Eden's Eyes

by Sean Costello

  So they'd flipped a coin. And Shine had lost the toss.

  Coming up these same steps not five minutes earlier, Shine had felt sick to his very core. He had two sons of his own, and the thought of losing one of them, never mind the atrocity he'd come to this home to report, made him shiver with horror. He'd stood there in front of the stout wooden door, staring at the bell, silently rehearsing how he would break the news to the boy's mother. Christ, the kid had been dead less than a month, and the woman's husband was barely cold in his grave. How much shitty luck could one human being tolerate?

  When he rang the bell and the door inched open, the words had piled up like colliding boxcars in his throat. A woman in a wheelchair pressed her face into the crack and fixed him with the most striking blue eyes Shine had ever seen. He cleared his throat, introduced himself, and waited to be invited inside. But the door remained only partially open, that haggard face seeming disembodied in the gap.

  "State your business," the woman had tersely demanded.

  And he had.

  Dragging feet turned to lead, Shine moved around the front of his car and let himself in on the driver's side. His partner, who had in the interim lit his pipe, eyed him over, the rims of his glasses.

  "How'd she take it?"

  Shine drew a ratcheting breath, the first he'd taken since leaving the porch. When he turned to answer, his complexion was gray.

  "I've never seen anything like it," he confided, "I tell this lady that somebody's dug up her son's grave and stolen his body—not just his rings or his gold teeth but his entire fucking body—and she just grins at me."

  "Shock?"

  Shine considered this possibility again, for the same explanation had occurred to him during his walk back to the car.

  "No," he said finally. "I've seen that reaction before. It's different, more a grimace than a genuine grin. And it doesn't last. They always break down after a minute or so." He shook his head. "No. . . this dame was delighted."

  Shine glanced back at the house in time to see the lace curtain in the front window snap into place again.

  "Let's get out of here," his partner suggested.

  "Yeah," Shine agreed, and keyed the ignition.

  Chapter 14

  The phone was on its eighth ring and still her father hadn't answered it. . . as usual. Over the years, Karen had tried numerous times to coerce him into buying a hearing aid, reminding him repeatedly of how annoying it was to have to shout to make oneself heard, never mind having to wait while the phone rang a half-a-hundred times, never sure if he was, out or just not hearing it. But Albert would only grunt and turn away, bringing down a silence that fairly hummed with that grand ole Ottawa Valley obstinacy.

  Thinking of their ongoing battle now, as the hiss between rings stretched maddeningly, Karen had to smirk. She had inherited her own fair share of that obstinacy. . . maybe even more than her share. It was a trait largely responsible for her lifelong refusal to play the cripple, to strive instead to push the limits of her independence beyond what was normally considered feasible for a poor little blind girl.

  Still, it seemed ridiculous to wander through life half-deaf when all it would take—

  "Hello?"

  "And where were you?" Karen asked with an amused sigh. "Arnprior?"

  "Eh?"

  "I said oh. . . never mind." She was too excited about her first full day of sight to start grinding that old axe again. "I wanted to tell you about my adventures!" she shouted in deliberate exaggeration. "I can see nonstop now!"

  "Say, that's great! Nonstop, eh? Hot damn! Why don't you come on over?" Albert paused then, and when he spoke again, some of the enthusiasm had drained out of his voice. "I've. . . got some things I want to show you."

  There followed a brief, uncomfortable silence. Karen knew what it was that he wanted to show her, but she wasn't sure she felt up to it just yet. It had taken years to lay certain deep-running feelings to rest. Stirring them up now, at this early juncture, might prove an error.

  "Please?"

  "All right," Karen agreed without further hesitation. She had never heard her father use such an imploring tone. "I'll be right over."

  "Want me to pick you up?"

  Karen glanced out the hall window at the slope of the south field. She'd been tired after coming in this afternoon and had slept until past dark. Now a fat, silvery moon drenched the countryside in its cool white light. It looked like a scene from a fairy tale out there.

  "No, it's a beautiful night. I'd rather walk."

  "Okay, then. See you soon."

  As Karen moved to cradle the receiver, she heard a soft double click come over the line, something she'd noticed often before. Annoyed, she snapped the receiver back to her ear. . . but now there was only the smooth flat buzz of the dial tone. She hung up.

  She knew what that double click meant: someone had been listening in. Damn it, one of these days she'd like to catch the culprit and give him a hot dose of hell. That kind of snoopiness never failed to get her blood up, Party lines. . . why did they have to put up with such a primitive system anyway?

  Before leaving Karen pulled on a sweater, and as she stepped out into the dooryard she drew it more tightly around her. It was still only the middle of May, and in the valley, frosts were not uncommon until after the first week in June.

  But the damp cool registered only marginally on Karen's mind, so spectacular was the nightscape around her. Stars specked the high dome of indigo sky in dazzling profusion, lending a sudden, breathtaking credence to Karen's heartfelt belief in a divine architect. Beneath her feet the crushed quartz surface of the driveway threw back moonlight in shimmering earnest, seeming to challenge with its brilliance even the moon itself. A gusty breeze swept down from the north, teasing the new leaves into showing their underbellies. To her left, oblongs of pale illumination stamped the ground outside of the Dolan place, and to her right, farther off, the lamp on the dooryard post bathed her father's house, high on its helmet-shaped hill, in a cone of clean white light.

  Karen lingered there in the lane, awestruck, her upturned face radiant in the moonlight. She might have stood there all night had not an abrupt, out-of-synch rustling in the nearby woodlot whirled her around to face it.

  "Who's there?" she called out, trying to sound angry. Whatever it was it sounded huge. And it was still coming. "Who is it?"

  Nothing. No response.

  She thought immediately of Danny, big as a bear, flat eyes ogling her crotch, and her heart clenched like a fist inside of her.

  She called out again, squinting, trying to distinguish shape

  from shadow. The chill air insinuated itself more harshly now, reaching her bones. She wrapped herself in her arms and glanced behind her. The house was less than a hundred yards back, she could run for it. . .

  Something bulky and splotchy-dark clambered out of the bush toward her. Shrinking back, Karen brought her hands to her face and shrieked—

  Then giggled, a little hysterically.

  "A fucking cow," she said aloud, giggling again at her own profanity. The beast waddled toward her, its stupid eyes shiny above its cud-chewing mouth. It inspected her briefly, then turned and plodded off toward the fence behind the house.

  Gone to taunt the other inmates, Karen thought, and her giggles turned to laughter. She had almost peed in her pants.

  As the cow lumbered away, lowing nervously, Karen closed her eyes and let her other senses take over. Immediately she recognized the loud stamping gait, the unmistakable chomp of bovine jaws, the sweetly feculent smell.

  After all these years, she thought unhappily, I'm afraid of the dark again.

  If she had closed her eyes when the rustling startled her, she'd have known right away it was a cow. How many times had they tramped down the fence by the line and wandered off into the bush? Too often to count.

  Karen decided right then to try to hang on to the savvy possessed by her other senses, to avoid the trap of near-total reliance on sight. It
might come in handy some day. . . save her soiling her undies.

  She giggled again and turned back to the moon. Now, a lone sliver of cloud stroked its surface like a long purple finger.

  Then she remembered her father.

  She saw the firefly flicker of a cigarette ember before she saw him, and wondered briefly if someone had dropped by—on the advice of his doctor, Albert had quit smoking some years ago. But there was no other car in the yard, and no murmur of conversation. The only sound was the faraway grumble of a radio, muted by the wind.

  She found him on the screened-in porch, in the Boston rocker. That old rocker had been her mother's favorite, and after her death Albert had claimed it for his own. He held a half-drunk bottle of beer in one hand, and a lit cigarette in the other. The porch light was off, but in the silver shine of the moon Karen could make out what she guessed was a tall stack of photo albums in his lap, confirming her earlier suspicions.

  She pulled up a chair and sat next to her father, her eyes searching the night-shaded planes of his face.

  "Aren't you the guy who mere weeks ago was bad-mouthing poor Uncle Ike"—she lapsed into a fair imitation of her dad's Ottawa Valley drawl—"fer smokin' them damned old coffin nails?"

  Albert chuckled, but there wasn't much humor in it. He glanced down at his lap, and for a moment his face was lost beneath the chewed-up brim of his cap.

  "I guess I got so used to sneakin' a few out here after your mom went to bed, I just never gave it up." He took a final quick drag, nudged open the screen with his boot, and flicked the butt out onto the lawn. It hissed in the gathering dew. "Only smoke five or six a week."

  He leaned toward her then, and in the moonlight Karen glimpsed his eyes. They were moist.

  "Want to tell me about your day?"

  "It can wait," Karen said. She reached into the cooler on the floor by the rocker and lifted out a bottle. "Mind if I have one of these?" She hated beer, but suddenly her mouth was dust-dry.

  "Help yourself."

  She uncapped it and chugged half the bottle at a go. It tasted like hell, but it was cold and wet. The buzz hit her almost immediately.

  Albert patted the albums with an open palm. "You know why I asked you over here, don't you."

  Karen nodded.

  "God, I wish she was here now, to see you. And for you to see her." He took off his hat and tossed it onto the swaybacked couch behind him. "She was a beauty, Karen. A real beauty."

  Karen bit back tears. Since her mother's death, she and her dad had exchanged hardly a word about her, each of them choosing to deal with the loss in their own quiet manner. At first, Karen's withdrawal had caused her father concern. For weeks after the funeral she had lapsed into a state of detachment so profound, the doctors who saw her likened it to autism. She ate her meals, read obsessively in braille, and played with the dolls her mother had made for her. But she kept stubbornly to herself.

  "Reach that light over there, will ya, honey?" With a cocked thumb he indicated a switch by the inner door. Karen stood and flipped it up. Soft yellow light pressed at the screens, turning them black.

  "Now, Pull in closer to your dad."

  She did, her forehead glistening with a thin shine of sweat. She was about to see her mother for the very first time.

  Albert opened the top album.

  On the facing page were two sepia-toned wedding photos, and Karen's gaze was drawn immediately to her mother's oval face, beaming bright and proud beneath the lacy white wedding hat Karen now kept in a cedar chest at home.

  She closed her eyes against a mist of tears, and in her mind plugged that face into a thousand remembered moments.

  "She was just about your age when I finally talked her into marryin' me," Albert, said, and laughed a little. "Almost lost her to that souse Franky Wilson. Here was me, the big-shot farm kid travelin' for Goodyear, wantin' to move to Toronto, get off the farm. You know the drill."

  She did. One of her first thoughts the night Burkowitz had called her was that if the transplants worked, she would pull up stakes and move to the city.

  "'Well, Albert,' she says to me one fine Sunday morning, 'I guess I love you well enough. But I mean to live out my life right here, in the country. If you go to the city, you go without. me.'"

  He flipped the page to a shot of a battered old Buick ragtop pulling away, the words just married soaped onto the hump of the trunk, strings of empty Campbell's Soup tins trailing behind. Elizabeth, one white-gloved hand planted firmly on the crown of her hat, waved a smiling goodbye to the guests.

  "We went to Niagara Falls."

  The next bunch showed various guests stuffing themselves at the open-air banquet they had hosted that day. Albert flipped quickly through these, pausing only briefly to point out Franky Wilson—the loser—sitting on the swing beneath the honeysuckle, looking drunk and defeated.

  There were plenty more of Elizabeth, and with each of these Albert recited a short tale, enchanting Karen completely. He had always been quiet with Karen about his feelings, existing in the dark of her mind as a kind of silent guardian who kept his distance but was always there. Now, it both pleased and saddened her that after all this time he was finally opening up.

  "This is one of my favorites," Albert said somberly, pointing to a faded print. The snap showed a very pregnant Elizabeth, seated on the edge of a stool on the back stoop, shucking corn.

  Karen smiled.

  Over the course of the next several hours they worked their way shot by shot through the remaining albums, alternating between quiet laughter and purging tears, but never tiring. When the photos including Karen began to overlap her memory, she joined in the story-telling too, adding her own anecdotes and pleasing her father immeasurably. By the time Albert shut the last of them Karen felt warm and fulfilled, her earlier fears of memory stirring sweetly dispelled.

  They were quiet after that, but it was a comfortable quiet, counterpointed only by the lonesome moan of the wind. After a while Albert produced the scrapbook he'd been keeping, and they leafed through that. Newspaper clippings, magazine articles, cutouts from medical journals, dozens of photos—all of it concerning Karen's transplants. Albert read a few of the shorter articles aloud, plodding along in his slow, farsighted manner. In a way, it distressed Karen that so much publicity had arisen from all of this. Her name, address, and a short bio appeared in each of the articles, along with the same information, albeit more briefly presented, on the other two people who had received organs from the same donor. It made her uneasy, cheapened the whole thing somehow. She was about to comment on it—

  And then realized that her father was crying.

  "She was pretty as a picture the night she died," he said quietly.

  And in the low light of the porch Karen felt it all flooding back. She had been away at the Brantford school for the blind that early fall, and had refused to believe her father when he drove down the following day to bring her the tragic news. She had never gotten the exact details—or if she did she'd blocked them out—only that her mother had died of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm.

  "We was sittin' at the table in the summer kitchen,"' Albert said, "her finishin' up a new doll for you, and tellin' me the tale she'd dreamt up to go along with it. She surely was a wizard at the story-tellin', wan't she?"

  Karen nodded. She was crying softly now, too.

  Albert sighed and looked down at his boots. And like a long-buried confession, the words poured out of him.

  "It was cool that night, and your mom asked me if I wouldn't mind puttin' in a fire. I said of course l wouldn't mind, and I was just gettin' up to do that. . . and do you know she was never sick a day in her life? I was just gettin' up to do that when I seen how pale she was. There was an awful blank look about her, too, as if she'd just. . . I dunno, switched off or something. 'Liz?' I says to her. 'Liz, what is it?'" His hands curled into a knot on top of the albums, and a shudder danced rudely through him. "She seemed to snap out of it then. Her color come back and she turn
ed to look at me. 'I love you, Albert,' she said. 'And I love Karen, too.'" He scrubbed his eyes with his shift-sleeve." 'I dare say I love her more than I do God. Tell her that for me. . .'

  "Then she died. Just dropped over dead on the tabletop. . ."

  Karen got up and went to him. She curled on his knee and they rocked together until the pain drew back again.

  Later, when Karen went inside to make tea, she was seized by one of those pleasantly numbing shocks that come with discovery. Stepping into the summer kitchen from the porch, it dawned on her that she had not yet seen the one place in the world with which she was most familiar. . . the house she'd grown up in.

  In mute wonder she wandered the old farmhouse, zigzagging randomly through time, adding image after image to the remembered smells, textures, and sounds. The Franklin stove (which in its own cruel way had taught her that hot iron blisters small fingers), although black and bulking, was nothing like the leering monstrosity she had imagined it to be. And the pantry, where her mother had stored canned goods and homemade preserves, was not the airless coffin she had dreaded as a girl. . . just a pantry after all. In its place by the front window, the old Singer sewing machine her mother had crafted Karen's clothes on stood carefully dusted and oiled, its black ironwork and worn treadle faintly gleaming in the lamplight. Closing her eyes, Karen could almost hear the ratcheting bursts as her mother hemmed a skirt or plaited a blouse, humming all the while. The family portrait on the wall over the living-room sofa induced a fresh wave of tears.

  Inevitably, Karen ended up in her bedroom, which her father had left mostly unchanged in the three years since Karen had moved out. Standing in the doorway, she remembered the day Albert told her she could have Aunt Rita's place if she wanted it, and how delighted she had been. Rita, the last of Albert's three elder sisters, had died of a stroke at a Saint Mike's Church social, and had willed the house, in which the entire Lockhart clan had been born, to Albert. Karen knew he had intended renting it out; God knew he could have used the extra money. But he had sensed her growing unease over living at home when by her age most normal people had long since fled the nest. After much argument, she had persuaded him to accept a small rent payment, which she skimmed from her growing book royalties, and had moved in right away. A half mile up the road from her dad's, the converted farmhouse allowed her a feeling of independence without the attendant fear of being left completely alone if something went badly wrong. Her father was just a phone call away.