Eden's Eyes

1

April 4

When the telephone woke her, Karen was dreaming . . . the soothing balm of her mother's voice, the fresh-scrubbed scent of her skin, the safe, enfolding warmth of her hand around Karen's. Though startled, she let go of the dream begrudgingly, preferring the death-cheating feel of her mom, who'd passed away sixteen years prior, to the cumbersome dark of her bedroom, just a thought's breadth away.

The phone rang again.

And Karen sat up in darkness, aware of the dream taking a small, almost physical part of herself away with it—there was a palpable tug in her chest. But the tug became a tightness as she realized the hour. A ringing phone at three A.M. usually meant one of three things: a wrong number, a prank . . . or bad news.

She waited for it to ring again—and during that interminable pause, the worst catastrophes imaginable marched through her mind. Was it her father? A wreck in that godforsaken pickup truck of his? But no. What would he be doing out at this hour? Besides, she'd said goodnight to him over the phone not five hours ago. Maybe Uncle Ike had finally died, his heart⁠—

Another ring, the intrusion somehow more insistent this time. Her hand fluttered out to answer it . . . then she thought of Cass, her best friend, who'd moved to Alberta a year ago. Was it Cass? The way she rodded around in that Camaro of hers . . .

Karen lifted the receiver in the middle of the fourth ring.

Hello?

A crisp male voice said: Is this Karen Lockhart?

Yes. She had no idea who it was.

This is Doctor Burkowitz calling, from the Civic Hospital in Ottawa.

She took a deep breath and held it.

We've got a donor for you, Karen. They're working on him now, up north in Sudbury. We expect to be ready at this end by about five o'clock. That's just over two hours from now. Can you make it?

Of course, Karen said, a dozen conflicting emotions snapping at her heart. I'll have my father drive me down. She swallowed dryly. Where do I go once I get there?

Go through admitting. Someone will meet you there.

Do I need to bring anything?

Just your hope, the voice said.

Who is it? Karen said, blurting the words. The donor. I'd like to know who it is. How they . . . What was the word for the state the donor was in right now? How they died.

We'll tell you all we can when you get here.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Goodbye, Karen, the voice said.

Then there was only the dial tone.

She tried to find that hope as she dialed her father's number. For years she'd dreamed of this moment, this incredible chance. But when at last he came on the line and she explained what had happened, the only feeling she could clearly define was fear.

She packed in a reckless frenzy, moving from closet to bureau and back again, grabbing things she'd never need. She knocked over the vanity stool with her knee, and when she hurried into her office to retrieve the manuscript she'd been working on, she elbowed a plant and knocked it to the floor.

By the time she reached the front door, her heart was a creature of fury, battering the cage of her chest. She waited there for the sound of her father's truck.

A quarter mile away, while Karen spoke with the doctor over the phone, Danny Dolan crept down the stairs of his mother's farmhouse. The pattern of two long rings had awakened him, and now he lifted the receiver—carefully, so as not to be overheard by the speakers. He was good at that; years of listening in on Karen's calls on the party line had made him good.

When he heard a man's voice, a coil of jealous rage tightened in his chest. But now the guy identified himself as a doctor and gave his news, and Danny's rage withered into something dark and unmanning. Lightheaded, he stood hunched in the shadows at the base of the staircase and waited. When the line went dead, he hung up and felt his way to the front vestibule, where a pair of patched coveralls hung from a hook behind the door. He took them down, pulled them on and thumped out barefoot onto the porch, letting the screen door clap in the frame behind him. He peered owl-eyed through the night toward Karen's wood-frame, a quarter mile west, but saw only dark against dark.

In the house the phone rang again, another familiar pattern, and a start slammed into Danny like a hammer blow.

She was calling her father.

And that meant it was true. He hadn't dreamed it.

Several times the pattern of three short rings repeated, and for a crazy moment Danny prayed Albert Lockhart wouldn't hear it—he'd always been deaf as a post—and Karen would miss her chance.

But now the lights were on at Albert's farmhouse, a half-mile beyond Karen's, and the phone had stopped ringing.

Danny leaped off the porch and ran down the lane, cutting into the field at the gate. His stride through the stubby spring grass was long and he reached Karen's place in under a minute. From the willow at the edge of her property he had a clear, moon-sketched view of the house, which itself remained steeped in darkness.

He waited, his mind a whirlwind of dread.

Then the old farmer's pickup rattled into the yard and Karen appeared in the doorway, suitcase in hand. She started down shakily, stumbled on the bottom step—then her father was there to help her.

They got into the truck and the truck sped away, high beams knifing the night. Danny watched until the taillights faded to pinpricks, brightened briefly, and died. Then he turned and ran away.

The night swallowed him.

2

Dr. Skead saw the donor for the first time in the ICU at the University Hospital in Sudbury. Skead was the anesthesiologist on call. He'd had only four hours sleep in the past thirty-six and now he was cranky, feeling unfairly put-upon having to drag his ass in at two A.M. to anesthetize a dead man.

He waited until the big, hunched-over man at the bedside—the father, he assumed—had left, then he grabbed the chart and got to work.

Skead didn't bother with the donor's name. That was unimportant. What was important was his general state of health. That would determine how well he'd tolerate the retrieval procedure. Once that was done, it wouldn't matter anymore.

Standing at the foot of the bed, Skead scanned the medical history: white male; twenty-seven; unemployed; boozer; smoker; involved in a brawl behind the Prospect Hotel; acute subdural; admitted comatose, April 1st, three days ago; hematoma drained with no improvement.

Sighing with fatigue, Skead glanced at the body on the bed.

Another loser.

Greasy black hair; blood-caked nose packed with gauze; lips raddled; intubated, each breath fed in by a mechanical ventilator; bile-filled nasogastric tube; Foley catheter leaking bloody urine.

Not a pretty sight.

Skead noticed a tattoo on the man's forearm, a cobra coiled around a dagger, and leaned in closer to read the inscription.

Live fast. Party hard. Die young.

Credo turned prophecy, Skead thought.

Shall we get on with the nasty business at hand, Ed?

Starting a little, Skead turned to face Ken Tucker, the surgeon who'd be removing the kidneys. Hey, Kenny, no time like the present. He waved a nurse over to help transport the donor to the OR. Who's coming up for the heart?

The Ottawa team, Ken said, opening the chart. And there's a real major-leaguer coming in for the eyes. Ken glanced at his watch. Should be here any time now.

Ed regarded him curiously.

"German by the name of Hanussen. You might've read about him in Time magazine. Ed shrugged. He's done all the pioneer work in the field of whole-eye transplantation. Apparently he's had a string of successes in Europe, decades ahead of anything we've got here. This'll be the first time the procedure's tried in North America. And I understand they've come up with a near-perfect tissue match. A twenty-eight-year-old woman, a writer."

A blind writer, Ed thought, bemused.

Ken returned his attention to the chart, leafing to the certificate of death, checking it for completeness. Thumbing next to the consent, he noted that it had been duly signed by the donor's father. Ken was a cautious man. In a case like this, there was no room for error.

Satisfied, he started away. See you in the OR, Ed.

Yeah, Ken. Room five. Give me about ten minutes.

Bert Crowell had seen his son for the last time—lying whole and at least organically alive in his bed in ICU—and had felt nothing. That was the part which tortured him most: the not caring. He'd stood by the deathbed of his only child, searching his heart for even the faintest spasm of pain, but had found only relief. There was no sense trying to dress it up. His son had been a mean, self-thinking bastard whose life had come to a justly violent end. From the very outset the boy had lived at odds with everything his father held sacred and dear. Even in birth he'd shown his true colors, punishing his already frail mother through ten hours of labor only to suddenly pop out, minutes shy of the knife, robust and wailing. The boy's battle with the world had begun then, in the womb of a doting mother.

And it ended three nights ago, in a senseless, drunken brawl.

Sighing wearily, Bert Crowell climbed into his car. He drove out of the hospital parking lot and headed for home.

Dr. Tucker had called him earlier that evening to explain that technically his son had died—his brain was dead. He warned that as long as the life-support systems functioned, his son's body would have the appearances of life, but that without it he wouldn't survive more than a few minutes. After offering his condolences, he told Bert the hospital hoped to obtain consent for organ retrieval—the deceased hadn't filled out the release form on the back of his driver's license, so they needed a family member to sign.

When his wife Eve asked his who it was on the phone, Bert had lied. A problem at the smelter, he told her. He'd have to go out.

They'd been forewarned of the gravity of their son's condition, that it was only a matter of time. But Eve had brushed it off, convinced her boy was only sleeping. The Lord's sleep, she'd told him. And soon he will be re'wakened, cleansed and at peace in his soul.

Bert sighed again, shoulders heaving under the weight of his anguish. He'd reached the traffic lights at Highway 69 South—the road out of town—and for a moment the urge to flee into the starless middle-night was almost overpowering. Then the light changed and he thought of Eve the way he'd known her, years ago, and the memory drew him homeward.

Donating the boy's organs was a chance, he'd decided, to salvage something good from the wreckage. The doctors had told him to take his time, consider it carefully, go back home and discuss it with his wife. His son's body, they told him, could be kept viable almost indefinitely.

But Bert had signed the consent on the spot, without hesitation, excluding his wife from an important family decision for the first time in almost thirty-five years of marriage. His reason, though tragic, was simple enough. Eve had changed over the course of their lives together—changed for the worse. Her once moderate religious beliefs had taken on the sulfury flavor of fanaticism, and she'd drifted away from him, become someone he no longer knew or wholly understood. And Bert had known that, given her say, Eve would not have allowed the surgery. She'd have come up with some cryptic Biblical quote, paraphrased it in her own zealous, self-serving way, and damned the whole thing.

So he'd gone over her head . . . and now he had to tell her.

He swung into the driveway and paused, heavy behind the wheel of the aging Chrysler, remembering dreams that had turned to regrets. Then he went inside.

Eve was there, stiffly erect in her wheelchair, the bandaged domes of her arthritic knees pressed firmly together, her worn, leather-bound Bible laid open in her lap.

You weren't at the smelter, she said. I called.

Bert looked at his feet. I was at the hospital.

Is he all right? Eve said, her sea-blue eyes suddenly bright with dread. Is my baby all right?

She was parked in the entrance to the living room, her grim face only half-lit in the darkened hallway. The light, yellow and flickering, came from the dozens of blessed candles she'd kept burning since the boy was injured. Behind her, Jimmy Swaggart crooned a muted hymn on the stereo. It was almost four in the morning.

Bert paused in the vestibule, the urge to turn and walk away more compelling than ever before. He'd thought of it often, how easy it would be to just cut and run, abandon his wife to her quotes and her tracts and her TV evangelists. But whenever he got close to actually doing it, the guilt would set in. He'd look at Eve and remember her as she had been—the wide, easy smile, that cute little notch in her turned-up nose, the round, inquisitive eyes cut from a clear summer sky—and he'd be powerless to do it. Something inside him kept hoping she'd go back to her old self, and someday soon they'd retire together, buy that mobile home, see a bit of the world before time finally planted them.

But in the haggard face that glowered at him now, Bert could see not the faintest trace of the girl he'd once known.

Is he all right? she said again, Bert's silence catching at her mouth and twisting it.

He drifted toward her now along the shadowy hallway, shoes whispering over the worn runner. No, he said before the light found his eyes. He's not all right. He's gone.

No.

Yes, Eve, he said firmly. He's gone.

Eve's face wilted. She clutched the Bible to her chest and her mouth began working around meaningless syllables; Bert got an absurd image of his wife speaking in tongues. Sick with pity, he knelt before her and took her hand.

I have to see him, Bertrand, she sobbed. "He isn't dead, he can't be. She drew his face to her breast and Bert felt a warm surge of love for her. The Bible, smelling of dark leather, felt cool against his cheek. He's my baby and I have to see him. I have to see him now."

This was the moment. You can't see him now.

Eve took Bert by the ears like a recalcitrant child. "What do you mean I can't see him now? He's my boy and I have to see him. He's not dead, Bertrand. It's not possible."

Now, Bert thought. Tell her now.

But a part of him felt traitorous and ashamed, and the words lodged like gravel in his throat. In the ensuing silence, the grandfather clock at the end of the hallway bonged out the hour.

The doctors asked me to sign some forms— Bert began.

But before he could finish, the clock struck four A.M. and Eve recoiled in her wheelchair, clutching her breast as if shot. Her head angled back and her face went gray, the cords in her neck bulging grotesquely. Bert, stunned by this display, was certain she was having a coronary.

Evie?

Oh, my God, she cried. I can feel . . . Her body jerked⁠—

Then her eyes bore down on Bert like rifle barrels.

What did you do? she hissed. "What-did-you-do?"

They told me there were people who needed his organs, so I⁠—

In a lightning-quick thrust, Eve's hands curled into his hair, grabbing thick handfuls and twisting fiercely. So you what? she shrieked like something prehistoric.

And with strength Bert had never imagined her possessing, she wrenched his head back until their eyes met. He tried to pull free but couldn't, his balance in that moment pitched precariously backward. His eyes watered as he gazed in fear and awe at his raving wife.

"What did you do? she shrieked, those ice-blue eyes screwed down to baleful slits. What did you DO?!"

Eve—

With predatory swiftness, she dragged a claw across his face, opening furrows that reddened and wept. Bert half rose, stumbled, then toppled back against the doorjamb, giving his skull a dizzying crack. In the swimming extremity of his gaze, the big mantelpiece portrait of Jesus eyed him with quiet benevolence—all-seeing eyes of celestial blue, heart naked and aflame in a bracelet of thorns.

Murderer, Eve raged. She jerked the wheelchair forward, digging a footplate into Bert's ribs, lashing out again. This time he deflected the blow with an upraised arm.

"You've got to stop them. Stop them now."

He shook his head, tears still blearing his eyes. It's too late.

"It is not too late."

Forsaking him, Eve wheeled briskly away, down the hall to the kitchen. Uttering prayers laced with bitter condemnation, she picked up the phone and dialed in the flickering light of the range lamp.

Oh God I beg You damn this killing heathen hasten him on his hellbound path wield your Holy armor deflect the fiery darts of the fallen angel save my boy Your servant blessed issue⁠—

Then her whole demeanor changed. In a cadenced, controlled voice she said into the phone: Give me the ICU please.

Bert got to his feet, his face a stinging agony where she'd clawed him. He moved to stop her, meaning to cut the connection; then he thought better of it. Let them tell her. Perhaps the shock would settle her once and for all. He didn't regret what he'd done. The boy had been his, too. It was a good thing. Good from bad. Couldn't she see that?

He started into the stairwell, blocking out his wife's voice as she made her demands into the phone. At the top landing he paused and glanced into his son's bedroom, lit eerily now by the grinning Daffy Duck night-light Bert had bought for him twenty-five years ago.

It was a child's room still—stuffed toys with black-button eyes, stacks of dog-eared comic books, water-marked rocking-horse wallpaper, a football dimpled from lack of air.

Bert pulled the door shut, nauseated by the room's musty breath. He slouched down the hall to the far end, to his own room—Eve had shut him out of the master bedroom years ago—and lay down in the dark.

Far away, Eve's voice railed on.

After a while, he got up and locked the door from the inside. For the first time in their long lives together, Bert Crowell was afraid of his wife.

Once the guy was on the ventilator again, and receiving enough anesthetic to relax his muscles and dampen any reflexes that might otherwise occur, there was little for Ed Skead to do. He'd been in practice for nine years now, and during that time he'd been involved in procedures like this on perhaps a dozen occasions. But as he watched Dr. Hanussen preparing to remove the donor's eyes, he decided that even a hundred such cases would fail in making the process any more pleasant to witness.

In the fashion of all accomplished surgeons, Hanussen had arrived with an entourage, each member of which would later assist him in the laborious process of grafting the eyes into the recipient in Ottawa. Terse without being impolite, he'd swept quietly into the room, nodded greetings without inviting conversation, and set about his business.

The first thing Ed noticed was the color of the donor's eyes, a most striking shade of blue. Like Paul Newman, he thought. So clear and blue they were almost silver.

He watched with sickened fascination as the surgeon began the first extraction, slender gloved fingers moving with deftness and speed.

The lids of the left eye were propped open using a tiny metal retractor. Then the conjunctiva, the membrane encapsulating the globe, was split and stripped away, making Ed think of peeled grapes. Next, the tiny strap muscles responsible for the movement of the eye were transected and folded back. Finally, the major vessels and the trunk-like optic nerve were severed.

The left eye, freed of its mortal tethers, was plopped into a fluid filled jar. The jar was tightly capped and lowered into a bowl-shaped thermos. The pirated socket, welling blood, was packed with cotton batting.

The cardiac monitor registered a jump in the donor's heart rate, from ninety to a hundred and twenty-three. Noting this, Ed adjusted the anesthetic up a notch.

On the opposite side of the surgical drape, a nurse prepped the donor's abdomen with a brownish iodine solution. At the sinks outside the door, Ken Tucker and his assistant scrubbed their hands.

Without ceremony, Hanussen started in on the opposite side, glancing up only once to note the time. With similar ease, he dissected and freed the right eye. He said something in German and a second jar was opened. The eye went in with a soft plip.

Ed felt his stomach do a deliberate rollover.

Now Ken Tucker strode into the operating room, soapy water dripping from his elbows. A nurse helped him gown and glove. He nodded to Hanussen as the man skinned off his gloves and left the OR.

Just like that, Ed thought. Just like that.

He looked at the donor's unknowing face. A scarlet streamer of blood issued from the corner of the left eye-socket. Cotton batting protruded from the wet slits.

Ed looked away.

Live fast.

How's he doing? Ken said, accepting a scalpel from the scrub nurse.

Ed thought: Is he trying to be funny? But there was no trace of jest in the surgeon's eyes. He glanced at the monitors. The heart rate had settled back to eighty-eight.

Stable, Ed said.

Party hard.

Ed caught the scrub nurse averting her gaze as Ken's knife traced with brutal precision a line from breastbone to pubis. White at first, the line quickly flashed red. The incision was deepened using surgical cautery, a concentrated arc of electrical fire that spewed sterile white smoke smelling of cooked fat and incinerated muscle.

Die young.

Ken extended the incision laterally, creating the illusion a giant letter I had been painted in red along the man's belly. Using metal clips, he turned back and anchored a full-thickness flap at each corner, causing the abdomen to gape like a hideous, viscera-filled mouth.

Again the nurse looked away.

Disturbed himself, Ed glanced uneasily around the OR, his gaze pausing on the clock over the doorway.

Twenty to four. Jesus.

The room was too quiet, Ed realized as he settled into a chair and began his flow sheet. There was none of the typical late-hour banter, none of the tasteless jokes or endless gossip habitually exchanged in an effort to buoy morale in the face of chronic exhaustion. It was this damned case, he knew. This obscene, mutilating case. It was creepy, plain and simple, even for those inured to death, as health professionals inevitably became. All of his carefully cultivated instincts were meaningless in this situation, because the patient was not intended to survive the intervention. It was for a worthy cause, true—but he disliked it just the same.

Against his will, Ed's gaze drifted back to the donor's face. The guy was sweating now, beads of the stuff blooming on his brow, cheeks, under his nose. Ed's hand itched to crank up the anesthetic—in a normal situation, sweating indicated a too-light level of anesthesia—but he reminded himself that it didn't matter and the itch went away.

The cotton batting in the eye sockets. That part bothered him⁠—

Slowly, deliberately, the donor's head rolled ten degrees to the right.

Jesus, Ed said, springing to his feet, spilling the chart to the floor. "Jesus Christ." Hackles bristled on his neck.

What is it? Tucker said, peering over the drapes.

His head just moved.

The circulating nurse appeared at Ed's side, eyes fixed expectantly on the donor's head.

You mean like this? Ken said, dark mirth narrowing his jade-green eyes.

The donor's head moved again, and this time Ed saw Ken's fingers through the drapes, nudging the man's chin.

Sick bastard, Ed said over Ken's paroxysm of laughter. You sick son of a bitch.

Ken's assistant, a taciturn G.P. by the