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From Chapter One: Listener

"Why did you stop?" her husband asks. His hand had lifted, as it did involuntarily, while she was reading, but as soon as she'd quit it had dropped back into his lap, lifeless. "Julia?" he says, and though his hands are both peacefully draped on his lap, his voice holds the most minor of tremors, perhaps perceptible only by his wife. "Julia, is there something...?"

"It's just that man again."

Averil's hand rises when he hears her voice. It flits to his collar, to his ear, his nose, a pattern his hand has etched into any space Averil inhabits. He is blind, and when he hears his wife's voice, when his hand senses her voice on the air, he must check the other senses rapidly. He is here, they seem to tell him, he fills a shirt, a body; he can enclose himself with his hands.

"Next door?" he says, gently.

"Across the way." Not an alley, just a brief ten-foot space between windows. "I can't get used to apartments," she says, rising to pull the shades. The room shrinks, the light dulls. "But I can't stand his being out there. He just sits on his bed and..."

"And what?" Averil has a smile on his lips, his face and hand following her voice in their own bedroom to the windows, back to the rocker.

"And he listens."

"You read well. You have a lovely voice for reading, and I'm sure he only wants to hear." He crosses his long legs on the bed, fluffs the feather pillows behind him, rubs his temples with his slender fingers. The only part of him he cannot maneuver to his liking is his hair, which triumphs wildly on his head, thick and brown, a few gray strands rising even more mutinously above the rest, coarse and cantankerous. He has the rulable space. She led Averil through the rooms. His hands, clumsy and out of sync with his body in the new rooms, sought the familiar objects of their lives: the smooth round oak table he'd sanded himself, a cold marble vanity stand, the hairy surface of his recliner where his cat Sophie slept, was now sleeping.

It took him no time at all to adjust to the layout. The noise was different. Sirens still startle him in the night. Helicopters and human voices can make him clutch Julia, whose heart leaps for him. It is only then, blackness surrounding both of them, together in a shared blindness, that she mistrusts their judgment. Moving was not good, she thinks. We have done the wrong thing. In these moments she feels anything could happen, that she has so little control in the world that nothing, no place, is safe.

But Averil relaxes, slips into sleep trustingly. His breath against her throat is sweet, not like an adult's but like a child's, clear. His faith in her can calm her; if he trusts her, she must be trustworthy.

Copyright © 1990 by Antonya Nelson