Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  “Good,” Case said. “In fact, very good.”

  He stopped the wheelchair and spun to face Weir. “You did a fine job with that law-school kid in Springfield. I’ll see you are properly rewarded.”

  “Thank you.” Weir removed his rimless glasses to clean them. “It was fun.”

  20

  Sherry was more nervous than she could recall ever being. She’d had two or three one-night flings in her past, but never one that had been born of circumstances so insubstantial. There didn’t seem to be anything between her and this man but a chance meeting of a few hours and a physical attraction. He was fun to be with, yes. She wouldn’t deny that, but something told her that nothing more would have happened between her and Troy but for the fact that she had seen him with her own two eyes. And, yes, she knew that eyes can only see, they have no ear for duplicity, no sieve for filtering out mistakes of intent. That any wife or husband or altarboy could be fooled by what looked like the sincerest of smiles and the kindest of eyes. She didn’t have any gift more special than anyone else’s, no innate way to recognize subterfuge in another human being. And yet she had always sensed and been told that her gift of second sight conferred on her an uncanny sense of intuition. Did she still have it?

  Then there was Brian Metcalf. Perhaps all this worry over Troy Weir was because she felt guilty about Brian. Something was holding her back, preventing her from having an innocent and guilt-free relationship with Troy. What did she owe Brian to cause such consternation? They might have been serious, but they weren’t engaged. There were no vows expressed. Of course, you knew when you were dating someone more seriously. You knew when faithfulness and a belief in someone else’s loyalty were implied.

  No, it wasn’t the right thing to do to see Troy. Not if she allowed more to come of it than friendship. Not if she had thoughts of spending her life with Brian.

  But a lot of things weren’t right in life. How often did you end up holding a canister of radioactive cesium that could turn healthy cells into cancer? How often did you have to see loved ones torn away by a violent world? Brian was halfway around the world at this minute, and who knew if he was coming home? Nothing was certain in this world. It was pompous to plan for anything beyond the moment.

  Sherry had never before been exposed to a level playing field. Didn’t she deserve to find out what life was like? Wasn’t spontaneity an element of happiness? Brigham himself had called her a wallflower. He’d once said she was God’s little masterpiece trapped on the canvas. Brigham didn’t do drama, and she could never imagine where he’d found those words, but during those dark months, after her best friend was murdered and preceding her spiral into depression, he had wanted her to get out of the house, to talk to someone, a therapist, her neurologist, hairdresser, client, stranger, anyone.

  And now she was doing just that.

  She heard a car in the drive and took a last look in the mirror. Then she set the alarm code and walked to the open door of a wine-colored Porsche. The top was down and she lowered herself into the leather seat.

  “Nice car for a biologist who can barely afford his rent!”

  “I had a small windfall last year. An aunt died in Oregon, quite unexpectedly. I should have invested, but what the hell. I’m impulsive at times.”

  There were clouds in the sky and she marveled at their shapes. Clouds remained one of the few memories she’d retained from before her accident—clouds and ocean and sand and a smiling woman who smothered her in piles of rich dark hair. She wished she had a mother to talk to about all this, about life and men and happiness.

  “Did you come straight to Case and Kimble from school or did you work somewhere else?” she asked.

  “I bounced around schools for a while,” he said cagily.

  “And you last went to…I’m sorry, I forgot if you told me.”

  “George Mason.”

  “I have a friend on the Fairfax County police department. What years were you there?”

  “Am I being grilled?” Troy laughed.

  “No”—Sherry smiled and shook her head innocently—“just making conversation.”

  She asked where they were going, but he told her it was a surprise. They were city bound, however, the theater or a museum perhaps. She hadn’t told him anything about herself yet. He would have been astounded to know she had grown up in the Halley House Orphanage that he had been reading about lately and that she’d had the use of her eyes for only three weeks; astounded to know she couldn’t read a word of English and that she supported herself by interpreting the last memories of dead people.

  “You get around pretty good for being new to the area.”

  “I have an instinctive sense of direction.” He smiled and tapped the dash. “I studied the PCM earlier too.”

  “PCM?”

  “Porsche Communication Management.” He laughed. “It’s a map, GPS technology, you know?”

  Sherry laughed back, nodding, deciding to back off the questions for a while.

  Suddenly they were following ramp signs to Camden, and Sherry wondered what in the world they could possibly find in New Jersey, until he parked outside the aquarium.

  And she felt at that moment as if a ghost had laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “This okay with you?” he asked.

  How could he know, she wondered? How could he have imagined it was so important on the list of things she had ever seen or done? The last time she was here it was with her old friend John Payne. She remembered him holding her hand, reaching out, fingers entwined, as he laid it upon the back of a dolphin.

  For two hours she tried to recall Payne’s descriptions of all the fish and creatures as they walked by the tanks. But when they left the aquarium this time it wasn’t Payne’s hand she was holding. It was Troy Weir’s. He had given her the gift of actually seeing an old and wonderful memory.

  “Now where?” she said.

  “Lobster Claw at the wharf?” Troy asked. “They have a great lobster salad sandwich.”

  “I don’t think I could eat something I just saw walking around in a tank,” Sherry said glumly.

  “How about the Tuscan Grill?”

  “You even know about Philadelphia culinary?”

  “I looked up restaurants on the Internet to impress you. The ratings were good at both.”

  Sherry nodded. “Yeah, okay,” she said, half smiling.

  Troy punched buttons on his PCM and cracked his window an inch. He was losing her, he thought. He would need to give her some encouragement, synthetic or otherwise, and soon.

  They found a table off to themselves. Sherry watched people come and go as Troy went to the restroom.

  She thought about Brian Metcalf and decided she should return his messages soon. It wasn’t certain he could be reached, but it was possible to leave a message where he could retrieve it. Troy Weir aside, she wanted to tell him about the miracle in Nazareth Hospital. She wanted to tell him she could see. Who knew, maybe next week, after the gamma ray test, she would have even better news to tell. Better news for the two of them?

  Sherry stared into her iced tea and realized that she was having the first positive thought since leaving New Mexico. Maybe Brigham had been right all along. Maybe she’d just needed time to get through the stress of all that had been going on around her. Maybe the dazzle of being able to see had clouded her mind and her judgment.

  After dinner they parked at Weir’s apartment house on Society Hill and walked the three blocks to the Dark Horse Tavern. By dusk they were back on the sidewalk, weaving slightly, linked arm in arm.

  The apartment was contemporary. She expected no less and guessed correctly that a designer had decorated it.

  She couldn’t say she had a plan. She just sat there and listened to music, drank wine, and tried with all her senses to summon her inner voice.

  There was no cause to stop him when he kissed her. She had walked into his apartment under her own power. She had never suggested there was a significant other. She
had allowed him to take her hand at the aquarium and she had held his arm on the way home. His hands moved, first around her neck, around her ears, lifting her hair and kissing the back of her neck. He pulled her into him. She felt his fingers brush across her back and the strap of her bra. He pulled her gently into him, managed to push his knee between her thighs as he rolled her toward him.

  It was good, not great; wanted, not needed. But how long had it been? Oh, there was Brian. She had certainly slept with Brian. But Brian came with strings, like John Payne had come with strings. She could have loved either of them. She could have been happy with either one and for the rest of her life. Except that she had no control over the rest of her life. She was damaged goods, she thought. She could only bring someone pain.

  Wow, that wine had hit her hard!

  “Ladies’ room?” she asked, and he gave her directions. She had to be careful not to stumble as she turned down the hall.

  She looked at herself in the mirror and threw handfuls of water on her face. She used a towel to dry it and saw the slightest stain of blood that she traced to her nose. Her nose must have been bleeding, she realized, and she wiped it with a tissue and rinsed the blood from the towel. How odd.

  She took a deep breath and then made her way back to the living room.

  Perhaps she had held herself to too high a standard. Troy seemed like a wonderful young man. A couple of drinks, a few laughs, a little love, and they could go on their way. No harm, no foul. Right?

  His fingers found her stomach where he’d separated the buttons. Deft hand was inside and flat across her ribs, thumb prying up the underwire of her bra. His lips moved down her neck, her throat; she felt his tongue flicker across the top of her breast.

  “Troy.”

  “Yes,” he whispered, thumb slipping up on her breast.

  “No.”

  He retracted the thumb from under her bra.

  “Not yet,” she said, kissing the side of his neck. “Just not yet.”

  He nodded, his forehead damp, and turned to her with a smile. “You tell me when,” he said politely. “I want it to be right.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered hoarsely. “It’s way late and I should really get home.”

  “I’ll get the car,” he said, rising.

  “No,” she said quickly. “I’ll take a cab. You’re already home.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “But I do,” she said kissing him on the lips. “We’ll do it again.”

  “Promise.”

  She nodded drunkenly. “Promise.”

  21

  “I’m beginning to think we should move up to Stockton. Maybe we could get homes next to each other near the asylum.”

  “Oh, you love it, Mr. Brigham. You get to see Betsy every time we go.”

  Brigham didn’t respond.

  Carla had told Betsy they could come to get the journal; she was ready to give it up. Brigham asked Betsy if Carla had looked at it, and Betsy said she had not. Carla didn’t want to know if there was anything painful inside. She wanted to remember her husband the way he was in her mind.

  Betsy was taking Brigham sightseeing in Old Town Kingston on the Hudson this evening. It would be their first official date. Sherry would have the night—and the journal—to herself at a room in Grant’s Tavern.

  She didn’t know what to expect. McCullough, according to his wife, was a woodsman through and through. He knew the trees of the forest and the sound of every bird. His friend Dick McKinley used to brag that he could track a snail to Schenectady. And so she couldn’t know if the pages were going to be filled with wild ramblings of a suicidal man or sketches of life in the Catskill Mountains. Clearly Carla also didn’t know, or she would have opened it. Something scared her about the journal, about Jack’s wanting it to be locked away until they were both long dead.

  Betsy met them at Grant’s Tavern once more. They had cocktails at the bar, where she turned over McCullough’s strange book. “Carla said to keep it as long as you need to. Or destroy it if you have to. She said she’d trust your judgment to that. I peeked, of course.” She smiled and stirred her drink with a straw.

  “And?” Sherry asked.

  Betsy shrugged. “I didn’t know McCullough all that well, I mean, I was still a kid when he died, but I can tell you this. He didn’t write that journal.”

  Sherry looked at Betsy questioningly.

  “Oh, I didn’t examine it at length, but it goes on about war. A kid in boot camp and then overseas in battle, reasonably intelligent stuff at first, he volunteered for some research and then it digresses into numbers and random words, I guess the kid really did lose it in the end.”

  “Monahan?”

  “Well, there’s blood all over the pages. Carla said Jack was covered with blood, but she never said anything about Jack being injured.” Betsy shrugged.

  Sherry squeezed it to her chest with one arm. “Jesus.”

  The bartender gave a thumbs-up. Suddenly Sherry felt weak and the sparkling lights came in and out of focus.

  “You okay?” Brigham reached for her arm.

  “I’m fine,” she said, taking a breath and patting Betsy on the back. “You guys sit.” After a moment she stood to go to the ladies’ room. “I’ll be right back.”

  Sherry went into the ladies’ room and locked the door, wet a handful of paper towels, and sat on the toilet lid, pressing them to her face. “Please, please, please,” she whispered. “Please don’t take this away, God.”

  She thought about Brian just then. What would he think if they were in a restaurant one day and she went to the ladies’ room and returned as blind as the day he met her?

  When Sherry returned, Betsy had her forehead against Brigham’s and they were laughing over something private.

  Sherry felt a tinge of unexpected jealousy. She had never had to share her best friend with anyone before.

  “You okay?” Brigham asked again.

  Sherry gave him a nod as she slid onto her stool.

  “You two off on an adventure, then?” Sherry asked.

  “I have some favorite places on the eastern side of the Hudson. A little town called Rhinebeck, and then we’ll come back to Old Town in Kingston and try a glass or two of port.”

  Sherry just sat there and grinned and Brigham turned his profile to her.

  “All right, kids,” she said, “I’m going upstairs to listen to a bedtime story. I’ll see you in the morning for breakfast.”

  She put money on the bar and asked Mike the bartender how late he was serving in case she got restless.

  But Sherry did not come back downstairs that evening, nor was she asleep when Brigham turned the lock in his door across the hall at nearly 3 a.m. A late night with Betsy, she thought smugly.

  The optical scanner Sherry possessed was a year more advanced than any model available to the general public. It was able to convert handwritten text more accurately than all previous scanners on the market, because its computer was taught to make decisions based both on probability of character likeness and a nearly infallible formula for predicting—by context—what the author intended to convey. In other words, Sherry was able to listen to an electronic transcription of the journal to within ninety-two percent accuracy.

  Betsy had been right about the text lapsing into seemingly random words and numbers, but what she didn’t understand was what made those words and numbers significant.

  All evening, Sherry had been listening to Monahan describing a dreary two months in boot camp.

  Now he was deployed and about to land in Korea.

  She laid in her bed looking up at the old tin ceiling, put the headphones back on and pressed her thumb against the track wheel on the scanner’s remote.

  August 26th, 1950

  We arrived last week, rough seas under a full moon and puke all over the landing craft. None of us had slept the night before, anticipating what we’d heard about the fighting at Old Baldy and knowing we’d be there by the end of the week
. Most of the battalion we were joining had only been in country six months before us, but they sure acted salty as hell. Our captain, Jim Merritts—he was in World War II in the Philippines—said it wouldn’t take long to get our battle scars here and that the way commissioned officers were falling, battle promotions either. We thought he was being dramatic and laughed at the way they said he slept with a gun in his hand. Someone said he’d seen too many Tex Ritter movies. Then last night one of the guys went out to use the latrine and didn’t come back. They found him barbwired to a tree along the perimeter the next morning, his tongue had been cut out. He kept shaking his head and making noises as they began to untangle him. When they were finally able to pull him from the tree a grenade blew two of them to pieces. His back had been holding the spoon down.

  That was how it started for us.

  We heard that the Koreans liked to sneak into the camps at night and use their knives on our soldiers. We never saw any thank God, but one night they bombed us from a glider and all these guys were set on fire. You didn’t sleep much at first, you marched and you bedded down. That was it. And in between you waited for the enemy to come over the next rise and overrun you. After a few days the exhaustion set in. You didn’t jump at the sound of a rifle shot anymore. You learned to put your head on your knees and go unconscious. We were already salty by the time we got to the 38th Parallel.

  September 22nd, 1950

  We are at the base of a prominence they call Hill 105, near railroad tracks that run into Seoul. I know the Marines have tried to get on top of it and they were pushed back down, but we’re going back up there with them in thirty-six hours to do it all again.

  I promised myself I would never say goodbye to you in any of my letters. I don’t plan to break that promise, but I have to tell you all that I love you, Mom, Papa, Sophie and Sam. Never forget that.

  Captain Merritts says we aren’t to worry, that if anybody should be afraid it’s them gooks in the 25th Infantry who are about to meet the Fighting 32nd. I’m wearing my cross, Mom, I know that makes you happy and tell Papa there is a Gunny Sergeant somewhere here in Seoul whose name is Theodore Roosevelt Monahan just like Grandpa. I haven’t met him yet, but if I do, I’ll tell him Grandpa was in the battle of Somme. I know that will impress him.