The Eye Unseen (8 page)

“Mommy! Mommy! Where’s my little sister? I want Lucy!”

A couple of minutes later, the police were at the door, accompanied by a woman from the state. How desperately I wanted her to take you away. Silently I begged her to just get it over with and make me a whole person again. To tour the apartment and see the evidence of my hatred, polka-dotting your floor. To lift my sleeves and know how keeping you around was killing me.

Instead I lied.

“Oh my goodness, I am so sorry. Brandy and I were celebrating her first day of school and I think we overdid it. Between the pizza and big bowl of popcorn at the movies, she got incredibly ill. During all the turmoil that caused, I lost track of time. I was just about to call the department to see how I could find Lucy. Poor thing! She must be terribly afraid! I know we’ve been worked up since I realized my mistake.” The smile I plastered on my face must have worked. The policeman expressed concern, and I told him how embarrassed I was at not getting home on time.

“Being a single mother is really rough sometimes.” I told him about Alex, that the father of my girls was no longer in the picture.

After we moved, I tried to change my ways and look at you like a mother should. But it made me feel so vile inside that I couldn’t tolerate it for long. 

I could spend all of my time praying to God, but in the end I was still saddled with you, Lucyfer. Even God wouldn’t take you away.

Lucy

The Hanleys didn’t harvest until mid-October. I was insane with loneliness and boredom by the time the combines arrived, lumbering like drunken beetles up the field from the farmer’s house. I couldn’t help but adore their enterprise, the welcome respite their machinery and team work brought to my silent existence. But I hated them just the same. Despised the way they invaded my field, the hostility of annihilating the corn just a kernel when compared to the destruction dealt the wildlife.

The sheer number of animals sheltered by the plants amazed me. Early on I could barely make out the forms running from the comfort of their seasonal home but assumed they were coyotes. As the Hanley’s continued working I saw pheasants, foxes, raccoons, and, of course, my deer, barrel in terror from the brigade. The farmers stopped for nothing. The animals meant diddly-squat to them. Once, I swear Mr. Hanley swerved just to run one over, a dog that had been raiding garbage cans since his owners had dumped him on our road early in the summer.

“Oh my God! Stop!” I hollered against the window pane when I saw the golden retriever get wedged into the corn head.

The poor dog was a stranger to the countryside and didn’t understand farm equipment. The machine swallowed him whole. Within seconds, a flurry of blood misted the field.

“Don’t look, Tip. Get away from the window!” I didn’t want my dog to have a breakdown, watching the tragedy as it played out in the corn.

As Mr. Hanley moved forward, bits of something blonde spewed from his combine, but he was too far away to tell if he was harvesting corn or the remnants of a broken-hearted creature long rejected by his family.

My heart wrenched in fear and agony. The dog had done nothing to deserve such a wretched death, to be threshed alive. And who but me was left to stand up for him and deliver a eulogy?

And how many mice had died? Rabbits? Feral cats that roamed the stalks and kept the rodents from overrunning our house? A hundred obituaries, unwritten.

Of course I cried. I had watched the animals night after night as they snuck around our property, grazing on whatever greenery they could find. I did not want a single one of them to die or become so terrified of the field that they wouldn’t return.

I cheered the beasts on. Celebrated each life as it escaped the clutches of the machines. Then realized, in a sudden and profound moment of truth, that these animals were blessed with the ability to flee.

Unlike me.

I fell to the floor. Covered my eyes with the edge of my curtain and bawled into it, drenching the material while I let my emotions rip through the room completely unfettered.

I had needed a good cry for a while. Tippy bounced around my legs, nipping at my skin, and battled me for control of my tears. Her tongue sought out the moisture before it had time to drip from my cheeks, her little face wedging between me and the curtain.

When I pushed my dog away, she growled and feasted on me with her one eye, her look a warning that I was losing precious water and shouldn’t be so liberal with my tears. Which made me wail even harder at the thought of catching my own fluids in a water bottle just in case Mom never returned.

By the time the combines were at the edge of our yard, I was standing in front of my bed, screaming in an uncontrolled rage. I took my pillows and flung them around the room, then picked them back up and pounded them repeatedly against my mattress.

Tippy retreated under the bed.

After my tantrum, I returned to my window. I could almost see eye to eye with Mr. Hanley’s son, but he didn’t pay any attention to me.

 “She hasn’t let me out for two days!” I shouted. But of course, with the window closed and his combine fast at work, he couldn’t hear me.

Every cell pushed me to flee. Every voice trapped in my head hollered with such force I thought my skull might explode. I looked at the Hanley boy, drinking a big plastic bottle of pop, wanting desperately to gulp it down myself. I knew I could break the window. Then crawl out onto the roof, wave my arms at him until he realized my distress.

But I restrained myself. What would Mom do to me if I acted so bold? Would she put me in the shed again? Even in the cold? How many times could she pound my face against the wall before it became Swiss cheese?

When Mom didn’t show at lunchtime on Thursday, I at first worried about her safety and then as the hours passed began to panic about my bladder.

Tippy just said ‘fuck it’ and peed right on the floor.

“If she doesn’t care, why should I?” my dog asked.

“Because I don’t want to stay in a room that reeks, it’s bad enough as it is,” I explained.

“Then open the window and climb out to safety,” Tippy told me, her snout in the air. At least she had had the decency to go in the corner and hadn’t made a puddle by the bed.

I had the luxury of using my waste basket. Drip-drying was controversial, but after the third trip to my closet, I gave up trying to find old tissues and decided to go with nature. The stench overwhelmed the room. Even Tippy acted repulsed when she jumped on the bed to cuddle.

We shared my stash of water, a couple pieces of beef jerky, and played thirteen games of Monopoly. Tippy liked to be the banker, and because she usually won, I understood her to be a quick cheat.

“This time I get to hand out the money,” I ordered as we cleared the board for the next game.

“Then good luck finding someone else to play,” Tippy barked. She jumped onto the game board and pieces went flying all over the room.

By ten p.m., each time the house creaked I jumped off the bed and hovered by the door. Mom had stripped the room of light bulbs so the Hanley’s wouldn’t see that my room was occupied, leaving me without so much as the promise of hope.

I had never been left alone overnight. Brandy and I hadn’t even had a baby sitter since we were in school. Mom was always there. Even since I had been locked away, I still took comfort in her footsteps, her routines, the sound of her bedroom door opening at three in the morning when she took a trip to the bathroom. In my room I listened to her every movement, every sound of her socks on the carpet, water running, the vacuum as she performed Saturday cleaning chores. Her motions became my own as I closed my eyes and imagined the thrill of doing dishes again or the luxury of a scalding hot bath with lavender scented bubbles.

But without Mom I had less than nothing. I had stuffy air that I could only relieve at night when no one noticed a cracked bedroom window. I had Tippy, who blamed me for our situation and would occasionally crawl under the bed and go mute with rage. Mom controlled my everything.

The darkness clawed at my every thought. I could feel someone standing behind me, breathing on my neck, making me jumpier than my lack of sleep had.

Then I realized that not much could be worse than my current situation. Burglars? Ha! Maybe they’d set me free. Steal me and take me home with them. I’d probably be much safer. And well fed.

I thought of them, these masked men, invading our house, tip-toeing in the darkness, looking for the electronic loot that other families would cherish. A television. Nintendo. A fancy fitness machine.

Instead, they’d stumble upon my locked room, thinking it must contain the household’s treasure. Break down the door. Find me sitting, Tippy glued to my side, ask me why I was kept by myself in the pitch black.

When they opened their cloth bags, they’d be full of food. Hot soup. Macaroni and cheese. Pork chops, fresh from the frying pan, covered in apple slices.

The smells of their delicious spoils filled my room. Made me open my eyes. Brought me back to my current situation.

My stomach had a growling match with Tippy. We had such a limited food supply under the bed that I began to panic. What if Mom never came home? Could I eat the wallpaper? The sheets? And how long would Tippy and I make it without water?

When we heard the car drive under the bedroom windows, Tippy ran to the door and cried softly. I warned her not to get too excited, but her hopes were soaring and she was practically screaming by the time Mom finally made it upstairs to let us out.

“Dear God, you reek. Get in the shower. I want to go to bed soon, so make it snappy.”

She carried a small suitcase into her room, and I ducked into the bathroom for a much-needed break. As I warmed the shower, I returned to my room and fetched our water bottles, the wastebasket, Tippy’s piles. The toilet filled fast with our waste, the stench sickening.

Showering had never felt so sweet. And even though Mom interrupted my time, I cherished the fresh squeak to my hair and the droplets of water that clung to my skin. Tippy appreciated them, too. While I hurried about the room in my towel, she chased behind me, licking the moisture before I could dry it off.

“Are we that desperate?” The look in Tippy’s eye told me everything. “At least she came home. We didn’t have to eat any books!”

Joan

You have always been part of my family.

Not because you shot screaming from between my legs or even because you inherited my mother’s beak nose.  It’s not so simple.

You are as ancient as the wind, a disease that has rippled untamed through generations of my blood line. Every century at least one like you has emerged. A devil of sorts. Waiting patiently until the time to strike has come, then causing untold damage to kindred and community. 

Alex always laughed at the family legend. My mother, though she rarely discussed the issue, quietly believed. She would whisper about it on occasion. Only in extremely private moments. Never at the dinner table, or a neighborhood barbeque, or even with God. Just with me, alone, her hand in mine.

She knew you would come. I’m certain of it. Mom always carried that wariness about her, almost a resignation that horror might emerge at any moment. A passive understanding that this was her fate, her turn to deliver the beast upon the world.  Through me.

How could I have missed it? Was the depression after everyone was gone so all-encompassing that I somehow went blind? And stupid? And forgot everything? When all was upon me, did the terror close my mind to the truth?

My great-aunt Evelyn had spent years researching our heritage, following the stories from Mongolia to Alaska and all through Europe. When I was younger I found her eccentric, an old woman on a first name basis with Earth, who would pull my chin up and bore through me with her eyes. Her bangles skittered back to her elbow as she held my face under the hard light, the slight jingle of the silver bands offering comfort as I stood noiselessly, afraid she would yank out my eyes and gorge on them while my mother stood by and watched.

I listened to their conversations. She had maps and charts and old journals passed down from so many generations that I could barely see the script still on the page. Yet Aunt Evelyn could not only see the ink but translate each from the original language. Her intelligence amazed me. Her words terrified me.

The last time we visited she had spelled it out quite clearly, but none of us heeded her warning. Even after they carried her lifeless body from the room.

“Sixty years have passed since the last sighting,” she reminded my mother as she wrapped her boney hands around a mug of hot tea.

“That’s good, then. The longer the better.” Mom hated these conversations with Evelyn.

“No, it’s not good!” My great-aunt pounded her fist on the table, the silverware jumping upon impact. “One is upon us! I can feel her! I can feel her in this room, clawing to be free!”

Grandma silenced her sister. With one firm hand upon her shoulder, she politely told Evelyn to calm down.

Aunt Evelyn moved her gaze toward me. I clung to my mother. Wrapped my arms around her stomach and held on as tightly as I could.

“She’s in you, child.” Her pointed finger forced me to burrow my face into mother’s side. “She taunts me. I have followed her through time. The wench knows who I am! I can smell her even when she’s not of this earth. I saw her once, in Spain, and who won that time?” Evelyn raised her eyes heavenward, pointing at God. “Who was left standing?”

“That’s enough, Evelyn. Quiet down.” Grandma hovered by her sister’s chair.

When Evelyn shot out of her seat the room took a collective gasp. I felt Mom’s hands wrap around me protectively.