Now he is leaning in, two inches from her face, staring into the smoky green depths of her good eye. His gaze, uncomfortably intense. Her body, rigid, pressed as far back in the chair as she can go.
At his side, a brilliant palette of paints. In one hand, a tiny brush, in the other, the object he has told Angel will transform her—an acrylic shell that he cast to perfectly resemble her other eye. It will slip in like a giant, unseeing contact lens once it is painted and baked.
Whatever happened to Angel’s eye, it wasn’t recent. The remaining muscle and tissue had been repaired by a decent surgeon. Someone cared for her once. There was no infection. She had worn a prosthesis before or the muscle around her eye would not be in such good shape.
But right now, her back tight against the chair and cheeks flushed, she shows no sign that this process is familiar. It certainly isn’t to me.
I thought her new eye would be round like a marble. I thought there would be a 3-D printer and a high-tech computer with color matching—not a man with a tiny brush who told us to call him Tushar, not Doctor, because he isn’t one.
He rolls his chair back and sets down his brush.
“Angel, you need to breathe. Let’s take a break for a few seconds.” He’s at the sink, washing his hands, every move deliberate. Drying his hands on a paper towel. Balling it up for the trash.
Angel’s shoulders visibly melt. He walks over and places a hand on her arm.
Tushar’s eyes, surrounded by fine lines, are perfectly matched gray-blue jewels, a striking contrast with his caramel skin and flat cap of gray hair. A map of random red veins thread through each one. As we shook hands the first time, it was disconcerting that a man who designs fake eyes should have such beautiful real ones.
His hand reaches up to his face. One of his eyes is now drooping, like Angel’s. In his hand, a blue shell. He lets us stare for a second. Slips it back in. Blinks.
“A hunting accident when I was seventeen. My friend’s gun misfired. I was set to go in the military. West Point. My dream, deferred. I’d say it was providential because I ended up helping people live happier lives instead of plotting ways to end them.” He smiles. “Can you trust me, Angel? Ready for me to go back to work?”
A nod from Angel. This time, she doesn’t shrink away as he bends close enough to feel her breath on his cheek. He paints, holds up the acrylic shell to her eye, and paints again. He dips into the gold, the blue, the brown. “Green is more than green,” he mutters. “Blue is more than blue. Everything on earth, more complex than it appears.”
He has done only the most gentle probing of her story, with no success. So he chatters about clients who tell no one about their missing eyes—a top college basketball player who doesn’t want his opponents to use the knowledge to guard him on his blind side, a famous actress with a face he says we’d know, a Texas beauty queen, a Middle Eastern princess whose husband would have considered her damaged and never married her if he knew she was born half-blind. She travels to Texas every several years on a shopping trip, leaving with a lot of jewelry that includes a beautiful new topaz eye. After four trips and twenty-two years together, her husband still doesn’t know.
“Tell me this, Angel,” Tushar says, “do you think I can shoot a target as well as when I was a shoo-in for West Point?”
Another nod from Angel. Yes.
“You’d be wrong. I’m a far better shot now.” He leans back. “Almost done. You have a right to keep your secret, Angel. You and I, we get to decide. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.”
He’d made me a believer. And now? What a recklessly counterproductive piece of advice. Tushar and I had talked earlier in private—he has to know I need Angel to open up, not retreat. How can he responsibly advise a teenager to lock in her shame—to keep such a seminal secret?
That’s what the cop in me says. But I’m also the girl in that chair. If you had been offered a leg that felt and looked exactly like real flesh and muscle, wouldn’t you have chosen to lie? Wouldn’t you be happier if the thing that defined you to the world was not what you were missing?
Tushar slides his chair back. “Finished. Go to lunch. I’ll have your new eye when you get back.” He smiles at Angel. “Oh, one more thing. Sometimes I paint something personal on the inside corner of the eye, in miniature. A little secret. No one will be able to see it but you, and that’s only when you take it out. A letter of the alphabet, a word, an animal, whatever you want. Would you like me to do that? A signature of sorts?”
I’ve told him that Angel won’t speak.
I’m certain she will think this idea is childish.
“Dandelion,” she says.
15
A single, soft word.
Dandelion, with a velvet drawl on the lyin’.
I keep my face like a mask. I let the full strangeness of it wash over me.
The dead stems in the field where Angel was found, sacrificed for wishes. The undetermined brown debris in the bag I pulled from my father’s drawer. The yellow flowers and fluffy seeds slaughtered every spring and summer by Wyatt like a fierce religion. Does any one of these things have something to do with the others?
Angel snatches the sunglasses from my hand as soon as the office door shuts behind us. Her silence in the elevator, on the sidewalk, inside the truck, is a clear message that she has reverted to silence.
At least I know one thing from that word. She’s not from New Jersey.
She nods, relieved when, instead of pressing her, I suggest we swing by the Whataburger drive-through and eat in the truck. Until I know exactly what she’s afraid of, the less out in the open we are, the better I feel.
Angel smacks down every bite. Maggie said Angel threw up her breakfast because she was so nervous about this appointment. I touch my finger to my lips so she knows there is a drip of mustard left on hers, and she swipes it away with the back of her hand.
I lean over, hesitant, and dab a bit more mustard off her cheek with a napkin. She lets me.
I want to take her by the shoulders. Ask a hundred questions. Beg.
Instead, I’m going to call this progress.
Just a single second to panic.
Angel is sprawled on the floor, gripping a hand over her missing eye. The sunglasses, one lens cracked, under a chair out of reach. The culprits: identical little girls with blond pixie cuts, chasing each other, cutting off her blind side as she entered the waiting room.
I quickly retrieve the sunglasses and hand them to her. She jams them back on.
A thirtyish woman, her eyes concealed behind her own pair of Ray-Bans, throws down a magazine and hops up from her seat, apologetic. “Lisa! Renee! I told you to cut it out. Girls. Say you’re sorry. And then sit down.” She is reaching for her purse. “I will pay for the sunglasses.”
“That’s OK,” I say. “It was an accident.”
Angel has dropped into a chair in the farthest corner, trying to gather herself. The twins have arranged themselves in front of her, holding hands.
“We’re sorry,” one of the little girls says. She places a tiny finger under one of her eyes and asks, “What terrible happened to you?”
“Renee!” The mother is still hiding behind dark lenses. “What have we said about giving people space?”