I stood in what felt to be sub-zero weather.
Maybe it was colder, maybe it wasn’t cold at all but maybe my heart was so bitter that everything around froze solid like the legend of the snow queen. Or something like that. I kept turning my ears back to the remains of the van we were traveling in, trying to listen to my younger brother’s shallow breathing. He said he was alright but I didn’t believe him for a second. Our driver, Mr. Denman, was dead, or at least he didn’t respond when I screamed out for him and then slapped his face. I felt something warm and wet on my fingers and resisted any urge to wipe what was possible blood form my hands as I tried to crawl out of the van into the cold.
“Amber! Don’t leave me.” Clarissa yelped from the middle row. We had picked her up from a group home in Couer d’Alene, Idaho earlier that day. She was snippy about being in a van with my brother, a frightened eight year-old, and me, a blind seventeen year-old; saying that she was “healthy” compared to us as all she had a problem was adults not letting her self-medicate with whatever drugs she could get her hands on.
“I’m going to see if I can get help. Stay here.”
“You can’t! You’re-”
“Afraid?”
“Blind.”
“Never stopped me before.”
“Just stay in here until someone comes for us!”
“They won’t see us.”
I may have been blind, but I knew we had gone off-road and with the snow continuing to fall, no one would be looking up an over the embankment.
“Stay with Marshall and…Mr. Denman.”
“Is that his blood?”
“No, it’s fine…he’s just knocked out.”
“You’re lying.”
“Clarissa, can you see anything outside, like where we drove off from?”
“Back there.”
“That doesn’t help me.”
“To your left, and then up.”
I really wanted to yell at her in frustration, but it wasn’t the best time to do that.
“You’re going to freeze!”
“Maybe,” I replied as I climbed out and stepped into the snow.

The cold air and wet flakes struck my face and it was a mixed feeling of bitterness and a gentleness that I had never felt in my life. Sure, I felt snow and I played in it abundance when I was younger. There was a time that I thought I could actually see the individual ice crystals as they fell to the Earth, but that was only because I knew of them, I knew of the science behind them. The reality, not the dreamy fantasy that allows someone to paint a picture of a cozy cottage with a large window and a small fireplace with the family surrounding it because it was convenient.

My family hung around a small fireplace in order to stay warm and that same fireplace caused our house to burn to the ground. A fireman saved Marshall and myself, but our parents were never found. Did they die in the fire or disappear like the falling snow as it touched the flames. What should have been described as a beautiful January night turned into pure darkness. From there on, it was one foster family after the other as Marshall was traumatized by the fire and I refused to leave him—so families who wanted just one got a pair instead and for some reason or another, we never stayed long. I don’t want to think it was about my condition.
All of my life, I was asked how I felt being blind. I When I was young, I didn't care, I had nothing to miss and nothing to imagine. You could describe the colors of a ball and I'd tell you that you were a funny person to make up stories like that, as nothing has color or a visible shape. I could tell you an apple was kind of round and had bumps and turns, but I couldn't see it as a bright object. I could only feel.
Until I lost the ability to feel.
To care.

From hearing people talk about me right in front of me...as if blindness and deafness were synonymous or that I was just a bit dense. From that point on, I did the work but I no longer cared for anyone else but for my brother and myself.
As I said, that lead us to have to move frequently, eventually into state custody and then into a private institution in Seattle: The Carter Institute. We were picked up from our latest “home” in Michigan and taken across the country, to abruptly stop in Idaho and then, for the moment, in a snowy mountain area of Washington.