Second Sight (7 page)

“Help me,” he called to the man behind the door.

Sherry’s lips continued to move; can’t…on, can’t…on, can’t…on…

He looked down at the gun in front of him. His hand moved toward it as his eyes darted back to the white dial. “Can’t…on, can’t…on…”

He saw a man in a fishing boat with an open cabin. There were rectangular wire cages in the stern tied to dozens of battered cork buoys. He saw the man kneel and reach into the hold and come up with a rifle and start shooting at him.

There was a grinning soldier, American, sitting at a crude wooden table in a room. There were enemy soldiers all around him. A rifle pointed at his head. There was a gun on the table in front of him, just like the gun on the table in this room. He picked it up and put it to his head and pulled the trigger and his head jerked sideways and he fell to the floor and the soldiers were smiling at the camera and laughing.

Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten…

There was a dirigible floating just above his head—it was massive—approaching a tall steel tower. There was lightning and the dirigible caught fire and exploded in a ball of flame. People were falling from everywhere, charred black people, and the people on the ground were catching on fire as the debris fell.

He looked away from the wall and tried not to watch, but voices kept telling him not to turn away, voices not from the cone-shaped objects or the hole in the door but from in his head, his own head, and they would not let him look away.

There was a young girl. She was wearing a sailor’s cap and red lipstick. She was wearing a white shirt tied above her stomach and red pedal pushers. She was smiling at him and waving and a
friend, another brunette, ran up next to her and was pushing an elbow in her side.

He forced his eyes down. Something was burning his skin on the arm of the chair. The gun on the table had a cylinder and he could see the ends of the shiny brass cartridges in the chambers. It was a six-shot revolver, double action, it had no safety, required no effort but to point the barrel and pull the trigger.

Thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten…there were wet spots on the table next to the revolver, beads of perspiration that had fallen from his cheeks. He didn’t want to watch the girls on the wall, he didn’t want to know what the shadows coming up behind them were.

There were marks on the table by the gun, grooves cut into the wood, the scars from someone’s thumbnail that had been carved into the wood. He put his thumbnail in one and rocked it back and forth. His fingers were only inches from the revolver, it was shiny and he wanted to pick it up, pick it up and end it all…ten, five, zero, thirty, twenty-five, can’t…on, can’t…on.

It was dawn and he was awakening from sleep. He was covered with mud and lying on his side on the ground. There was an open-bed truck with the rear end facing him. It was full of corpses and next to the rear tire soldier helmets had been stacked. Next to the helmets were web belts and canteens and gas masks. A man wearing rank and chaplain corps insignia was putting his hands on each of the bodies. He rolled to look away, then he looked down, pulling a green leather-bound journal closer to his body.

Can’t…on, can’t…on, can’t…on, can’t…on, can’t…

“Sherry?” Dr. Salix shook her shoulders roughly. “Sherry!”

Her eyes fluttered, but remained shut. Sherry could hear words, but they were far, far away. Suddenly she saw something pink, blue orbs floating in space, dark caverns that oddly reminded her of a nose and she felt as if she were falling through a soft warm light and the light would protect her. She was aware
of the old man’s hand. She could still feel the energy coursing between them. It wasn’t over.

There is a riddle, she thinks, something she must solve. “Can’t…on, can’t…on,” she repeated, thinking it would be dangerous to say anything else, to say the wrong thing.

“Sherry, it’s Dr. Salix.”

“Monahan,” she said suddenly. “Thomas J., private first class, serial number 7613779…”

“Sherry! Sherry Moore, I want you to focus on my voice. I want you to concentrate on the date. Tell me what day it is?”

“Can’t…on, can’t…on…”

“Sherry,” he said sternly. “Tell me what day it is. Think about the day.”

“Thanksgiving.” She began to falter. “Can’t…on, can’t…on…”

“Sherry, you’re in a hospital. You are in Philadelphia. Do you remember Philadelphia? That I’m Dr. Salix?”

She shook her head no, distrustful.

“Sherry!” he said, turning and pointing toward the ceiling. “Somebody, give me some light!” he yelled and one of the technicians turned on the overhead surgical lights.

He thumbed open one of Sherry’s eyelids and she let out a bloodcurdling scream.

Garland Brigham sat in his favorite rocking chair in front of Sherry’s gas fireplace. His work boots lay by the door with his old U.S. Navy peacoat. He had propped his wool socks on the hearth to warm. Sherry reposed on a couch.

He sipped coffee and watched her reaction to the front page of the newspaper he’d brought. He had been working in his yard most of the morning, organizing the woodpile and raking last winter’s leaves from beneath the rhododendrons.

“The fire feels good,” she said, turning toward Brigham. She tried to dry her cheeks with the fingers of both hands.

It was June, but the unseasonably cold nights held a chill within the heavy stone walls of Sherry’s house on the Delaware.

He stood and leaned toward the coffee table, pushing the tissue box a few inches closer. She pulled one out and dabbed her face.

“Hurt?”

“Still tearing a lot. The light hurts.”

“So don’t overdo it, Sherry. Put your glasses back on.”

She made a face and did, feeling remotely silly. The glasses were as big as ski goggles and wrapped around the sides of her face.

“Better?”

She nodded.

Sherry turned to face him. The room was blurred and smoky gray. She knew now that the small mark on the breast pocket of Brigham’s plaid shirt was a polo pony. He had also explained the anchor carved on the buttons of his peacoat and the tiny scar that split one of his eyebrows. She couldn’t see things clearly for any length of time, but Dr. Salix warned that her eyes were still weak and would take time to gain strength.

She closed her eyes and waited for the headache to recede. Then she squinted to watch the flames, more shadow than light as they danced beyond the lenses, never the same way twice, and she found them mesmerizing. How amazing, she thought, to put an image to the sounds and sensations around her.

“I can go outside.” She studied Brigham for his reaction.

He nodded. “I know.”

“Will you show me your house soon?”

Brigham shrugged. “Sure. When are you going to answer Brian Metcalf’s calls?”

“You have photo albums, wedding pictures. I want to see what you looked like when you were young.”

He made a face. She kept steering away from the subject.

“Mr. Brigham,” she said sternly. “Let me worry about Brian and you show me the photographs.”

“If you insist.” He yawned and reached to test the toes of his socks and found them dry. “But not today. Maybe this weekend.”

“You don’t seem very happy about it.”

“I’m never happy when you strong-arm me. What did you think of your picture in the paper?”

Sherry reached for the coffee table and picked up the
Inquirer,
tossing it irritably next to the tissues.

“It doesn’t look like me.”

“Pictures never do. Get used to it.”

Sherry scratched a fingernail across the fabric of the sofa, watching the lighter image of her hand as it moved beneath the dark glasses on her face. “I’m sorry, Mr. Brigham, but I have to find out who he was. I want to meet his family.”

“They don’t give out that kind of information, Sherry.”

“They certainly could. I don’t want his Social Security number, for crying out loud. I want to call his wife, his children, anyone.”

“You know what you saw on that table wasn’t all that pleasant. You said it yourself. Something was very wrong about the man before he died.”

“And yet it changed me, Mr. Brigham. I let go of his hand and I opened my eyes to see for the first time in thirty-two years! What in the heck do you do with that? How do you move on without acknowledging the miracle?”

“The man was preoccupied with death and still thinking about it fifty years after the fact. That’s a little nuts, Sherry.”

She shook her head firmly. “We don’t know that. He was in a vegetative state. Maybe it’s all he ever remembered about anything.”

“All right, we’ll ask Dr. Salix on Tuesday—will that satisfy you?”

“His nurse called to change the appointment. It’s Monday at four, but don’t change your plans. I want to go there myself.”

“Sherry,” Brigham said sternly.

“Really,” she said. “I mean it.”

Brigham looked at her, nodding, thinking she was even more pigheaded with sight.

“Where are we going for dinner?” she said happily, hoping to lighten the mood.

“Do you still feel up to it?”

“I’ve got to get out of this house.”

“Well, it depends on what you want to eat.”

“Something red,” she said.

“Spaghetti?”

She shook her head, whipping her hair from side to side.

“Lobster?”

She clapped her hands. “Yes!”

“You’ve got to stop grinning like that!” Brigham said. “People will think you’re daft.”

“I’ll be good, I swear,” she said. “I won’t stare, I won’t ask questions, and I promise not to look surprised by anything.”

Brigham rolled his eyes. “Promise to wear your glasses.”

“Not these,” she said. “One of my other pairs.”

“Fine. We’ll wait till dark, but you must wear something.”

“Can we watch a movie when we get home? Please, please?”

“I’ve inherited a five-year-old,” Brigham grumbled, getting to his feet. “I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours. Why don’t you close your eyes and go to sleep?”

Sherry reached for his hand and he took it and squeezed before continuing on to the door.

“Did you know my bathroom soap is green?” She giggled.

Sherry knew she had to take it slow. The doctor wanted her to wear eye patches five hours a day—to force her eyes to rest. She was down to two hours, and Brigham was sure she was pushing the envelope, as always. He was worried about her. She was worried that whatever radiation she had been exposed to in New Mexico would affect the already tenuous wiring of her brain.

Sherry wasn’t sure what to think of the miracle of sight.

The experience, for better or worse, was a little disconcerting after thirty-two years. There was more to seeing again than just strengthening fibrous muscles that navigated the eyeballs around a crowded street or room. Sherry had to learn how not to
be blind, how to abandon the instincts she had so long ago developed and honed and come to trust. She needed time to get her equilibrium under control. Suddenly she was relying on an entirely new means of navigation and she was tripping and bumping into things that she normally would have avoided. She also needed to practice being skeptical, she’d told herself, not to rely entirely on the presentation of things, on the world as it seemed.

Dr. Salix had never come right out and said it, but he didn’t have to. It was possible that she would regain her vision in its entirety. It was equally possible, however, that one day she might be drying her hair and look up to find she was no longer in the mirror. There were no guarantees that she would continue to see. There were no guarantees that she would be alive in the morning either. Who knew better than she how quickly things could be taken from you in this world?

So she didn’t yet dare to accept its permanency. Not yet and perhaps not for some time. It had been thirty-two years, after all, since she’d last seen a thing.

And that was okay, she told herself. Part of living practically was having the knowledge that whatever happened today was good enough. She would plan for the best and she would be positive, but only by tempering her elations daily. There were no more long-term plans for Sherry Moore.

Suddenly she thought of the empty shelves in her library. She must get books for that room. She must fill the empty shelves with colorful old books and then she would try to read as many as she could before her eyes went dark or she died.

She tapped the key on the computer, the screen came to life, and she spoke her name and the date.

A list came up and she listened to the choices, stopping at last with a video from MSNBC. She was in the news again. Front page of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and headline cable news.

“They were calling it a minor miracle in Philadelphia last week. Blind celebrity psychic Sherry Moore is said to have re
gained full sight during a routine neurological test at Nazareth Hospital last Tuesday. In a prepared statement given just minutes after she was photographed leaving the hospital, Dr. William Salix confirmed that Moore has been totally blind for the past thirty-two years. Salix said that Moore’s condition was the result of head trauma received as a child, a condition known as cerebral blindness. While there are no statistics to support that Moore is truly a miracle case, Salix says he knows of no other patient who has recovered sight after such a long period of time. Cerebral blindness, according to Salix, results from trauma to the occipital cortex. Victims of cerebral blindness are left without sight, but their pupils appear normal and actually fluctuate in varying degrees of light. Moore received national attention in 2006, when…”

Sherry turned the volume down and swiveled her chair to face the windows. The boughs of tall cedars bounced lightly in the breeze. There was a tugboat on the river and it was pulling a barge well behind it. She had heard the mournful moan of its horn dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times before. But now she was actually seeing the water ripple around its bow, right down to the pale green froth of its wake.

She turned back to the computer and touched another key. There was just one other nagging uncertainty that had come with her “minor miracle,” and it had been bothering her since the moment she had opened her eyes. From the moment she had seen the blurred face of Dr. Salix in the operating room and screamed. Had sight come at the sacrifice of her longtime friend?

Did she still have the gift of second sight?

“Adult literacy,” she said to the screen. “Private tutors, Philadelphia.”

She scrolled through a dozen listings and listened to each description. After fifteen minutes she stopped and spoke a phone number that the computer dialed.

She thought about the cadaver on the table once more—his
hand, the texture of his skin, the terrible feeling she had watching those images. She thought it unusual that his last memories were trapped in the last century. She might not have been surprised if he had had no memories at all. He was in a coma, after all. Time might have cleansed the slate of short-term memory. She had a feeling from the images she had seen, the wind and flames, the woman staked in the road, that they had been played and replayed until they were frozen in his mind. His thoughts had ended in that room some fifty-odd years ago. She could still see that man behind the door, the box on the table, the gun by his hand. It was sad that he’d never thought of his parents, his siblings, or a wife when he died. It was rare that life parted from the body before retrieving some millisecond of someone loved. Only the boy in the trenches by the truck, the heaps of dead bodies, the chaplain, the helmets, and canteens seemed real. He had been there, she was sure. He was that boy with the green book.

She wondered too about the strange words she had spoken during her test. There was no image to go with them. They had bored into his mind, but from where? The words
can’t
and
on
meant nothing out of context, so what was he trying to say? Can’t
go
on? Can’t
live
on? And the name she repeated. Monahan, Thomas J. Was it his? There was just no way to know.

“Jonathan David,” the voice answered.

“Yes, Mr. David, I noticed your ad for literacy services. Private tutoring? Is that correct?”

“It is,” the man said stiffly.

“I was impressed with your qualifications. Are you taking on new clients?”

“I have two days open a week.”

“You’re in Philadelphia.”

“The city,” he said, ruling out suburbs, which he must have found offensive.

“Perhaps we could meet. I’m a member of the Athenaeum,” she said. “I could meet you there for an interview.”

“The Athenaeum,” he repeated. “It would have to be on Tuesdays and Fridays, both at three o’clock.” He coughed. “If things work out I am to be paid on the date of each session, only before, not afterward.”

Sherry had to remind herself she was looking for a qualified tutor, not a friendly chat over tea.

“Tuesday it is,” she said. “Three o’clock.”

They exchanged descriptions and settled on a location. She laid down the receiver and felt as if her world was about to take a new turn.

She had been given a wake-up call. And with it a window of the world she lived in.

From now on, she solemnly vowed, she would live in the here and now.

For Sherry Moore there were no more tomorrows.