Eden's Eyes (16 page)

"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 its 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.

It was her agent, Jack Dent.

Immediately Karen began making excuses—she had scarcely even thought about her unfinished novel since the surgery, let alone work on it—but Jack cut her off politely.

"That's not why I'm calling," he said, his thick Brooklyn accent making her smile. "I've got some exciting news for you, Karen. I got a call from Viking yesterday, and another from Doubleday this afternoon."

Karen said nothing. She had no idea what he was getting at.

"They want you to do a book. About the operation, your life. . . before and after, that kind of thing. It should be easy enough for you to do. And they mentioned some very large numbers."

"How large?" Karen asked, her imagination already reeling.

"Are you sitting down?"

He told her and she did sit down, hard.

"I think we should run with the Doubleday offer," Jack went on. "It's about the same as Viking's but they hinted at a hardcover market for your fantasy stuff later on. . ."

Jack was still talking, but Karen tuned him out.

Suddenly, she was rich. Very rich. And all she had to do was sit down and do what she did best, what she had always enjoyed doing best. A book like that would be easy, she could dictate most of it. And she would donate a sizable chunk of the advance money to the Transplant Fund. . .

"You still there, Karen?"

"Yeah. . . sorry, Jack, I—"

"I know. Listen, I'll send you the paperwork by registered mail. Sign it and send it back—and good luck!"

"I will, Jack. And thanks."

Karen hung up and went outside. She wandered the yard in a happy daze, feeling like a child in a fairy tale who'd wished on a star and the wish had come true. Suddenly things were really taking off, and it left her breathless. In a matter of weeks she'd been given more than she'd ever dared hope for. . .

And when she tilted her face to the twinkling heavens, she murmured a quiet thanks.

Full dark found her back inside, snoozing fitfully on the living-room couch. She awoke with a start when behind her eyelids something seemed to claw at her face—

Momentarily disoriented, Karen rose and started through the night-drenched house the old way, like a blind person, believing at first that the whole incredible show—the new eyes, Cass's visit, the book deal—had all been a cruel joke of the mind. Then in a wondrous flash she remembered, and went gleefully about flicking on every light she could find.

Afterward, shifting slowly from room to room, she acquainted herself visually with a way of life she hoped never to endure again. Everywhere was the evidence of her blindness, from the unadorned walls to the braille-tagged canned goods, and it saddened her to realize how much of her life had been spent in lightless exile. Standing before the small table in her workroom, looking at the humpbacked brailler she had thumped out her manuscripts on, Karen got a fleeting image of herself seated there cold and alone in the icy depths of a mid-winter squall, hammering away at those four smooth keys, converting the best of her dreams into stiff little dots on paper. And as she watched it the image grew old and infirm, its back bending until it, was humped as the machine it labored over, its soul withering to the barrenness of the snow-clotted fields outside.

In that instant the bug of change stung her hard. Despite her already firm decision to move to the city, hopefully by winter, Karen vowed right then to totally remake the place, erasing even the remotest trace of its previous inhabitant—that sightless, withering ghost in her workroom upstairs.

With that resolve firmly in mind, Karen strode downstairs, grabbed the Eaton's summer catalogue, that had come in the mail and began thumbing it through page by page, marking off the items she wanted with big red check marks. For a long time now she'd been sitting on a sizable cache of royalty money—without even considering the mind-boggling advance Jack had managed from Doubleday—and she meant to burn through it now like a blaze in a bank vault.

By the time Cass got back and heard the news—and the two of them had paged through the catalogue again—Karen's red marker had run out of ink.

"You're wrong, you know."

They sat on pillows on the living-room floor, chatting and drinking, Cass teaching Karen the fine art of Crazy Eights from the opposite side of the coffee table. Behind them on the boom—box the Shangri-Las belted out "Leader of the Pack." The cuckoo had just clucked twelve—"the witching hour," Cass joked—and the second of three wine bottles, tall amidst the clutter of Pepsi cans and crumpled Humpty Dumpty potato chip bags, was down to the dregs. Karen was giddily, falling-down drunk. . . and loving it.

"Whaddaya mean, wrong?" Cass said, blowing out smoke and slapping down an eight, changing the suit to clubs.

Coyly, Karen dropped out a deuce, making Cass pick up two. She was a fast learner. "About me getting laid," she said, and a spasm of hurt shaded her face like a fast-moving bird.

Cass closed her fan of cards and set it down on the floor by her knee. "Tell me."

Karen took another swig of wine. "I met him last June, at the annual CNIB conference in Toronto. A doctor. . . a resident, really, in ophthalmology. She smiled wistfully. "Boy, could he talk. Smooth as silk."