Eden's Eyes

by Sean Costello

  Karen stepped into the room. She lay on the bed and gazed at the ceiling, wishing a fierce, little-girl's wish that her mother was still alive. After a while, she got up and went to the cedar chest by the south wall. She sat on her haunches before it, lifted the lid, and reached inside.

  Her dolls were in here, entombed in plastic and stacked four high. The dolls her mother had made her. Karen knew each of them by feel.

  Here was Puffball, the brown-faced mushroom who blew baby powder out the top of his head when you squeezed him. And Baggy-Anny, the Arnprior wino, with a witch's warty nose and matching toothless grin. And Gobbling Gerty, the magic turkey who grew back its head every Thanksgiving after the farmer cut it off. And Sam and Frodo and Pippin, characters from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, portions of which her mother had recited to her so many times Karen could still quote them by heart. And here was Cerin Songweaver, with his harp of barn wood and wool.

  And there were others.

  But the last of them was the hardest for Karen, so hard that she nearly left it in its dark back corner. It was the doll her mother had been working on the night she had died.

  Its name was Daylight, the fairy princess with the sparkly wand who came to sleeping blind girls and made them see. But you've got to have faith," her mother would tell her.

  "Because if you do, Daylight really will come to you someday."

  Karen slipped the doll out of its protective sheath and laid it down in her lap. Its faintly musty odor drenched her in a warm flood of memory. Clad in scarlet and crowned in a tiara of gold, Daylight would have been her mother's most perfect creation, had she completed it. She'd been adding the finishing touches to the doll's face the night she had died, Karen realized.

  But she had never gotten round to the eyes.

  One by one, Karen re-bagged the dolls and carefully put them away. Then she went back downstairs.

  When they finally came in off the porch it was near dawn, and Karen decided to sleep over. A lot of long-buried emotion had been dredged up between her and her father, and both came away feeling drained but relieved. Before bedding down, Karen returned to the cedar chest and pulled out Daylight again.

  Now she lay asleep, one arm wrapped tightly around the unfinished doll. Despite her fatigue it was a restless sleep, shallow and riddled with dreams. . .

  She was on the porch with her father, looking at albums. But now she was twelve, and her folded hands looked brown in the lap of her new summer dress, the fuchsia print with the puffy sleeves her mother had only just finished. It was daylight now, and the doll's eyes were finished—silver-blue, like shiny new coins in a bright noon sun.

  Her dad flipped the page. . .

  And there was the old Buick ragtop pulling slowly away. Her mother was waving and holding her hat, and something was shining in her eyes. Karen leaned closer to see what it was. . . and her mother's smile widened with pleased recognition. Of course it couldn't be, it was only a picture—

  But the car was pulling away and her mother was waving to the crowd, most of them tipsy and all of them smelling of beer and over-rich food. Karen stood waving cheerily back, an unseen hand laid firm on her shoulder, and watched as the newlyweds rolled happily away. On her mother's moving silk glove sunlight caught sequins and launched diamond tipped darts, some of which stung Karen's eyes. Dust rose from the Buick's whitewall tires. Albert smiled proudly, both hands clasped to the wheel.

  As the car reached the gap a hundred feet away, Elizabeth's eyes met Karen's. . . and the smile fled her face like a bird taken wing. She drew her hands up under her chin and began moving her lips. She was saying something, Karen realized, speaking to her. But the Buick continued to roll.

  Desperate to know what her mother was saying, Karen shrugged the hand from her shoulder and started to run. The car was speeding up now, creating more dust, and when her mother's lips moved again Karen could scarcely see them.

  What? she cried out despairingly, running even harder. Mommy, what are you saying?

  But her dad kept on driving, steadily widening the distance. Karen could see her mother speaking again, turning her head now to Albert, whose tanned face beamed in profile. She pointed at Karen and said something to Albert, but he only smiled, half-deaf even then.

  What is it, Mommy?

  It seemed critical now—she had to know what her mother was saying because her mother was going to die and it should have been said before she died but it never was. She'd been away at school, not at home where she should have been. . .

  I'm sorry I wasn't there with you Mommy I should have been there with you—

  Plucked away by invisible talons, the lacy hat rose from her mother's head and soared in widening spirals. Elizabeth pointed. . . but not at the hat. She was pointing at Karen—no, behind Karen—and her face was changing in the dust swirls, distorting with distance and something else, something ugly and stark—

  (terror?)

  She was pointing and shouting and now Karen could hear her voice, frantic and far away—

  Karen!

  Look out!

  And when Karen swung round to where her mother was pointing, the wedding party had vanished and the woods were there, behind her, all around her. . .

  And something was crashing through the trees, rending and splintering, maddening the boughs like a fierce winter wind.

  Karen!

  It was coming through the woods for her—

  "Karen!"

  She opened her eyes to a teetering blur. Her stomach clenched and her heart skidded madly. . .

  Then her father was there, hunched over the bed, his seamed face pinched with concern. "What is it, child?" he said, one hand firm on her shoulder.

  Karen sat up. Blinked her new eyes. Swallowed dryly.

  "A. . . dream," she rasped uncertainly. "Only a dream."

  But she peered warily around the bedroom of her childhood, half-expecting the walls to fade, the woods to appear, and the thing in the trees to reach out for her—

  "Land's sake, you gave me an awful fright just then." He sat on the edge of the bed, the smell of straw hanging thickly around him. He smiled, but it wavered with residual alarm. The look of her face just then. . . "Better now?"

  Karen nodded. Her skin was slippery with sweat, but she was feeling more awake.

  What was she trying to tell me?

  "Well, then. . . you've got a visitor."

  Albert looked smugly secretive, a look Karen immediately understood.

  "Who?" she asked, excitement replacing her fear.

  Mercifully, the content of the dream was quickly blurring. "Who's here?"

  But then she heard the unmistakable croon of Ricky Nelson, coming from downstairs.

  Chapter 15

  Leaving off her sewing for a moment, Eve Crowell angled her chair to face the den wall behind her, unaware in her transported state that night had fled and dew-specked morning had taken its place. Her naked buttocks squeaked rudely against the vinyl seat cover. She grinned, quotes and misquotes spilling in a nonstop flood from her lips.

  She had papered the entire back wall with fold-outs from Life magazines. All were the same—full-page photos of a blue-eyed Karen Lockhart, better than a hundred of them. Eve had gone to nearly every magazine stand and cigar shop in town, buying up all of their stock.

  From each of the photos, the eyes had been meticulously snipped out.

  "Vengeance is mine!" Eve sang out suddenly, casting a conspirator's eye on the wood-carved crucifix. "I will repay!" Then, in a pious whisper, she added: "So saith the Lord."

  She turned back to her project, which was nearly complete, and lifted it up to the lamplight. Smiling, she examined its seams, its lovingly hemmed edges. Much of the work she had done by hand, thumbing a heavy needle through the thick rawhide, joining the pattern-cut segments, which she'd had to enlarge to a much, bigger scale, with a special nylon thread as stout as fishing line.

  A fine piece of work, Eve thought as she folded it carefully and tucke
d it away. She could hardly wait to strap it on.

  Quivering with ecstasy, she quit the den and strode into the kitchen. Still naked, she descended the basement steps, the Bible pressed to her joggling bosom. On her way down, she remembered the satisfying snap of her husband's neck as it broke on the bottom step.

  Chapter 16

  Throwing caution to the wind, Karen dashed through the doorway and lit into the stairwell, dropping to the middle landing with a jaw-cracking thud. Through the first-flight railing she could see a wedge of living room, at the edge of which a dyed-blond head be-bopped to "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It."

  "Cass?" Karen cried, hitting the bottom landing even harder.

  "Get your butt down here," came a familiar brassy voice. "You plannin' to sleep all day?"

  Karen's face felt numb from the width of her grin. Rounding the corner, she skidded to a stop in the living-room archway and beheld her dearest friend. Seated on the floor on folded legs, a Virginia Slim in one hand and a canned Pepsi in the other, Cassy Fields gawked dumbly back. Her lean face beamed through its thick cosmetic mantle, and her green eyes brimmed with tears. As she rose on sneakered feet, the scarlet slash of her mouth curved almost comically downward. She approached her friend as if drunk, her eyes never leaving Karen's.

  "Lord, they're blue," she said with a quaver. "Blue as a summer's sky."

  Karen hugged her hard. This scrawny, big-hearted throwback from the fifties knew all of Karen's secrets, and Karen loved her like family.

  "And you can see?" Cass said, nudging her out to arm's length.

  Karen nodded her own eyes leaking now, too.

  "Oh. . ." Cass raised a hand to her flyaway hair and pecked self-consciously through it. She dropped her gaze to the floor. "Oh, my. I must look a sight—?"

  "You look like a dream," Karen said.

  But there were poorly disguised bruises near Cass's left ear, and the crescents of skin beneath her eyes were brown and transparent.

  The music ended. Taking advantage of the interruption to terminate this suddenly clumsy moment, Cass pulled away, her eyes still downcast. She went to the table where she had set her ghetto blaster and flipped the tape. When she returned her expression was once again cheery and bright.

  And in that instant Karen realized there were volumes about her friend that she didn't know. It was a regretful realization, one which brought with it a sharp tug of guilt—Cass had always been the listener. Silently, Karen vowed to change all of that.

  Albert poked his head into the room. "I'll be goin' out for a bit," he said cheerfully. "You gals have a good time gettin' caught up.

  "Oh, we will," Cass said. "I'm gonna corrupt this girl yet."

  Laughing, Karen turned back to Cass as Albert stepped out the door. Her heart pounded with wonder. Here she was at last, face to face with the woman who had held her head in some of her darkest moments, and whose quick, earthy wit had at times driven her near to laughing her lungs out onto the rug. With a clarity she might never have known she was seeing the gal who had first gotten her drunk, and stoned, and who had made certain she got dates with boys.

  "But we never did get you laid," Cass said, as if during that brief silence she had read Karen's thoughts.

  "Same old Cass," Karen said, and opened her arms for another hug.

  "The same fer sure," Cass said, leaning into the embrace. "But you know where you can stuff the 'old.'"

  The getting-caught-up went on for hours there in the living room, Karen grinning till she thought her face might crack, Cass swilling Pepsi and smoking, her head jerking and her chin rhythmically jutting, hopping up each time a tape ended to replace it with a new one from her caseful of Baby Boomers ("Never leave home without 'em!") Classics. Tales of the West overlapped detailed descriptions of Karen's ordeal in the hospital, the badgering news people, the thrill of vision. And toward late afternoon, when the talk grew more intimate, Cass told Karen about Derek, the silver-tongued dandy who had whirlwinded her first into bed and then out West, dragging her off to share in his fortunes. But he wound up guzzling his fortunes, scant as they were, in a dingy C&W roadhouse on the rough side of town. And when he stumbled back home in the middle of the night, he turned his fury on Cass.

  "So I left the sour sonofabitch," Cass confessed bitterly. "Told him I was comin' down home for a while, and that when I got back he'd better be gone." The deck was silent now, and wine had replaced the Pepsi. As she finished her story, Cass's voice hardened in a way which startled Karen—and frightened her a little. . "I hope the fucker wraps that Harley of his 'round a power pole."

  And then she cried, bitter and hard, and Karen held her head.

  Near dusk the talk turned back to the surgery. It began innocently enough—Karen pulled out the scrapbook her father had pasted together, and they leafed through that. But before long Karen's darkest misgivings about it all bobbed nakedly to the surface again.

  "I can't stop thinking about the donor," she said quietly, summing up the worst of it in that one simple sentence. "I've even been dreaming about him. Bad dreams."

  She flipped to a double-page spread near the back of the scrapbook. On it were two full-size before-and-after photos of herself. Using Karen as their focus, Life magazine had done a seven-page feature article on the "Exciting New Technology of Whole-Eye Transplantation." The pictorial fold-out was a part of that article.

  "Look at this," Karen said, feeling more than a little tipsy from the wine. She pointed to the Before shot. "Remember this?"

  Cass let out a jet of white smoke and chuckled nostalgically. "Your grad photo from Brantford."

  "Brown eyes, right?"

  Cass nodded, uncertain where all of this was leading.

  "And over here. . ." Karen tapped the After shot. "Now they're blue." She regarded Cass perplexedly. "How do I thank him, Cass? How do I thank him for letting me see?"

  As if suddenly ponderous with the weight of her sympathy, Cass's head leaned sharply to one side. She squeezed Karen's knee. "You don't, honey," she said simply. "You just let it go."

  A deep cleft formed in Karen's brow. "But I feel so. . . close to him, Cass. So sorry." Her eyes brimmed with tears that didn't fall. "I feel like, I don't know. . . like I love him."

  Alarmed at first by this statement, which struck her as morbid and unhealthy, Cass nodded her understanding. "I think I know what you mean, hon. Cripes, you've got parts of the guy right inside of you." She lifted Karen's chin with her fingers. "But you've gotta forget him, kid. Get on with your own life."

  "I wish it was that easy," Karen said. "I really do."

  When they finally broke it up it was pushing seven. By then, both of their bellies were grumbling, and Cass still had to drive to Arnprior, fifteen miles away, to visit her mother.

  "A couple of hours'll be enough," she told Karen. "Any more than that and the old gal'll be after me about giving her grandchildren before God gives her notice."

  Cass had taken three weeks off from her hairdressing job out West (although, she confided, at this point she wasn't sure if she'd be going back at all, except to collect her belongings), and planned on spending the bulk of it with Karen. . . if that was okay. Karen told her it was more than okay, it was mandatory, and they agreed to meet back at Karen's around ten. The living-room couch was a fold-out, and that suited Cass just fine.

  Waving, Cass tore out in her bright orange Camaro, kicking up bullets of gravel.

  Deciding to wait and eat with her father, Karen cruised the farmhouse again. As she moved from place to place, hungrily gobbling up images, an interesting phenomenon began to take place. At first, it occurred without her awareness of it. . . but when she got to the old Singer sewing machine, at the foot of which she had so often sat as a girl while her mother sewed, she suddenly, wonderingly realized what was happening.

  Her mind was trying to add images to her memories, memories which, until now, had consisted of everything but. When she strolled over to the Singer and stroked its smooth surface, smelled it
s oiled parts, she was that little girl again—just for a moment. She sat on the floor and drew her knees to her chest. . . and heard the whir of the bobbin, the mechanical clatter of the treadle, even felt the faint breeze created by the machine's moving parts, just as she had as a child. She sat there remembering—eyes tightly shut, chin raised and facing the chair where her mother used to sit, was sitting now in her memory—feeling her, smelling her, hearing her. . . then she opened her eyes and saw her.

  Sepia-toned, like the photos, younger than she would have been in real life, her pretty face frozen in a photographic rictus. . . but gradually softening, becoming warm and animated, lifting her eyes from her work and regarding her blind child with an ever-present mixture of sorrow and love—

  Then she was gone and Karen was sitting on the floor, smiling and crying, touching the ironwork, feeling closer to her mother than she had in years.

  When by eight-thirty Albert had not yet returned, Karen gave up and walked briskly back home, swinging a plastic IGA bag, which contained the scrapbook and a few lacy items she'd snitched from a trunk full of her mother's old clothes in time with her stride. Around her, dusk trembled on the verge of extinction, and only the tardiest of birds kept her company, buzzing the brush for a roost.

  Once home, she fixed herself a snack of canned soup and dry toast. Still queasy from the wine, her stomach refused anything heavier. She had just started doing the dishes when the telephone rang. She answered it with soapy hands, hearing that second click but somehow not caring.