CHAPTER 12

Kyra Talbot stood in the doorway of her trailer in a sleeveless green dress, listening to the little West Texas town of Van Horn, population 987, waking up. A pickup truck was accelerating down Eisenhower, and from the straining note in the exhaust, Kyra guessed it was Mr. Azucena’s Chevy. She heard children yelling at each other from somewhere behind her and figured it was the Kirby kids, Jack and Joanna, fighting over something. Off in the distance, she could hear the occasional car passing through on IH-10.

It was a hot, stifling morning. Kyra focused on the heat and the dust against her face and bare arms. There wasn’t even a trace of a breeze in the air. She could smell dry grass. She was already starting to sweat and the small of her back and her breasts under her bra were wet.

Next door, Misty Mae Burns let her screen door slam and walked outside, her shoes grating against the cinder path that led down to her curb. Kyra heard bottles clanking together softly, as though in a bag, and guessed Misty Mae was taking out the trash.

“Morning, Misty Mae,” she said.

“Morning, Kyra.”

Misty Mae’s voice sounded rough, scratchy. There had always been a smoky hoarseness to her voice, but this morning she sounded rougher than usual. She almost had a wheeze to her, like there was a ball of phlegm caught in the back of her throat.

“You feelin’ okay, Misty Mae?”

“Lousy.”

Misty Mae’s husband Jake had come home from the oil fields over in Odessa for the Fourth of July weekend and the two of them immediately got after each other like two alley cats in heat. They’d been at it most of the afternoon, started drinking around dinnertime, and didn’t quit until long after Kyra had gone off to bed.

There was a muffled clatter of bottles being tossed into a metal trash can and then the sound of the lid being replaced.

“You hungover?” Kyra said.

She had been hungover once, and she hadn’t liked it. She hadn’t liked being drunk, either. Being blind, Kyra relied heavily on her other senses, and the alcohol had left her with a feeling that she’d had a blanket tossed over her. Everything had seemed muted and washed out, and it scared her.

“Yeah, maybe,” Misty Mae said in answer to her question. “Hung over, or maybe I’m coming down with whatever Jake brought back from Odessa.”

“What’s wrong with Jake?”

“Flu, probably,” Misty Mae said. “He come home yesterday complaining his back was hurtin’ him. Last night he started throwing up. I thought he’d just drank too much, you know? But this morning he looks like something the dog coughed up.”

“You gonna take him over to see Doc Perez?”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe. I ain’t feelin’ so hot myself. Jesus, if that man got me sick, I’m gonna kick his ass. I can’t afford to miss no more work.”

Kyra could hear Misty Mae’s labored breathing.

“Is it hot out here to you?” Misty Mae asked. “I don’t mean summertime hot. Good Lord, I think I’m burning up.”

She coughed, and it was a deep, rattling sound.

“I’m gonna go inside and take a nap,” Misty Mae said. “I’m sorry if we kept you and Reggie up last night.”

“You didn’t keep us up,” Kyra said, though that was a lie. They’d had Tim McGraw’s Greatest Hits blaring out of the tape player in Jake’s truck till at least two.

“Okay. You take care of yourself, you hear, Misty Mae? You let me know if you want me to call Doc Perez for you.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll see ya.”

“Yeah,” Kyra said.

She listened as Misty Mae trudged up her steps and let the screen door slam behind her. Then Kyra turned and felt for the doorknob to her own trailer and went inside.

She was feeling troubled, and it didn’t have anything to do with the way sighted people so carelessly said things like, “I’ll see ya” or “See you later.” Kyra had been blind since she was four, and she had long since gotten over it.

No, it was something else that was bothering her. She was afraid and trying hard not to show it.

She made her way into the kitchen, the fingers of her right hand dancing along the wall, placing her in her mental map of the world she knew. She felt the hard, cool edge of the refrigerator, and she stopped and turned around.

Directly in front of her was the sink.

She reached for the cabinet above it and took down a plastic cup and filled it with water. Growing up, she had developed the habit of putting the tip of her finger down inside the top of the glass and waiting for it to get wet. That’s how she knew when to shut off the tap. She no longer needed to do that. These days, she could tell just by how long the water had been running.

She took a few nervous sips and put the cup down.

She let her fingers glance over the counter, over a damp hand towel, over a few pieces of used silverware her Uncle Reggie had once again neglected to drop into the sink, and finally to the radio.

Kyra touched the baffled cover over the speaker, moved to the right side of the unit, and found the volume knob. She gave it a quick twist and listened as the voices flooded back into the kitchen.

All her life, the radio had been a warm and wonderful friend. She loved music. She loved listening to the high school football games on Friday nights with the cool desert night air blowing in through the open window over the sink, carrying with it the sweet, smoky smells of a nearby barbecue. She even loved the preachers on the AM channels, the way they could give the word “blasphemous” six syllables, the quaking timbre of their voices as they shouted about sin and immorality and turning to Jesus in your desperate hour of need.

She felt the thrill of inclusion when she listened to the radio. But this morning she was not feeling that way at all. None of the regular programs were running. Instead, it was the news. There had been an outbreak of the necrosis filovirus along the east coast of Florida sometime in the last thirty-six hours, and it was spreading out of control. There was talk of moving officers from the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority into the area, of calling in the National Guard and even the military to support local and state police, but no one had any real answers. They talked all morning, and within just a few minutes, Kyra realized the newscasters were talking just to fill up the silence of what they didn’t know. It was the same thing over and over again. Breaking developments were just some other person saying the same things that had already been said, and nowhere in there did she hear anything new.

It reminded her of the first outbreak, the one in Houston. She was nineteen. She could remember everything from that morning, the same way the old-timers in town told her they remembered exactly what they were doing and where they were the day Kennedy was shot. That Tuesday, like every Tuesday back then, she’d stayed home from school till 10 o’clock, when Uncle Reggie would help her into his truck and together they’d make the drive to Fort Stockton, where she and six other blind kids from surrounding towns met for their real-world-skills class. She had been standing right where she was now, listening all morning to the sometimes frantic, sometimes stunned radio announcers babbling the same thing over and over again, and the monotony of it had terrified her even more than the insanity of what they were actually saying.

She heard footsteps from off to her left, Uncle Reggie’s heavy tread on the linoleum tile.

“Are you still listening to that?” he asked.

She nodded. She was standing still, arms crossed over her chest, cupping her elbows in her hands, chewing on her lower lip.

“Anything new?”

She shook her head.

A moment later, she felt his hand on her shoulder. He was a big man, with heavy, meaty fingers that could completely envelope her delicate shoulders, but he was also a gentle man, kind.

She put her hand over his.

“The world is so big,” she said. “I don’t know if I can make you understand that, Uncle Reggie. I don’t know if I can make you understand how much it terrifies me.”

“It has nothing to do with being blind. You know that, right?” he said. “Everybody feels that way. If the world doesn’t seem absurd to you, then you’re not alive. At least you’re not living a life worth living.”

She smiled faintly. Those were pretty words, but they didn’t make her feel any better. She thought of telling him so and then reined herself back. It was pointless.

She dropped her hand back down to her side.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“I know you are.”

“But you’re not scared, Reggie?”

He hesitated. She knew he was deep in thought. He always thought before he spoke, and it made her wonder what his face looked like at those moments.

“I lost a lot of people during the first outbreak,” he said finally. “A lot of friends. Yeah, it scares me to think of what might happen. I hear this stuff going on in Florida now and all the people who are still inside the quarantine zone trying to bust out and it scares me.”

“Will it spread?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope not.”

“The man on the Abilene station said they’ve already had twenty reported cases.”

“Abilene’s a good, long way away, Kyra.”

“Yeah but, are we…okay here?”

“I think so.”

“The radio said we should get some supplies. Bottled water, extra gas, stuff like that.”

“We’re gonna be okay, Kyra.”

“Uncle Reggie, please.”

She heard him sigh.

“What do you want me to do, Kyra? You want me to go over to the Walmart in Fort Stockton and get some supplies?”

She nodded.

He sighed again.

“You gonna be okay here while I’m gone?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“You’re not gonna let that radio scare you, are you?”

“No, I promise.”

She heard his boots scuffing across the floor as he moved to the door. His keys jangled as he took them down from the hook on the wall next to the light switch.

“You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

Kyra nodded. She listened as he fired up his truck and pulled out of the drive and accelerated up 6th Street. A moment later, she was alone again, with the sounds of the newsman on the radio and the sound of dust blowing against the windows and the weight of her fears pushing down on her, making it hard to breathe.

Inside her shell of blindness, she wondered why the world had to be this way.