“Daddy, that book there.”
“Which one, Jessie? Show me.”
She pointed. “That one there, Daddy.”
My three-year-old daughter hadn’t grasped that her Daddy’s vision was fading. I saw a blur that was the line of books on the shelf, but I couldn’t make out the individual volumes.
I’d just finished bathing her and helping her on with her jammies. Her shampoo-tinged baby scent had become a fond part of my evenings.
“Tell you what,” I said, “how about I tuck you in bed and tell you a story?”
She put her little arms as far around my chest as she could and gave me a big kiss on my cheek. Then I pulled down the bedcovers and she jumped on the bed. When she stopped wriggling, I pulled the covers up to her shoulders.
“Which book will you read to me, Daddy?”
Most evenings her mom read to her, but every so often I’d play a recorded story to her. Before tonight, when Jessie and I were on our own and I didn’t have a recording cued up, we’d watch TV or, sometimes, she’d open a book and tell me about the pictures. Tonight I felt a challenge in her voice, and I felt defensive. Ridiculous for a grown man to feel protective of himself around his three-year-old daughter. I summoned up images of things, animals, people—anything on which to hang a story.
Finding space at the foot of her bed, I sat down and said, “I’m going to read to you from a book in my head.”
“You’re silly, Daddy. There aren’t any books in your head.”
“Oh yes, there are. I’ve got lots of books in here.” I tapped my temple.
“Daddy is a moron. Daddy is a moron.”
I was supposed to discourage her from insulting people, but it was all I could do not to laugh. She’d picked up the expression from overhearing me slamming down the phone and saying, “What a moron.” At least I stopped saying, “What a fucking moron.” Thank God Kirsten, my wife, had put her foot down about swearing.
“Well,” I said, “shall we see if Daddy really is a moron? If I tell you a story and there’s no book in my hand, what will you say then?” I waited for her mirth to subside. Then I said, “Okay, so here goes. This is about Baby Bat.”
“Like a little baseball bat?”
“No, honey. This is an animal that can fly.”
“With bat wings? Like Batman?”
“Exactly like Batman. Only Baby Bat is a mouse with Batman wings.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Very. The prettiest mouse with wings you ever saw. Now then, bats live in caves. Great big caves. It’s dark in there, and smelly.”
“Urgh.”
“You’re not kidding. And because it’s dark in there, they sleep all day long.”
“And all night?”
“At night they go out. During the day, when they sleep, they hang upside-down.”
“Why upside-down?”
“It helps them relax their wings. They fly from sundown to dawn. It’s really, really tiring.”
“And hanging upside-down helps them feel better?”
“That’s right. So the day comes when Baby Bat must leave the cave for the first time.”
“Doesn’t Mommy Bat take her out to class, like Mommy takes me to Ms. Addison’s?” Kirsten took Jessie to a prekindergarten program twice a week.
“No, angel. Baby Bat is really, really nice, but she isn’t as clever as you.”
I paused, realizing I shouldn’t say such an ego-inflating thing to such an impressionable child. Too late now.
I pressed on. “Mommy Bat and Daddy Bat touch her gently by each wing and walk with her all the way to the cave’s opening. ‘Mommy,’ she says, ‘it’s cold.’
“‘You’re used to being nice and warm in our cave, but you can’t be cozy all the time.’”
Having said that last sentence in a higher pitch, I interrupted my narrative to say, “In case you can’t tell, that’s Mommy Bat speaking.”
“I knew that, Daddy. I’m not a moron. Not like you.” I waited through another fit of giggles.
I said, “I know you can’t remember what it was like the first time you walked—”
“I’ve always walked,” Jessie insisted.
“Well, this was the first time Baby Bat was going to have to fly. She won’t ever forget it. She was scared.”
Just like I’d been, I realized, the morning when I’d first been afraid to step out of our apartment and trust my white cane to get me securely to the office. The shifts in my vision had been so gradual that I didn’t notice until suddenly, that day, objects lost their shape and people turned into shadows. Flailing my cane ahead of me and relying on memory as much as residual vision for turns, subway train doors, the layout of each station, the location of steps, and all the other features of my commute, I made it to the office. On reaching my desk, I collapsed into my chair. Then, collecting myself, I made some calls. I signed up for an intensive course in mobility instruction, way more demanding than the sporadic lessons I’d had before.
Kirsten had moved in with me a year earlier. Before then, when we’d become serious, I’d told her I’d been diagnosed with RP, but made it sound like real vision loss was far off in the future. It was my optimism speaking. The ophthalmologist had told me there was no predicting RP’s progress.
After that morning’s reality check, I worried about staying employed and the whole idea of a good life. I got frustrated—I suppose I mean depressed—and convinced myself she’d be better off without me. I did things to push her away, like acting more impatient and testy than ever.
Still, I kept taking mobility lessons and taught myself to use a speech program while working on my computer. I gained confidence. My subway commute to the Financial District was pretty routine, and my firm’s partners couldn’t have been more supportive. Instead of leaving, Kirsten married me.
Pulling me away from my trip down memory lane, Jessie asked, “Why was Baby Bat scared?”
I cleared my throat. “See, you and I, we’ve never flown, and we never will.”
“I will. I’m going to fly.”
“No, honey, humans mustn’t fly. It’s way, way too dangerous for us.”
I waited until she said, “Okay, Daddy.”
“So, imagine poor Baby Bat. There she is, high on a mountain, sitting at the edge of a cozy cave, and suddenly her Mommy and Daddy are telling her she has to go into that cold air with nothing to hold her up.”
“Would you and Mommy make me do that?”
I’d frightened her, but I wasn’t sure with which part. “You mean would we make you fly?”
“Uh-uh.”
“I told you, honey, it’s too dangerous for you, just like it is for Mommy and me. And when it’s cold outside, remember how we give you a big coat to put on and a funny woolen hat?”
“It’s not a funny hat. It’s a nice hat.”
“Yes, it is. Mommy chose it for you. So let me tell you about Baby Bat.”
“I’m worried for Baby Bat.”
How did Jessie learn empathy so young?
“So Mommy Bat says, ‘Move your wings backwards and forwards.’ See, when a bat flies, the wings move up and down, but on the ground, bats have to kind of stand up. They have to move their wings like this.”
I stood and rowed my arms forwards and backwards, making myself look ridiculous. It was how I’d felt when I started using a white cane: a man in an executive suit working it back and forth before him.
“You’re silly, Daddy.”
I sat back down. “That’s what Baby Bat said—‘I look silly.’ But Daddy Bat said, ‘Sometimes you have to look silly if you want to go somewhere.’
“Baby Bat said, ‘But I don’t want to go anywhere. I like being in our cozy cave.’
“Daddy Bat said, ‘Once you start flying, you won’t want to return until you’re really, really exhausted.’
“‘But I only want to be in the cave,’ Baby Bat insisted.
“And Mommy Bat said, ‘Someday you’ll understand.’”
Jessie broke in. “That’s what Mommy said the first day she took me to Ms. Addison’s class.”
“You remember. Well, was Mommy right?”
Jessie went quiet. Knowing it normally meant she was thinking, not ignoring me, I waited.
Eventually she said, “I guess so.”
“You only ‘guess’ so?”
“Yeah.”
Right now Jessie was feeling cozy, and she no more wanted to leave her cave than Baby Bat did hers.
“Well,” I said, “Baby Bat is a good kid, like you, and she always obeys her Mommy and Daddy, and so she starts moving her wings forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards. Like this.” This time without getting up, I rowed my arms. Jessie made no comment. She was waiting for the next plot turn.
“‘Faster, Baby Bat,’ her Daddy said. And Baby Bat went faster and faster. ‘Now,’ her Daddy said, ‘get ready to jump and keep flapping as hard as you can.’
“But I’m too scared.’ That was Baby Bat.”
Jessie said, “I know that, Daddy.”
“So Daddy Bat says, ‘Wait here with Mommy while I jump. Now, see how I flap my wings faster and faster.’”
“Did he fall?” Jessie said.
“Nope. He flew and circled in front of Mommy and Baby Bat and kept talking. ‘See how easy it is?’
“‘I’m still scared,’ Baby Bat said.
Daddy Bat said, ‘If I thought it was dangerous for us bats, do you think I’d tell you to fly?’
“‘Um, no,’ Baby Bat said. But it was a nervous ‘no.’”
“She didn’t believe her Daddy,” Jessie said.
“Well, she did and she didn’t. She knew Daddy would never lie to her. But she was so scared. Then Daddy Bat did something that scared her even more. He flew away.”
“He left Baby Bat all alone?”
“Remember,” I reassured my precociously empathetic daughter, “Mommy Bat is still with her. And Daddy Bat came back in a nanosecond.”
“What’s a nan…?”
“A nanosecond. It means he came back in almost no time. So, Baby Bat said, ‘Daddy, where did you go?’
“‘Around the mountain and back.’
“‘What’s a mountain?’”
Jessie broke in. “She didn’t know what a mountain is? I do.”
“That’s because you’ve seen pictures of mountains, and then we took you to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, remember?”
“How come Baby Bat didn’t know what a mountain is?”
“When you live inside a mountain and you never go outside, you’ve never been able to look at one. Imagine you’d never been out on the street. Would you know what our building looks like?”
“But I do know.”
“Fair enough, angel. Well, for whatever reason, Baby Bat didn’t know about mountains. But her parents were bound and determined that she find out. Daddy Bat said, ‘Our cave is in a mountain. Come, and I’ll show you.’
“And then Daddy Bat flew off again. Baby Bat wanted so badly to know what her Daddy was talking about that she forgot all about being scared. Just like that, she jumped out of the cave and flew after him.”
“Really?” Jessie said.
“Really.”
My voice must have betrayed finality because Jessie said, “Is that the end?”
“What more could there be?”
“Wasn’t Baby Bat cold?”
“All that wing flapping warmed her up.”
“Did Daddy and Baby Bat come back to the cave?”
“Sure they did. Mommy was waiting right there at the entrance, and she folded her wings around Baby Bat in a big hug. Do you know what Baby Bat said then?”
“What?”
“When can I go flying again?”
“She liked it?”
“She loved it.”
“I wanna fly someday,” she said drowsily. Then she said, “Daddy, do you really have lots of books in your head?”
“Didn’t I just show you I have?”
“You showed me you have one.”
My literal daughter. How I loved her for it.
“I have lots of books in my head,” I said. I resolved to make it true. “But now it’s time you went to sleep. Turn on your side, angel.”
As she shifted around, I made out how the light area of her face against the pillow became the brown hair around her ear.
Blind as a bat. Only then the expression came to me. Subconsciously, it must have inspired my tale. Funny I hadn’t made the connection right away.
I stroked her soft hair, and her breathing grew regular. Then I turned off her bedside lamp, leaving a glimmer of light from the hallway behind the half-closed door. Kirsten would be home any minute now. I stepped lightly to the door and half-closed it behind me.
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