Eden's Eyes (11 page)

But she kept on. And on Sunday morning, a drab rainy dawn grumbling with thunder, she opened her eyes and saw the geranium.

It had been her mother's favorite house plant, and Karen had grown up surrounded by its scent, subtle to the sighted, yet rich to her heightened sense of smell. Now she kept dozens of them around the house—in the windows, suspended from macrame hangers, even outside, in an assortment of porch-rail planters. It was a means of keeping her mother alive, as vividly for Karen as a well-stocked picture album might accomplish for others.

Thunder jerked her awake that morning with an unpleasant start. The odor of the coming storm, damp and electric, lay thick on the air. She sat up sleepily and opened her eyes, expecting the same shapeless gloom as the morning before. . .

But there on the sill not two feet away, its leaves and blossoms crisply in focus, stood the geranium. Green and red—her mother had told her the colors years ago.

The image lasted perhaps a minute, during which Karen sat transfixed on the edge of her bed, drinking it in. Then it began to blur. . . and fade.

And the headache started.

She lay back awhile, eyes closed, the geranium's image still fixed in her mind. Then she sat up and called her father, the clean scent of blossoms sweetening the storm's cloying breath.

She told him over the phone about seeing the geranium and knew from his voice that he was crying. Not just because of her first episode of clear vision, Karen knew, but because of Elizabeth, too. Even now, sixteen years later, he missed Karen's mother as if she had passed on only yesterday. She should have been here to share in this moment.

Sniffling, he said he'd be right over.

Karen replaced the dark glasses and waited on the porch. She could already hear the truck roaring up the half mile of dirt road. . . but she stifled the urge to peek. The next thing she wanted to see was her dad.

"In color?" he asked as he stumbled up the steps to embrace her.

"Yes!" she told him brightly. "Red and green! And they're just as you described them."

This was a fib, and Albert in his silence seemed to know it. He had spent hours with Karen as a child, striving with his farmer's vocabulary to describe colors, comparing them to moods and feelings and the various earthy things Karen could feel and smell. She realized now that to appreciate color it had to be seen. . . but the fib was her way of thanking him for trying.

"Come on inside," she said, tugging him by the jacket sleeve. "I want to try something."

Slipping off his muddy wellingtons, Albert followed her in.

"Sit over here," Karen instructed excitedly, indicating a press-back chair at the kitchen table.

What's up, kid?" he asked, obeying her command.

Karen knelt before him, sinking to her haunches. In a quick, nervous motion she flipped off the glasses.

Blinked.

Blinked again.

To Albert, her new eyes (so blue, he thought, still astonished at the color change) seemed unfocused, striking him somewhere in the vicinity of his stubbled chin. . .

Then they flickered up and fixed on his, filling with tears as that unmistakable glint of recognition registered in their blueness.

She touched his cheek with her hand. "It's you," she said in a whisper, the image already fading. "It's really you. . ."

Albert Lockhart lifted his daughter to her feet and held her. He held her for a long time.

Karen slept that afternoon, a sleep partially induced by the pills Burkowitz had prescribed for the headaches.

But the deep, dreamless slumber of that rainy mid-May Sunday resulted mostly from chronic fatigue. Since her surgery almost two months ago, Karen had spent scarcely a night without waking at least once before morning. That, combined with the steady gnaw of apprehension over the transplants, made her eventual crash inevitable.

The crash came that afternoon, and Karen welcomed it.

It was nighttime when she awoke. Crickets chirred but only irregularly, their song stripped of its usual spring vigor by the unseasonably cool air. The geranium was a sleepy silhouette in the moonlit window, the moon itself a shiny copper button sewn into the lining of a huge navy cap.

And Karen could see it all.

She felt lightheaded and tingly before she realized she was holding her breath. She chuckled at the idea that it was dark at night.

She believed in miracles.

She stood then and did something that she had never done for herself before now—she turned on a light. The low-wattage glow of the bedside lamp was yellow, and she added that to her burgeoning collection of colors. Around her, articles winked into shadowy relief—the brass bed on which she sat; the antique bedroom set: dresser, highboy, oval-mirrored vanity. . .

The mirror.

Karen began to shiver. Now that the one thing she had wanted more than any other—to see herself—was hers for the taking, she was terrified.

What if I'm ugly? she fretted. Really grotesque? What if God's little joke didn't end with the blindness? What if the blindness was His way of sparing me the horror of witnessing my own image?

She looked down at her hands, seeing them plainly for the first time. The tight skin and sharply defined angles suggested the strength she knew them to possess.

Good hands, she thought.

She glanced again at the mirror. Still in focus. She could see a section of the north wall reflected in its depths.

But for how much longer? What if the image faded like her father's had and just never came back?

Coward. . .

She stood, battling vertigo. After twenty-eight years she was about to meet Karen Lockhart, blind author.

She shifted in front of the mirror, eyes closed to slits.

A delicate white form flickered into the framing oval. It seemed to fade, then solidified into—

Me.

Karen opened her eyes and beheld herself. She stood motionless for a long while, not blinking, not breathing, fearful that the slightest disruption might shatter the image into ripples.

Then, hesitantly, she stepped forward, her whole body quivering with delight as the girl in the reflective oval grew larger and clearer.

She sat on the stool, leaned forward on her elbows, and studied the face she had lived with all of her life but had never seen.

How many times had she sat on, this very stool, probing the contours of her face with curious fingertips, trying in vain to sculpt in her mind an image of what she was feeling?

How many times had she sat and listened, desperately attentive, while her mother, or father did their best to describe her in image-provoking terms, only to come away more mystified than before?

And now, miraculously, here she was.

Beautiful, she thought without a trace of vanity.

Beautiful. . .

She smiled at the image in the mirror and the image smiled back. Its teeth were white and even, all but one on the top, which angled slightly forward, and its lips were moist and full red, like the geraniums. Its skin was creamy white, but Karen thought she could see a tiny blush of color in each full cheek.

The image in the mirror, still smiling, shed a single glistening tear. With profound sadness Karen watched it fall, understanding that the image wept for all the lost years, for the changes in its living geography it had failed to witness.

Then her gaze fixed on the eyes.

Her eyes.

And it registered anew that the image she was seeing was not just an image but a true reflection of herself. A little blurry perhaps, its hollows deepened by the soft yellow light. . . but it was her.

Karen Lockhart.

She felt a fit of giggles welling up in her throat and thought: Not yet. There would be time enough later to vent the joy she was feeling, to leap and dance and shout at the moon. Now was the time for discovery. There were no guarantees that the darkness might not at any moment reassert itself, drawing her back perhaps eternally into its lightless womb.

She had to see as much as she could right now, in this single enchanted moment.

A hand came up and scrubbed away the tear. Karen combed her fingers through her hair and watched, fascinated, as her reflection did the same. She flared her nostrils and laughed. Now she leaned forward, the tip of her nose almost touching the mirror.

"Hi there, Lockhart," she said. "Pleased to meet you."

Rapt, Karen gazed into the crystal chambers of her eyes, forcing back with an iron fist any thought of where the gift had come from. That part of it was finished, behind her now.

There was yet another reflection, she observed with a kind of awestruck glee, in the pool of each eye. Tiny duplicates of herself, grinning back at her from the cool, Aegean blue. She imagined them filing away inside of her, these miniature reflections, hundreds upon hundreds of them, an overload of images, glutting the cobwebbed chambers of her visual memory, assuring like some frenzied pack rat that if darkness fell again, there would be staple enough to last.

She leaned back, ignoring the worsening pain in her temples, her eyes straying now to the smooth contours of her neck. They paused in the warm valley formed by the notch of her breastbone, then scanned left, to the taut skin of that shoulder, following its youthful slope till it vanished beneath the cotton margin of her nightdress.

Karen fingered the loose material off her shoulder, revealing its shiny dome, and it occurred to her only now, in a kind of happy shock, that there was more to see than her face. . .

Standing, she loosened the buttons one by one, her, breath catching as the peeling gown revealed first one naked breast, then the other.

Her fingers strayed, her mind pleased by what she was seeing: the fleshy fullness, the rich color contrast, the symmetry. Now she turned and glanced over her shoulder, at the curving cliff face of her back, the corn-silk cascade of her thick blond hair. A breeze from the nearby screens found her skin, and she whirled to witness the tight engorgement of her nipples.

She smiled.

There was a pounding in her ears, and as the gown pooled at her feet she realized the pounding was her heart.

There she is, she thought, the giggling fit threatening to seize her again. Karen K. Lockhart, newborn, in all her naked glory.

Her eyes dropped and settled on the pale tuft of her center, and in a flash she remembered her lecherous pal Cass telling her that that was how her boyfriends would know she was a true blonde.

Now she did giggle. And laugh. And cry.

Boyfriends. . .

Possibilities began to rain down like manna from heaven. Boyfriends, travel, learning to read and write real words and not just pimples of braille on paper as thick as cardboard. . .

Karen stood the oval mirror, turning, twisting, charting her mortal topography in all of its most intimate detail. She lost track of time in the low light of her bedroom, stopping only after the images had smeared together indecipherably, and the pain had reached the intolerable.

Then, swooning-weary, she dropped into bed and slept.

She dreamt of darkness.

But there was light out, there, just beyond the press of blackness, and she fought toward it, clawing and thrashing with a fierceness she had never known. The jealous dark sought to hold her back with its weight, intent on keeping her there until she rotted in its seamless shroud. She fought it desperately, dug and gouged as if through a wall of earth.

And when she briefly awoke in the middle reaches of the night, the battle was won. There was light out there, just beyond the pink-lined veil of her eyelids.

Smiling, Karen rolled onto her side and drifted off again, forgetting the dream as she did.

The seed had long since dried on Danny's fingers, and still he squinted through the field glasses, desperate for another glimpse of her. The puppy, whose chocolate eye had opened only a few days before, had slipped from his lap and scurried away, leaving Danny to his fruitless yearnings.

But tonight had been, wonderful! How she had touched herself! In all the ways he thirsted to touch her. If only he could have gone over there, become her hands. . .

His breath, calmer now, frosted the window glass.

He watched. And waited. And later, when the sun splashed orange in the east, Danny replaced the binoculars in their hidy-hole and got dressed, pulling on the same grimy overalls he'd been wearing all week. He had to hike over to the Teevenses farm this morning and butcher a hog.

A cool spring of excitement welled in his belly as he unsheathed his pigsticker and examined its curving blade. There was power in slaughter, the smug feeling of a finger on destiny's wheel. . .

Before leaving his room, Danny glanced at himself in the beveled mirror, missing how much like a tragic clown he looked with the angry red eye circles the binoculars had left behind.

Chapter 11

Keeping to the shadows, Eve Crowell caned her way out to the carport and climbed into Bert's old Chrysler. She slipped her seatbelt on, adjusted the mirror, and keyed the ignition. The engine turned over with a shuddering cough, its innards damp from the drizzly weather. Eve hadn't driven in ten year's, and her license had long since expired. But as she backed out of the lane and steered her way through the sleeping streets, she found herself well in control.

"Like riding a bike," she said aloud, completing the thought in her head: You never forget.

No, you never forgot. Eve refused to forget. Bert had learned that the hard way, the way the Lord had intended.

And everyone was so upset. Poor Bert. The phone was still ringing off the wall, call after call from the sentimental fools he had worked with at the mine in Falconbridge. And his funeral five days ago had been lousy with them. Where had they been for her boy's funeral? Where had the sons of bitches been then?

"You poor dear," they bawled at her. "A double tragedy. First your boy and now your husband, and all in the space of a month. How can you keep your faith?"

What they didn't realize was that Bert had killed his own son, signed the warrant in his own hand. And if that wasn't enough, he'd let them carve the boy open and dole out his living parts, too. It was hideous, Satan's answer to the Sermon on the Mount.