

  "Don't worry, Mom," I said. "I'll get along."

  My mom died the next morning, without me ever knowing if she'd heard.

  This is my first time to Texas. The cold air surprises me. Somehow I thought Texas, even in the north, would be warm and dusty-smelling, not damp and cold and made empty by a wind without scent. There is no sun; I would feel it through my eye-lids. I would see it. I can see sunlight, bright light. There is none this day.

  We drive a long while after leaving the Dallas airport, first over highway and then back roads, and then I'm inside a house and still chilly. Aunt Emma puts a bundlely sweater on my shoulders and I hear a furnace come roaring on. "Cold November," says Uncle Abe. "We'll have heat in just a few minutes."

  I can't stop a shiver.

  "Em," says Abe, "guess we've got another cold-blooded one," and I think he's saying that I'm mean, but he's not.

  Gabriel says, "Your Uncle Abe means thin-blooded. Emma always wants the heat up."

  The house smells of cooking, onion and broccoli and meats layered one meal into the next, nice smells, but smells.

  And of flowers, but not sweet ones like my roommate's at the hospital. I ask Aunt Emma what kind and she says marigolds. "About the last, I guess. We could get frost any night now."

  "Most people plant marigolds to keep deer away," says Gabriel, "that's how bad they smell. But Em likes them."

  "An honest smell," says Aunt Emma, "and they're easy to grow." Her answer starts another question. It seems to hang in the air: This Mandy, does she grow
easy?

  No, I want to shout. I don't grow easy. I'm trying the best I can and messing up terribly and I don't see how the three of you are going to make anything any better.

  No, I want to shout. Don't you read? It's never easy to raise a child, not even for the people whose job it's supposed to be. Mothers grow children. Not great-aunts and old uncles.

  No, I want to shout. Stare at me, in this bundlely sweater. I don't even know quite where to look, now that you're silent and your voices don't tell me where you are. Do I look easy to grow?

  "May I see my room, please?" I ask.

  Again that silence. I'd said, May I see. You'd think I'd know better, would have learned these last weeks what see and look do to people who can, when they hear the words said in front of someone who can't. When someone who can't says them herself.

  "Certainly," answers Aunt Emma. She laughs, an embarrassed little laugh. "Actually, we have a choice for you. About what room you want, I mean. There's one here on this floor..."

  "Aren't your bedrooms all upstairs?"

  I know they are. Mom had a picture of this house, though she'd never been in it. "My mother's house," she'd say, when she'd find me looking at it. "Your grandmother's."

  Again that embarrassed little laugh. "Yes," Aunt Emma says, "but there's a little room down here, a study, that we thought you could..."

  "Whose study?"

  "Well, your uncle Abe's, but..."

  "I don't need it," he breaks in. "I can work perfectly well upstairs. Lots of space in my bedroom for a desk."

  I ask, "What's the other choice?" I know what they're doing, trying to give me a room where I won't have to climb steps. But I'm blind, not crippled.

  "The other one is on the second floor," says Emma, "but it's so tiny..."

  It's Uncle Gabriel who interrupts this time. "Actually, there's another choice," he says. "Nobody's using the attic room, nobody has for years. It's not much bigger, but..."

  "Let me see it, please."

  I am not going to stop saying see just to spare their feelings. It's what I mean. And what do they want me to say, anyway? Let me feel the attic, please? Smell the attic? Choose it for my bedroom without learning one thing about it first?

  It's Gabriel who puts my hand on his arm and walks me to the staircase. I run the tip of my long cane side to side. The bare treads are wood and very wide, worn to rounded edges.

  "It's a long flight," he says.

  I start up on my own, as rapidly as I can go and not hesitating once, even when I'm thinking, Please God help me find the top so I take a smooth step onto it and don't fall on my face. And I do it right.

  I wait for the others. Aunt Emma comes up wheezing. I've made her climb the steps faster than she usually does. Abe doesn't come up at all.

  "The attic?" I ask. "How do we get there?"

  I start to unpack by myself, opening my suitcase on a high, creaking bed. It's afternoon now, and someone has cleaned and made the bed with sheets and a puffy quilt. Aunt Emma comes in long enough to hang lace curtains. "Washed and pressed," she says. "They don't give much privacy, but there's no one out there but cows."

  She chatters as she works, telling me about Herefords and Angus and how the uncles are thinking of trying some exotic breed.

  I hear metal snap. "There, done," Aunt Emma says. An instant later she touches my hand. "Mandy," she begins. "Mandy, I'm glad your caseworker found us. Your uncles and I had no idea we even had a niece."

  I can't decide which response to pick from the several that come to me: I'm not your niece, I'm your grandniece; I didn't know about you, either; I must have been some surprise. Any one of them would lead to more talk, when all I want is to be left alone.

  "If you don't mind," I say, "I'll finish unpacking now."

  I find the closet and a dresser and put away my clothes, becoming angry all over again about how much is missing. Half my things got thrown away by the child services woman who closed up the apartment after Mom died, I guess because she thought my stuff looked cheap. "It wasn't your right," I told her when I learned what she'd done. She'd answered, "Your needs will be different in Texas."

  At least she left me my photos. Now I stand them on a dressing table. Mom. Her dad, who died before she was born. I touch the glass in the frames.

  The sun has come out now and it's making the attic too warm. I go toward the sun, feel behind the curtains to the window latch, unlock and raise the window. Fresh, cold air rushes in, blowing the curtains against my face. I hold them aside and lean out, into the wind. There's someone calling.

  I lean out farther, to hear....

  "Gwen. GWEN. Where are you?"

  It was a child's voice. "GWEN?"

  Footsteps sound on the stairs. "Mandy," Aunt Emma is saying, "I've got towels ... Oh, child, be careful. Don't lean so far out."

  "I heard something," I tell her. "Who is that boy calling? Wanting Gwen?"

  There's a space before she answers. Too long a space. "There's no one out there, child. You must be hearing the curtains whisper."

  Chapter 2

  I LEARN QUICKLY that this is a house of routine, with times for everything. If a time needs to be changed, nobody makes a big deal, but everyone knows. Something's changed.

  Enter Mandy. They must hate how I'm making everything in their lives change.

  Like Tuesday morning, my first morning in this house. Breakfast here is a sit-down, all-together affair that starts at 7:15. Tuesday I make the start but I'm late for the finish. One minute there's forks clinking against plates and talk about hay and pregnant cows and shopping lists, and the next minute I'm the only one left eating.

  "Don't wait for me," I say, but they do, and I know they're all replanning their mornings because I'm making things slow, have made them change what they do.

  A wave of longing for my mom, and for the easy way we lived, washes over me. Mom and I, we never had anything set enough to change.

  "Hungry, babe?" she'd ask, whenever she thought about food. It might be five in the afternoon or nine at night. Or 3:00 A.M., when she'd been awake and I'd heard her prowling in the hall. She'd know I wasn't sleeping, either, and ask, "Hungry, babe?"

  The memory is so strong I can hear her voice, and Gabriel's voice cutting through it is a jolt.

  "If you're done, Mandy," he says, "let's give Emma a hand with the dishes."

  "I don't think Mandy should...," Emma begins.

  But Gabriel's saying, "The door's just behind you, Mandy."

  He doesn't leave me any choice but to start toward it, even as I'm thinking, No, I can't help and I shouldn't be in a kitchen and please, how will I keep from breaking things and what if the stove's still on?

  Emma must be thinking the same things, because as soon as I step from carpet to tile, she's by my side. "Mandy, I'll walk you to the sink," she says.

  I let her guide me, and, reassured I won't get hurt, I move forward until I brush against something off to the right. "The kitchen table, Mandy," Emma says. "The refrigerator is along the wall to your left."

  I reach out and find its smooth, cool front.

  "Next there's more counter," Emma says, and I'm going to touch that, too, but before I can her voice sharpens into a warning. "Don't, there's the stove next."

  I jerk my hand back and right away hope no one has seen me do it. I will not let on that this scares me; I will not.

  And tumbling after that thought is the realization I'd jerked my hand away from warmth.

  As we round a corner I say what I've just learned, say it as though it's something I've known all along: "You don't have to worry about me getting burned. I'd feel heat before I'd actually touch a burner."

  But I'm thankful to hear Emma say, "That's enough exploring. Why don't you stand here?"

  Then someone's handing me a towel and soon I'm drying pots and lids, laying them on the counter. For a bit there's the whish and soft clang of Aunt Emma working at the sink and the clatter of the uncles loading things into the dishwasher. T
hen Emma says, "Mandy, we need to talk about what's next for you."

  One of the uncles takes a frying pan from my hand.

  "We're asking, Mandy," says Gabriel. "What do you want to do?"

  The question is school. Where. If I want to go away to this special one where there would be other blind kids or if I want to try the high school in town.

  Already my child study team has met with my aunt and uncles to go over reports from the rehab center where I was before coming here. I guess they've all pretty much decided the final decision can be left up to me. "She has potential for success in either environment" was the way it was put.

  The special school, which I'd have to board at, would have more equipment and a lot of specialists to. teach me all the things I suddenly need to know. And—get this bit—my "chances of social integration would be greatly enhanced."

  The local high school has some stuff, too, mainly in a resource room, but I'd be expected to do most of my work in regular classes. I could count on some help from itinerant teachers, teachers who go from school to school to work with kids like me, but, for sure, I'd be a lot more on my own.

  Now Uncle Gabriel breaks into my thoughts. "So, time for a command decision," he says. "Pros and cons either way."

  He doesn't have to spell out the cons, and, besides, I doubt if he thinks of the same ones I do. A school of fifteen hundred normal kids—will they make room for me? Whisper and watch me? Will they laugh at me?

  Don't be stupid, Mandy, I think. Of course they will, but since when haven't you been able to handle being the outsider?

  Mandy the new girl, I think. Mandy the new blind girl. So what's the difference?

  I don't fool myself. The difference is huge and lies, cold and sick-feeling, in the pit of my stomach. I swallow back welling saliva.

  "The town school, I guess," I say.

  It's not a guess, though. More a gamble, or a chance I have to take. I'm afraid not to try, afraid to disappear into that special school for blind kids. I'm not ready to give up, to disappear from my life. I don't ever want to be.