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herself saying as tears rolled down her face. “If you hear a car or truck, just stop and pull over. If it gets to be too hard, don’t be afraid to turn around and come back. And don’t be afraid to be afraid—it’s important to know when you’re afraid.”
    Ori Jean knew that Mike wouldn’t turn back. Standing at the mailbox, she watched him pedal down the driveway, around the culde-sac, and over the top of Kevin Court. And then she couldn’t see him anymore.
    An hour passed. Two hours. Something had to be wrong. Ori Jean got into her car, but when she went to leave she thought about how it might hurt Mike’s feelings if she were to come upon the scene, how it would seem that she hadn’t believed in him. She stayed home and vacuumed the living room, then vacuumed it again. After three hours Mike walked in the door. “Hi, Mom,” he said, then went to wash up for dinner. She never asked him about the trip—she didn’t want it to seem like a big deal.
    At home, Bill’s drinking worsened. To support the family Ori Jean took a full-time job teaching Spanish at a suburban Oakland school. Her annual salary was less than $5,000. Still, when she brought her children to the grocery store or to the park, she wore earrings and jewelry and made herself as pretty as she’d looked in Chile, when she’d been the daughter of wealth and had servants to brush her hair. She dressed her kids smartly for school and in their Sunday best for Catholic church. In public, there was no sign that the St. Vincent de Paul charity had brought groceries to her house for Christmas that year.
             
    For fifty weeks of every year since Mike had been seven, Ori Jean had immersed him in the sighted world. For the remaining two she sent him to the land of the blind.
    Set in the Napa foothills, Enchanted Hills was a summer camp for the visually impaired. It urged independence in its campers. Kids could hike, row, camp out in tents, explore, even get lost, all according to their appetites. Ori Jean had discovered the place in 1961 and enrolled Mike straightaway, sometimes soliciting churches and kind souls for funds. It had felt like home to him ever since.
    In the summer before junior high, Mike began to do things at Enchanted Hills that most campers wouldn’t consider. He rode horses into areas no one had probed, hiked off the map, negotiated paths paved in poison oak. He described a plan to counselors whereby he would hike away from camp for hours on known trails, then return as the crow flies, up and down through canyons and streams. The counselors drew the line at that one, but none doubted that Mike would have tried. They could not see his eyes behind his drooping eyelids, but when they looked at the way his head tilted upward while conceiving a plan, they could see the pioneer in his heart.
    At summer’s end, Mike and the other blind students from Buena Vista Elementary matriculated to Park Mead Intermediate. Nick Medina went with them. That meant no whining for another two years. Mike felt lucky. Medina seemed sure and constant, the way Mike tried to feel when the world got too big. It felt good when Medina said, “If I hadn’t kicked your butt you wouldn’t have gotten that A.” It felt great when he said, “I like you, Mike.”
    Math and science spoke most directly to Mike, though he made A’s and B’s in all his courses. He remained mostly shy and quiet in class, as he had been since kindergarten. Though he spent much of his day among sighted students, no one teased or bothered him—he wasn’t a tattler or dorky, just blind. He continued to take notes and write papers with a braillewriter, a clackety-clacking cousin to the typewriter that used pins to push braille letters into paper. When Mike walked down the halls the ten-pound steel machine swung wildly from his noodly arm. The sighted kids learned to scatter fast when they saw him coming.
    The playground remained the epicenter of Mike’s schooltime passion. He