Helen Keller in Love by Kristin Cashore Page A

I waited. “The book …”
    “Oh,
The Story of My Life
.”
    “Paid for it,” I exhaled. My autobiography had been published to critical acclaim when I was only in my twenties.
    “Looks like you bought this place in the halcyon days.” I felt his fingers peeling the decayed paint from the windowsill. “Spent money you couldn’t afford. But that’s not the strangest part. Let me get this straight. You wrote the story of your life when you were what, twenty-five?”
    “Don’t age me.” I gave him a poke. “I was twenty-two.”
    “Tell us all about yourself,” people urged. So I wrote
The Story of My Life
when I was a college student. The tale I told in my autobiography was one of utter triumph: of how Annie, then the Perkins School for the Blind, then Radcliffe, all carried me closer to the shores of the normal, sighted and hearing world. Books were my dearest friends, I wrote, making up for the lack of human company. But for all the success of that book, underneath there were so many things I never said. A dark jealousy burned. I tried so hard, in my writing and my books, to seem exactly like a normal, hearing and sighted person that I never showed how discouraged or disappointed I was at times. I wanted to show perfection.
    Later in life I wrote, “What I have printed gives no knowledge of my actual life.” Strangers, the people closest to me, no one liked hearing that.
    I felt Peter pivot so my hands moved from his chest to his back. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got twenty-four acres, some outbuildings that seem to be sinking into the earth—”
    “They’re not that bad,” I interrupted.
    “Well, theroof needs repair, even the lawn needs mowing. But this place really is something,” he tapped into my palm. I felt his fingers spell
I’ll see you tomorrow
. “No offense,” he added, “but I hope Annie needs a long mending period before she takes over again. I’m beginning to like this job.”
    “I’m beginning to like being the boss.”
    “Have I told you how much I like a woman in charge?” He pinched my lower back hard, sending a jolt to my skin. “Do that again,” I said. “And you’re employee of the month.”
    Pain is a dark star in my life. It’s always been with me. Even now, thirty-five years after I lost my hearing and sight, I still remember the burning, like a fireplace poker turned around behind my eyes, at nineteen months old when my fever broke, and I was going blind. Day by day, the sunlight pierced my eyes like fire. Slowly my sight burned to ash. Nothing left. My fingers still ache with the felt memory of how fiercely I rubbed my infant eyes of pain.
    And my blue eyes? The ones you see in my photographs? So bright and clear that reporters say they are mesmerized by my gaze? They’re glass. I had them put in during an operation when I was a young woman so that I could look more normal, less blind.
    But no pain is like the one I had when I went to Annie’s room our first night back in Wrentham and realized she knew I wanted Peter near me, and that she had made plans to send him away.
    The truth is that it was Annie alone who really knew me. She read my moods instantly. With a touch or by a look I was exposed to her, like a child. After Peter left for the night I walked carefully inside the house and, touching the hall table, then the velvet loveseat by the far wall of the entryway, found my way to her room. Slowly, I went in.
    The queer aluminum scent told me that Annie sat up, alert in bed,and the shrill pock of her fingers in mine once I crossed the thick-rugged floor to greet her was like an electric shock. With great force Annie threw back her quilt and told me to sit down. She must have run her eyes over me—the top buttons open on my dress, the heat in my face from being with Peter—because she said, “Sit down, now. You look like a chicken about to be plucked.”
    “Don’t you mean a flower?” I idly picked up the bristle brush on her bedside table and