She looked behind her, once, at something that didn't pursue her past the boundary of the forest, but waited there on the edge, watching. She could not see it. She could smell it.
She stepped forward until she was balanced on a tread, and there, swaying, she waited for the train.
7.
When she woke, Beate Abendroth had no parents, but she did not know it. The doctor and the nurse gently unwrapped the bandages. They'd ministered to her for weeks using lamplight only. The eye was healing nicely, the cornea no longer blurred and weeping but nearly crystalline, vessels transiting to the rest of the eye.
“Are you prepared?” asked the doctor. Beate nodded, ready for the pain of opening into light, if, indeed, there would be pain.
At first there was startlement more than anything. The nurse stripped the last bandage away, and swabbed her eyelid with cotton pledgets. The doctor touched her lids with his fingertips, and whispered to her.
“Now,” he said.
She opened her eyes. A flash of rose and orange in the left one, the new one. Two blurry forms moved there, human, but not.
“Tell us what you see,” the doctor said.
All around the discomfort were the possibilities of a room, draperies blowing, a vague rectangle, a window, a bureau. There was a lamp. She hadn't seen any part of herself in so long, and now she saw her hands. They splayed, pale fingers spread. A leg moved, and she knew it for her own, but it was a woman's leg, a woman's skirts. Everything was haloed with white, agonizing light. She shut her eyes.
“Please,” Beate said. “Dark.”
She felt the doctor's arm around her shoulders. She opened her eyes again, a little, and saw the curtains move. The doctor waved his hand.
“How many fingers do you see?” he asked. “Look at me. Look into the light, and tell me what you see.”
The doctor bent closer to look into her eye, and through a wash of tears, blinking rapidly, she saw him too, a beard and skin. She had not thought in faces before, but in voices, and the doctor's voice, bright and merry, was not his looks. He looked like a man getting old, his hair long and curling around his ears, his beard and mustache streaked with silver, though his body was still that of a young man, slender and wiry. The nurse was freckles and comforting roundness. Beate stared at the shapes on her bodice, triangles and squares. She touched them with her fingertip, and found them pleated, pressed. She could see them, and feel them at once, and this was what woke her into vision.
She could see.
She jolted. Something had moved in the room, something other than the people in it. No, the curtains.
“How many fingers?” asked the doctor again.
“Two fingers,” she said, looking up at the kindly face of the living man before her, at the nurse, at the wallpaper, a pale yellow twisting motif. “Two. I can see them. I can see you. But what is that?”
She pointed at the window, at the curtains. They shifted, gusted, surged, as though something brushed against them.
“The wind,” the doctor said, and laughed in delight. “You can see. You can see!”
“It's moving,” said Beate. “Everything shines.”
The doctor took her in his arms and held her tightly. Beate stiffened for a long moment. She could not remember having been held before. There were tears in her hair, the doctor weeping, in pride.
“My parents?” she asked. “Where are they? Why are they not here?”
“I've cured you,” the doctor said. “No one's ever done it before.”
Beate looked with her left eye over his shoulder at the room, its glowing edges, the nurse, her glowing face, the way the bedcurtains and the window curtains still shifted, the way the carpet seemed to crush beneath something heavy.
“I can see,” she whispered. This was what the world looked like. This was what this room, and these people looked like.
The doctor brought her a mirror and held it before her, so that she could see herself.
Strands of blonde hair, a gown, and later, in the floor-length mirror, a blurry-edged shining girl. She saw for the first time the silvery cornea in the un-changed eye, the ugly right eye her mother had objected to, but it wasn't ugly. The doctor stood behind her, watching her watch herself and grinning.
“You're beautiful, Beate,” he told her.
“Am I?” she asked. She found herself bewildering. She didn't know what beauty would be, what it would mean, nor what it even consisted of. Here were her mouth and her eye, still red. Here was her hair braided and golden. Here was the strangeness of everything around her, the world.
“Perfect,” said the doctor. “You're perfect.”
But the part of her that was truly perfect was the silver eye. She knew it.
“Where are my parents?” she asked again.
The doctor hesitated, she thought.
“In Frankfurt,” he said. “Your healing took long enough that your father was called back to the city, to work. Your mother went with him.” He showed her a piece of paper, an envelope, but she couldn't read it. He knew that.
“We've had a letter from her,” the doctor said, looking at Beate. “All is well.”
She could not read his expression, but then he smiled, and repeated himself. “All is well, Beate. You are to be cared for here for as long as you need to stay.”
The doctor and nurse took her outside, and she looked around, at the grass, at the trees. There were no ghosts here, she'd known that already, but it was different to see with one eye, to see people where ghosts had been. Her eye saw the world in glinting movement, birds flinging themselves up toward the light, shocking flashes. She was overwhelmed by it, and excited at once. She did not want to sleep again. She felt like crying, or laughing, not simply for joy but for loss too. She stood between the doctor and nurse, seeing the sky, wondering what would happen when she went away from this piece of land.
“Will they come back for me?” she asked the doctor, and some part of her referred to both her parents and the ghosts.
Her parents had never liked her. She was not stupid. They'd sought release from their burden. She thought of her father, in his office, surrounded by his books. Without Beate, Johanna might do as she pleased, and Beate knew she'd longed for afternoon concerts, for flower gardens unmarred by a daughter who saw only blackness and death, an unmarriageable daughter.
She slept that night in a knot of coverlets, sweating, springing up over and over again to look into the dark and wonder if she was blind again, if this had all been a dream. Every time she woke, she lit the lamp, and every time she lit the lamp, she marveled at it, the way the heat of the oil transformed into light, the way seeing depended on it. Her knowledge of the world had never depended on light before.
She looked into the dark, hunting for something. She was looking for the dead, she realized, things her mind was used to seeing, but there were none here. She allowed herself to think a moment about what it would be if the ghosts were no longer visible anywhere, if she herself had shifted. There would be no more of the woman leaping from the roof edge, no more plague victims following her through the house. There would be no more battlefield ghosts, no more derailment victims dropping toward the water. She would be free of all of them, and of their hopes for her acknowledgement. She would be more alone than she'd ever been before, for all her childhood raised in an echoing house, without a governess. She'd always — until this house — traveled with an invisible entourage. It would be a test, leaving. Then she'd know. Back in Frankfurt, with her parents, she'd know if the ghosts were gone. Here, who could say?
She got out of bed, tied herself into the wrapper — striped in pink and silver, she now saw — the names for the colors coming back to her from her childhood. She took the oil lamp and tiptoed out into the house itself. She ran her fingertips along a wall, guiding herself to the stairs.
She felt something in that wall, in that wallpaper, a scoring just beneath the surface. Something
had clawed the paper back. She brought the oil lamp up to show the spot, but there was nothing. She shut her eyes, and touched it again. Yes. Marks, widely spaced, and deep. She could feel the plaster crumbles around each one, and the paper too, that unpleasant yellow-figured paper. She thought that she heard someone else awake in the house, or a dog perhaps, a huffing, raw breath, something snuffling in the dark just ahead of her.
Beate ran a hand over something she thought was bark, a branch, but it was only a banister. She closed her left eye, and saw nothing with the right. She closed the right eye, and again, the banister looked like a tree. The walls looked like forest. She squinted. No, it was only the wallpaper. She touched it again, to be sure.
In the early morning, Beate sat in the kitchen with the cook, drinking a cup of scalding tea, and looking out over the green grass and golden leaves — and yes, they were green and gold, and now she understood those colors — toward the woods. There were birds on the lawn, pecking and plucking at worms, and occasionally, Beate saw things hopping and dancing, little motes of white. Rabbits, she thought, and went out to look at the pen.
There they were, all in a clump, their many-colored bodies twisted together, nuzzling and prodding themselves closer into one another. Their ears twitched frantically, but they couldn't see her. There was disparity between the rabbits she saw before her and the notion she'd had of rabbits until this moment. Rabbits were precise, and these eyeless ones even more so. There were hollow sockets. What sort of rabbit had it been that had given her this sight? Did all rabbits see the world the same way? She imagined her head twitching up to see the sky, for fear of an owl or eagle. She thought of what a rabbit might see from the side of its vision, a fox, a wolf, a big cat. Or a surgeon, kneeling to trap.
She stood beside the rabbit pen, looking back and forth, her new left eye still uncertain. If something were to swoop upon her from above, she would not see it coming. If something were creeping up from behind, she would not know.
It was cold on the lawn, and she felt an urge to drop to her knees and dig in the dirt, to burrow in. She saw the house, the way it loomed up over the grass, the sun rising behind it, a dark building full of gleaming windows, each one cased in triangular panes like honeycombs, or the wings of a kitchen fly like the one she'd caught this morning and examined.
In the dew, she saw her own footprints, a trail from the front door, the sunrise showing her path across the grass in a perfect negative. There was another set of tracks beside hers, as though she had not walked out from the house alone. Even as she wondered, the sun broke the roofline, and the dew shifted into droplets, steaming away with the day.
Mist and sunlight playing tricks. The sun was out, and she could see Doctor von Hippel standing on the porch, calling her in for breakfast.
She glanced toward the woods, but there was nothing there. Then she turned, and ran to the house, laughing at her speed, her certainty.
#
Beate looked at Arthur von Hippel, at his hair newly cut, at his shirt newly starched. He'd dressed for dinner, and so had she. He'd brought her a gown in shot silk the color of the trees outside. She looked like a changing leaf, though her throat was covered in ivory lace, nothing like the dark stems appended to the true leaves outside. Her hair had been done into a series of poufs, and for the first time, she understood a hairstyle as something to be seen rather than touched. The house still moved before Beate's left eye, the curtains shifting, the carpets crushing, but she'd ceased to care. These aftereffects of the surgery were common, the doctor told her, memories of things her mind had created to fill the vacuii.
They were celebrating her complete healing, the streaks of red gone from her cornea, the rabbit's eye fully integrated into Beate's own.
“Some people create starry skies inside blindness,” Doctor von Hippel told her, refilling her wine from the decanter. “Others create universes of animals, people, memories of the time before they were blinded. Houses made of rooms they saw when they were infants. Still other blind people never think in visuals at all, but only in sounds and smells. You saw what your mind wished you to see,” the doctor said. “And now you see with your eyes.”
She felt the grain of the table with her fingers. Her left eye thought it saw the pale marks of claws. It didn't. Her mind had made them.
“Has something spilt?” he said.
“Might I have another portion of nut cake?” she asked. She had a sweet tooth now she could see sweets.
“Of course, liebling,” he said. She looked up at him, startled.
“I apologize,” said the doctor, and flushed. “You must know I've become fond of you. My wife died long ago, and it's been some time since there was a young woman about.”
In the dark at the corner of the dining room, she thought she caught sight of something moving, but then, no. Nothing was there. The doctor fed her a bite of walnut cake, the glaze orange-flavored, sweet and crystallized, and she sucked it, holding it in her mouth until it dissolved. The nights were getting cooler. He wrapped a shawl about her shoulders.
In her bedchamber, she looked at herself for a moment in the mirror, admiring her hairstyle. She turned, blinking, rubbing her eyes and stretched, facing the bed.
As she moved her hand from over her left eye, something rose up from the carpet.
There was a bear.
It filled the room. A bear made of dark.
She stayed silent, her hand clapped to her mouth, and frantically closed first one eye, then the other. The bear blinked in and out of existence. The great jaw, the glittering eyes, the tremendous paws, each one the size of her face, each one with too many claws. It had too many legs. It had too many heads. It wasn't what it was meant to be, but it lurched forward, shambling, humping across the carpet, crushing it beneath its weight. It grunted and snuffled the carpet pile, the bedclothes, the edge of her nightgown.
She couldn't see it through the blind eye, the human eye. This was the rabbit eye.
The bear was a ghost.
It passed through her in a rush of brambles and cave, of oak leaves and berries and rotting meat, and she gasped, holding her heart. It used no words, but it growled, and the vibration of the growl shook her skeleton.
“Help,” she whispered, too frightened to scream, but there was no one to hear.
A wrong bear, as though drawn by a child. A bear that had never seen another bear. It moved through the room, hunting. It had mangy clots of bedclothes half-hidden in its darkness, and its jaw was rowed with fangs. It growled. A gaping wound in its shoulder bled light. It was not right, it was not quite a bear. It was something more. What did she know of bears? A picture book from her childhood, before she was blind, nothing like this.
The bear rose up on its hind legs, opened its mouth, and roared into her face, its jaw dripping with ghost gore, its breath pouring across her skin, and into her own voice. Then it stormed through her and down the stairs, leaving her shaking, nearly vomiting.
She'd exchanged one kind of ghost for another.
When she looked out the window with her left eye open, she could see more ghosts, a stampede of eyeless rabbits, escaping the house, the bear stalking them, running, its haunches gathered, bounding over the grass. It stopped in the center of the lawn and sniffed, tearing up ghost grass with ghost claws, and the ghosts of a thousand rabbits ran from it.
For the first time in weeks, with a shock that went right through her, she saw motion with her right eye. She closed it, and looked at the same place, only with the left. Nothing but animal ghosts. Slowly, as slowly as she could, shaking as she was, she covered her left eye with her palm, and opened her right.
She saw at last what the bear was chasing.
She watched the man stumble and turn. She opened both eyes. With her left she saw the bear ghost, and the rabbits, and with the right she saw the human. With both eyes, she watched the ghost bear tear into a man she recognized from her early childhood, before the blindness. Her fathe
r, in his pajamas.
Now she screamed, at last, and the doctor rushed in, tying up his robe. He took her in his arms and held her, but she could not stop screaming. Her father was being torn apart on the lawn. The room was full of rabbit ghosts, silken silver and white, furred things, flashing things, moving quickly, emerging from the walls again.
“What do you see?” the doctor asked her urgently, looking into her eyes, moving his hand from eye to eye, shining a light into them.
“Hundreds,” she said, but they were gone, burrowed, under roots and in the trees.
“How many fingers?”
“What fingers?” she asked. She'd spent years less than blind, and now she was more than sighted.
“You're not well, liebling,” said the doctor. “You must try to calm yourself, or there will be morphia.”
“No,” Beate wailed. “I know I am not well. Am I your wife, Doctor von Hippel, that you call me darling? You should not wish to take me to wife. I see too much.”
“Hush,” said the doctor. “Call me Arthur, Beate. We are friends.”
“Are we?” she asked. “Where are my parents? You said they were in Frankfurt. My father is not in Frankfurt! He is not!”
She stumbled to the window, looking out with her blind eye and her rabbit eye at once. Her ghost father was there, dying in the grass, and the bear was there too, dragging him into the woods.
“He is in Frankfurt,” said the doctor firmly. “With your mother. You had a nightmare, Beate, but you're safe with me, here. Everything is safe.”
Beate turned and looked at von Hippel, but he did not change his story.
She watched ghost rabbits circle her doctor, weave themselves in and out of his mouth and eyes and ears, clawing him, raking him. She watched rabbits throw themselves into his body like worms eating bones, and through his skin they jumped, blind and raging.
She whimpered.
“Stay with me,” the doctor said. “I will be your husband.”
“Where else am I to go?” Beate wept. “My father is dead. My mother is gone. Where is she?”
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 21
