Stephen White: Blinded

Her fine hair was pulled back into a petite ponytail. She smiled in a way that almost dared me not to notice how together she looked.

I nodded noncommittally. My practiced chin dip could have been measured in millimeters.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here,” she said.

Another microscopic nod on my part. Most days while doing my work as a psychologist, if I were paid by the word I’d go home a pauper. But Gibbs was right, I was wondering why she’d come back to see me after so many years. I had a guess-I was wagering that she’d divorced Sterling and had moved back to Boulder to start a new life. It was a scary journey for most people. Me? I was going to be the tour guide.

That was my guess.

“You remember Sterling? My husband?”

Husband? Okay, I was wrong. The Storeys were separated then, not divorced.

I spoke, but since it was Monday morning I failed to assemble a complete sentence. “Yes, of course” was all I said.

Gibbs raised her fingertips to her lips and leaned forward as though she were whispering a profanity and was afraid her grandmother would overhear. She said, “I think he murdered a friend of ours in Laguna Beach.”

Okay, I was wrong twice.

The previous weekend.

I decided that I couldn’t stand watching her struggle with the damn halo.

It just wasn’t natural.

She hated it. And even for something as unearthly as a halo, it didn’t look right on her. Maybe it was the size-did the thing really have to be that big?-or maybe it was the way it seemed to block her off from the world. Was that the intent? And tight spaces? No way. If she could squeeze through a narrow pathway headfirst at all, she ended up making enough of a clanging racket that she emerged hanging her haloed head in shame. I wasn’t sure exactly what she hated most about wearing the damn thing, but I was absolutely sure that she hated it.

Still, I’m a psychologist not only by training but also by demeanor, and I was determined to help her live with the halo. Taking it off wasn’t an option.

We had our orders.

I wondered, why not transparent material instead of opaque? Wouldn’t that be an improvement? Maybe a rearview mirror would be nice. Or… wouldn’t the plastic cone be more tolerable if it were just smaller?

And there was always duct tape. Couldn’t I create some alternative with duct tape?

The ultimate solution hit me at a quarter to three in the morning in the utter darkness that divides Saturday from Sunday as I was soothing my year-old daughter back to sleep on the upholstered rocker in her room.

A paw umbrella.

I had to figure out a way to make Emily a paw umbrella. If I could shield her paw from her mouth, then she wouldn’t have to wear a bizarre plastic Elizabethan collar to shield her mouth from her paw. A little over a week before, her veterinarian had excised a basal cell carcinoma from the top of her front left paw. Now the dressing was off so that the excision could be exposed to the air. Emily’s only job was to let the wound heal without the aid of her big tongue and her copious saliva, a state of affairs absolutely in contradiction to a Bouvier’s instincts, which dictated that her drool was the finest salve on the planet.

The halo effectively prohibited her from licking the wound. But the bizarre collar was making our dog morose. A paw umbrella was the obvious alternative. How hard could that be?

I explained my project to my friend Sam Purdy, who’d come over for a late-morning bike ride. We were sitting at the kitchen table in my Spanish Hills home. The Thanksgiving decorations embellishing all the stores in Boulder and the naked trees below us in the valley at the foot of the Rockies screamed late autumn, but the day promised to read more like late spring. Bright sun, clear skies, gentle breezes, and the guarantee of an afternoon in the seventies.

“I decided-I think it was sometime around four o’clock this morning-that I needed to use rigid foam to make the doughnut piece,” I said. Sam didn’t answer me. I thought he was trying to swallow a belch. The surprising part was that he was trying to swallow it; Sam didn’t usually allow social decorum to interfere in his digestive processes.

I proceeded to trace a circle about five inches in diameter and then began cutting a hole in the gardener’s kneeling pad that I’d swiped from my neighbor’s barn. “It has to hold its shape,” I explained. “This foam will be perfect.”

“Lauren won’t care that you’re cutting up her stuff?” Sam knew me well enough to know that if it had to do with gardening, it couldn’t belong to me.

“It’s not Lauren’s. I stole it from Adrienne’s shed. But even if it were Lauren’s, she wouldn’t care. It’s for a good cause.” Sam was a Boulder police detective, so I was demonstrating a modicum of trust by copping to a misdemeanor before lunch.

Adrienne was my urologist neighbor and the keeper of a sizable vegetable garden. Our unofficial deal was this: For the right to steal goodies from her plot at will, each August, using her tomatoes, I made a year’s supply of fresh tomato sauce and roasted tomato salsa for her freezer.

Her tomatoes and basil and chiles, my kitchen labor. Communal living at its purest. I figured that the foam rubber I’d swiped would somehow become part of the annual accounting.

I cut a Bouvier-ankle-sized hole in the center of the disk of foam and then sliced from the center to the outside so I could close the contraption around Emily’s lower leg like a handcuff or, more accurately, pawcuff. The thing I’d created was the size of a DVD, more or less, but the hole in the center was larger, more like the circle in the middle of an old 45 rpm record.

“Is Adrienne home?” Sam asked.

I was so distracted by my veterinary appliance manufacturing that I almost failed to notice his fingers pressing up under his rib cage. Almost.

“Why?” I asked. Adrienne was a good neighbor-she lived with her son in a big house across the dirt lane-and a great friend, but what I suspected was more germane to this discussion was the fact that she was also a fine urologist who had once treated Sam for a kidney stone.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just wondering.”

I began laying out some rigid plastic craft strips that I’d swiped from Lauren’s craft cupboard. Lauren wasn’t particularly craft-y; supplies tended to age indefinitely once they made it into crafts storage. There was some Elmer’s glue in there that I suspected dated back to Jimmy Carter’s administration.

The plastic strips I chose were about two inches by four. To accomplish my design, I’d figured I would need to cover about 270 degrees of the foam circle with the plastic strips. With a pair of kitchen shears I began to turn my circle into a rough octagon to accommodate the attachment of the flat strips.

Sam rotated his neck. Up. Side to side. Back. His fingertips disappeared below his ribs again.

“Nothing?” I asked. “You sure?”

“I’m thinking I may be developing another damn stone.”

I tried not to act obvious as I began using filament tape to attach the plastic strips to the octagon of foam, but I was watching Sam, too. Sam was usually stressed out, he was chronically overweight, he frequently ignored the diet that Adrienne had recommended after his first stone, and he didn’t get enough exercise unless I dragged him along on an occasional bike ride somewhere. All in all, he was a prime candidate for a return trip down the river of agony that carried sharp little stones from the kidneys to the hellish port of Oh my God !

“I’m sorry. Does it feel like the last one?” I asked. I’m quite adept at keeping alarm out of my voice. I think I kept the alarm out of my voice.