by Paul Cleave
“How many fingers am I holding up?” she asks.
He has to process that. He can count, but he’s never counted visually before, so he has to figure it out. “Three. Now one. Now four.”
She backs away until she’s in the doorway. “And now?”
“Four. Two. Four.”
“Good,” Dr. Toni says, coming back towards him, and already he’s sick of this. Yes, he can count fingers, yes, he can see the inside of this room, but he wants to see more. He lets go of his mother and scoots to the edge of the bed. “Wait,” Dr. Toni says.
But he doesn’t wait. He gets to his feet and the next thing he knows, both Dr. Toni and his mom are holding on to him and he can’t stand straight.
“What’s happening?” his mom asks, sounding concerned.
“Joshua’s brain is being overloaded with new stimuli,” Dr. Toni says, as they prop him back up on the bed. “Joshua, I know this sounds crazy, but you’re going to have to get used to walking. Your balance is going to be off.”
“I feel dizzy.”
“Give it a few hours. By the end of the day you’ll be fine. How about I go and get you a wheelchair, and your mom can show you around a little.”
His mom hugs him when Dr. Toni has gone. His mother with red hair tied into a ponytail because he’s been told that’s what color it is and how she wears it, and now he knows what that means. Smooth skin and a big smile, green eyes, warm and friendly and loving and familiar. Now that he’s sitting, the dizziness has gone. She pulls away from him and looks into his eyes and doesn’t say anything. She’s looking at his father’s eyes, her husband’s eyes, and it must be difficult for her.
“I’m so happy for you,” she says.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he says, but he’s not okay. It doesn’t matter that he can see. It doesn’t matter that by the end of the day he’ll be up and about. It doesn’t matter what he does, because the curse is waiting to punish him for breaking the rules and sneaking into the land of the seeing. For a short time, he’ll be allowed in as a guest, but the curse won’t allow him to stay. He knows it’s only a matter of time before this world he can now see will cast him aside and the curse will pull him back into the darkness from where he came.
THIRTEEN
“You’re late,” his boss tells him.
Vincent looks at his watch. “Only by six minutes.”
“Which means you’re late.”
“I’ll make up for it.”
His boss has a beard but not the mustache component that goes with it. It’s a look Vincent has never understood. Given that he’s also bald, it leaves a horseshoe of dark-brown hair on the bottom half of his face. Vincent imagines picking him up by it and swinging him around. They’re standing out in front of the warehouse where deliveries are being sorted. Vans are racing into and out of the building. It’s going to be another hot day, and Vincent wants this conversation over with.
“You had time off at the start of the week, and on Thursday you didn’t even finish your deliveries. It’s—”
“My friend died,” Vincent says.
“Your friend was a homicidal maniac.”
“The police got that wrong. Look, I’m sorry I’m late, but it’s just six minutes, and it’s Saturday.”
“I don’t care that it’s Saturday,” his boss says. “And it’s not just six minutes. You’re six minutes late here, which means people are waiting by their doors six minutes longer than they need to. Documents get dropped off in town six minutes later than they should, people have to delay their—”
“I get your point.”
“I don’t think you do, because if you did you wouldn’t have come in late. People have to delay their lunch breaks by six minutes, they have to—”
“Like I said, I get your point, and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“I know it won’t happen again, because we’re going to let you go.”
“Wait. What? Come on, you—”
“We should have let you go a few days ago when you didn’t finish your run.”
“But I had to go to a funeral,” he says, and he thinks that’s why he’s being let go. Not for being late, not for taking time off, but because Simon was his friend, and nobody wants to work with people who hang out with killers.
“Get your gear and go,” the boss says. “You’ll be sent a severance check within the next two weeks.”
All the jobs he’s had, he’s always walked away from them. They’ve gotten boring, or too difficult, or the work was outside when the weather was too cold, or maybe he didn’t like the people he worked with. This is the first time he’s ever been fired. “Come on, you can’t—”
“I can, and I have,” the boss says. “I’ve assigned your route to another driver.”
Vincent shakes his head. “You can’t do this. I have bills to pay. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Be on time with your next job,” his ex-boss says, “and get new friends.”
He stands motionless as he watches the fucker walk away—except for his hands, which are tightening into balls of rage. He thinks about the cabin, the isolation it gives him, the power tools he has. He could cut that son of a bitch up and wrap him in different packages and deliver him all across town. Of course, the problem is that he’d be the number one suspect. In six months’ time it would be an idea he could revisit.
He walks to his car. When he pulls out onto the street, the engine shudders, hiccups, comes back to life, then dies. He twists the key and pushes the accelerator, and the engine turns over but won’t catch. He feels like head-butting the steering wheel. Feels like leaning forward and biting it. Everything from the last week is starting to take its toll. He can’t believe Simon killed that woman on his own without including him, can’t believe Simon is dead, can’t believe he got fired . . .
He punches the steering wheel. And again. A woman pushing a pram walks past and stares at him. He punches the steering wheel again and she looks away and walks a little faster.
He takes a deep breath. He thinks about the cabin. The river. How peaceful it is out there and how, if he wanted to, he could drive there right now.
It doesn’t work.
The anger is still there.
The car starts. He revs the engine a few times. He pulls calmly into traffic and doesn’t gun the engine and doesn’t run anybody over. He drives calmly all the way to the address he drove to last night and parks two houses away. Right now what this slightly upmarket street needs is a very casual murder.
He unclips his seat belt and stops with his hand on the door. “You’re being stupid,” he says. “You don’t even know who’s home. You can’t act on emotion. This isn’t the plan. This was never the plan. You’re angry. You should leave.”
He doesn’t leave. But he doesn’t go inside the house either. Probably just his luck there are twenty cops in there, all hidden behind furniture, getting ready to throw a surprise party for Detective Inspector Ben Kirk, who, right now, is on his way home. A surprise party to celebrate what Ben did to Simon.
He should leave.
He needs to leave.
He will leave.
He is turning the car around when there is movement from the driveway. Ben’s girlfriend. The tall blonde whom he knows from somewhere. She’s driving a dark four-door sedan. He waits for her to pass. He waits until she gets to the end of the block before he begins to follow.
FOURTEEN
They wheel Joshua along the corridor. There are paintings on the walls, and he tries to figure out what the images could represent. Some are landscapes; there are some with what he thinks might be flowers in vases. There are people walking past them, towards them, people who all look different, and even though he knew everybody would be, it still surprises him how different they are. Of course, if they were similar, nobody would recognize each other, but it’s not just ethnicity, or the way their faces look, it’s their skin, their h
air, the way they walk, how tall or short they are, the way they dress, the way they hold themselves—all of them unique. There are signs everywhere, on walls, on doors, some hanging from the ceiling on chains, all with symbols that could be numbers and letters—none of which he knows. There are posters on the walls, and when he gets home, he can put posters on his walls too.
There are thousands of things to take in, and he imagines most of them are irrelevant to everyone else. He looks at things others see so often they dismiss them. He sees the beauty in a window, in a door, in the buttons by the elevator, in trash cans, in stains on the wall, in the broken leaves of a potted plant. There are objects on the floor, stuff in people’s hands, things in corners, things behind other things.
“I want to go outside,” he says.
“And you will,” Dr. Toni says. “But I’m going to need to examine you first.”
“Then I can go outside?”
“As soon as we’re done, yes.”
He becomes as dizzy from trying to look at everything as he did from his earlier attempt to stand. They reach Dr. Toni’s office. More items everywhere, things that weren’t in the corridor. A desk. A computer. Office furniture. Things on walls. A big boxy thing that might be a filing cabinet. He takes it all in. Dr. Toni crouches in front of him, staring into his eyes, something that’s been done other times in his life, but for the first time he doesn’t know where to look. Not into her eyes, because that makes him feel uncomfortable.
“Look into the light,” she says, then holds a small flashlight in front of him.
“It hurts a little.”
“Just a few more seconds,” she says, and then she checks the next eye. “Everything is looking good.”
“Everything is good,” he says. He’s still smiling. Perhaps it’s a side effect. He may smile for the rest of his life.
“I want you to look at something for me,” she says, and she turns his wheelchair so he’s facing the wall. There’s a bookshelf full of books. A coatrack. More things on the walls that might be certificates, since he knows doctors usually have them on display. She walks over to a painting with symbols on it.
“First I need you to cover your right eye for me.”
He covers his right eye.
“This is an eye chart,” she says. “I want you to keep your right eye covered, and I want you to tell me what shapes you see.”
The biggest shapes are on the top, and they get smaller as the rows go down. She points to the top one. As before, when she was holding up fingers for him to count, he has to come to grips with what he’s seeing. He knows his shapes from feel, and he’s imagined how they look—now it’s a matter of lining them up.
“A circle.”
“Good,” she says, then points to the row below where there is a line of shapes.
He has to count the sides. Three of them. It has to be . . . “A triangle.”
She points to something else.
“A rectangle, and now . . . a square?”
“Good,” she says, then points to the next row.
“Square, circle, um . . . I can see it, but I can’t figure it out.”
“It’s a pentagon,” she says. “Next line.”
“Circle again, triangle, umm . . . looks like the pentagon again, but with more sides.”
“Hexagon,” she says. “Keep going.”
So he does. The shapes getting smaller, then getting blurrier as he gets a few rows from the bottom. He reaches the point where he’s guessing, but two guesses into it she tells him to stop.
“That’s good, Joshua. Really good.”
“It is, isn’t it?” his mother says.
“Very good,” Dr. Toni says, smiling at them both. “Now let’s do the other eye.”
She turns the chart over to reveal the shapes in a different order, and Joshua covers his left eye and looks at the chart with his right.
“What’s the top one?” Dr. Toni asks.
He doesn’t answer.
“Can you see where I’m pointing?”
“Everything is darker.”
“Can you see the shapes?”
His smile wavers. “I mean, I can kind of see them, but I couldn’t tell you what they are. The top one might be a circle.”
“Okay,” she says. “That’s enough.”
He takes his hand away and can see that it’s a square. She turns his wheelchair towards the desk, then sits on the other side. “First of all, there’s no reason to think anything yet, other than we just need more time. Could be tomorrow your right eye will be as strong as your left, or it could take a week, or a month.”
“Is there a problem?” his mom asks.
Dr. Toni smiles at them. “No, we just need to be patient.”
“It’s okay,” Joshua says. “I mean, even if it never works, it’s okay. I can see and everything is amazing, and I’m thankful for what you’ve done, more thankful than I can ever say.”
“It really is a miracle,” his mother says.
Dr. Toni smiles. Joshua gets the idea they’re saying all the things that makes her job rewarding. “The good news,” she says, “is there are no signs of any infection. The drugs we’ve had you on since the operation have been doing their job. You’ll need to keep taking them for a while longer, but other than that, I can’t see any reason you can’t leave here tomorrow.”
“Not today?” he asks.
“I want to keep an eye on you today.” She reaches down to a desk drawer. “Here,” she says. “I’m surprised you haven’t asked already.”
Even though he’s never seen one before, he knows it’s a mirror she’s handing him. When he doesn’t pick it up, his mom asks if something is wrong.
“I’m not sure if I’m ready,” he says.
“It’s common to feel that way,” Dr. Toni says. “There’s no hurry.”
“No,” he says, and he picks up the mirror. “I want to do this now.”
He can feel his smile disappear. He doesn’t know what to expect, and doesn’t know what would make him happy. He angles the mirror and looks into the glass, and what should be a complete stranger looking back at him isn’t. This is someone familiar to him the same way his mother was familiar to him earlier. This is Joshua Logan, the boy he believed he would never see. He has black hair, because he recognizes black, and because he’s been told. His skin is white, but it’s not how he imagined white would be, but some warmer version of that, similar to the tone he saw earlier when his eyes were closed and light started to come through. His eyes are blue because his dad’s eyes were blue, and now he knows what blue is. He wonders for a brief moment where his original eyes are—those things that were part of him his entire life have to be somewhere, don’t they? His lips are red because he’s been told they’re red, and his teeth . . . well his teeth are white, and his skin is white, but they are different types of white, just like Dr. Toni’s coat is a different white. He doesn’t know if the boy smiling back is a good-looking boy or an odd-looking boy—then decides none of that matters, and then decides that later on it might matter, that his thought process today will be different from what it will be in a month, or a year, because his ability to see is going to make him different. William and Pete were right—there is no way he can go back to his old school, and he wishes they could have what he has, but not at the same cost. The skin around his eyes is darker. He reaches out and touches it gently.
“The bruising will take another week or two to fade,” Dr. Toni says, “and the swelling will disappear.”
“Okay,” he says.
“And you’re going to need to wear protective glasses,” she says, “for a few weeks. We don’t want to risk anything getting into your eyes.”
“I’ll make sure he wears them,” his mom says.
“And you’re going to keep taking pills for a while, and eye drops too. You’re going to have to come back in here every day for a few weeks.”
He hands the mirror back to Dr. Toni. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for
everything you’ve done.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, then hands him a pair of clear protective glasses. “Now, why don’t you go and take a look around outside and put those new eyes of yours to use?”
FIFTEEN
Erin Murphy is running late. The kind of late that will annoy her colleagues, but it’s the kind of annoyance that will disappear when she shows off the ring on her finger. Last night, Ben proposed. Proposed! The ring was hidden inside a fortune cookie given to her near the end of the evening, and once she opened it and saw what was inside, he got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. It was totally romantic, like something from a movie. For a moment they were the center of attention as everybody in the restaurant turned to watch, which was a little embarrassing, and everybody went quiet as they waited for her to give her answer—would she say yes? Would she say no? Was happiness to come, or disappointment? She said yes, to the relief of not just the crowd, but to Ben too, and probably also the waiters, who had probably seen people storm out without paying when things didn’t go well. This morning she couldn’t be any happier—even if deep down she questions if the proposal came because Mitchell’s death put Ben’s life into perspective. You have to hold on to what you have, because one day it might slip away—and what happened to Mitchell couldn’t be a bigger reminder of that.
She winds down her window when she reaches the parking garage in town. The parking garage is a five-story concrete cube that looks like it could survive a nuclear bomb. There’s a homeless guy hanging out front.
“Morning,” he says, coming over.
“This is for you,” she says, and she hands him a sandwich, which is part of her morning routine. Henry used to be a doctor, before he became a gambling addict, which led to him losing his job, losing his house, his wife, his kids. This she discovered a year ago when he helped her after the heel broke on her shoe and she fell over right in front of him, twisting her ankle and spraining her wrist in the process.
