A Single Eye (22 page)

B
y the time I got back to my cabin after my final check on Leo, Amber was snuggled so far down in her bed that only a thatch of her golden hair revealed her presence. I shone my flashlight around my bed, but there was still no sign of my letter. The cabin was icy, the floor carpeted with our bags and clothes. I undressed like a November tree in the wind. The only sounds were the soft thud of my feet in thick socks and Amber's wheezy breathing, each exhalation a great sleepy sigh of one happy finally to be in bed. All the time she'd been sitting cross-legged in the zendo, she'd have been yearning for the moment when she would crawl into her warm bed, stretch her knees straight, and let her eyes close without having to jerk herself awake. I hoped she'd held off sleep long enough to enjoy it.

Next to Amber's raincoat by the door I stashed my boots, ready for me to slip quietly back into them in the dead dark of 4:10
A.M.
From the look of her, though, there wouldn't be much danger of waking her when I crept out. I stepped back to turn off the oil lamp. It was then that I heard the telltale squish, felt the spreading cold, and knew the awful truth. My sock was wet. An arctic pool was soaking ever-wider in the wool, turning my cold foot into an iceberg that wouldn't thaw at all tonight. I'd stepped in the puddle from Amber's raincoat.

I think—I know—that's what tipped the balance. A dry-socked woman would have let her roommate sleep. I shook her.

“Amber?”

Digging around in my duffel for another sock, I hissed, “Amber!”

“What? Is it morning already?”

“No. Night.”

She turned over.

“Amber!”

“What?” she snarled sleepily. “I don't have your damned letter. Gabe left it in the wrong cabin.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“Dunno,” she mumbled after one of those pauses that screams
Lie!

“It was him you were talking to when you weren't in the zendo during zazen this afternoon.”

“So! What're you going to do, report me to Rob? Is he going to tie me to my cushion?”

As furious as she was, she still wasn't really awake. If I stopped prodding she'd be back asleep in seconds. And, in a few days she'd be strolling through the woods, poking into buildings, and chatting up anyone she could find.

“Why did you come to a sesshin as hard as this? Why one this long?”

“Leave me alone!” she wailed.

“You've never sat a day of sesshin.”

“So?”

“So why not join the Olympic Ski Team?”

“Huh?”

“What are you doing here? Just tell me.”

Her eyes closed. I couldn't decide whether she was trying to crank her mind up for a decent lie or going to sleep in spite of me.

Finally she muttered, “Roshi called.”

“What do you mean,
Roshi called!
Roshis aren't stock brokers; they don't make cold calls to round up business for sesshins. Students apply for sesshin and just hope they're lucky enough to get in. What do you mean, Roshi called you?”

Unleashing a great sigh, she heaved herself over onto her stomach and plunged her arms under her breasts.

“When he found out Aeneas had never gone to Japan he called to tell my parents. But they don't answer the phone anymore; I do that for them. Even if they did they wouldn't have talked to him.”

“Aeneas is your brother?” I said, astounded.

I stared at her huddled in her red sleeping bag like a kid on an overnight. How could she have a brother who had walked off into nothingness? I thought about my own brother. How could she bear this enormous grief? Just hours ago she was giggling about boys throwing peanuts at her. I was still staring, expecting her to transform, to age before me.

“Yeah, my brother,” she said as if commenting that she was considering lavender nail polish.

I swallowed my amazement. In a lavender nail polish voice I said, “What did Roshi want?”

“To know if Aeneas had called us, of course. Well, of course, he hadn't. Aeneas didn't use the phone.”

“After he disappeared, you mean?”

“Well, ye-ah.”

I pulled a dry sock from my suitcase. Still standing I pulled it on. “Your parents blamed Roshi for Aeneas's disappearance?”

“Not entirely. I mean, they did and didn't. You know, they wanted to blame someone, and so sometimes they did, but the thing is Aeneas had gotten strange before he ever came here. The last couple years he lived at home he wouldn't touch the phone.” Her sleepy face quivered; I thought she was going to cry. She was looking down at the floor beyond her pillow and when she spoke I had to strain to make out her words. “I adored him . . . when I was little. He was the best big brother, he always took me with him everywhere and he was, like, happy to have me there, like I was some special expensive gift he'd been given. He was always happy.”

Her face had gone pink; her voice was shaky. I dropped down beside her on her futon and sat rubbing her shoulder, willing myself not to think of my own family. She smelled of cream and peppermint from either muscle ointment or a stash of sweets.

“And then,” she said, “I guess he was about fifteen when he started getting strange. He was ten years older than me.”

“Strange? More than with the phone?”

“Quiet. At first that's all it was, just quiet. I had started to school, so I didn't care so much that he didn't want to have me with him all the time. I mean, I didn't realize that it was that he didn't
want
me, I just figured . . . I don't know what I thought. I mean, I was six years old. But first it was the phone, then he started staying in his room more—most of this I got from what my parents said later, you know? He started making rules. I mean, my mother would say, ‘Don't brush your teeth with hot water.' And he'd say, ‘How cold does it have to be?' And she'd say, ‘Well, just let it run a minute.' Then that was law for him, and he had to do it for sixty seconds, not”—she started to swallow and ended up gulping back tears—”not sixty-one.”

I rubbed her shoulder softly, giving her time to pull herself together.

“When you're quiet, people don't always notice your strangeness, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, surprised. “How'd you know that?”

I shrugged. “No wonder Aeneas made such a great facsimile of a Zen student. Sits quietly; adores rules. He must have been in heaven here.”

“He was,” she said, and despite the irony of my question she spoke of him in the soft tone of pride. “When I saw him that weekend the Japanese roshis came, he was, like, walking on air. He knew every line of every ceremony. He could do all the chants in Japanese. I mean, he always was really really bright anyway, and a better mimic than anyone I ever saw. But here he was a star. And Roshi really liked him, and the Japanese were really impressed.”

“Amber,” I said slowly, hating to bring up the stains on this cherished memory of him, “I have to ask you this. The Buddha on the altar at the opening, did Aeneas—”

A guffaw exploded from her. The shock of it threw me back, and I watched as she turned toward me, still laughing. She pulled the bag around her shoulders. “The Buddha the Japanese brought, did he lift it right off the altar? Yeah, of course. He liked it. So he took it.” She was staring at me now, and my shocked expression made her laugh all the more. “Darcy, it was funny. I mean, I knew the minute the Buddha disappeared that Aeneas had snagged it. It's what he did. He had no sense of boundaries. He used to pocket things in stores in San Francisco. Little Buddha statues, staplers—for some reason he adored staplers—pens, other odd things. At first it really scared me; I mean, I was still a little kid and I knew you shouldn't steal. It could have been a big problem, but the thing was Aeneas didn't want most stuff. But when something attracted him, he just figured he should have it.”

“How did you handle that?”

“Luck. We were really lucky. Part of the not-wanting thing was that once he did pocket something it slipped out of his mind. You know, as if he wanted the ‘wanting' more than the actual thing. So when I saw him pocket something, I'd distract him. Then I'd borrow his coat, take the thing out, and return it. I got so I could do it all in under a minute. Even in shops, we never had a problem; I always got stuff back before we left the stores. But I had to watch him all the time.”

“Didn't your parents—”

“They couldn't have handled it. I just made sure Aeneas never went to a store alone.”

“You were in grammar school?”

“Yeah. I was in junior high when he came here.”

“That's a huge responsibility for a kid. You must have been so relieved when he came here—”

I just caught myself before speaking the last two words:
and died
.

When he came here and died
.

Suddenly the sadness of it was too much. Sweet Amber's sweet, helpless brother. How could he have died, here, in this place where he should have been safe? I wanted to clasp Amber to me, to ease the gnawing around the hole, to fill her emptiness.

Her round sweet face tightened like an apple suddenly dried, as if all the life had gone long ago.

“It was a miracle; that he found a place he could fit in, where he could shine. A miracle. My parents said that all the time. When I told them how central he was to everything at the opening, it was like their son had graduated from Harvard. They loved it that the important Japanese teachers focused on him. Like he wasn't crazy, didn't have a tumor or some weird disease; he was just in the wrong place before. But now, in the monastery, with the Japanese masters, he was a star.” She took a breath, and her face relaxed back to normal. “So, like, when we heard that he'd gone to Japan we weren't surprised. My parents were worried about him being in a foreign country, but they were proud of him, and really, really relieved.”

I had to swallow before I could say, “But your parents didn't really believe Aeneas went to Japan, did they?”

“Why'd you think that?” she demanded. But before I had to answer, she slumped back on her stomach, face propped on forearms, gaze into a neutral distance. “Yeah, okay. You know, the Japanese taking him, it was too happily-ever-after to really accept. And then when Roshi called and said Aeneas didn't go to Japan, it made sense.”

As I listened to her twisting what had been said and what might have been, a cold dread filled me. Roshi had said Aeneas never went to Japan. He didn't say he'd gone anywhere else. But Amber was hanging onto that belief. I knew I should ask her, but I couldn't, not yet. Not yet by far.

I swallowed hard, and again, and forced out, “How'd your parents take what Roshi told you?”

She shook her head and when she looked up at me it was with a different, far less innocent expression. “They didn't. Why would I tell them? It wasn't like that changed anything. It'd only be a new obsession for them. That's what they've got left of Aeneas; now
they
obsess.”

I was impressed, and not a little shocked that she could be so controlled.

“So you came to sesshin to find out, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And Roshi let you.”

“He didn't want to, but I guilted him into it.”

I was about to protest that Zen masters don't act from guilt, but in this case, maybe Leo did. Guilt would explain why he let a novice come and why he put his assistant in the cabin with her. Why he introduced this sesshin with the question of Aeneas. Why he was doing exactly what Yamana-roshi warned him against.

I sat in the dim light, looking at her in a vague half-seeing way, thinking about long-gone family, a brother vanishing, and feeling sad, knowing I shouldn't let her go on hoping for a brother who was dead, and being unable to yank away that hope—

And then words burst out of my mouth in such a flurry I only half heard them. But I did hear Amber's reply. She cocked her head and stared at me as if I had asked where the nail polish bottle was, the one I had in my hand.

She said, “Aeneas isn't dead. We never thought Aeneas was dead. He sent us postcards every couple years.”

I sighed so heavily she actually laughed.

“From where?” I asked.

“A temple in Kyoto, and later a temple in Seattle, one in Vancouver, the Japanese garden in Portland. My parents were hurt to think he'd gotten back here on trips or vacations and hadn't called, and I actually had to remind them about him and the phone. Someday he'll send a card with a return address, and then I'll go get him.”

Tears glistened in her eyes, and mine. I felt a huge wave of relief as if my whole body had been frozen in tension and now the sun had come out. I exhaled long and luxuriously. Only then did I feet the backwash of suspicion. “But the postcard from Japan? How do you explain that? I mean, he never went to Japan with the Japanese masters.”

“He must have had one of them send it for him. They liked him; they would have done it as a favor.” She pulled her arms back inside her sleeping bag, and snuggled down on her side, her unclasped blond hair spread over her head like a fluffy kid's blanket. “I only had to think about that now, after Roshi's call. Because, see, it was easy to imagine Aeneas charming the Japanese masters. When I was a kid he'd take me downtown to Union Square or Coit Tower. He'd listen for tourists, and soon he'd be ‘talking' to them. He was such a great mimic he could almost pass himself off as anything. He picked up sounds, just enough words in their language to make them wonder. But it was more than that; he stood like them, gestured like them, his face was their faces. When he was doing it, he was one of them. It sounds like he was mocking them, but that wasn't it at all—Aeneas would never be cruel; he just wanted to mirror them. Like stealing the Buddha; he just wanted to steal who they were for a minute. People were never offended. They were charmed. It was like they had met the one really tasteful person in all of San Francisco.”