The Coach
THE LUXURY COACH bus departed New Jersey’s St. Lucia’s Home for the Blind in the early afternoon, headed for an exclusive academy in Upstate New York.
The driver, with his corny stories and an entire catalog of knock-knock jokes, made the journey fun for his passengers, some sixty nervous children between the ages of seven and twelve. Their cases had been culled from emergency-room reports throughout the tristate area. These children were recently visually impaired—all had been accidentally blinded by the recent lunar occultation—and, for many, this was their first trip without a parent present.
Their scholarships, all offered and provided by the Palmer Foundation, included this orientation-like camp outing, an immersive retreat in adaptive techniques for the newly blind. Their chaperones—nine young adult graduates of St. Lucia’s—were each legally blind, meaning their central visual acuity rated 20/200 or less, though they had some residual light perception. The children in their care were all clinically NLP, or “no light perception,” meaning totally blind. The driver was the only sighted person on board.
The traffic was slow in many spots, due to the jam-ups surrounding Greater New York, but the driver kept the children entertained with riddles and banter. At other times, he narrated the ride, or described the interesting things he could see out the window, or invented details in order to make the mundane interesting. He was a longtime employee of St. Lucia’s, who didn’t mind playing the clown. He knew that one secret to unlocking the potential of these traumatized children, and opening their hearts to the challenges ahead, was to feed their imagination and involve and engage them.
“Knock-knock.”
Who’s there?
“Disguise.”
Disguise who?
“Disguise jokes are killing me.”
The stop at McDonald’s went well, all things considered, except that the Happy Meal toy was a hologram card. The driver sat apart from the group, watching the youngsters finding their French fries with tentative hands, having not yet learned to “clock” their meal for ease of consumption. At the same time, unlike the majority of blind children who were born sight-impaired, McDonald’s had visual meaning for them, and they seemed to find comfort in the smooth plastic swivel chairs and oversize drinking straws.
Back on the road, the three-hour ride stretched into double that amount of time. The chaperones led the children singing in rounds, then broadcast some audiobooks on the overhead video screens. A number of the younger children, their biological clocks thrown off by blindness, dozed on and off.
The chaperones perceived the change in light quality through the coach windows, aware of darkness falling outside. The coach moved more swiftly as they got into New York State—until all at once they felt it decelerate suddenly, enough so that stuffed animals and drink cups fell to the floor.
The coach pulled to the side and stopped.
“What is it?” asked the lead chaperone, a twenty-four-year-old assistant teacher named Joni, sitting closest to the front of the bus.
“Don’t know… something strange. Just sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
Then the driver was gone, but the chaperones were too busy to worry—anytime the coach stopped, hands went up for assistance to the restroom in back.
Some ten minutes later, the driver returned. He started up the bus without a word, despite the fact that the chaperones were still supervising bathroom trips. Joni’s request to him to wait was ignored, but the kids were eventually helped back to their seats, and everyone was okay.
The coach rolled on quietly from there. The audio program was not continued. The driver’s banter ceased, and, in fact, he refused to respond to any questions Joni asked, seated right behind him in the first row. She grew alarmed, but decided she must not let the others sense her concern. She told herself that the coach was still moving properly, they were traveling at an appropriate rate of speed, and anyway they had to be close to their destination by now.
Some time later, the coach turned onto a dirt road, waking everyone up. Then it rolled onto even rougher ground, everyone holding on, drinks spilling into laps as the bus bumped along. They endured this shaking for one full minute—until the bus abruptly stopped.
The driver turned off the engine and they heard the door fold open with a pneumatic hiss. He departed without a word, his keys jingling faintly into the distance.
Joni instructed the chaperones to wait. If they had indeed arrived at the academy, as Joni hoped, they would be greeted by the staff at any moment. The problem of the silent bus driver could be addressed at the appropriate time.
Increasingly, however, it seemed that this was not the case, and that no one was coming to greet them.
Joni gripped the back of her seat and stood, feeling her way to the open door. She called into the darkness:
“Hello?”
She heard nothing other than the popping and pinging of the coach’s cooling engine, and the flutter of a passing bird’s wings.
She turned to the young passengers in her care. She sensed their exhaustion and their anxiety. A long trip, now with an uncertain end. Some of the children in back were crying.
Joni called a chaperone meeting at the front. Amid frantic whispering, no one knew what to do.
“Out of range,” explained Joni’s cell phone, in an annoyingly patient voice.
One of them felt along the large dashboard for the operator’s radio but could not locate the handset. He did notice that the driver’s seat of cushioned plastic was still exceedingly warm.