Helen Keller in Love by Kristin Cashore Page B

“Tell me, Helen, who doesn’t?”
    “I’m sorry.” His criticism of me seemed like a small betrayal. Did he think I forgot that I needed money coming in? The cost of Annie’s test and treatment suddenly flooded through me.
    “Seems like you’re always apologizing.” He traced my upper lip with his fingers. “But then you go ahead and do whatever you want, anyway.”
    I can’t remember a time when Mother didn’t need my help. She needed me to ease her guilt, her sorrow. When I was almost twelve years old, Annie and I traveled to Tuscumbia in June to find my father very low on money—almost bankrupt. Everything he owned was mortgaged. My baby brother, Phillips, had whooping cough, and my half-brother, James, had what seemed to be typhoid fever. Exhausted, Mother cared for them. She had no nurse, no cook. Annie loaned my father thirty-five dollars of her own, and thirty-five of mine, too, so heavily was he in debt.
    My father threatened to have me become part of a freak show, to be an exhibit: people would flock to see the blind, deaf, mute girl talk with her hands.
    “They’ll pay me five hundred dollars a week,” he yelled. The air in our Tuscumbia house so thick it felt like wool around me, so heavy I could not remove it from my eyes, my mouth. My great-great-grandfather had a claim to thousands of acres of Alabama land, Robert E. Lee was a second cousin to my grandmother; my father was a Confederate Army captain—but after the Civil War his title was about all he had left. Finally, Mother snapped at my father, “You’ll never use her to support us.” But the message was clear: She would fight for me, yes. But the need to make my own life was up to me.
    So Itold Peter I had to go to Boston Common, I had to be on the podium, in front of the crowd, but I didn’t tell him why. That since an early age I’ve needed a crowd to let me know I have a reason for being. The warmth of their applause slowing, for a moment, the sorrow I, too, carry inside me.
    So I turned to him and said, “I have to go. And I’ll need you with me.”
    He hesitated.
    “Look. I’ll split the twenty-dollar honorarium.”
    “You’re too generous,” Peter said.
    “It will pay for our train ride—round-trip.”
    “And two martinis,” he laughed. “Okay. Boston Common, here we come.” Peter pushed the pile of letters away. “Now, missy, Annie will be back in a few hours and your mother gets here tomorrow, so let’s attend to some more important business right now.”
    We had the whole morning together. And I got hungry. A wild growling in my stomach. Together we walked the hall to the kitchen and had toast slathered with jelly, huge glasses of milk, and a bowl of porridge that I made myself.
    Then by the kitchen table, the whole kitchen filled with the scent of ripe peaches, he pulled me close to him until I was breathless, and he said, “Can I see the ripe, bawdy Helen?” With one hand he reached behind me to close the kitchen curtains, then slid a date into my mouth; I bit it, then slid it between his teeth.
    His mouth tasted like the earth’s deep dark.
    Then he lifted up my blouse.
    “I’ll put upwith your mother. I’ll help you take care of Annie. I’ll even go to the rally with you and take my fee in cold hard cash because it’s my job. But pleasure?” He put his fingers on my blouse, and unbuttoned the top button.
    “That’s free.”

Chapter Fourteen

    I ’ve written twelve books about my blindness, and in them I said I was an optimist, fully alive since the day in college when I’d read Descartes’s “I think, therefore, I am,” and decided I could use my intellect to overcome any obstacles in my way. I wanted for nothing. I was as capable as any sighted or hearing person. Yet I never said how much I yearned for that which came so easily to others: the ability to love a man, to have a child. Those things would never come freely to me. So a fury raged in me. I became a burnt fuse inside, nothing but