Eden's Eyes (7 page)

Around her the hospital droned onward, its morning sounds damped to a level made inaudible by her dark imaginings.

How had he died? she wondered now. A car accident?

Yes, it had probably been a car accident. She'd been involved in one herself about five years back, just this side of Dunrobin. She'd been on her way to a CNIB meeting in Ottawa with one of the local counselors when the right front tire suddenly blew. The explosion had struck Karen's sensitive ears like a cannon blast. The small car had swerved into a broadside skid, struck the soft shoulder, flipped, then rolled three times before coming to rest on its roof in a roadside cornfield. Unhurt (apart from a cut above one eye and a bruised shin), Karen had shaken for hours afterward, realizing how close to death she had come.

She decided the donor had died like that, in a car accident.

Had he known he was about to die? her mind demanded. If so, then what was the last thing he'd seen? And whatever that was, was it permanently etched on the backs of his eyes, the eyes she now possessed? Would the first thing she saw (if the transplants worked) be a faded imprint of the last thing he had seen on this side?

Or a hideously vivid afterglow of the first thing he saw on the other. . .

Another man's eyes.

Karen reached up and touched the bandages, pressing them gingerly over her closed eyelids. No matter which way she pondered it, it still felt strange having actual physical pieces of another human being inside of her. Maybe it felt less when it was a wholly internal organ—a heart or a kidney—something you were never all that aware of in the first place.

But eyes. . . eyes seemed so much more personal. The heart might be the seat of the soul, but the eyes were its windows.

Another man's eyes. . .

They, must have had him on an operating table similar to the one she'd been on. . . cold, hard, narrow, but lacking the promise it had held for her. For the donor that table had been a kind of premature autopsy slab. Sure, he was brain-dead at the time, she understood the concept. But who really knew for certain? Unless they'd been there and survived to tell the tale—which in itself was a contradiction—how could they have known for certain that he was dead? Really dead?

Oh, Christ, imagine the horror. Completely immobile, unable to cry out or even blink an eye—and then someone opens your eyelids, holds them open with cold metal . . . and you can see the blade coming down, actually see it. And all you can do is lie there, every nerve ending shrieking in a single inaudible scream.

And with your other eye you see the first one torn free of its bed, plopped like an olive into a waiting jar. . .

(What do they put in the sockets?)

Then the knife finds the vulnerable flesh of your belly, oh yes, your warm, gut-filled belly, and it traces, its fine and your nerves cry out again and again, a chorus of agony heard only by the angels, the dark angels—

A hand, tightened on Karen's forearm; she let out a yelp.

"Hey, hey, pumpkin, it's only me. Your dad. She pulled herself up and hugged him desperately. "What is it, child? You're sweatin', breathin' like you just. run a mile. What. . . ?"

"'Just hold me awhile, Dad. Please."

Without another word Albert Lockhart drew his daughter close and held her, just as he'd done all those years ago.

It was seven thirty-five.

"When do I get the fistula out?"

In the Children's Hospital across town, Dr. Forget smiled. "It's like I told you before, Shirley," he said, patting the child's decidedly plumper bottom. "We have to keep the fistula in your arm until we're sure-sure-sure that your new kidney's going to work. If you have to go back on dialysis for a while, we don't want to have to operate on you to put it back again."

Shirley Bleeker, seven, affected her most persuasive pout. Lending force to her argument, she held out her scarred, ravaged little arm and examined it with disgust. Like a fat worm under the skin, the Gore-Tex graft which served as a hookup point for dialysis pulsed and writhed. "When will you be sure?"

The doctor glanced at Shirley's mother, who stood by the closed examining-room door. Realizing what he was after, Mary Bleeker nodded. She was always honest with her baby, even when it hurt.

"Could be as long as a year, honey."

Shirley's bottle green eyes brimmed with tears, the anguish of chronic illness never very far from the surface.

"But, hey," the doctor said with real enthusiasm. "You're going to be good as new!" He crouched and hugged his tiny patient to his chest, a great weight of compassion filling his heart. Nudging her out to arm's length, he looked her over appraisingly.

Although she had gained some weight since her surgery, and the anemia she'd endured throughout her life had begun to improve, Dr. Forget could still see the listless, sad-eyed child underneath; the waif who'd always looked as if she'd just stepped out of a Romero film; the innocent whose

life had been a dark carnival of bland meals, constant thirst, repeated painful operations to keep her fistula patent, and twelve hours a week skewered to a dialysis machine. . . hours that should have been spent just being a kid.

“Think of all the good things you can do now that you couldn't do before," he told her. "Think of all the big tall glasses of Pepsi you can drink in the hot weather, and all the ice cream you can gobble, whenever you want."

The child gave him a hopeful grin, then glanced fetchingly at her mom.

"Almost whenever you want," her mother added, and laughed. Right now, with her only child free at last of that horrid dialysis machine, she'd probably let her consume ice cream as her staple diet if that was what she wanted.

Stretching to his full height, Dr. Forget shifted his attention to Mary, whose young face bore the telling hallmarks of constant strain.

"She's past the worst of it now, Mrs. Bleeker. It's been three weeks, and so far the transplant shows every sign of holding its own. We're going to let you take Shirley home today, but we'll have to see her weekly for the next couple of months."

Her own eyes welling tears now, Mary Bleeker nodded her thanks.

"We're going home?"' Shirley shrilled excitedly, gluing herself to her mother's leg. "Really?"

"Yes, honey," Mary Bleeker promised. "We're going home."

"Didja get it?"

As she skulked into Tommy Kelly's hospital room, dragging her shopping bags behind her, Bella LeGuin nodded conspiratorially. Shooting a quick glance into the hallway to be sure she hadn't been spotted, she fished out a Mickey of cheap whiskey from one of her bags and tossed it onto the bed.

"Hot shit!" Tommy proclaimed gleefully—but in an effort to snare the bottle he sat up too fast, and the still-healing incision in his chest punished him for it. Licking his dry lips, he tried again, more slowly this time.

The bottle felt like a missing limb in the palm of his hand. He held it up to the early-morning light of the seventh-story window and gazed at its amber beauty. Then he unscrewed the cap and drank deeply, his breath quickening as the pungent fluid torched its way down through his guts.

Bella LeGuin cackled.

"God's holy trousers!" Tommy exclaimed when he finally came up for air. "'If this ain't love. . ." He kissed the bottle affectionately; it was already one-third empty. "May we never stray apart for this long again."

He glanced at Bella, who had stationed herself on the edge of a blue vinyl chair to witness this tearful reunion. Bright-eyed and toothless, clad in pilfered castoffs and flanked by her half-dozen grimy shopping bags, Bella cut a classic portrait of the big-city bag lady—which of course was what she was. And after three weeks of clean sheets, antiseptic air, and regular bubble baths, Tommy Kelly noticed the stink of her for the first time in the many years he had known her and shared her delights.

But he decided not to comment on it until after he'd gotten his smokes.

"What about my butts?" he said, capping the Mickey and slipping it under his pillow with a conjurer's deftness.

After another quick glance behind her, Bella reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of tobacco. From a different pocket she produced a book of Eddy matches and a sheaf of Vogue rolling papers.

"Cameo?" Tommy complained, accepting the cancerous care package. "You know Players is my brand, Bella."

Stretching out her right arm, Bella regarded him with patient disdain. "My arm's only that long, Tommy Kelly. And you know yourself that a thief can't be too particular. What'd you expect me to do, say, 'Hey, fella, I'd rather hawk a pack of Players but the arm that God gave me is just too damned short?'"

Tommy was already rolling one, his yellow-stained fingers working with practiced efficiency.

"Bella," he said sincerely. "You smell bad."

Bella grunted. "I'd invite you to kiss my rosy red arse, Tommy Kelly, but I'm not of a mind for gettin' up off it just yet."

Tommy popped the rolly-o into the corner of his mouth and lit up, coughing out his first deep lungful. Wincing, he clutched his chest in pain.

"You ever figure you, might have to let go some of your vices?" Bella said, cackling again.

"Not a chance," Tommy declared once his hacking subsided. "If you can't smoke then you can't drink, and if you can't drink then you can't be a Kelly. And a Kelly's what I am, thank you kindly, Miss Bella LeGuin." He grinned and took another puff, his impish blue eyes darting to the doorway, alert for white-clad spies.

The banter finished, Bella leaned closer, and Tommy knew right off that she had something on her mind. . . something serious. In fact, he, thought, she looked a wee bit like someone about to admit to a new-found belief in ghosts.

"Tommy. . . I been wondering about this since I hear they brought you in here." She paused, fidgeting uneasily in her chair. "What's it like? I mean having another guy's heart knockin' away inside of you?"

Averting his eyes, Tommy took another deep drag on his cigarette. Unnoticed, a fat finger of ash fell onto the bib of his hospital johnny.

He had never counted himself superstitious. In fact, Tommy Kelly had never thought of himself as anything but a drunk, like his father before him, God rest his pickled soul. But Bella's question cut closer to the bone than he cared to admit. Lying here alone at night, deprived of the liquid staple of his sanity, Tommy had thought of almost nothing else. It was one of the reasons he'd been so desperate to get back on the bottle, so he could dull his mind to the fact that the heart beating inside him was not his own.

"Weird," he admitted after fetching out the Mickey and draining off another quarter. "Sometimes thinkin' about, it drives me near crazy."

He drank again, and in a flash decided to let it all come out.

"I lay awake nights, Bella, and I start to fancy I can hear it inside me, hammering out its business, only too loud and too fast. And that sets me to thinkin' about the poor dumb sonofabitch what owned it before me. I mean, it's not like I picked out a pair of his hand-me-down trousers at the Sally Ann. I got his heart now, Bella. His Jesus-Christ heart!" A shudder danced visibly through him. "So. . . what about his soul? Huh? Where's that, Bella? It gives me the fuckin' willies, if you don't mind my sayin'. With bells on."

Disturbed, and yet keen to hear all of this, Bella flapped a hand of dismissal. Her own mouth was fouler than a sewer pipe, and Tommy knew that. But whatever else he might be, Tommy Kelly was a gentleman, and Bella respected him for that.

"And there's other times Bella. . . other times when it don't feel like it's beating at all, but just sort of. . . writhin'."

An angry voice roared out—"What in blazes is going on in, here?"—and Tommy half spilled the dregs of his Mickey trying to stash it with the cap missing.

He looked up into the fat, tyrannical face of Helen "The Hun" Gibson, the broad-backed R.N. in charge of the postsurgical floor.

"Out!"' the gunboat that passed itself off as a nurse bleated at Bella. "Visiting hours don't start till four o'clock."

For a giddy moment Tommy feared Bella would go for the rusty shiv she kept tucked in her sock to scare off muggers.

But then Nurse Gibson swung the full heat of her attention on Tommy.

"And you!"' She snatched the bottle away just as his lips pursed for that last reviving guzzle. "You can do whatever you want once we spring you out of here. But I'll not stand by and watch you waste the taxpayers' money and ruin a perfectly good heart in this hospital. Understood?"

Head forlornly bowed, Tommy only grunted. Out of the corner of his eye he spied Bella in the doorway, junk-laden shopping bags cutting into gnarly fingers, bright eyes laughing like a child's.

"'Bye for now, Tommy Kelly," she said, uttering a cackle as the nurse snatched his tobacco.

"Bye, Bella," Tommy said, to her back.

Five minutes later he was alone again. Alone with the sound of his heartbeat.

At ten past eight, a small group of people shuffled unannounced into Karen's room. Karen recognized Burkowitz's asthmatic breathing, but she was unable to place any of the others. She estimated from all the shuffling that there were at least five of them. Students? Yes, they would likely be medical students. She recalled a nurse mentioning that a few of them might tag along.

There followed a moment of agonizing silence.

Then Dr. Smith, the psychiatrist, breezed into the room, the swish of her windbreaker and thud of her stride reminding Karen of the woman's vitality.

"Oh," she trumpeted. "You mustn't start without me!" She crossed to the bedside and pulled up a chair, announcing as if no one else were there: "I've just come back from the Gatineau Hills, Karen, and I saw the most exquisite Baltimore oriole! I shot nearly a full roll of film." She took Karen's hand and squeezed it. "Just wait until you see the prints."'

Karen managed a ghost of a smile.

"Well,"' Burkowitz said simply. "This is it."

Karen's heart began to pound. As. if in a dream, Hanussen's last words to her came echoing back: It will be painful at first, perhaps even agonizing. . .

"Lights," she heard Burkowitz say. And then the sound of a switch being thrown. Did that mean he'd turned them off? Or on?