Eden's Eyes

by Sean Costello

  Danny shivered. The sun had sunk almost completely out of sight now, only its bald red pate visible overtop Karen's two-story wood-frame, and a chill infected the air, cooling his light film of sweat.

  He sighed again. . . deep and melancholy.

  And inevitably his thoughts turned to Karen, his dark eyes conjuring her image easily in the patchwork of gathering clouds.

  His feelings for the girl were painfully simple: he loved Karen Lockhart, had for as long as he could remember. She haunted his thoughts, his dreams, and the few aspirations he possessed. And it was just a matter of time, he believed, until she saw how good it could be between them. They'd settle down some day, raise kids, farm the land maybe. . .

  He glanced again at her house, a silhouette now, haloed in heart's-blood red. The day she had moved in there had the best day of Danny's life. The house and its three out buildings had belonged to Albert Lockhart's eldest sister, who had inhabited it until her death from a stroke three years ago. In his heart Danny believed Karen had moved in there to be closer to him. This way he got to help her with chores and drive her places more often, even sit in her kitchen sometimes and eat pie while she talked about her books.

  And in the evening, when she went up to her bedroom and the light was just right—

  A vehicle swung off the main highway onto the Twelfth Line, the long stretch of dirt side road leading in to the farms. Danny saw the trailing plume of dust, candy-colored in the sunset, a full minute before the headlights winked over Sawyer's hill.

  He stood. It was Albert's pickup. Though he could not yet see it, he would know its rackety approach anywhere the jangling springs, the throaty purr of its rust-eaten muffler, the rattling hammer-knock of its one blown piston.

  It came into view. . . and this time Albert was not alone.

  Karen! Danny thought gleefully, a grin covering his face. Home at last! He wanted instinctively to run to her, to race the truck to the turnoff. . .

  But deep down he knew that just wasn't his place. Instead he turned and dashed inside. He crossed the kitchen in four quick strides, stopping at the foot of the staircase. The dog, a stray Danny had taken in a few months back, lay curled in its cubbyhole beneath the steps, suckling its litter.

  Slowly, so as not to startle, them, Danny approached the cozy den and dropped to one knee. He patted the bitch's crown and smiled. The pups were only a few days old, their sightless eyes still sealed over, but Danny had already chosen his favorite—the runt, an all-white—and had named it Karen. And as soon as it was old enough, he meant to give it to her as a gift.

  With a gentleness surprising for such blocky hands, Danny drew the pup from its mother's nipple and cradled it under his chin. Blindly, its little tongue tasted the base of Danny's jaw, searching for its interrupted supper. Finding only bristles, it uttered a tiny lost whine.

  The bitch's ears pricked.

  "It's, okay." Danny soothed her, stretching again to his full six-four. "I'll bring her back. I'll bring her back soon."

  He took the stairs two at a go, pivoted into his west-facing bedroom, and whipped aside the time-yellowed sheets.

  A quarter mile away, Karen was just climbing out of her father's truck. That was good. It meant she was staying home and not over at her father's, a half-mile further a long the Line.

  That was good.

  Setting the pup on the bed, Danny curled back a corner of the linoleum flooring. He loosened a floorboard and removed a leather case from the airspace.

  Binoculars. He'd had to send away for them. And they'd cost him a fortune, too, money he'd skimmed from the pittance he made odd-jobbing for the neighboring farmers: hauling hay, repairing machinery, slaughtering cattle and pigs. Money he'd had to hide from his mother so she wouldn't know. But they were the best thing he'd ever owned—and they made him feel that much closer to his girl.

  Seated on the edge of the bed, Danny pressed the lenses to the window, snugging his brow to the eye cups. Behind him the pup described small, aimless circles on the bedspread, whimpering forlornly, the urine of fear leaking from its bladder.

  Unmindful, Danny fingered the focus until Karen's body resolved into dusk-light sharpness. She was wearing one of his favorite dresses, plain white with a flower-print fringe. He thought of her stripping it off and something twitched at the base of his penis. He picked up the puppy and set it in his lap. He stroked it gently.

  Karen kissed her father and waved good night from the porch steps. She looked slumped and tired, even in the sketchy light. And she was wearing a pair of dark glasses, more like the old-style aviator goggles Danny had seen at Keenan's Curio Shop in Arnprior than actual glasses.

  He closed his eyes and prayed that the surgery hadn't worked. And when he went into the woods, sometimes for days, he prayed then, too. Prayed to the gods of the forest. Because if she wasn't blind anymore, then she wouldn't need him. He'd be without her forever.

  She'd. . . see him.

  When he opened his eyes again she was already inside, Albert's truck a slash of dusty red light in the distance.

  He scanned the lower windows, his breath catching at the sight of her there in the kitchen, blond hair ablaze in the backlight of the setting sun. . . just a glimpse and then she was gone. She reappeared in the front hallway, and he marveled once again at her ease of movement through the wood-and-metal maze of her house, how she seemed to just glide past obstructions with a grace even the most elegant of the sighted would envy. It angered him, that grace. That. . . independence.

  Now she was there in the living room, touching things. Saying hello, Danny imagined. Hello, I'm back.

  He willed her, upstairs to her bedroom.

  She went.

  In his lap the puppy nuzzled restlessly, its tiny claws catching in the fabric of his pants where it stretched over his engorging crotch. Danny was unaware of the dark wet circle of dog urine against his leg.

  In her room Karen skinned off her dress, revealing a cool blue camisole.

  Danny stroked the puppy.

  Then she sat in front of the mirror and removed the goggles.

  Karen opened her eyes to slits, fearful of another fire-flash of light. . .

  But the sun was down and the lights were off and she saw only gray against gray. Squinting around her bedroom, she struggled anxiously to discern shapes, to attach them to articles she knew strictly by feel. She thought of the mirror, a thing as mysterious to her as color, or the moon. She had tried looking in mirrors dozens of times before leaving the hospital and had seen nothing but shapeless shadows.

  But now?

  The mirror.

  She reached out a hand, searching for its oval edge—

  Unexpectedly, Karen's arm intruded on her sight line like a darkly scintillating wing. Startled, she jerked her hand back as if bitten. In the aftermath of that sudden movement clots of gray beat and pulsed, and a great black hole yawned open in front of her. From its center, slack fleshy limbs materialized, streaking out to scoop her off the stool.

  Karen snapped her eyes shut, letting darkness blot out this new madness. She hadn't anticipated this kind of thing. It seemed her imagination had overlapped her vision somehow, spawning grotesqueries from the hazy stuff of the ordinary. Something similar had happened in the hospital the other day, when a nurse came into the room and startled her. The woman's blotchy, vaguely human shape had transformed into a writhing, tentacular mass, scary enough to make Karen cry out and clap a hand over her eyes.

  Breathing heavily, she realized the irony of her blindness. For the sighted the boogeyman crouched in darkness, where Karen lived without qualm. But for her he dwelt in daylight.

  She opened her eyes again, determined to make sense of the images, so much like reflections on still water.

  Gray on gray, shape in shadow.

  Cautiously, Karen raised her hand into the field of her vision. If she moved slowly enough the images held together, the smeary beasts remaining at bay. She found the edge of the mirror and tilted it.
Something flashed, but not painfully. An ache began at her temples. Now she followed the splotchy column of her arm to the quivering arc of the mirror's wooden frame, then traced the frame through its entire oval. Satisfied she had its limits, she shifted her gaze to the middle area, where the reflective surface should be.

  "Oh, my," she said aloud, unaware of the sweat sheening her skin.

  There was something out there, a shape she might have likened to a man motionless in a blizzard had she ever seen such a thing.

  But no. . . not a man.

  She lifted a hand to her long hair. Before her eyes, the snowbound image followed suit.

  Monkey see, monkey do.

  She giggled through the pain in her temples.

  Me, she thought in quiet awe. That's me!

  Until the pain made her stop, Karen frolicked, like a child with a newfound companion. She tilted her head from side to side and chuckled when the oval-framed phantom did the same. She raised her arms and waved them, gently at first, then wildly when she realized the image was holding together.

  Her laughter tinkled on the encroaching night.

  Across the field, Danny replaced the binoculars in their leather case. He felt cheated by the dark, which had so selfishly stolen her from sight.

  Had she really seen herself in the mirror?

  He prayed not.

  He sat awhile, gazing at the fading silhouette of Karen's house, stroking the puppy. Then he went out to the woods.

  Chapter 10

  May 10

  A week following her arrival home, a week filled with pain and increasing anticipation, Karen saw the geranium.

  In an effort to minimize the maddening headaches, which had become a constant trial in Karen's life, Burkowitz adjusted her schedule to longer periods with the dark glasses in place—a schedule which. Karen patently ignored. Not out of any disregard for the doctor or his good sense, but out of a child's boundless zeal for discovery; because where sight was concerned she really was a child, a newborn registering those first blinking glimpses of a larger, infinitely brighter world.

  Following that first night home, when she'd frightened herself in front of the mirror, Karen had daily pushed herself to the limit, wandering the house and the yard, sometimes wearing the nearly opaque glasses but most times not, trying to harden those fickle, colorless, swirling images into reality. And as a result, she suffered. More than once a sunflare glanced off a window or a steely bit of gravel and slashed into her eyes, twin lasers of white heat searing to a flashpoint and igniting at the center of her brain. More than once as she sought to negotiate the eddying fog she tripped or barked a shin or bumped her head. And more than once her hapless gaze fell upon the sun itself, the shock of its brilliance carrying her to the ground in a dead faint.

  But she kept on. And on Sunday morning, a drab rainy dawn grumbling with thunder, she opened her eyes and saw the geranium.

  It had been her mother's favorite house plant, and Karen had grown up surrounded by its scent, subtle to the sighted, yet rich to her heightened sense of smell. Now she kept dozens of them around the house—in the windows, suspended from macrame hangers, even outside, in an assortment of porch-rail planters. It was a means of keeping her mother alive, as vividly for Karen as a well-stocked picture album might accomplish for others.

  Thunder jerked her awake that morning with an unpleasant start. The odor of the coming storm, damp and electric, lay thick on the air. She sat up sleepily and opened her eyes, expecting the same shapeless gloom as the morning before. . .

  But there on the sill not two feet away, its leaves and blossoms crisply in focus, stood the geranium. Green and red—her mother had told her the colors years ago.

  The image lasted perhaps a minute, during which Karen sat transfixed on the edge of her bed, drinking it in. Then it began to blur. . . and fade.

  And the headache started.

  She lay back awhile, eyes closed, the geranium's image still fixed in her mind. Then she sat up and called her father, the clean scent of blossoms sweetening the storm's cloying breath.

  She told him over the phone about seeing the geranium and knew from his voice that he was crying. Not just because of her first episode of clear vision, Karen knew, but because of Elizabeth, too. Even now, sixteen years later, he missed Karen's mother as if she had passed on only yesterday. She should have been here to share in this moment.

  Sniffling, he said he'd be right over.

  Karen replaced the dark glasses and waited on the porch. She could already hear the truck roaring up the half mile of dirt road. . . but she stifled the urge to peek. The next thing she wanted to see was her dad.

  "In color?" he asked as he stumbled up the steps to embrace her.

  "Yes!" she told him brightly. "Red and green! And they're just as you described them."

  This was a fib, and Albert in his silence seemed to know it. He had spent hours with Karen as a child, striving with his farmer's vocabulary to describe colors, comparing them to moods and feelings and the various earthy things Karen could feel and smell. She realized now that to appreciate color it had to be seen. . . but the fib was her way of thanking him for trying.

  "Come on inside," she said, tugging him by the jacket sleeve. "I want to try something."

  Slipping off his muddy wellingtons, Albert followed her in.

  "Sit over here," Karen instructed excitedly, indicating a press-back chair at the kitchen table.

  What's up, kid?" he asked, obeying her command.

  Karen knelt before him, sinking to her haunches. In a quick, nervous motion she flipped off the glasses.

  Blinked.

  Blinked again.

  To Albert, her new eyes (so blue, he thought, still astonished at the color change) seemed unfocused, striking him somewhere in the vicinity of his stubbled chin. . .

  Then they flickered up and fixed on his, filling with tears as that unmistakable glint of recognition registered in their blueness.

  She touched his cheek with her hand. "It's you," she said in a whisper, the image already fading. "It's really you. . ."

  Albert Lockhart lifted his daughter to her feet and held her. He held her for a long time.

  Karen slept that afternoon, a sleep partially induced by the pills Burkowitz had prescribed for the headaches.

  But the deep, dreamless slumber of that rainy mid-May Sunday resulted mostly from chronic fatigue. Since her surgery almost two months ago, Karen had spent scarcely a night without waking at least once before morning. That, combined with the steady gnaw of apprehension over the transplants, made her eventual crash inevitable.

  The crash came that afternoon, and Karen welcomed it.

  It was nighttime when she awoke. Crickets chirred but only irregularly, their song stripped of its usual spring vigor by the unseasonably cool air. The geranium was a sleepy silhouette in the moonlit window, the moon itself a shiny copper button sewn into the lining of a huge navy cap.

  And Karen could see it all.

  She felt lightheaded and tingly before she realized she was holding her breath. She chuckled at the idea that it was dark at night.

  She believed in miracles.

  She stood then and did something that she had never done for herself before now—she turned on a light. The low-wattage glow of the bedside lamp was yellow, and she added that to her burgeoning collection of colors. Around her, articles winked into shadowy relief—the brass bed on which she sat; the antique bedroom set: dresser, highboy, oval-mirrored vanity. . .

  The mirror.

  Karen began to shiver. Now that the one thing she had wanted more than any other—to see herself—was hers for the taking, she was terrified.

  What if I'm ugly? she fretted. Really grotesque? What if God's little joke didn't end with the blindness? What if the blindness was His way of sparing me the horror of witnessing my own image?

  She looked down at her hands, seeing them plainly for the first time. The tight skin and sharply defined angles suggested the streng
th she knew them to possess.

  Good hands, she thought.

  She glanced again at the mirror. Still in focus. She could see a section of the north wall reflected in its depths.

  But for how much longer? What if the image faded like her father's had and just never came back?

  Coward. . .

  She stood, battling vertigo. After twenty-eight years she was about to meet Karen Lockhart, blind author.

  She shifted in front of the mirror, eyes closed to slits.

  A delicate white form flickered into the framing oval. It seemed to fade, then solidified into—

  Me.

  Karen opened her eyes and beheld herself. She stood motionless for a long while, not blinking, not breathing, fearful that the slightest disruption might shatter the image into ripples.

  Then, hesitantly, she stepped forward, her whole body quivering with delight as the girl in the reflective oval grew larger and clearer.

  She sat on the stool, leaned forward on her elbows, and studied the face she had lived with all of her life but had never seen.

  How many times had she sat on, this very stool, probing the contours of her face with curious fingertips, trying in vain to sculpt in her mind an image of what she was feeling?

  How many times had she sat and listened, desperately attentive, while her mother, or father did their best to describe her in image-provoking terms, only to come away more mystified than before?

  And now, miraculously, here she was.

  Beautiful, she thought without a trace of vanity.

  Beautiful. . .

  She smiled at the image in the mirror and the image smiled back. Its teeth were white and even, all but one on the top, which angled slightly forward, and its lips were moist and full red, like the geraniums. Its skin was creamy white, but Karen thought she could see a tiny blush of color in each full cheek.

  The image in the mirror, still smiling, shed a single glistening tear. With profound sadness Karen watched it fall, understanding that the image wept for all the lost years, for the changes in its living geography it had failed to witness.