The gift was five and a half feet long, no thicker at its narrowest than a curtain rod, and in the ballpark of thirty-five pounds. Its Kraft-wrapped slenderness cantilevered off either side of the Ottoman, beyond which crouched Rahul, a splotch of whiskery brown and red—he was wearing a Razorbacks polo; Edith’s vision was going—his body vibrating with all the intensity of a uranium core.
“You must open it, ma’am.”
Rahul was the first man to give Edith a gift in six years. The first person, really. Unless you were counting the casseroles. And even then, it was five and a half years. And no one was counting the casseroles.
He was also the first man to live under her roof in that period: a strange, new, boisterous presence in her guest room, once Henry’s studio. He’d answered her Facebook ad the night she’d posted, a soon-to-be engineering student at the University of Arkansas who’d burnt all his runway leading up to the start of his PhD program concocting elaborate dissertation proposals, only to discover, a week before boarding his flight to the States, that he still needed housing.
“Money is no problem,” he’d assured her on a video call whose graininess was lost on her. “My brother is bigwig for Mr. Walton.”
But money wasn’t Edith’s concern. She’d listed the rent at $850 to filter out the riffraff, but the lease she’d drawn up for Rahul said only “one dollar and other considerations.” She’d learned this many years ago, while doing research for a high school genealogy project involving a trip to the county courthouse, where old leases and deeds were stored: a clever trick used by landlords to knock themselves down a few tax brackets. It had impressed her. Here it was, decades later, still in her head.
The other considerations, in Edith and Rahul’s case, were to cook and clean, to trim the hedges, to water the flowers, to whack the weeds, to mow the lawn, to carry out the trash, to do the grocery shopping, to drive her to and from appointments, and, most important of all as far as Edith was concerned, to stay up at least once a week with her, munching popcorn and watching action movies. She’d been partial to Bruce Willis since Die Hard, but now Idris Elba was on the scene. She hadn’t gone a year since 2013 without rewatching Pacific Rim.
Henry had never cared for action movies, but he’d sat through them with her all the same, perhaps unaware of the fireworks set off in her by those brave men with sleeve-splitting muscles and ovular heads, or perhaps just secure in the knowledge that whatever the state of his heart, whatever the state of his other muscles, his head was the most ovular of all. Loyalty had set him apart. If Edith had gone first, he wouldn’t have opened his doors to a Priya or a Shruti; but, Edith reminded herself, it wasn’t as if she had opened her heart to Rahul. Their domestic arrangement was purely transactional. Each was to the other but a means to an end.
But now this gift…this gift was muddying things.
Unable to contain himself long enough for Edith to make sense of the white and gray and yellow splotches peeping through the tape and brown paper, Rahul yelped, “Smart cane, ma’am. It is smart cane!”
The shaft was the width of a curtain rod, Edith realized, because it was a curtain rod, or at least had started its life as one; “But what are these?” she wondered aloud, feeling the four thick swellings situated at roughly even intervals.
“Battery packs.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why batteries?”
“Because,” roared Rahul, “it is revolution!” Springing to his feet, he snatched the cane. It began to vibrate in his hands, responding, it seemed, to the flip of a switch or the push of a button, emitting a lightsaber’s wobbling drone. “It warns you, ma’am,” he went on, swinging it to and fro. “When you are close to some nuisance, it just goes wild!”
Without warning, he swung it like a driver into the fireplace. Its buzzing whirred louder, as angry as a hive of bees. Breathless, Rahul put the cane back in sleep mode before laying it gingerly back on the Ottoman, declaring, “You see? Indestructible.”
“But why are you giving this to me?” asked Edith.
“You are losing sight, ma’am.”
Guilt at looking a gift horse in the mouth wrestled for control of Edith’s mind with guilt of another sort. The other sort won. “It’s just,” she mumbled, “it’s very heavy.”
“You will be strong, ma’am,” Rahul assured her. “Strong in no time. Miss Edith the body builder!” He lunged forward, flexing a bicep just under her nose.
“And I’ve already got a cane,” she added, struggling to suppress her irritation, and also to tamp down the blood in her cheeks.
“That cane is trash, ma’am.” Seated on the Ottoman, knees apart, his face an inch and a half from hers, he addressed her matter-of-factly: “All it does is bang around, hitting shins. But this one vibrates before it hits any shins.”
He smelled of pizza and cologne.
“But I’ve never hit anyone’s shins,” protested Edith.
“But you will, ma’am,” said Rahul. “You will if you do not adopt smart cane.”
“It needs to be adopted?”
“You will be early adopter,” he cried. “First adopter. Proof of concept. I will get my PhD! Now, you just hold it like this only—” and he shoved the cane into her hands.
* * *
It remained in her hands just long enough for Rahul to snap a picture, which, he noted, would be vital for his dissertation. Then it went into the downstairs closet, where, for another year, it stayed.
Rahul’s conviction that his cane would render not only all other canes, but also all other smart devices, from Apple Watches to Android phones, obsolete, at least for the blind, was not enough to liberate it. Nor was his ordering half a dozen barbells of various sizes on Amazon in hopes that Edith, thus encouraged, would see fit to gradually build up her arms. The continuing deterioration of her eyesight did not convince her to take up the smart cane. Nor did Rahul’s completion of his PhD, even though it meant that he’d proven, at least to the satisfaction of the advisory committee, that he’d revolutionized the field of assistive technology, full stop.
What did eventually lead to the redemption of the cane was his return to India, four years and nine months after he’d taken up residence in Henry’s studio, nearly to the day. His departure shouldn’t have affected Edith so; and yet, somehow, it was Henry’s departure all over again. It was worse, in fact. If she’d spent those five years scrubbing her own toilet and preparing her own TV dinners, she might’ve gradually learned to live with neither sight nor company. Now, though, with the bandage torn off, she couldn’t help but feel that she’d been robbed of both at once. And into this void came Rahul’s enticing description of the smart cane, softly creeping: “Every day, you are getting older. Your memory is going the way of your eyes. You should not carry many things, ma’am. You are needing all-in-one assistant. One thing only.”
It was a fine spring day when Edith finally got around to admitting, if only to herself, that she could use a little help. That she could use the cane. Both hands were required to drag it from the closet, but in just a few minutes, she had it out and propped against the wall, where she could feel up it and down in search of switches, toggles, buttons. And then she had it, and the switch was thrown, and it was alive in her hands, as chaotic as the day Rahul had given it to her, its irrepressibility reminding her of those push-mowers and vacuums that buck forward of their own accord, practically dragging you after them; or maybe it was more like the planchette of a Ouija board. Its weight bowed her forward, but its buzzing terminus drew her on, sphere-tipped, skating along the hardwood of the hall. Leaving scratches, probably, but she couldn’t see them. Didn’t mind.
The front walk’s paving stones bit back with greater friction, but the cane took her weight when she staggered, held her, sturdy as a man: as sturdy as Henry, or Rahul, or Idris Elba, even. The sun lit her blood, brought her cheeks to a boil, kindled fire in her veins. She’d been on and off her stationary bike all winter, anxious to strengthen her faltering bones, imagining that she was hurtling down snowy paths, but of course the air was also stationary, not wide-open, crystalline.
When had she been out last?
When had she needed to?
Would she make it to the bus stop? The neighborhood market? And would the cane know the way home?
And then her foot found something unanticipated, a faint depression between the stones, and something twisted, something cracked like a shot, something gave, and she was tumbling, a violent, impromptu, apoidean cacophony following her down, a protective bar like the ones that close over your chest on amusement park rides; and she was recalling those rides, remembering as if she were snatching fluttering fragments from the air, reliving the sunburns, the pretzels, the funnel cakes, the ice cream, the boys’ eyes searching, roving, flashing, finding—Henry’s—the wind a riot in her hair; and she wasn’t ready, anything but ready, for this weight across her chest, this raucous buzz across her windpipe, the only thing she needed spasming, going wild, there in the fallow flower bed behind the hedge, where she could not be seen, nor see.
