Eden's Eyes (19 page)

(Stop this!)

"I just wanted to offer my condolences," Karen blurted, her voice suddenly shrill. "It was a brave thing your son did, a very unselfish thing. I realize that you still must be grieving his death, but—"

"Are you sure you've got the right number?" the voice interrupted, still flat, still arctic. "It's true, my son was very ill. Some even thought he had died. But he didn't die. My son is alive and well, Miss, Lockhart. He's not feeling himself just yet, but he will. He's already up and around. . ."

"I'm sorry," Karen said, her palms slippery with sweat. "You're right. I must have misdialed. I—"

She was talking to the dial tone.

Why had she lied? Even if her son had not been Karen's donor—which Karen did not believe—he was dead, it was in the newspaper.

Was it denial? Had the shock of her son's death shattered her mind? Karen had heard of that happening. The Sawyers over in Fitzroy had lost their only child in a motorcycle accident. Marty Sawyer, who had just finished law school, had gone out with a few of his classmates on a celebratory pub crawl and had never come back. Milly Sawyer, his mother, had gone around for weeks afterward, talking about her son as though he were still alive, quoting from nonexistent letters from Kingston, where Marty had been slated to apprentice. She hung herself from a crossbeam in the attic three months after the funeral.

Maybe that was it, God help the poor woman.

Karen's innocent trespass left her feeling ill, confused, more unsettled than she had been before. And yet, percolating down through her own perplexity was a sense that perhaps she'd come up against something that couldn't be changed, a reality no one could alter. Maybe she really would have to let it go.

The real question was, would it let her go?

Thursday started out fine. Karen had slept soundly—there had been no dreams—and the morning was summery and bright. Barely awake, she donned her sunglasses and stumbled outside to sample the air. She had surreptitiously replaced the goggles Burkowitz had given her with a pair of stylish Vuarnets, complete with ropy danglers and suede carrying case. The lenses dyed the world a sort of glowing amber, but they cut the glare well enough.

As she scanned the yard, her previous freightload of heady excitement returned with a palpable thud—the day verily gleamed with possibility—and she dashed back inside, got the coffee perking and a picnic lunch started, got her body showered and her teeth flossed and brushed; and finally, after an hour of carefully generated noisemaking, got Cass out of bed. It was a lot like raising the dead.

Cass stumped into the kitchen like a hung-over sailor.

"Whadafucktiisid?"

"What?" Karen asked cheerily. She was pouring coffee.

Cass raked a hand through her tangled, Watusi-style hairdo. Sniffed. Squinted at the clock—then showed the whites of her eyes in shock.

"Ten after seven! Are you out of your mind?"

She turned and began tottering back to the couch.

"Whoa!" Karen piped, roadblocking the hallway with her body. She held out a mug of steaming hot coffee. "It's picnic time!"

Cass mumbled something which sounded both obscene and physically impossible. But she took the coffee. . . and smiled. When Karen was up like this, it was damned hard not to. The girl was nothing if not itchily contagious. And it relieved Cass enormously to see that finally the storm clouds were lifting, had lifted, if that beaming smile was any kind of barometer. To keep Karen in a mood like this, she'd probably agree to scale the Eiger.

"Picnic?"

"Yes, picnic!" Karen repeated. "In the woods. Or down by the Carp. Or both." She grinned. "C'mon, it'll be fun! We'll take the Polaroid along, go fishing maybe. Remember the catfish we used to catch off the bridge?"

"And remember who always had to clean 'em?"

"You can teach me."

Cass shuffled over to the table and sat, her green eyes squinty in the bright slanting sunlight.

"A picnic I can take," she conceded, adding a heaped spoon of sugar to her coffee. "But please, kid. No fucking catfish."

Karen laughed. Then she went back to packing the lunch.

Later that night alone in the house, shuffling through a stack of what she had playfully dubbed The Picnic Polaroids, Karen was struck once again by the remarkable process of memory-making, a function that went on well below the level of conscious awareness for most folk—as it had for herself, before the transplants started to work. But now. . .

The parallel to the unexposed Polaroid print did not escape her. Her brain was much like one of those blanks. Naked of images, yet armed with the potential to capture and store them. Like the unexposed print, all her brain had ever needed was a proper system of lenses. She had even possessed the shutter-release mechanism—her futilely blinking eyelids. Only the lenses had been missing. The process was so new to her, so exciting, it was impossible not to remain consciously aware of it. Every time she even so much as glanced at an object she could close her eyes and instantly visualize its afterimage, already trapped, already permanently stored. . . like in the photos. It was miraculous.

But draining. Burkowitz had been right. She could overdo it, and she had been. Who in hell wouldn't? There were all kinds of junkies out there, and since her own first fix—that intensely painful and yet gorgeously exquisite javelin of sunlight the student had unwittingly impaled her with—Karen had become an image junkie.

She sat on the bed, placed the prints in front of her, and fanned them out in an arc.

She had a decision to make.

Bath? Or bed?

Her head sagged sleepily toward the pillow. . .

"No," she said firmly, straightening again. "Bath. Even I can't stand the smell of you."

With a final, giggling glance at the Polaroids—in one of them Cass had chucked a skinny white moon at the camera—Karen padded into the bathroom and cranked on the faucets.

The tub was one of those deep, ancient, claw-footed lagoons you could sink into up to the chin. The faucets were made of copper, and the porcelain, though chipped in places, had yellowed only slightly with the passage of time. To Karen, those chipped spots looked like soulless black eyes. The feet were of tarnished brass, wicked-looking claws clasping smoky crystal balls, and the tub's metal slides held the heat like a thermos.

So hot. . .

Steam wisped up lazily, fogging the mirror and the single small window, misting the heavy air. Two or three times the book Karen had been phonetically sounding her way through had drooped almost into the water (the surface of which was heaped with downy Ocean Mist bubbles), and finally she had dropped it with a thunk to the floor.

Now she hovered dreamily on the doorstep of sleep, knees bent, arms draped almost majestically over the rims of the tub. She didn't want to fall asleep, at least not in the tub—one very clear memory was of her mother's voice warning her sternly against doing just that—but she was helpless to prevent it. The steamy, soporific warmth of the water, and the good fatigue of the day, conspired implacably to lull her away. . .

The water was cold when she jerked awake. Through her still-closed eyelids, she noticed that the light had changed in quality; it was flickering now, as if the bulb had chosen exactly that moment to die. And she noticed something else, something tickling the ball of her left calf, just above the stagnant waterline—

Karen opened her eyes and screamed.

There was a body in the tub with her, facing her, lounging like some macabre casual lover, a decayed, mummified corpse, eyeless and grotesque, its ulcerated legs intimately intertwined with her own. She screamed and thrashed at the water, the tickling thing on her leg was a maggot, there were maggots floating on the water, hundreds of them, spilling out of the vaginal slit in that cadaverous chest. She came out of the water like a performing dolphin, screaming and thrashing, vaulting out naked and almost falling, swiping the maggots off her legs—

Then the light brightened and the tub was empty. There was only the water, still sloshing slowly back and forth, spilling over the edges onto the floor.

The maggots were clots of suds.

Chapter 20

May 20

Here, in the fluorescent harshness of the doctor's waiting room, Karen felt suddenly unsure of herself. When she called the office last night—sick with panic, certain she was losing her mind—she had been desperate to talk to Dr. Smith. By the sheerest luck, the doctor's secretary had still been in, catching up on some billing, but she was unable to locate the doctor. The best she could do, she said, was an afternoon appointment tomorrow.

Now, five minutes away from that appointment, Karen was having serious second thoughts about being here at all.

Cass had returned from Arnprior about an hour after Karen's. . . dream or hallucination or whatever it had been in the tub, and Karen had finally, frantically spilled it all out, deciding that she had to, that if she didn't tell someone the weight of it would snap her mind like a string. Cass, alarmed at how far out of hand the whole thing had gotten, urged Karen to level with her doctor. It was all she could think of to do. Karen had trusted the doctors this far; why should she run from them now? In full agreement at the time, Karen admitted that she'd already made an appointment. Afterward, she kept Cass up as late as she could, yakking and playing cards; then, after Cass went to bed, spent the balance of the night almost painfully awake, half-watching hokey, late-night movies on the TV, incapable of even pondering sleep.

But now, her experience in the tub seemed very far away. And what seemed very close, so close and so huge that it filled the world, was what the doctor might think if Karen told her about any of his.

She might think Karen was crazy.

Might? Karen's mind shot back. Come on, let's be realistic. She's going to know that you're nuts. God help her, she even thought so herself.

And if the doctor thought that, then what?

She recalled once again the recipient in Europe, the one whose grafts were removed—whose perfectly functioning grafts were removed—and got to her feet to leave.

As she did, Heather Smith swung open her office door and bounded out. A sheepish-looking woman in her late forties crept out behind her, clutching a scrawled prescription. Slyly, Heather tipped Karen a wink. Then, she smiled and said: "C'mon in."

She was caught.

"So," Heather said, dropping into her chair. "Tell me."

“Well, there's not much to tell," Karen said, clearing her throat. She always did that when she was lying. "I missed my Wednesday appointment, so I just thought, since we were coming into Ottawa anyway. . ."

Heather arched a doubting brow. "That's odd. My secretary told me you sounded quite agitated over the phone last night." She studied Karen a moment, noting the pallor, the deepening hollows of her eyes. "And you certainly don't look well to me. Have you been sleeping poorly?"

Karen regarded the doctor uncertainly. Dressed in khaki, surrounded by as many bird photos as degrees, Heather Smith looked more like an off-beat biologist than a psychiatrist. But under the woman's scrutinizing gaze, Karen felt her psyche stripped curiously naked and had to avert her eyes as she made little of the way she was feeling.

"Honestly, Dr. Smith, I—"

"Call me Heather."

"Heather. . . I've just been steadily on the go. Not used to it, I guess. I mean, I feel like Cinderella. . ." She smiled, but the corners of her mouth twitched nervously.

"Bad dreams?" Heather said, and Karen felt more naked than ever.

"Some," she admitted hesitantly, clearing her throat again. "But they're not really bad."

"Want to tell me about them?"

"Can I give it some time?" Karen said, trying to disguise her relief. In the sway of that piercing gaze, she hadn't considered having choices.

Heather eyed her over the rims of her specs. "Of course you can," she said, her tone sisterly. "But if it keeps up, or gets worse, I want to know about it. Based on what scant knowledge we have, Karen, we feel that psychologically this is a critical period for an eye recipient, these first few months after surgery. Just from the look of you I'm tempted to admit you for a while"—Karen tensed—"but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt."

Heather stood, revealing a mannish leather belt. Turning her back to Karen, she made much of examining a framed photograph of a Canada goose.

"I know what you're afraid of,” she said after a moment had passed. "You're afraid to talk about your dreams because they're awful, and you think that we'll take back your eyes if you do." She turned to face Karen again. “Am I right?"

Karen dropped her gaze and nodded jerkily.

"I'm going to ask you to trust me," Heather said as she returned to her seat. "I suspect your wariness is my own fault. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that patient in Europe—"

"No," Karen cut in. "At the time I was glad that you did. Back then, I needed to know all that might happen. But. . ."

"But now it haunts you."

Karen nodded again.

"Look," Heather said gently. "I told you about that case only to inform you of the worst that might happen—barring any serious complications with the surgery, of course. But the odds against the same thing happening to you are high, Karen.

"Unless you hold out on me. If you're suffering and not letting on, then those odds decline. And sharply."

Karen's hands writhed in her lap like battling dragons, clasping and unclasping, shiny with sweat. One question plagued her mind: Should she trust this woman? Considering it rationally—which had become damned hard to do over the past several days—the doctor had only Karen's best interests in mind. She would not do anything that didn't need doing. The risks would be weighed before any action was taken. But the less rational, more childlike part of her mind, which had assumed almost total control of her thinking just lately, counseled sternly against uttering another word. As soon as you mention these. . . whatever the Christ they are, that child's voice cautioned her, she's going to press a button and a couple of orderlies will burst in and drag you away in a straitjacket.