The girls continue to hold their ground in front of Angel.
Angel slowly pushes her sunglasses down her nose so they can see her eye. I know what she’s doing because I’ve done it myself—yanked off my leg for shock value, revealing the blunt, ugly truth to a stranger asking for it. Angel is trying to teach these girls a lesson about tact. And I approve.
Except that’s not it. The girls aren’t bothered. Angel has hung the sunglasses on her knee and is leaning forward, almost as close as Tushar was to her while he painted.
Angel has already figured out what is just now dawning on me. The mother, busy pulling out a selection of twenty-dollar bills, is not the client.
Angel touches the girl’s face, the same spot right under her pretty brown eye. Without moving her lips, Angel is repeating the question back to her.
What terrible happened to you?
“A ping-pong ball,” her twin says, speaking for her sister. “I hit a ping-pong ball.”
Angel is back in Tushar’s chair, head tilted back. More tension radiates from her than the first time, if that’s possible. Tushar is slipping her finished eye in place. I’m saying a prayer to the God who has been spotty about answering me. Give me this. Tushar is chattering, chattering, chattering.
The veins are made from tiny red silk threads and baked into the acrylic.
Turn your whole head when you look at something, and it will trick people into thinking the artificial eye is moving, not stationary.
The eye is in. She’s blinking rapidly. Tushar places a mirror in front of Angel’s face, blocking my view. Her pause seems to hang forever.
When she turns, I’m looking into two identical, deep green pools with flecks of sun—at a face I don’t recognize, not just because there are two eyes, but because this new one is lit with joy. I’m startled to realize what her eyes remind me of—the lake.
“A miracle,” I stutter.
“Not a miracle,” he corrects me. “A beautiful illusion.”
Angel is transfixed by her image in the mirror. We let minutes pass by with nothing but silence.
The crack of a sob. And then she’s out of the chair, throwing her arms around Tushar. Around me. Everyone, wiping away tears. “If this were a movie,” Tushar says, “the director would roll his eyes and cut this scene for being too over the top. But it is over the top. Every single time.”
A half hour of instruction later, Tushar tucks his card in Angel’s hand. “No one is ever going to know unless you tell them. I’m going to guess that whatever prosthesis you wore in the past, that wasn’t the case. But don’t get overconfident. You still always have to remember to compensate for the loss of peripheral vision on your left side. As I’m sure you know, danger is everywhere. A shopping cart that decides to pass, a speeding car out of nowhere, an elbow you don’t see. Watch the shadows. I tell the little kids who sit here, shadows scare most people. But they talk to people like us. The shadows will save your life.”
This man does not know her story, but he knows enough. He understands that Angel’s eye is not just a beautiful illusion. It’s a beautiful disguise. If someone is hunting down a one-eyed girl, she just became a lot harder to find.
16
I was three when I first saw my grandmother wipe red prints from my daddy’s boots off the kitchen floor like it was ketchup, not blood he’d brought back from a crime scene.
Seven when I learned that a man my father helped to put in prison hid a poorly constructed bomb under our porch the day after he got out on parole. Ten when I learned to cock a shotgun. Thirteen when I heard a noise and cocked one, alone in the house, and pointed it at the front door until my daddy walked through it.
I turn off the ignition and roll down the window of the truck. The house sits in the night shadows of a sprawling old oak that my uncle and father climbed as little boys, long before Maggie and me. A single light shines on the Texas flag—a big white star on a red, white, and blue field. Easy to draw, easy to love. That’s what my father always said. The flag has hung off the porch of this house since I was little enough to salute it.
My childhood home is known to everybody as the Blue House, not because it is blue—it is the palest of yellows—but because it has housed four generations of cops. It became mine when Daddy died. I couldn’t stand to sell it even though I had three offers without even putting it on the market.
I begged my husband to uproot his Chicago law practice and start our lives in this house five years ago, and he did. Tonight, I’m trying to dig up the courage to ever go in again. Dad is gone. Finn is gone. Where they laid their plates at the kitchen table, the box with the Santa face is now leering.
If Finn were home, warm light would be spilling out the kitchen window into the side alley. He would have found the contents of the Santa box on the kitchen table and spread them out, reminiscing. He would be sucking down a favorite local brew with a clever name—Sex in a Canoe or Blood and Honey.
He would look up at me and ask Are you finally done? He would want to make love without any metal——not my leg, not the key. He hated that tiny, cold reminder of my father banging against his chest.
Whatever was in that brown baggie from my father’s drawer, Finn would pop it open and we’d try to get high on it. He’d turn up the Black Eyed Peas and tell me to let it all go up in the smoke we blew at the ceiling: Trumanell, Wyatt, Daddy, Angel with one eye, this town that turns girls to mythic stone.
Instead, the house bullies me with its history. Its emptiness. It urges me to finish the job. Discover all its secrets. It says, With Finn gone, you have nothing to lose.
Before my grandfather and father, this town’s first sheriff brought up his five children in these rooms. His picture hangs in the front hall, a grim man who looks like he slept in his uniform. His body is now crumbs in the ground at the Whitethorn Cemetery five miles out of town. So is every other single person who was raised under this roof, except for my uncle and me. I’ve been anointed the last of the Blue House line. My uncle broke his noose when he stepped out its door and became a preacher.
I’m glad I didn’t bring Angel here tonight. It would have been selfish. I left her curled up again on Maggie’s couch, Lola’s arm splayed against her chest. We had toasted her brand-new eye with pizza, fizzy grape juice, and messy cupcakes that Lola had a hand in making.
The scene on the couch had screamed safe. Happy. The Blue House sometimes felt happy. It never felt safe. There were knocks on the door in the dead of night. Daddy met every one of them in his plaid robe and slippers with a gun in his hand.
If he stepped on the porch and the door shut behind him, I knew it wasn’t good.
My phone is flashing, urgent, awake on the seat beside me.
For once, I don’t jump for it. I let the call go. I sink back into the seat, into all that regret, wondering what kind of person I am.
Finn made compromises. He ate his cereal every morning with the gloomy company of The Last Supper on the kitchen wall. He nicked his knuckles every time he used my grandmother’s rusted peeler. He made love in a rickety old bed he hated, very carefully, because it shook the old clouded mirror on the wall.
Wyatt would make that mirror on the bedroom wall quake and fall and shatter instead of trying to keep peace with it. He wouldn’t hold me like glass. He would rock my bones until our secrets fell out, the ones we keep from everyone else and the ones we keep from each other.