Disclaimer: CBS owns Numb3rs, not me. No copyright infringement is intended.

As long as you can see, it’s possible to hear and never really listen—hearing is, after all, only the physical process of the transmission of sound—but when you depend on your ears to construct the world, you have to actually listen and not just hear. Until I lost my sight, I did a lot of hearing but not so much listening. And now that I actually listen, I hear so many of the things that I’ve spent my whole life missing.

“He’s been out there all day, hasn’t he?”

Standing at the dining room doors overlooking the garage, I can hear not only my brother and a basketball going at one another, but my brother and my basketball, the one with the bell inside. Beyond Don’s footsteps and the ball, I can also hear the continuous-sound buzzer attached to the basket and, occasionally, the louder bell attached to the net which tells me he’s managed to land a shot despite the fact that his eyes are hurt. No one’s told me much about what happened, except that Don got shrapnel in his eyes while making an arrest, but that’s enough for now. I don’t want to believe this is happening again.

“Most of the evening—pretty much since he came home.”

I was still at school when Don came home, but Dad tells me he took a taxi from the hospital rather than call Dad to come and pick him up. I’m not sure what happened to Don’s car; I think it might still be at his job. “He needs to eat.”

“I’ve tried; he won’t come in. Says he’s not hungry.”

“He’ll make himself sick, expending all that energy without stopping for food or drink.”

Instead of persisting, Dad barks—I think it’s supposed to be a laugh—and says, “You seem to have survived all right to this point.”

“I don’t put out that level of intense energy.”

“Yes, you do. I’ve watched you.”

I listen again, more critically this time for the ratio between footsteps and shots made. He’s right. Although Don is making lots of shots per minute, he’s only taking the few steps necessary to retrieve the ball and line up again. I really do expend that much energy working. This must be how they felt watching me out in the garage when Mom died or when Don got shot outside the bank heist three years ago, or how Don must have felt last month when I disappeared into the data for several consecutive days after my classroom was bombed. Instinct promises I’ll never do this to them again—fear would be easy to push aside; this is more of a gnawing concern I can’t get rid of—but realistically I know it will happen again. I can’t seem to help it. Unfortunately, if I have trouble understanding other people, I have just as much trouble understanding me.

“You might as well sit down and eat, Charlie. Don will come in when he’s ready.”

The resignation in Dad’s tone I recognize. It’s the same thing I hear when he tries to get me to come in from the garage and I refuse, but usually I’m not aware enough when I hear it to understand what’s behind it. Tonight, though—Tonight I get it, and maybe for the first time in my life I understand my father with the clarity of a basic Pythagorean equation. Dad plus this resignation equals grief.

A familiar rush of satisfaction-induced adrenaline courses through me. It’s the same rush I get when I finally finish a complex equation, like the ones I run for Don and the FBI, and I suppose that makes sense. My father is a complex equation—most people are—and solving even this one part of him simplifies the larger equation.

But then my satisfaction gives way as I realize that the solution was grief. I’m not sure what Dad is grieving when I’m the subject, especially not since this tone predates my blindness and, in fact, was a part of even my earliest interactions with him, but I understand what he’s grieving with my brother. This wasn’t supposed to happen to Don.

“At least do something, Charlie. Please. Just standing there isn’t helping him and it’s unnerving for the rest of us.” Of all the nights, Dad’s book club had to meet here tonight.

Do something. What does Don usually do when I’m this way? Last month, he brought me food and drink; I think he sometimes sat with me, as though his company would help even if I wasn’t directly aware of it. And maybe it did. I barely noticed it at the time, but some of the data seemed to fly by so much easier than other parts. Maybe his presence was the variable I wasn’t able to account for, the one I sometimes wonder about when my brain is idle.

I walk back to my place at the table and pull two slices of bread from the basket. Then I reach for my steak knife to separate slices of rib eye from the bone and layer them thick across the bread to form a sandwich. When I’m done, I shift one chair down to sit behind Don’s plate and do the same for him, then transfer both sandwiches onto one plate and take it into the kitchen to pour drinks into spill-proof containers. I can’t believe we’re doing this again.

“What are you up to, Charlie?”

“You said to do something.”

With the plate in one hand and two sports bottles full of ice water in the other arm, I head out the back door and around the corner to the side yard. As with me and P vs. NP, Don’s current basketball obsession is a delaying tactic, although in his case I suspect it’s more of a conscious decision than it is with me. I sit on the ground behind him to wait, turning my back to the dining room and everyone in it, and sit our drinks aside. “You know you have to eat eventually.”

“I will, just not rib eye and not in front of Dad’s book club. I hope you didn’t bother bringing my plate out here.”

“Dad had to choose tonight to host the book club here at the house.”

“He offered to cancel it; I told him not to.” Don laughs once, sharply, and sends the ball sailing through the net. “I don’t want this screwing up his life, you know?”

I said the same thing in the beginning, but neither of them listened. Their whole worlds came to a halt for several months, no matter how much I wanted things to go on the way they always had. It seems like things have always been that way for Don, even when we were kids—me getting all the attention while he stayed out of everyone’s way. I wonder why I’ve never seen that before now. “I made sandwiches, Don. Come eat with me.” I don’t want to be the axis around which the Eppes family turns anymore. It’s Don’s turn now.

“Rib eye sandwiches?”

“Dad already had the bread on the table. I just sliced the meat off your steak and stuck it on the bread. I also brought water.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he switches off the buzzer and lets the ball roll up against the garage door so the night air is finally silent around us. Crossing the pavement, his footsteps are cautious. “What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. Dad said to do something, so I did something. Don’t worry about the plate—it’s on my lap until you sit down, and the drinks are in sports bottles.”

He grunts and picks his pace up to something approaching normal. He stops just shy of the house and sits beside me, leaning back against the retaining wall. “Thanks.”

With a mouth full of rib eye, all I can do is grunt. “Uh-huh.”

“But you know you didn’t have to do this.”

I swallow and wash it down with a drink of water. “Yeah, like you don’t have to do anything when I get too busy to eat.” I sit the plate between us and push his drink toward him until our fingers connect around the bottle. I smile through the darkness at him, hoping he can hear it the way I can. “I’m sorry, Don. I never knew what it felt like to watch.”

“You can’t help it, Charlie. It’s okay.”

“It is?”

After a short silence, he sighs. “It’s taken me a long time, but I think I’m finally beginning to understand. Some things just take time to deal with. Some things are too big to approach head-on.”

I wonder if that’s what Dad is grieving with me—the fact that he doesn’t understand. Maybe I’ll be aware enough to ask him the next time I hear it. “I wish Dad understood that well.”

---

Dad and Charlie are really struggling. I knew things were rough for them, but not living at home, I hadn’t been around enough to see much more than the public façade Dad puts on for guests. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t started looking for a new apartment yet. I’m still trying to figure out when I started getting the guest treatment by my own father and whether he even realized he was doing it.

At any rate, the question now is Dad and Charlie. By his own admission, Dad’s ability to relate to my brother has always been minimal, but always before they had—or at least Dad thought they had—a common reference point in vision. At least they could see the same things, even if they differed in how they understood what they saw. Blindness takes that away, not all at once but gradually, until all that’s left is the thin thread of actual fact, untainted by the observer. I think this is what Charlie means when he talks about the uncertainty principle.

Charlie’s been slipping away from that common reference point for two years, but last month he finally turned the corner and put it behind him. It’s been like watching him wipe his chalkboard clean and start over. He and Dad have two different views of the world now, and there might as well be a canyon between them. Absorbing braille into his system seems to have triggered another learning spike that’s sent Charlie pitching over the edge into a world almost entirely constructed on touch and hearing. The more he focuses on those senses, the further he recedes from his visual memory of the world. I doubt that he’ll ever forget it entirely, just like I know he still dreams in pictures when he dreams at all—and when his dreams aren’t equations—but the longer it is, the sketchier the details become and the less they mean. Now that I’m better able to handle the changes, he’s been talking about them more freely. “Give him more time.” It seems like everything about blindness takes longer.

“You don’t think thirty years is enough? Dad’s never understood me.” His voice is hoarse. “I’m beginning to think it’s like P vs. NP; maybe there is no solution for Dad and me.” He sits aside his drink, and after a moment his voice changes. He seems to be smiling. “But I’m glad you understand, Don. That is important to me.”

“It’s important to me too.” I take a bite of sandwich and spend a while chewing, then wash it down with several mouthfuls of water. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was, probably because it didn’t feel like I was working up a sweat, but now that I’m sitting I can’t seem to get enough water. That was stupid of me. I’m an athlete; I know better than to let myself get dehydrated. “This is good, Charlie. Thanks.” I take another drink, then sit the bottle aside for a minute. Something he said bugs me. “Are you saying it’s not important for Dad to understand you?”

“No, I’m just saying that maybe there are more important things out there. Don, is it okay if I ask you a question that probably sounds stupid?”

“‘The only stupid question is the one you need to ask and don’t.’ That’s what you tell your students, right? So, by definition, it’s not a stupid question if you’re asking. Go ahead.”

Charlie laughs once, maybe appreciating having his own lessons lobbed back at him, before he sobers. “Earlier, Dad said that before they patched your eyes you couldn’t even see the big E on the eye chart, but—I don’t know. I’m just having a hard time imagining. What does that look like?”

That, especially, isn’t a stupid question. “It didn’t look like much, I can tell you that.” My eyes are sore, but I resist the urge to rub at them because it won’t do any good, and it might actually do damage. “I could see shadows, motion, a few colors if there was enough contrast.”

“Doesn’t sound very useful.”

It wasn’t, although maybe with more time I’d have learned how to interpret it better. “I’ll tell you what’s been useful—knowing how you do things.”

“But it’s not permanent, right? I mean, you said it would just be a couple weeks before your eyes clear up.”

“According to the doctor.”

“You never said what happened. You came home late last night, then went back out this morning before breakfast. You were making an arrest in the case you pulled me off of last week?”

“Yeah.” I wish I could tell him the whole story, but I don’t dare. I don’t want him getting dragged into this mess, at least not until I’ve figured out what I’m dealing with and until I know I can keep him safe from it.

“How did it happen? I mean, don’t you wear protective eyewear?”

“Yeah, we do. This happened after I had taken mine off. We thought we had the scene contained, but apparently something got overlooked.” How that happened is what concerns me and why I don’t want Charlie anywhere near this case. “There was a small explosion near where I was standing; shrapnel flew into my eyes. It penetrated the cornea, so they had to put me under anesthetic to remove it. The patches come off Monday morning and then we’ll find out how the surgery went. After that, I guess it’s just a waiting game to see if anything develops.”

“Are you saying you could go blind?”

“Officially, the ophthalmologist talks like everything should clear up in a few weeks.” Getting information out of doctors can be like trying to work a confession out of a hardened criminal. It helps that I’ve made a career out of listening to people, not only watching their faces but listening to their voices, phrasing, what they don’t say as much as what they do say. “Unofficially, I think that’s what he wasn’t saying. But for now that’s just my suspicion and that’s how I’m keeping it.”

“What are you going to do?”

I sigh and reach for the sports bottle he brought me, letting my hand skim just above the cement to keep from knocking the bottle over. “Well, I can’t live in limbo for the next few weeks.”

“It doesn’t sound like you have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice; I just have to find it.” I’ve been chewing on this since I left the ophthalmologist’s office, and there seem to be three possible outcomes. The best-case scenario would be for my vision to clear up entirely, so I could go back to the way my life was before. Less ideally, my vision could clear up somewhat but not entirely, which would mean that I’d still need to change how I function. The worst-case scenario would be to lose all or most of what’s left of my vision to glaucoma, cataracts, retinal detachment, damage to the optic nerve, or all of the above, which would definitely mean adapting.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking the odds are about one in three that I can just wait this out.” And, of course, there’s also the fact that I can’t really afford to just wait anything out—not with Lia Oates still untraceable. My team and I have to find her, because no one else is even looking; and based on what happened this morning, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s not some reason for that.

“Okay.”

“Two out of three is better odds.”

“Absolutely, but what are you going to do?”

“I’ve already learned a lot from watching you, but there’s just as much still to learn.” My biggest concern is being able to get around on my own, not just by tagging along on someone’s arm. Charlie’s mobility specialist, Kimball Lewis, has become a friend of the family, so he seems like the most natural place to start. “Do you think Kim would come over this weekend? I’ll pay him.”

“Kim Lewis?”

“I don’t want to waste time, Charlie. What are the chances that I’m ultimately going to need to know how to live with this?”

“Are you asking for numbers?”

“Yeah, I’m asking. What are the chances?”

The way he hesitates, I don’t need to see his expression to know the answer isn’t good, and when he does answer his tone says enough. But what really frightens me is that this is the first time I’ve ever heard Charlie back away from numbers. “Statistically? Pretty good. Can we just leave it at that?”