Until I Find You - Rea Frey Page 0,22

in and out of the hospital so many times, I’d lost count. The doctors constantly warned her that she needed to change her diet and drinking habits, but she told them that if she had a limited amount of time on this great big earth, she was going to listen to herself, not them. She enjoyed every day, I’ll give her that. And she’d gotten to meet Jackson.

Her death wasn’t grisly like Chris’s, the wreckage of my beautiful thirty-eight-year-old husband displayed on Milwaukee Avenue like roadkill. Only his tie was clean, blown neatly over one shoulder, as if he’d placed it there on purpose.

Dignity in death.

I take a deep, cleansing breath, hold it until I feel dizzy, and exhale completely. “Enough.” I abandon those memories, place the tie carefully back in the closet, and ponder what to wear. When I was first losing my sight, I used ColorTest, a gadget that actually alerted me to what colors to wear. Now, I buy clothes in muted shades of gray, black, and white so everything matches.

I drop Jackson with Jess for my therapy session. I kiss him good-bye and hesitate. I’ve only left him with Jess one other time, but I tell myself he’ll be fine, and continue toward the train. Today is like any other day, except I am going into the city. This is about my first therapy session with Dr. Gibbons. It’s not about the life I used to live with Chris, or as a musician, or with Jake. My fingers tighten instinctively around my cane at the mere thought of Jake in the city—our city—alive and well.

This is your life now, I remind myself. This is who you are. You are a mother. There is no pretend reason to go into the city anymore. No husband. No condo. No rehearsal to get ready for. No past lovers to avoid. No agenda. I am going in for therapy. Period.

I concoct the markers in my mind: the thin sidewalks that outline tidy yards; the sharp left turn at the end of our street onto Park Avenue. The white vinyl fence I drag my fingers over like water; the divot in the weed-choked sidewalk. I maneuver over the holes and watch for unassuming objects—cones, rocks, a feral cat—and loosen the grip on my cane. The parallel Metra tracks, surrounded by groomed pits of gravel, bisect the town into distinct halves. A train barrels to the right. To the left, Glos Memorial Park, another spot I often walk to, blossoms past a cluster of mammoth trees. The bridge ahead bows in a slight incline and is always decorated for each season. I pull these details from memory—from updated descriptions my friends feed me, from long walks I used to take with my mother, where she’d indulge me in the latest Elmhurst gossip.

Delicious scents of baked bread seep from Courageous Bakery. I sidestep rows of yellow plastic chairs fanned in front to facilitate morning loitering. Five steps, then Lou Malnati’s. Ten steps, then Kimmer’s Ice Cream. Twenty-five steps, then Brewpoint Coffee.

At the station, I fish out my card. The announcer’s voice fades as our train thunders to a stop. The doors hiss open, and I use my cane to step on. I settle in a window seat, remembering how much I used to love trains, how endless rolling green hills would whip by, the lush, changing landscapes making my life seem so insignificant. One of my greatest pleasures used to be in watching the world from a window and pondering my place in it. What I would do to glimpse even one more meadow. One more hill. One more tree.

I plug in my headphones, shuffle through emails on my phone, and open up Facebook again. I check the Chicago Lighthouse page, a forum for the blind. I miss my vision-impaired city friends. There used to be a small group of us who met up at the Chicago Lighthouse once a week. After Chris died and I decided to move in with my mother, it was like suffering yet another loss.

Having other vision-impaired friends was a lifesaver in countless ways. We didn’t talk about our disability—we just talked about life. But they understood my need to be in the suburbs.

When I left, a few of them warned me how hard it would be without vision-impaired friends, but I’d knocked away their concerns. I didn’t want to admit to anyone how hard it was to prove myself to a world of people who took their