Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

Forward, under the spreading black branches of the massive tree, receiving continuous green-tongued murmurs of encouragement from the breeze-stirred leaves, Barty was Barty, determined and undaunted.

When he judged that he was near the porch steps, he probed with his cane. Two paces later, the tip rapped the lowest step.

He felt for the railing. Grasped at the empty air only briefly. Found the handrail. He climbed to the porch.

The kitchen door stood open and full of light, but he missed it by two feet. He felt along the back wall of the house, discovered the door casing and then the opening, probed with the cane for the threshold, and stepped into the doorway.

Turning to face his four trailing escorts, all of whom were hunch shouldered and stiff-necked with tension, Barty said, “What's for dinner? “

Jacob had spent most of two days baking Barty's favorite pies, cakes, and cookies, and he'd prepared a meal as well. Maria's girls were at her sister's place this evening, so she stayed for dinner. Edom poured wine for everyone but Barty, root beer for the guest of honor, and while this couldn't be called a celebration, Agnes's spirits were lifted by a sense of normality, of hope, of family.

Eventually, dinner over, cleanup finished, when Maria and the uncles had gone, Agnes and Barty faced the stairs together. She followed, holding his cane, which he said he preferred not to use in the house, prepared to catch him if he stumbled.

One hand on the railing, he ascended the first three steps slowly. Pausing on each, he slid his foot forward and back on the carpet, runner to judge the depth of the tread relative to his small foot. He ran the toe of his right shoe up and down the riser between each tread, gauging the height.

Barty approached stair climbing as a mathematical problem, calculating the precise movement of each leg and placement of each foot necessary to successfully negotiate the obstacle. He proceeded less slowly on the next three steps than he had on the first three, and thereafter he ascended with growing confidence, pumping his legs with machinelike precision.

Agnes could almost visualize the three-dimensional geometric model that her little prodigy had created in his mind, which he now relied upon to reach the upper floor without a serious stumble. Pride, wonder, and sorrow pulled her heart in different directions.

Reflecting upon her son's clever, diligent, and uncomplaining adaptation to darkness, she wished that she had described to him the dazzling sunset under which they had made their journey home. Although her words might have been inadequate to the spectacle, he would have elaborated on them to create a picture in his mind; with his creative skills, the world that he'd lost with his sight might be remade in equal splendor in his imagination.

Agnes hoped that the boy would spend a night or two in her room, until he was reoriented to the house. But Barty wanted to sleep in his own bed.

She worried that he would need to go to the bathroom during the night and that, half asleep, he might turn the wrong way, toward the stairs, and fall. Three times they paced off the route from the doorway of his room to the hall bath. She would have walked it a hundred times and still not been satisfied, but Barty said, “Okay, I've got it."

During Barty's hospitalization, they had graduated from the young adult novels by Robert Heinlein to some of the same author's science fiction for general audiences. Now, pajamaed and in bed, with his sunglasses on the nightstand but his padded eye patches still in place, Barty listened, rapt, to the beginning of Double Star No longer able to judge the boy's degree of sleepiness by his eyes, she relied on him to tell her when to stop reading. At his request, she closed the book after forty-seven pages, at the end of Chapter 2.

Agnes bent to Barty and kissed him good-night.

“Mom, if I ask you for something, will you do it?"

“Of course, honey. Don't I always?"

He pushed back the bedclothes and sat up, leaning against the pillows and headboard. “This is maybe a hard thing for you to do, but it's really important."

Sitting on the edge of the bed, taking his hand, she stared at his sweet little bow of a mouth, whereas before she would have met his eyes. “Tell me."

“Don't be sad. Okay?"

Agnes had believed that through this ordeal, she'd largely spared her child from an awareness of the awful depth of her misery. In this, however, as in so many other instances, the boy proved to be more perceptive and more mature than she'd realized. Now she felt that she had failed him, and this failure ached like a wound.

He said, “You're the Pie Lady."

“Once was."

“Will be. And the Pie Lady-she's never sad."

“Sometimes even the Pie Lady."

“You always leave people feeling good, like Santa Claus leaves them."

She gently squeezed his hand but couldn't speak.

“It's there even when you read to me now. The sad feeling, I mean. It changes the story, makes it not as good, because I can't pretend I don't hear how sad you are."

With effort, she managed to say, “I'm sorry, sweetie,” but her voice was sufficiently distorted by anguish that even to herself, she sounded like a stranger.

After a silence, he asked, “Mom, you always believe me, don't you?"

“Always,” she said, because she had never known him to lie.

“Are you looking at me?"

“Yes,” she assured him, though her gaze had dropped from his mouth to his hand, so small, which she held in hers.

“Mom, do I look sad?"

By habit, she shifted her attention to his eyes, because though the scientific types insist that the eyes themselves are incapable of expression, Agnes knew what every poet knows: To see the condition of the hidden heart, you must look first where scientists will not admit to looking at all.

The white padded eye patches rebuffed her, and she realized how profoundly the boy's double enucleation would affect how easily she could read his moods and know his mind. Here was a littler loss until now shadowed by the greater destruction. Denied the evidence of his eyes, she would need to be better at noting and interpreting nuances of his body language-also changed by blindness-and his voice, for there would be no soul revealed by hand-painted, plastic implants.

“Do I look sad?” Barty repeated.

Even the Shantung-softened lamplight blazed too bright and did not serve her well, so she switched it off and said, “Scoot over."

The boy made room for her.

She kicked off her shoes and sat beside him in bed, with her back against the headboard, still holding his hand. Even though this darkness wasn't as deep as Barty's, Agnes found that she was better able to control her emotions when she couldn't see him. “I think you must be sad, kiddo. You hide it well, but you must be."

“I'm not, though."

“Bullpoop, as they say."

“That's not what they say,” the boy replied with a giggle, for his extensive reading had introduced him to words that he and she agreed were not his to use.

“Bullpoop might not be what they say, but it's the worst that we say. And in fact, in this house, bulldoody is preferred."

“Bulldoody doesn't have a lot of punch."

“Punch is overrated."

“I'm really not sad, Mom. I'm not. I don't like it this way, being blind. It's ... hard.” His small voice, musical as are the voices of most children, touching in its innocence, spun a fragile thread of melody in the dark, and seemed too sweet to be speaking of these bitter things. “Real hard. But being sad won't help. Being sad won't make me see again."

“No, it won't,” she agreed.

“Besides, I'm blind here, but I'm not blind in all the places where I am."

This again.

Enigmatic as ever on this subject, he continued: “I'm probably not blind more places than I am. Yeah, sure, I'd rather be me in one of the other places where my eyes are good, but this is the me I am. And you know what?"