Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

The hardest was being in this room at the very moment when Phimie had moved on. Celestina knew beyond doubt that this was the worst thing she would have to endure in all her life, worse than her own death when it came.

“And, of course, you'll need to make arrangements for the body,” said Dr. Lipscomb. “Sister Josephina will provide you with a room, a phone, privacy, whatever you need, and for however long you need."

She wasn't listening closely to him. Numb. She felt as though she were half anesthetized. She was looking past him, at nothing, and his Voice seemed to be coming to her through several layers of surgical masks, though he now wore none at all.

“But before you leave St. Mary's,” the physician said, “I'd like a few mutes of your time. It's very important to me. Personally."

Gradually, she perceived that Lipscomb was more troubled than he should have been, considering that his patient had died through no fault of his own.

When she met his eyes again, he said, “I'll wait for you. When you're ready to hear me. However long you need. But something ... something extraordinary happened here before you arrived."

Celestina almost begged off, almost told him that she had no interest in whatever curiosity of medicine or physiology he might have witnessed. The only miracle that would have mattered, Phimie's survival, had not been granted.

In the face of his kindness, however, she couldn't refuse his request. She nodded.

The newborn was no longer in the operating room.

Celestina hadn't noticed the infant being taken away. She had wanted to see it once more, even though she was sickened by the sight of it.

Evidently, her face was knotted with the effort to remember what the child had looked like, for the physician said, “Yes? What's wrong?"

“The baby ...

“She's been taken to the neonatal unit."

She. Heretofore, Celestina hadn't given a thought to the gender of the baby, because, to her, it had been less a person than a thing.

Lipscomb said, 'Miss White? Do you want me to show you the way?"

She shook her head. “No. Thank you, no. Neonatal unit. I'll find it later."

This consequence of rape, the baby, was less baby to Celestina than cancer, a malignancy excised rather than a life delivered. She had been no more impelled to study the child than she would have been, charmed to examine the glistening gnarls and oozing convolutions of a freshly plucked tumor. Consequently, she could remember nothing of its squinched face.

One detail, and one only, haunted her.

As shaken as she had been at Phimie's side, she couldn't trust her memory. Perhaps she hadn't seen what she thought she'd seen.

One detail. One only. It was a crucial detail, however, one that she absolutely must confirm before she left St. Mary's, even if she would be required to look at the child once more, this spawn of violence, this killer of her sister.

IN HOSPITALS, AS in farmhouses, breakfast comes soon after dawn, because both healing and growing are hard work, and long days of labor required to save the human species, which spends as mu& time earning its pain and hunger as it does trying to escape them.

Two soft-boiled eggs, one slice of bread neither toasted nor buttered, a glass of apple juice, and a dish of orange Jell-O were served to Agnes Lampion as, on farms farther inland from the coast, roosters still crowed and plump hens clucked contentedly atop their early layings.

Although she had slept well and though her hemorrhaging had been successfully arrested, Agnes was too weak to manage breakfast alone. A simple spoon was as heavy and as unwieldy as a shovel.

She didn't have an appetite, anyway. Joey was too much on her mind. The safe birth of a healthy child was a blessing, but it wasn't compensation for her loss. Although by nature resistant to depression, she now had a darkness in her heart that would not relent before a thousand dawns or ten thousand. If a mere nurse had insisted that she eat, Agnes would not have been persuaded, but she couldn't hold out against the insistent importuning of one special seamstress.

Maria Elena Gonzalez—such an imposing figure in spite of her diminutive stature that even three names seemed insufficient to identify her-was still present. Although the crisis had passed, she wasn't ready to trust that nurses and doctors, by themselves, could provide Agnes with adequate care.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Maria lightly salted the runny eggs and spooned them into Agnes's mouth. “Eggs is as chickens does."

“Eggs are as chickens do,” Agnes corrected. Que?"

Frowning, Agnes said, “No, that doesn't make any sense, either, does it? What were you trying to say, dear?"

“This woman be to ask me about chickens—"

“What woman?"

“Doesn't matter. Silly woman making fan at my English, trying confuse me. She be to ask me whether chicken come around first or first be an egg."

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

“Si! Like that she say."

“She wasn't making fun of your English, dear. It's just an old riddle.” When Maria didn't understand that word, Agnes spelled and defined it. “No one can answer it, good English or not. That's the point."

'Point be to ask question without can have no answer? What sense that make?” She frowned with concern. “You not to be well yet, Mrs.

Lampion, your-head not clean."

“Clear.

“I answer to riddle."

“And what was your answer?"

“First chicken to be come with first egg inside already."

Agnes swallowed a spoonful of Jell-O and smiled. “Well, that is pretty simple, after all."

“Everything be."

“Be what?” Agnes asked as she sucked up the last of the apple juice through a straw.

“Simple. People make things to be complicated when not. All world simple like sewing."

“Sewing?” Agnes wondered if, indeed, her head was not yet clean.

“Thread needle. Stitch, stitch, stitch,” Maria said earnestly as she removed Agnes's bed tray. “Tie off last stitch. Simple. Only to decide is color of thread and what is type stitch. Then stitch, stitch, stitch."

Into all this talk of stitchery came a nurse with the news that baby Lampion was out of danger and free of the incubator, and with the simplicity of a ring following the swing of a bell, a second nurse appeared, pushing a wheeled bassinet.

The first nurse beamed smiles into the bassinet and swept from it a pink treasure swaddled in a simple white receiving blanket.

Previously too weak to lift a spoon, Agnes now had the strength of Hercules and could have held back two teams of horses pulling in opposite directions, let alone support one small baby.

“His eyes are so beautiful,” said the nurse who passed him into his mother's arms.

The boy was beautiful in every regard, his face smoother than that of most newborns, as if he had come into the world with a sense of peace about the life ahead of him in this turbulent place; and perhaps he had arrived with unusual wisdom, too, because his features were better defined than those of other babies, as though already shaped by knowledge and experience. He had a full head of hair as thick and sable-brown as Joey's.

His eyes, as Maria told Agnes in the middle of the night and as the nurse just confirmed, were exceptionally beautiful. Unlike most human eyes, which are of a single color with striations in a darker shade, each of Bartholomew's contained two distinct colors-green like his mother's, blue like his father's-and the pattern of striations was formed by the alternation of these two dazzling pigments within each orb.

Jewels, they were, magnificent and clear and radiant.

Bartholomew's gaze was mesmerizing, and as Agnes met his warm and constant stare, she was filled with wonder. And with a sense of mystery.