Eden's Eyes by Sean Costello Read Free Book Online Page B

the ignition. Just this once I will not give in.
    They made the five-minute drive in silence.
    "Are you coming up to bed?" Bert asked once they were home. "I think you should rest."
    Eve ignored him. With exaggerated effort she rolled herself past him, the grim set of her mouth, the cold look in her eyes, even the squeak of her wheels on the kitchen linoleum accusatory. She vanished into the den. Bert went after her, hoping to console her. . . but the den door swung shut in his face so violently, the molding splintered in the jamb.
    Thinking that maybe he should have taken her to the psychiatric hospital—and loathing himself for thinking it—Bert trudged wearily up to his room. He was not expected at work the rest of that week, but he would be there just the same.
    The only decent picture Eve had of her son as an adult was a family portrait he had reluctantly posed for on the occasion of his twenty-fifth birthday. By then his hatred for his father had been total, and he had balked at the prospect of standing next to him, even for the space of a shutter click.
    Now that picture—minus Bert's gloating face, which Eve had neatly snipped out and then chewed to a pulp—was the focal point of a crude shrine. She had spent half the night constructing it, and now she examined it, with a mixture of pride and smoldering rage. Rusting carnations, pirated from a garish bouquet Bert had brought back from the funeral home, rimmed the gold-painted frame. Blessed candles, scores of which Eve kept in a secret drawer in the den, formed a bright, encircling hoop. Carefully chosen prayers and psalms, cut from the mounds of tracts Eve hoarded like a pack rat, lay among the candles in meticulous geometric array. The shrine itself adorned the top of a low, antique leaf-table, which had belonged to Eve's mother.
    Flipping open her Bible, Eve started to pray. With one bent finger she cruised the onionskin pages of the Book of Revelation, barely glancing at quotes she had years ago altered to suit her, then fervently committed to memory. Her voice was a constant murmur, dropping at times to sibilant whispers, soaring at others to exultant highs.
    "I am he that liveth and was dead. . ." Glancing at her son's framed, unsmiling face, Eve pressed a loving finger to the glass. "And behold, I am alive forevermore. . . and have the keys of hell and death; I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.
    "And behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him. And the sun became black as sackcloth, and the moon became as blood, and the stars of heaven fell unto earth."
    Eve smiled.
    "For the great day of his wrath is come. . .
    "And who shall be able to stand?"

Chapter 6

    April 26

    Three weeks.
    Three snailing weeks of struggling to pass the time, of trying to still the insistent dark voice of he heart: It isn't going to work, kiddo. Steel yourself for that. They'll remove the dressings and you'll still be blind.
    But another part of her, her very soul she sometimes felt, banished all negative thought before a flood tide of hope. And of course there was the evidence—it no longer seemed quite so dark behind the bandages. Black had thinned to gray.
    Well, whatever the outcome, today was the day. At eight this morning Burkowitz would be coming in to remove the bandages.
    Karen flipped open the crystal face of her braille wristwatch and fingered it deftly—six-thirty—then snapped it closed again.
    She waited impatiently, her thoughts shifting back uneasily over her seemingly endless hospital stay.
    The first postoperative week had been the worst. Despite the regular Demerol injections (which Karen ended up begging them to increase), by the start of the third day the pain had become excruciating. It came in sudden sizzling torrents, the worst of it usually at night, when Karen would awaken screaming and thrashing and gouging at the bandages, certain in her delirium that rusty