The Eye Unseen

by Cynthia Tottleben

  Cages sitting on cages. Cats. Mice, even. A dozen birds. Everyone hollering for attention. The cute ones getting it. Me, with my bad eye, getting ignored. Laughed at.

  The eye wasn’t even my fault. The kid did it, not long before they left me. Put a plastic sword in and pulled it out, his mom screaming at me when I yelped. Like I had done something wrong. Like I wasn’t good enough because he had disfigured me. My scar, hot. The place my eye had been a physical longing that I could never fill.

  By the time you came I was putting on my best ostrich routine. Paw over my face. Shivering. Backed in the corner. Out of my head. The cage metal my pack had rammed through my heart. Winnie the Weiner Dog, skewered. And on display.

  Your speech was song to me. Liquid. Smooth, flowing, easy. I uncovered my face. Waited for your head to bounce back. Worried about the awful words you might call me.

  “Hi, beautiful. What’s your name?” you asked.

  I could smell my own waste on myself. In my former life this elicited horrible feelings of shame. But you only drew closer. You didn’t seem to notice the depths to which I’d fallen.

  My gaze met yours. I didn’t want to play games and hide from you. Better to just let you see the badness and then you could run.

  “Can I pet you?” Your finger slid through the bars, across the tip of my snout. I scooted closer and let it run over my cheek. Fell into you. Put the scabby wound against your palm and let you siphon the pain right out of it.

  We melted together. The spike came out. Memories of the old pack, gone. My good eye focused on your tender face, and I knew that you would be my girl. That this time, this crate, the eternity I had lived in this foul-smelling building were well spent if I could cuddle up and feel your arms wrap around my body.

  You turned your chin to the side. Smiled. Kissed my snout when I pushed it between the bars. We were so close I could see it. Your eye, also sick. Your eye, with a circle blooming inside like a flower.

  I sniffed it. Your wound gave off a scent like the basement of my old home. Moldy. Wet. Slightly sick.

  Excitement overwhelmed all other thoughts. Another girl joined us, your sister. Then your mom. She paused when she looked at me, her attention on my deformation. What was it she saw and you didn’t?

  You saved me. Opened the door, let me jump into your arms. Freed me. Loved me.

  We shared the same seat in the car. You called me Tippy and it fit. I was no longer a Wiener Dog wearing a cape and doing flips for chunks of biscuits. I was Tippy, Princess of the Tea Party. Tippy, the Mouse Stalker. Tippy, Cuddler Extraordinaire.

  And you were my girl.

  I have been through this before. The wind is cold. I do not miss the outside. I have enough room to stretch my legs and roam from wall to wall. My cage this time is enormous compared to the last.

  But not you, my little one. Your cage is so much harder to bear. I see your humiliation and it is mine from old. Pissing where one shouldn’t. The sickness creeping through your system. Your scent no longer that of girl but of that familiar mildew spread from your face to your fingertips, even the bottoms of your toes.

  I was alone when my pack left me. Stranded. Isolated. Left without explanation. The cape removed, the biscuits hidden.

  My world was nothing but darkness when you found me. Saved me. Looked at me with your own polluted vision and held me despite my ugliness.

  Now our roles have switched. Your pack has dissolved, your alpha powerful but ruled by a different moon. Together we are held against our will. We may be hungry, but we are sisters and we have each other.

  We can warm the sheets together. Chase spiders for protein. Tell stories while I fold into you and calm you with my heartbeat, the kisses I slather across your cheeks.

  This time, my girl. This time I will save you.

  I have a plan.

  Chapter 11

  Joan

  Six months after Mom passed I got the FedEx box in the mail.

  Aunt Evelyn’s books. Sent from a storage company in Maine, with explicit instructions from Mom’s estate to turn them over to me once she was gone.

  I locked them in the closet. When we moved to Iowa they found their way into the attic. I had no use for them.

  After all, the rest of the family was long gone. Evelyn, dead at the table that day when I was a young girl. My Grandma Sweeney hit by a car four years later while getting her mail. Cousin Jackie drowned on a canoe trip on her thirtieth birthday. Her twin daughters suffocated, locked in a refrigerator playing hide and seek a year later. The whole Lang family wiped out during a tornado on the Fourth of July. Mom, her hands sawed off less than an hour before she finally bled to death on my living-room floor.

  I brought them down the winter of your eleventh birthday. By then your birthmark and I were quite familiar, as it liked to tease me more and more as you matured, coming out to join us for a snack when it was pitch black outside and we were playing Sorry! at the kitchen table or hovering in the morning air before it had scrambled for cover after you had just crawled from bed. I had gotten to know it so well we were almost on a first-name basis.

  I took to my room that first night and struggled to draw myself back out after I started reading. Aunt Evelyn had been very thorough, attaching notebooks to ancient journals so her study could be interpreted with each original document.

  Banking didn’t lend itself to historical research. I spent my days selling mortgages and signing customers up for car loans that everyone knew they couldn’t afford. What did I know of Portugal? Kharakhorum? Monkshood?

  But I learned.

  Every Sunday afternoon while you and Brandy played with the church youth group, I was at the university library, piling books to take home, delving deeper into the subjects Aunt Evelyn had already studied. You lived with me and demanded my love. The least I could do was learn about you. Know what I had shed the day you burst onto earth. What I had borne onto the world.

  When I first opened the box, I stumbled upon the story of my distant cousin, born just after the turn of the century and living out the life of so many women before her. Cooking. Cleaning. Managing her household, the children, the farm. Feeding goats and mending socks. Building a world that centered around God, work, and family.

  Evelyn had been so thorough as to list the midwives that assisted Ruby as she tore from her mother’s body. She included the teachers, pastors, neighbors and childhood friends that had helped form Ruby’s value system and exuberant personality. One page detailed the courtship that ended in her marriage to Robert Snell and their journey from Kansas to the farm he had purchased in Missouri.

  Ruby had been terrified to leave her mother and sisters. But like every good woman, she kept her opinions to herself and followed her husband wherever he led them.

  I skimmed these sections, not doubting for a second that Ruby was an honorable woman. I sought the details of Ruby’s family circle, how their secrets were shared, how she was forewarned about our curse. Did she have an Aunt Evelyn? As I searched through the box, would I find a holy woman in each clan who kept the others in line?

  One of my immediate questions was answered when I found the adoption certificate for Ruby’s son, Jacob. For years I had held onto the fact that Ruby’s daughter attacked her older brother—something I hadn’t thought possible, since no woman in our family had ever birthed a boy. Or at least one that had survived long enough to be named. I had seen it as a sign that maybe our blood was weakening, the legend showing its cracks—maybe by the time I had my own children the birth-marked babies would be extinct and I could live worry free after all.

  According to Aunt Evelyn, Jacob was the son of Ruby’s closest friend, who perished with her husband in a house fire. How ironic that he would also be put to death by fire. Did little Janie know this when she reached into the stove and pulled out a burning log? While her own hands blistered and she pushed the flame into her brother’s face, her strength amazing for a four year old? When Janie yanked the pan with fresh bacon grease and
doused her burning brother with it?

  Ruby knew instantly. She heard the commotion, she hurried to the kitchen, saw her son aflame and the smirk of satisfaction on her daughter’s mouth. The light of the fire sparked, and Ruby saw the shadow in Janie’s eye. I wondered if she even tried to save her son. Did she see her daughter for the imp she was and immediately quell the problem, or did she fight for her son’s deformed future while keeping her back to the wall in that small kitchen?

  Evelyn didn’t doubt her cousin at all. Her pages extolled Ruby’s efficiency. The four year old commanded the situation, but her mother’s will rebounded. She dragged the girl to the yard, the glass bursting from the windows as the house lit up behind them. Ruby held the beast down on the stump she used for beheading chickens, her hand clawing the child’s sweaty neck as she grabbed for the ax. Not once did she wail that this was her progeny or that her entire world was collapsing as the flames roared up the trees surrounding the house.

  Ruby got purchase on the wooden handle and yanked it from the ground. She did not hesitate. She did not falter. She severed the child’s head and watched as it plopped off the stump, rolling to her feet, the sickening smile still attached to Janie’s mouth.

  Before Ruby lowered her arms she joined her daughter on the ground. Her husband, drawn by the flames, had ridden home with his rifle in hand. As he witnessed his wife slaughter their child, he took aim and fired.

  The bewildered man told Evelyn just months before he passed that once Janie was dead the house stopped burning. He had lifted her head from beside her mother, and he swore that she spoke to him—giggled even—the bad eye dead and shriveling as he stood there. Terrified, he threw the head into the bushes and turned to his beautiful wife. He embraced her while she bled out, his apologies answered only by Ruby’s whispered assurances that this had been her destiny.

  Robert never discussed that day with anyone besides Evelyn. He went inside the house to find Jacob, still clinging to life, his skin melted in most places. The boy’s eyes were hollowed out and Robert took solace in the fact that he couldn’t see himself. He gripped his son’s hand, told him he loved him, then helped him join his mother and sent a bullet through his brain. After piling the corpses in the bedroom, Robert relit the flame and took off on his horse, never returning to his property.

  The old man told Aunt Evelyn that he could still smell the stench of evil that radiated from his daughter’s head. It had driven him half mad. He wound up in the barren lands of the west, working odd jobs for cattle ranchers or the railroad, staying far from women and children and anyone whose laughter might conjure up Janie’s giggling head.

  What would Ruby do in my situation? I’ve asked myself that so many times. You have always been so well-behaved, so mannered and pleasing. Would Ruby be able to use the same weapon on you?

  Am I that weak of a woman?

  Or are you so powerful that you soften me? Eat at my corners like acid? Emit a magnetism that fogs my brain?

  I wish Brandy could have stayed. She was always my center.

  And if I had asked her to, your sister would have swung that ax without blinking an eye.

  Chapter 12

  Lucy

  Time trudged past, a slug on a lazy day, picking up speed only after dinner when I could easily sleep. Mom sometimes let me linger, do dishes, sprawl out on the living room carpet, quietly promenade with Tippy in the downstairs hall. When she either gave me her annoyed glare or pointed to the stairs, we dashed to our room and waited for the lock to turn.

  But sleeping then was so much easier. After the waiting was done for the day. Our stomachs were full. Our minds at rest.

  The mornings weren’t so awful, either. Tippy and I were usually awake long before the lock opened, listening to Mom shower, waiting with throbbing bladders for our turn in the bathroom. Renewing our lockdown with our hunger sated wasn’t so difficult.

  The afternoon was when I really had trouble.

  Day after day, despair marched in, lined up against the walls, stared at me in awkward silence. I could only avoid it for so long. Closing my eyes didn’t work, for sleep slipped out of my hands as though slathered in warm bacon grease.

  As the sun shifted away, the inside of my room took on a bleakness as stark as my view out the window. Desolate. Frigid. Blocked off and blistered with regret.

  These were the hours I could never abandon. I watched the unchanging countryside endure the harsh breath of winter and couldn’t keep the cold from creeping into my heart.

  I would never drive a car.

  Be a homecoming queen.

  Write another book report. Even though I wasn’t sure if freshmen were still required to do such things.

  I wanted to be a singer. Not opera. Not classical, really. I didn’t even want to be on the radio. Or in a choir. Me and a piano. Or a guitar. Or nothing at all.

  What was I missing? What were other girls my age doing? Did they have dates? Auditions? Were they babysitting? Selling stupid candy bars for the band fundraiser?

  I had never been on a date. No pizza and breadsticks, no shared coke at the movies, no basketball games. No boy had ever tried to even hold my hand.

  Mike Brevaro. My seventh grade biology lab partner. His dark hair flighty, half curled at the ends and creeping out of the stocking cap he wore in the winter. His smile was so intense my cheeks turned beet red whenever he looked at me. I would have dated him. Sometimes I even thought about other things I would do with him.

  But that would never happen now.

  Boys.

  Brandy had kissed three or four. One she had made out with in the church basement, by the water heater, when we were having a lock in with the youth group. Tobias, the foreign exchange student. The guy was goofy looking, but he had had the hots for my sister. And did she enjoy that!

  At least, if she were dead, she had experienced some of life. Unlike me.

  The walls closed in, tighter. My throat rusted shut with the agony I could hardly swallow. Where was Brandy? Was she having fun?

  And why hadn’t she sent someone to help me?

  We had never vacationed much. Mom had used her time off work for home repairs and gardening, not for travel. I had only seen six other states: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and for a few minutes, Indiana. No big cities. No subway systems. No foreign museums. Missy Spencer’s grandparents had taken her to France. She had seen the Mona Lisa. And I was supposed to be living there!

  I would never visit Africa. Work for the Peace Corps or on a mission in Haiti. See humpbacked whales while on a romantic cruise with my new husband. Hike across Europe. Find vampires nested in the old cities there.

  No one would ever be proud of me. I would be lucky if people even remembered my name. My life was nothing, empty eggshells tossed after the cake was in the oven.

  Tippy could crowd me all she wanted. Her nudging couldn’t erase the horror that hovered around my bedroom door.

  Locked. My life, at a standstill.

  Would I grow taller while she kept me here? Or would I shrivel? My clothes had already started to hang on me.

  The world outside my window was boundless. Fields stretched on forever. Was this what it was like to live on the tundra? A vast frozen land? How did the pioneers survive in this weather?

  I tried to remember things. Funny commercials from when we still had television. Protozoa. Plankton. The preface from our old church hymnals with the dark burgundy covers. The recipe for lemon squares. Adverbs and adjectives.

  The names of trees and the shapes of their leaves.

  But as the hours stacked up, it ceased to matter.

  None of it mattered. Nothing but the sound of her footsteps, coming toward my door. Letting me out. Letting me breathe.

  Letting me live.

  * * *

  The rime built up on my window, frosted my bones. I had on layers and layers of clothing, from my too-small long johns saved from winters past to the thick wool sweater I had stolen from Brandy’s
room. Nothing helped.

  “Where is she?” Tippy would ask on occasion, believing that we were foremost in Mother’s mind. “Do you think she knows we’re hungry?”

  “Get under the blankies.” I didn’t want her to get sick, but I also wanted her warmth to keep me from shivering. “She’ll be here eventually. When she’s good and ready. We just have to hang on until then.”

  I kissed Tippy’s head. Pulled her tight. Slowed my heart beat to match her own.

  * * *

  Wallpaper makes a better decoration than a late night snack.

  Tippy had suggested I pull it down, peel the borders along the top of the walls. We consumed it with icicles and jewelry boxes full of snow. Even as I choked on the paper, I could feel the paste mocking my stomach, setting in motion two days of sickness that nearly destroyed my room.

  In my weakness I called for Mother.

  Banged on my door, wailed and begged to be let out. My gut cramped up, forcing me to drool as I rolled around on the bed, clutching my stomach.

  When the diarrhea hit I knew we were doomed.

  Tippy hid under the bed while I lost it all. I barely made it to the closet and did more damage to the walls than the wastebasket, the stench of my own waste causing me to hurl onto my floor. At one point I even slipped in the bile as I hurried back to my bed, my clothes discarded and used to wipe down my mess.

  “Please, Mommy, I need the bathroom.” I pounded the door as I lay on the floor beside it. “I’m really sick.”

  I no longer knew if she was working or at home. We had no routine, no regular meal times. The sun didn’t even seem to have a pattern anymore. I felt entirely lost. How long had it been since I’d even seen Mother?

  I fell asleep with my head against the wall. When I came to my hand ached, my fist coated in the same blood that stained my door. My stomach lurched, and I hurried to the closet to relieve myself.