Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

I have trusted in thy mercy, she thought desperately, reaching for comfort to Psalms 13:5.

“Frequently, symptoms appear early enough that radiation therapy in one or both eyes has a chance to succeed. Sometimes strabismus-in which one eye diverges from the other, either inward toward the nose or outward toward the temple-can be an early sign, though more often we're alerted when the patient reports problems with vision."

“Twisty spots."

Chan nodded. “Considering the advanced stage of Bartholomew's malignancies, he should have complained earlier than he did."

“The symptoms come and go. Today, he can read."

“That's unusual, too, and 1 wish the etiology of this disease, which is exceedingly well understood, gave us reason to hope based on the transience of the symptoms ... but it doesn't."

Be merciful unto me according to thy word.

Few people will spend the greater part of their youth in school, struggling to obtain the education required for a medical specialty, unless they have a passion to heal. Franklin Chan was a healer, whose passion was the preservation of vision, and Agnes could see that his anguish, while a pale reflection of hers, was real and deeply felt.

“The mass of these malignancies suggest they will soon spread-or have already spread-out of the eye to the orbit. There is no hope that radiation therapy will work in this instance, and no time to risk trying it even if there were hope. No time at all. No time. Dr. Schurr and I agree, to save Bartholomew's life, we must remove both eyes immediately."

Here, four days past Christmas, after two days of torment, Agnes knew the worst, that her treasured son must go eyeless or die, must choose between blindness or cancer of the brain.

She had expected horror, although perhaps not a horror quite as stark as this, and she had also expected to be crushed by it, destroyed, because although she was able to survive any misery that might be visited upon her, she didn't think that she possessed the fortitude to endure the suffering of her innocent child. Yet she listened, and she received the terrible burden of the news, and her bones did not at once turn to dust, though unfeeling dust was what she now preferred to be.

“Immediately,” she said. “What does that mean?"

“Tomorrow morning."

She looked down at her clutched hands. Made for work, these hands, and always ready to take on any task. Strong, nimble, reliable hands, but useless to her now, unable to perform the one miracle she needed. “Barty's birthday is in eight days. I was hoping. . ."

Dr. Chan's manner remained professional, providing the strength that Agnes required, but his pain was evident when his gentle voice softened further: “These tumors are so advanced, we won't know until surgery if the malignancy has spread. We may already be too late. And if we aren't too late, we'll have only a small window of opportunity. A small window. Eight days would entail too much risk."

She nodded. And could not lift her gaze from her hands. Could not meet his eyes, afraid that his worry would feed her own, afraid also that the sight of his sympathy would shake loose her perilous grip on her emotions.

After a while, Franklin Chan asked, “Do you want me with you when you tell him?"

“I think ... just me and him."

“Here in my office?"

“All right."

“Would you like time by yourself before I bring him to you?"

She nodded. He rose, opened the door.

“Yes?” she replied without looking up.

“He's a wonderful boy, so very bright, so very full of life. Blindness will be hard, but it won't be the end. He'll cope without the light. It'll be so difficult at first, but this boy ... eventually he'll thrive."

She bit her lower lip, held her breath, repressed the sob that sought release, and said, “I know."

Dr. Chan closed the door as he left.

Agnes leaned forward in her chair: knees together, clasped hands resting on her knees, forehead against her hands.

She thought that she already knew all about humility, about the necessity of it, about the power of it to bring peace of mind and to heal the heart, but in the following few minutes, she learned more about humility than she had ever known before.

The shakes returned, became more violent than previously—and then once more passed.

For a while, she couldn't get enough air. Felt suffocated. She drew great, raw, shuddering breaths, and thought that she would never be able to quiet herself but quiet came.

Worried that tears would frighten Barty, that indulging in a few would result in a ruinous flood, Agnes held back the salt tides. A mother's duty proved to be the stuff from which dams were built.

She got up from the chair, went to the window, and raised the venetian blind rather than look out between its slats.

The night, the stars.

The universe was vast and Barty small, yet the boy's immortal soul made him as important as galaxies, as important as anything in Creation. This Agnes believed. She couldn't tolerate life without the conviction that it had meaning and design, though sometimes she felt that she was a sparrow whose fall had gone unnoticed. Barty sat on the edge of the doctor's desk, legs dangling, holding Red Planet, his place marked by an inserted finger.

Agnes had lifted him to this perch. Now she smoothed his hair, straightened his shirt, and retied his loosened shoelaces, finding it even harder than she had expected to say what needed to be said. She thought she might require Dr. Chan's presence, after all.

Then suddenly she found the right words. More accurately, they seemed to come through her, for she was not conscious of formulating the sentences. The substance of what she said and the tone in which she said it were so perfect that it almost seemed as though an angel had relieved her of this burden by possessing her long enough to help her son understand what must happen and why.

Barty's math and reading skills exceeded those of most eighteen year-olds, but regardless of his brilliance, he was a few days shy of his third birthday. Prodigies were not necessarily as emotionally mature as they were intellectually developed, but Barty listened with sober attention, asked questions, and then sat in silence, staring at the book in his hands, with neither tears nor apparent fear.

At last he said, “Do you think the doctors know best?"

“Yes, honey. I do."

“Okay."

He put the book aside on the desk and reached for her.

Agnes drew him into her arms and lifted him off the desk and embraced him tightly, with his head on her shoulder and his face nestled against her neck, as she'd held him when he was a baby.

“Can we wait till Monday?” he asked.

Some information she'd withheld from him: that the cancer might already have spread, that he might still die even after his eyes were removed-and that if it hadn't yet spread, it might soon do so.

“Why Monday?” she asked.

“I can read now. The twisties are gone."

“They'll be back."

“But over the weekend, maybe I could read a few last books."

“Heinlein, huh?"

He knew the titles that he wanted: “Tunnel in the Sky, Between Planets, Starman Jones. “

Carrying him to the window, gazing up at the stars, the moon, she said, “I'll always read to you, Barty."

“That's different though."

“Yes. Yes, it is."

Heinlein dreamed of traveling to far worlds. Prior to his death, John Kennedy had promised that men would walk on the moon before the end of the decade. Barty wanted nothing so grand, only to read a few stories, to lose himself in the wonderful private pleasure of books, because soon each story would be a listening experience only, no longer entirely a private journey.

His breath was warm against her throat: “And I want to go back home to see some faces."