At this point, I’m still undecided whether the entire novel will be written only in Laura’s voice or if it will be divided into three entwined first-person narratives: Laura; Julia Ward Howe, the famous writer, abolitionist and suffragist who was the wife of Dr. Howe, Laura’s mentor; and Sarah Wight, Laura’s last real teacher, who later married a Sandwich Islands missionary and died in an insane asylum. I have already done extensive research on the lives of all three women, so it can go either way. Part of the Laura section has been published in The Atlantic Monthly as a short story (not any of this, though; this is all brand new!) Note also that the scarlet fever which destroyed her eyes and ears at age two destroyed also her senses of taste and smell.

May 1889, the last year of Laura Bridgman’s life, almost at the end of the novel. She is again living at Perkins Institute in Boston, and Dr. Agnanos, her dear Dr. Howe’s successor, has arranged her first and only meeting with Helen Keller, then almost nine. Helen has already been in Annie Sullivan’s care for just over two years; Annie had shared a cottage several years ago with Laura at Perkins, and so Laura had helped teach Annie.

How little they pomp or circumstance me these days, and yet here I am this frigid morning, brought up from my toasty room expressly to meet an eight-year-old. And Dr. Agnanos knows my head’s in a terrible ache, and me not out of my serious sickbed two weeks. But we’ve been waiting for her, he tells me, his hairy-knuckled fingers clumsy and moist, the way a toad’s would feel if toads had hands. The second coming of a blind-deaf-mute who can communicate; they’re actually calling her “the second Laura Bridgman.” The second, and I’m still here, the first! A lot of nerve. And what am I supposed to do, bow down to her? Set her on my knee? I didn’t like children even when I was one of them, and now I think them worse than dogs. I shriveled and so they’ve searching for another deaf-blind girl in bloom to exhibit and experiment on. It’s taken the Board decades to find one they thought pretty enough, quick enough. Well, pretty enough is really the important thing, or at least not too strange or maladapted and looking like what she is. Not looking like what I am.

“Just talk to her,” Agnanos wheedles. “You two must have so much to talk about!” Like two in the throes of the plague or the ague might share tips and grievances? Yes, little Miss Helen and I will rattle on about our lives in our respective cells, and she can tell me how the tastes of roasted mutton and strawberries and the odor of feces and chrysanthemums have opened enormous windows of happiness and universal feeling that my flesh will never be heir to. Why am I even crankier than usual at the prospect of her? Am I afraid to be soft or afraid that I cannot be soft?

She curtsies, I feel the whoosh of her little skirts as she goes down, and then she is on me like a dog, too excited for them to hold her back, if they are even trying. Her hair is heartbreakingly soft–I had forgotten this about children, this wonder–and her face round and warm as a little meat pie against my leg, clutching at my skirts, grabbing for my hand. Too much! I raise both arms into the air, hold my hands out so they will stop her, Agnanos or Annie. Annie always had bad manners, so this assault shouldn’t be a surprise. Even in the six months when she shared my cottage, she was boorish, impatient, overly acquisitive of knowledge and brash with her hands and her moods. She was a bit of a queen here, because she had partial sight, so she could be far more independent, and yet she was also a charity case, dirty Irish brought straight from the almshouse, so more dependent than the rest of us in that way. A constant conflict of self, that one, dependence and independence tearing her apart. But she’s done better than alright, it seems, as the teacher of this one. Will she give me any credit, I wonder, for patiently teaching her the finger alphabet? Doubt it.

“Get her off me!” I write into an adult hand, ah, Annie’s, and the girl is pulled back. We all breathe for a moment, and Annie takes the chance at last to greet me properly.

“Dear Laura,” she writes, “you are looking so well.” Proof of her half-blindness right there! “And God tells me that you are splendid also, dear Annie.” She is no fan of religion, Miss Sullivan; this will get her goat. “Congratulations on your work with this…”

And then the little hand taps again at mine, insistent as a black fly in June. “It is such an honor to meet you, Miss Bridgman.” Long pause. And so? “Thank you very much for the doll you sent me. I love it very much.”

“You’re welcome.” And now more happies, another honored, a couple of exciteds, and then an afraid that I choose to ignore. She is difficult to follow.

“Please talk to me,” she writes. “Please talk to me. Please.” My presumptive heir is begging in my palm. I must say I feel outside myself somehow, and unnervingly close to tears, no, almost to hysteria. I am furious. I am confused. And so I ask Helen my favorite question, the one I ask only of myself every few years, a handful of answers etched into my fortress wall: “If you could have one sense back, which would it be?”

Her fingers go round and round in circles, and I can feel the child actually thinking in my hand. She is a child, and yet the firmness of her fingers mark her as quite unlike other children I have known; she feels more like an adult in her faculties, though a child full in her emotions. “I would have back whichever sense God would choose for me,” she says. The perfect little diplomat to God and man. Oh, she will do fine, this second me, she will do so much better than I did, because she understands already, or Annie has made her to understand, what will be expected of her. And she might as well be the second Laura Bridgman, because she will not be able to be truly herself. Poor darling child.

“Thank you, Helen. A delightful answer.” And now I bend close and decide to genuinely converse with her, a surprise, and I turn us away from the eyes of the curious to allow for a private exchange.

“Little one, barbaric colt, I feel the faint puff of air as you sniff close to me, though you try to quell it. I’m sure you have been commanded never to sniff; it is dog-like. It’s the best of your equipment, and you know it and have a right to use it. How I wish my nose worked! Dear Helen, if you had landed instead in a kingdom of dogs, you would not suffer so in status, being such a chief eloquent sniffer. But you landed in the kingdom of men, and you and I must attend to their rules and preferences, though that’s really all they are–preferences. We could be crawling about on all fours sniffing and making our whole grand menagerie of noises but they prefer it all stately and quiet, in this part of this planet. That’s just how they like it, and that’s important to remember.”
She sniffs long and hard against my shoulder, and the normal ones must be shaking in their boots. “And get the marbles,” I tell her, “the bluest marbles fame can buy to stuff into those dry sockets for your adoring public. It will be worth it.”