Blinded by Aurora Guzzetti

Second Place, 10-12 Grade Fiction

It’s the crying that catches his attention. There are other signs, too, that Carolina is in another one of her fits. He’s grown accustomed to the sound of her knuckles cracking incessantly and her teeth grinding in her sleep, of locks clicking when they truly didn’t need to. Most dangerously, he’s grown acutely aware of her silence. When, at dinner, her mouth remains clamped shut. She sits erect, her hands clasped politely in her lap, never moving. Never eating. 

But this time it’s the sound of their daughter crying. 

“Carolina?” he calls, a naive type of hope in his voice. Maybe Annabelle, the two year old angel he’s trying to raise despite his wife’s growing hysteria, is just hungry. Or tired. But there’s no response. Carolina is not in the kitchen, washing the dishes from their dinner the night before, or in their bedroom folding laundry. She’s upstairs in the nursery with his daughter.

The doctors had told him to monitor her more closely. She must be committed, they’d said, send her somewhere safe. But he can’t bring himself to think of her as the woman she’d become. He still sees her as she was the day they met, with bright eyes that had a type of clarity he’d never seen in a girl before. She seemed to know something he didn’t, and with that knowledge she taunted and teased him, luring him into her orbit.

So he keeps her despite what the town screams at him. She’s a scarlet letter, treated as an outcast ever since her sanity had begun to slip. He didn’t mind, though, because so is he.

At nineteen, just months after he’d met Carolina, his eyes were removed. He remembers the struggle. It follows him, a memory made physical. It lingers in the shadows he cannot see, grasps at his ankles as he trudges through time. 

It was a punishment. For what, he no longer knows. Once, the whole town whispered of his sin. Rumors flew like songbirds. Old women gathered in cafes to excitedly share the gory details they’d gathered. Seeing him, though, wandering helplessly, bandages over his eye, brought shame to the topic. Whispers died a glorious death in mere days.

“Don’t worry,” Carolina had whispered in the days afterward as he lay in bed, helpless, writhing in a burning pain he couldn’t escape no matter the ways he contorted himself. “I love you, I will always love you, forever and ever and ever…” her voice had trailed off into the haze of darkness he now lived in. He reached for her, desperate to feel her face when he could not see her, but he only found the cold hard metal of the hospital bed railings. 

Now, it’s his turn to take care of her. In sickness and in health, he’d vowed, and he intends to stand by it. 

His hands find a notch in the wall between the kitchen and the living room. Carolina had carved it for him—she’d carved trails all over the house, from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the garage to the kitchen, from the nursery to everywhere in the house.

“Carolina?” he calls again, this time more urgent. He moves with a still new confidence in his ability to navigate without sight. “Carolina, honey, are you okay?”

No. The answer is always no nowadays, but love blinds. He finds the stairs. 

He cannot picture what the inside of the nursery looks like. He’d never been able to see it—he knows objectively that the walls were painted pink by Carolina, but he doesn’t know the exact shade. He knows the door had a knob just above waist height, but he doesn’t know whether or not it’s bronze or silver. 

He does know Carolina is crying now, too, and he does know the door isn’t locked, so when his hand finally finds the knob, he opens the door with a slow, careful gentleness. He can’t startle her, not when she’s like this.

“Jacob?” he hears, faint and quivering. 

“Yes, baby, I’m here. What’s going on? Describe it to me.”

Describe it to me, a phrase he says often, still not accustomed to the concept of understanding the world around him without sight on his side.

“I’m going,” Carolina replies. He notes her conviction, the borderline desperation with which she speaks. He’ll update the doctor about this. “I’m leaving. You can’t stop me this time.”

He takes a slow, uncertain step, then another. He hates this room. He never enters unless absolutely necessary. The mess is impossible to avoid with a two year old. There are toys everywhere and each step is a risk. He wonders if she counted on his slow approach, knew he would be out of his depth and less capable of reaching her.

“Going where? There’s nowhere else to go, my love.”

“My mother. I’m going to my mother.”

Annabelle’s cries fall quiet. The silence strikes Jacob. He can no longer use her as a beacon to approach—he needs Carolina to keep talking.

“Your mother in Illinois? That’s hundreds of miles away. I’ll report it stolen, they’ll find you and bring you home. You can’t take Annabelle away from her home, from me. We’re in this together. She’s my kid.”

“No,” she whispers. She’s backed up further now. Jacob throws out a hand, feeling for a wall or crib or dresser, but finds only empty air. “No, no, she’s mine. She’s mine and I’m going. You can’t keep me here anymore.”

“I’m not keeping you anywhere. You go to town everyday. We go to church. You’re entirely free, Carolina.”

She lets out a single, broken sob. There are more unshed tears behind it, but her throat is already raw and her eyes already crusted with the salt of earlier cries.

She opens the window behind her. He hears the squeak of it and suddenly the tact with which he’d been approaching her plummets to his feet. No, no, no, he cannot let her hurt Annabelle. He cannot let her jump.

“Get away from the window. Now.”

His command doesn’t echo, but the power in his voice reverberates through the room, striking Carolina’s chest in repeated stabs of guilt. The foggy red haze clouding her vision and body with anguish simmers and clears until she can finally see Jacob where he stands, tall and steady. She remembers, suddenly, the man she’d seen across the room three years earlier. His confidence as he strode through the crowd. He hadn’t noticed her immediately, hadn’t pursued her with cocky arrogance. Instead, he noted her. Admired her. And when he finally did speak, it was with a reassuring certainty that drew her in.

One of her hands finds the windowsill, the other still grasps Annabelle closer. She cannot bring herself to go further. Her body burns with the effort she’s already put in to resist his gravity.

“No,” she says again, convincing herself more than telling him, “No, I have to go, I won’t let you raise her like this—”

“Like what? She will attend a private boarding school. She’s going to get the best education available. She has a loving mother and a loving father. Please, Carolina, we can fix this. We can make it work. I just need you to stay with me.”

Finally, his wandering hands find first Annabelle’s foot, then Carolina’s arm, her shoulder, her neck. He searches for the hand on the windowsill and finds it clenched. The rest of her stands limp in his shadow. She is not braced, not scared. But she doesn’t fall into him with relief nor seek comfort in his proximity. 

“You’re here?” he whispers. He feels her nod. “Okay, I’m here too, so everything is going to be okay. Why don’t we go back to that doctor in town? He can check on you. I’m going to make everything okay.”

Helplessly, her head falls against his shoulder. There’s a type of apology in her muted crying. Annabelle’s hands play with the fabric of her father’s sleeve. She doesn’t know the difference between this moment and any other loving embrace of her parents, she cannot sense the danger her father had fought so valiantly to protect her from. 

Carolina’s hand falls from the windowsill. He finds it and holds it with his own. 

“It’s going to be okay,” he repeats. He doesn’t demand it, but the assurance he says it with is a type of command in and of itself. 

“Please let me go.”

God, what did she not understand? He squeezes her hand—hard, this time. He wouldn’t describe it as violent, though. He’s patient. He has been endlessly patient. 

His thumb grazes the cold, sharp chains on her wrists. 

Oh, he thinks. Simple as that. Oh.

Because suddenly, he remembers why they’d gouged his eyes out. It’d been mercy, they claimed, so he didn’t have to look at the misery in the eyes of the woman he’d imprisoned. 

He’d needed a wife, after all, and Carolina had been desperate for love.