Meg wanted to laugh. “It’s both. You can eat it.”
Pandora chanced a nibble and her eyes widened. “You don’t expect something so tiny to be that intense. It wouldn’t be such a cool surprise if it was bigger.”
When had she last enjoyed a small indulgence? It was as if that damn eye were a spot of noir film blood on her carpet and she couldn’t let anyone in until it was gone.
Surely Pandora cleaned up worse messes in North Dakota. Maybe she could help Meg with this one.
Her tale unfolded so easily. A homeless man finds a glass eye. Believing it must be reunited with its counterpart, he has an overwhelming urge to find the owner. For weeks, he’s been searching. He’s covered the city with posters and handbills. The police won’t take him seriously because of his history of mental problems. Isaac’s caseworker is worried he can’t take the stress. For all she knew, it was true.
“But maybe the eye’s old and it’s too late. Or the person who lost it isn’t from around here,” Pandora said. “Or he has a replacement, and getting it back doesn’t matter any more.”
“It matters to Isaac.”
“But if nobody wants it…”
“Then we could just say it was ours. That will solve the mystery for him. Once the eye is in the right hands, he’ll be okay.”
Pandora’s brows pinched. “Uh, I count four eyes at this table.”
“We’d say it’s a family member’s—someone no longer with us. I’d been thinking about doing this myself but I’m so visible around town and I know his caseworker from the Homeless Coalition. He might suspect something funny was going on.”
“So...basically, you want me to lie to a homeless man.”
Well, if you want to put it that way.
“Not a lie. This is a situation where nobody knows the truth. We’re filling the void with a comforting story.”
“Sort of like believing in heaven, I guess.”
“In a way. We’re rewarding kindness with kindness—undoing his distress.” Which shall undo unto you.
“He must be a nice man,” Pandora said. “All right. Let me think up the rest of the story. Where did he find it?”
“A canyon in the Monument.”
Pandora said her grandfather worked in the coalmines at Somerset, a good place to put out an eye. She conjured a drive over the Monument with this one-eyed grandfather, who wanted to teach her not to be afraid of heights. As he is hanging far over one of the overlook railings, “He sneezes. A big one. All of a sudden he’s looking at us with his eye socket empty! Grandpa was always kidding around, so we think he’s teasing. Now, which canyon? My story’s no good if there’s not an overlook.”
“Your story’s fine. He found it in Columbus Canyon, below Cold Shivers Point.”
“Oh.” Pandora’s impish manner dissolved. She plucked her napkin from her lap and covered her mouth. “You must think I’m this clueless little brat. First, I blew off the scholarship. Now I make up this story about horsing around on a cliff. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. I am so, so sorry.”
“Oh no, I didn’t take it that way at all.”
Pandora’s jolly coalminer would get the job done. He was real enough and explained the facts of Isaac’s discovery. Absolute truth was overrated. Even scientific truth was provisional, the best story available at the moment. Biblical truth, an all-time, all-purpose security blanket. That’s all anyone wanted, the explanation that didn’t raise other questions, the bedtime story that let you sleep. Before long she could sleep again.
She waved to the waiter, who knew her well. And as requested, he brought the check with cornichons instead of the customary Glitterati candies.
Pandora couldn’t wait to try her new shoes and Meg felt the same. Happily, Meg offered to show her the path that wound through a spatter of trees down to the river trails.
Gravity coaxed them into an easy lope. Meg knew not to pound downhill and took care to let her body flow. No sense ruining a good start with jellied quadriceps. At the bottom, a footbridge crossed the Redlands Power Canal, a diversion from the Gunnison River that plunged through an electrical co-op’s turbine before catching up with the merged waters of the Colorado. Pausing there, Pandora spotted a river otter swimming downstream with a large fish in its mouth. Meg, mindful of their feet in the new shoes, suggested they walk-run the dirt loops circling the Connected Lakes. Now, thanks to Donnie Barclay, Meg would forever think of the green fishing ponds as potholes bequeathed by gravel miners.
A heavy-set jogger, sweating and overdressed, reeled in his Labrador when he saw Meg and Pandora. Two intent bird watchers ignored them. A family on bicycles passed, crying on your left in four different voices. A pair of absorbed women on a bench dissected some bottomless woe.
“This is nice,” Pandora said. “I hardly ever came down this far. We usually partied close to our cars.”
Yes, it was great. Meg, too, was guilty of partying close to her car, her phone, her computer, her office. She came here only a few times a year.
They went as far as the owl tree, a cottonwood in which a wicker basket had been installed to support a nest. Each spring, a great horned owl pair returned to raise another hatch.
Pandora said, “I looked up some of the girls who won your scholarship. Artsy, all of them, but nobody seems to have made it. It made me think someday I might get tired of having crappy jobs just so I can do music in crappy bars. Maybe your first dream is like your first boyfriend. You have to go for it but you don’t want to be stuck with him forever.”
This kid. “Helen was the creative one. I was trying to be well-rounded. She was the one who went for it. I used to call her Hel and she called me Madge, if that gives you any clue.”
“But you seem to love what you do now. Your tag line, Helping you achieve the lifestyle of your dreams, sounds creative. Tell me the best thing about it, what makes you happiest.”
“I like helping people, smoothing their way.” It sounded like a cliché, but wasn’t happiness the realm of platitudes? “That’s what real estate’s about. The dream can be really different for people—a couple starting out, excited and in love; a growing, tumultuous family; a prosperous person broadcasting their success; a rancher who just wants to stay on his land after his wife dies.” A teacher in exile. A man who envisions a tent city. “People going and coming, crossing life stages, families expanding and contracting. Finding a place to live can be a stressful time. Not always. Most of it’s good.”
“And the worst thing?”
The market after the bubble burst. When nothing was moving. When brokers pored over the foreclosures like chiropractors skimming ambulance call reports. When she thought she might go under. Then later, when she realized she had been a willing beneficiary from the rancid enterprise of sub-prime lending. She had ushered people to the brink of misfortune and taken her cut.
A second footbridge led over the canal to a longer, steadier slope up the bluff. It offered a good excuse to pause, to gather breath, to consider whether an eighteen-year-old mulling her future really needed to hear the worst.
Pandora made the call to Isaac. He refused her suggestion to meet at the library, insisting instead on Whitman Park. The park had a bad reputation, but with the police department in the next block, it was the most closely patrolled acre in the city. Meg parked in the museum lot across the street, which gave her a clear view. A dozen men and women idled on the grass or sat at scattered picnic tables. A plump woman sorted laundry, bright reds, yellowed whites and faded blues. She held up shirts against the leaf-filtered sunlight, crossed their sleeves one by one, and then folded each in an embrace against her chest, bowing to draw in the fragrance. Nearby, a man lay facedown in the grass, his head in the crook of one arm; the other arm splayed oddly over his back, as if disaster workers had found a detached limb and temporarily placed it with the nearest body.
“Are you certain you want to do this?” Meg offered Pandora the pepper spray she always carried to first appointments.
> “Don’t worry, I’m good,” Pandora said. “We’re going to make his day.”
Isaac was not comfortable describing himself, so to help Ann identify him he carried a book to the park, a history of Henry Ford’s attempt to grow rubber in the Amazon, about the folly of men who have vision and don’t care about facts. He felt the book made him seem harmless, although reading a book outdoors also marked him as a vagrant. As he crossed the street, a girl dismounted from an SUV parked in the museum lot and headed straight toward him. The purple shoes. It had to be Ann. She was younger than he’d expected from her voice on the phone and striking in a way that made him nervous. Her hair looked as if the last person to cut it had been angry with her.
“Isaac?” she said. She was smiling. Not that mask most teens wore. She seemed pleased to meet him.
“Who’s driving your getaway car?”
Her laugh reassured him. She waved toward the SUV. The woman behind the wheel waved back. “Oh, my mom. You know how they worry.”
He did and he didn’t. Now he was hyperconscious of being observed, of being by himself with a girl. Last week, they’d arrested a man for cornering a teenager in the park bathroom and whacking off in front of her. He headed for one of the picnic tables where Mother Ruth had parked her shopping cart. With a grey carpet pad cover and plastic cemetery garland wired to the chrome front, the cart always made him think of a Cadillac. Mother Ruth could be their chaperone. She professed to have one hundred and fourteen children, and the way she said Jesus was the father of each one sounded like a paternity claim, not a mangled Biblical reference. No matter. Mother Ruth’s unreserved love for everyone was indisputable.
Mother Ruth ground tobacco shreds from her day’s cigarette butt harvest. She beamed at Ann. “Did you come to see me? You look like one of my kids.”
“No, we just want to sit,” Isaac said.
“Well, sit. You can call me Mom anyway. You know the name of that roll you eat for breakfast? I was at the store and couldn’t think of it this morning. If you’re alone and all you have to go on are your thoughts, you don’t even know if you’re making sense when you speak. I thought it might be Danish, but that was my first husband. Or was he Flemish? Are those the same thing? I know Denmark but where’s Flem?”
“It’s Flanders, not Flem,” said Isaac. “Flanders is a region, Flemish is their language.”
“No, he didn’t speak Flemish because I understood him. Is he your boyfriend, little girl?”
“We just met,” Ann said. “My granddad lost his glass eye and I think Isaac found it.”
“Oh, that’s nice. I’ve lost apartments, husbands, jobs and my Supreme Court child custody case, but I always knew where to find them,” said Mother Ruth. She fished a half-smoked cigarette out of the loose tobacco. “I found this but it wasn’t lost. Interesting… easier than hunting for a needle in a haystack. I don’t care, because I’m going to smoke it.”
“Not now, please,” Isaac said. Just the stench from her tobacco made him woozy.
Mother Ruth sniffed the butt and packed it straight before tucking it into her sleeve. “Okay, let’s see that glass eyeball.”
“Yes, let’s,” said Ann. She didn’t seem at all bothered by Mother Ruth. In fact, they might be preparing to gang up on him.
Isaac retrieved the Band-Aid tin where he kept the eye swaddled in medicine-bottle cotton. To build anticipation, he slowly unwrapped the thick rubber bands securing the top. “I get tired of explaining this, but it’s not glass and not a ball.”
Mother Ruth nodded. “Just like how I always have to explain why Jesus won’t wear a rubber. So what am I supposed to call it—and don’t say look it up!” She waggled her eyebrows toward the girl. “He always says to look it up but you probably know that already.”
“Ocular prosthesis,” Isaac said.
“What did you say?” she whooped.
“Oc-ular pros-the-sis.”
Mother Ruth howled and threw up her hands as if she’d been goosed. “I like glass eyeball better.” Now Ann was laughing, too.
This was serious. He covered the tin with his hands and waited for quiet. Mother Ruth, however, continued to chuckle as she swept stray tobacco strands from the table, then raised the baggie above her head and peered at the sky through the plastic.
“You know the sun’s magnetic field is going to flip pretty soon. The whole solar system is going to be radioactive with joy. I can feel it already.” She drew the seal on the bag. “Tobacco means peace.” She blew across her palms, peppering the air with scorched tobacco flakes. “Peace be on you, my children.”
Mother Ruth slipped off the bench and leaned into her cart, struggling as one off-kilter wheel wobbled through the grass. Once on the sidewalk, the cart straightened and she proceeded toward the soup kitchen.
Ann waited until Mother Ruth was well away before she said, “What was that about? Is she all right?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. Mother Ruth’s mother-sweetness was fine in small doses, but she talked without listening. Isaac understood why. Fill the silence and drown out the voices. Act crazy and keep people at a distance. Your mind was a weapon they couldn’t disarm.
Ann turned toward him now. He sensed expectation in her. Curiosity, perhaps. He felt victorious. The moment slowed, then expanded. He stood untouched at the center of a quiet explosion. Energy poured outward from him and connected with this girl. Despite everything, he had shepherded this treasure back to where it belonged. Finder and loser united! No, it was not victory he felt; it had to be happiness.
The eye was suddenly cool and insubstantial in his hand. He blew into the barrel of his fingers like a crapshooter, warming it for her first touch. He had never commanded such delicious attention. Now he desired to prolong it.
Raising his fist, he asked, “What color were his eyes?”
It was an obvious question, yet she paused.
“I was just a little girl then. I’m not sure I remember.”
“Your mother must know,” he said. That woman sitting in the SUV watching him as if he were a pervert. “Let’s go ask her.”
“She has an anxiety disorder,” Ann said quickly. “That’s why she sent me.”
He could understand that. “Then what color are her eyes?”
“Brownish, like mine.” No hesitation this time.
Could a grey-green-eyed father produce a brownish-eyed daughter? He should have looked up the genetics of eye color. He should have questioned Ann more closely when she called but it didn’t occur to him until now that someone might try to deceive him. He should have taken the eye somewhere to have appraised. The lifelike detail that had startled him in the canyon now seemed artificial. That metal disk showing through the back—he had discovered it was magnetic and assumed it was to anchor the eye movement… but what if it was a transmitter?
Ann slid closer to him. “I’m sorry I don’t have better proof. I appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to.”
Breathe.
“It wasn’t trouble,” he said. “Why do people call it trouble when someone does the right thing?”
She drew back a little.
“I didn’t mean you,” he said.
“It’s a good question, though. May I see it?” She leaned close again.
Breathe.
“Oh, wow. It’s amazing. Did you ever think about just keeping it?”
He did. But the glass eye song in his head kept telling him the clutter you call a collection/A forest that’s nothing but trees. It was the forest he was after.
“I find things all the time. It’s exciting at first but then it can be sad to realize that another person lost it or got rid of it because it doesn’t mean the same thing any more.” Don’t need eyes to cry.
“You’re right. It’s my grandfather I miss, not the eye.”
He held out the eye in his palm. “See this? The Muslims call it the hamsa, a symbol of awareness, conscience and protection. Pagans, Jews, Hindus, Christians—everybody has a version
. You can look it up. And now its good fortune is back with your family.”
Yoga Man.
As Meg followed the pantomime in the park, she lost any sense of having orchestrated the exchange. Isaac, Joe’s brother now unveiled as Yoga Man. Pandora, a successor to Helen now impersonating Ann. Who was Meg Margaret Madge—their champion or their exploiter?
Pandora left Isaac at the picnic table. She marched straight across the grass, paused for a break in the traffic and trotted to the car, her carriage tense, her face solemn.
“Success?”
“It was easy. He was excited to give it to me.”
“Did he take the reward?”
Pandora shook her head. “He thinks this is some kind of heartwarming family story. The only reward he wants is to have it told—so people will have more faith in each other, I guess. Jesus.” She slumped against the door, her face pressed to the glass.
“No way.” Meg had trusted Pandora to handle this. Had she softened and divulged something?
“No duh. I told him this was totally personal and private, but that I’d ask.”
“Ask who?”
Pandora snapped around to glare at her. “My mom.” The sarcasm was impeccable. “Don’t you even want to see it?”
Meg wanted it gone but she held out her hand. Smooth as a polished agate, the eye cast a lifelike impression yet was inert to the touch. She sensed no emanations—of Neulan or any person. She had lost sleep, imposed herself in Brian’s world, risked Pandora’s safety and, worse, compromised her integrity for a piece of acrylic with an unknown history.
“I’m sorry if you felt used.”
“I feel dis-gust-ing. He actually cared about what happened to that stupid eye, about our family. He trusted me and I lied to his face.”
“We discussed that. It’s a complicated situation.”
“Why do you think it’s okay to deceive someone if it’s for their own good?”
“Have you ever lied to your parents to keep them from worrying?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“And to keep from getting my butt whipped.”
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