A Single Eye (35 page)

He looked down at the tea.

“Could
not
be a mess.”

“Yeah, maybe you could have handled her fears. But you haven't in six years. What makes you think you could now? You know what the Achilles heel of the roshi is, Leo? It's arrogance.”

I'd gone too far. His features barely changed and yet his face was entirely different. He looked as if I'd punctured him. I hadn't meant to hurt him, not to the core like that. I wanted to grab his hands in mine and tell him how sorry I was.

“Close the door on your way out. Leave me the key. Tell Rob he'll have to double as jisha.”

He lowered himself to the bed and turned away.

Oh, right, kill the messenger!
Tuesday I had been excruciatingly careful not to give him the satisfaction of slamming the door. Now I didn't care. I plucked the key from my pocket, tossed it on the dresser, and slammed out.

I turned and walked across the muddy ground away from the cabin. I didn't know what had come over me. I wanted to cry, to kick. Emotions swirled through me with no mooring. I felt like I didn't know who I was anymore.

“Darcy Lott,” I muttered, “stunt double, the woman who overcomes danger.”

Not one who becomes it. I wanted to run, but I couldn't in the mud and in the boots. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't in the middle of sesshin. I couldn't even just keep on walking because the damn trees walled me in. Bile gushed into my throat; up was down, green sky pressing the air from my lungs. I was lost.

Then I did the last thing I would have guessed. I stopped dead, turned around, walked at double-time to the zendo, bowed to my cushion, bowed to the room, and sat zazen. I was still so angry, so shocked, so desolate, so lost there was no way to think about anything, and I just sat, feeling the anger burst into my stomach and then my chest, realizing my teeth were clenched so hard my ears were ringing. Some number of times I was on the verge of leaping off the cushion, furious that I might be giving Leo the satisfaction of doing what he would have told me. There was no way out.

But after a while something changed, the fire of my fury died, and I just sat and listened to the wind on the windows, Amber's little high-pitched wheeze next to me, the sound of my own breath. I realized then that I had stepped through a door, on my own I had trusted my Zen practice. I had, as we chant,
taken refuge in the Buddha
. I wasn't lost; I was right here.

I also knew I needed desperately to find Maureen.

The bell rang. I thought it was to end the lecture period, when Maureen should have been giving her talk, but, in fact, it marked the end of the entire midday sittings. I had sat through the whole thing, including the kinhin walking meditations, and marked none of it in my memory. Now I could hear the servers racing up the porch steps with the lunch pots. My first impulse was to bow, leave, and find Maureen. But in my new clarity I knew that part of the reason I had snapped at Leo before was hunger. I had missed too many meals here. Cold, tired, and hungry were never a felicitous trio. Still, it was torture to know Maureen was out there somewhere, fragile and on the verge of I didn't know what. And Roshi's door was unlocked.

I should have beckoned Rob outside and told him he was now jisha. I . . . couldn't.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-EIGHT

M
aureen's cabin was empty. The office, too. I hurried out, under the overhang and into the shed, and stood looking at the bottles lined up in front of the garden poison. It was cold here and damp. The earth floor sloped under my feet, and the place smelled of mold and chemicals. Even with the door half open the small room was so dark that bottles looked fuzzy and labels were merely colored paper on them. Just yesterday Gabe had startled me here. He had chosen this unlikely spot for a nap. It hadn't struck me then, but now I looked around this unadulterated outbuilding and wondered what made him even imagine he could curl up and sleep in here. It sure wouldn't have been my first choice. But he had been to the monastery before, and this time he made a beeline for this shed. That meant not only was there a big enough space for him somewhere in here, there was a known nook.

If the space was big enough for him, it would be ample for Maureen. I looked around for a flashlight. You'd think, in a place like this . . . You'd be wrong.

“Maureen?” I called softly.

No reply.

“Maureen?”

Nothing.

The wood was piled three logs high in the front and four in the back. I braced a foot, and leapt into the dark. Onto something soft. Forcing my hand down I felt beside me. I was on cloth. A sleeping bag. Ah, the soft thing. I could have laughed. Gabe would have been hiding out in comfort here if he didn't mind spiders and whatever country critters inhabit outbuildings.

My eyes had adjusted but the shadows were still close to black. All I could tell was that my space was very small—high enough to stand up, but not wide enough to lie full out. That, and that I was alone. Then my hand hit something hard and smooth. A flashlight. Automatically I pulled it toward me. It stuck, then, with a snap, gave.

I flicked it on and flashed the light back to the spot where it had hung. A good-sized nail protruded from the wall, and when I looked closely at it I could see the clean line the metal loop of the flashlight had made on the nail. The flashlight had been there a while. Perhaps this was its permanent home.

I shone the light around the back portion of the shed. The space was akin to a monk's cave, in size and accoutrements. Besides the sleeping bag I was on, there was a small trunk. It creaked like a horror-movie sound effect as I opened it. Inside was a floor pillow covered in tan print cotton, and a wool blanket; nothing else. I shone the light over the walls. In front of me the logs created a room divider of sorts. On either side were bare studs, and the back slanted out and down.

This part of the shed was a hideaway where Leo or Maureen or Barry or even Rob could come when he had to get clear of the rest of them in those long months when they were alone here; that's why the flashlight was not in the front part with the cans and bottles, but back here to accommodate the user.

This last-ditch hideout, but Maureen wasn't here!

I could so easily picture her standing here just as I was.

I understood how central Maureen was to everything here. She had come here as Barry's girlfriend. She'd seen him through the Big Buddha Bakery affair. She was the one they all loved in one way or another. She knew about Rob's ambition. She was closest to Roshi. When we outlanders arrived for sesshin it was Maureen who was in the kitchen weaving people into the preparations. She was the one who had made sure I knew how to find my cabin.

But her centrality was more than the result of being the only woman on the permanent staff. The key was not her position, but herself. What I had seen as a sort of sprightliness and Rob viewed as ditzyness, was more basic than either. There was a porous quality to Maureen, like the lightest of sponge cakes that a cook yearns to ice or to fill on the way to making it his signature confection. She was a helium balloon waiting to be tethered, with a quality that led everyone to think they were the proper tethering post. Her porousness, her lack of protective skin, made her alert to the danger in the air here.

Oh, what I would have given to change my decision in the bathhouse this morning. Instead of telling her no, if I had only taken her to Roshi. I wouldn't have left her alone there, of course. But Roshi was right. He had needed to see her, to keep her from cutting her tether altogether. Again I thought of Aeneas in the only convenient, camouflaged burial place, and wondered if Maureen was close to joining him.

A cold finger of wind traced the side of my neck. Pales stripes of light shown between the boards, but rather than light the shed they made the dark darker. I had never been in a ramshackle shed like this. We don't have outbuildings in Manhattan, nor did we when I was growing up in San Francisco. Locations where old dirt-floored sheds were common were spots I had avoided. And yet something felt familiar.

It wasn't the shed, I realized, but Maureen. Maureen was like my second sister, Janice. Not in appearance. Janice had coal-black hair like most of the family. Like Maureen, Janice was the one the others confided in. “The nice one,” aunts called her. She was the second girl, the fourth child, and, more importantly, the central one of the three middle children, there to hear year-older Gary's exploits, there to comfort, protect, and often have to find excuses for year-younger Grace. Because they were all so much older than I, I probably wouldn't have made the connection had I not stumbled in on Janice, scrunched in the back of the closet behind the stairs. I was five, so she'd have been fifteen. She'd put her finger to her lips, made me promise not to tell, and proclaimed our secret a sacred bond. It was the importance of sharing that secret that etched her words in my memory. She had said, “Sometimes I can't take it any more. Nice people pay a price. Other people would be hurt to know how big that price is. So you can't ever tell.”

What Janice didn't say, and I learned only much later, was one time when Gary and Grace got to be too much and Janice couldn't hide out she had attacked them with a shovel.

I had to find Maureen before . . . before?

She hadn't taken the truck. Was that a good sign, or a terrible one? She'd still be somewhere around here. Barry was already worried. He'd know where she'd be.

I ran along the paths, skirting the trio of women friends walking slowly, silently savoring their after lunch break. At the chocolate kitchen I flung open the door, and nearly fell over the packed boxes.

“Barry!” I panted.

“Wish me luck,” he said lifting another large, insulated box onto the counter.

He looked so different it stunned me. He looked like he'd stepped from the Redwood Canyon Monastery to the L.L. Bean catalog. Gone were his plain black monk's robes. Now he sported loose wide-wale tan corduroy slacks, light-blue work shirt, and navy V-neck sweater. All he needed was a pair of tassel loafers.

“You're leaving now?” I said, horrified. I'd forgotten all about his chocolate contest.

“I know, I should have been on the road an hour ago. I had to spend an hour making sure the truck wouldn't conk out again. Now it's going to be dark before I get as far as Santa Rosa. I've got the chocolate in cooler boxes; it
should
be all right. But I'm skirting the edge. I should be transporting it in a temperature-controlled truck and—”

“Barry, Maureen's gone!”

“Maureen?” he said blankly.
He'd
already forgotten about the monastery here. It was a moment before he pulled his attention back from his packed chocolate and road worries and demanded, “Where's she gone?”

I shook my head. “Don't know. Just gone. I checked everywhere here.”

As cook, of course, he wouldn't have been expected to be in the zendo in the mornings. He was too busy to be at lecture so he wouldn't have noticed Maureen's absence. And nobody would have thought to tell him.

“She was pretty unhinged this morning. She wanted to see Roshi and I said no.”

“Good decision. That's why you're the jisha.”

“
Was
the jisha. He fired me.”

The words came out squeaky. I realized I was shaking.

He put down the box, walked, over and put his arm around my shoulder. “Don't let all this get to you. This is sesshin. Everything is magnified.”

“But Maureen! I can't just leave her wandering.”

“She does that, goes off. She's lived here six years; she knows her way around.”

“Where would she go? She's not in the shed.”

“You know about the shed?” His arm stiffened on my shoulder.

“What about the fire tower?”

Suddenly, Amber was standing across from us. I hadn't heard her steps or seen her moving into view. For the first time I glanced down at the lower kitchen and noted Justin and two women drinking coffee.

“Break must be just about over, if all of you are up and drinking coffee. It can't be long till zazen begins?” I asked, to sort things out in my mind.

Amber seemed to be the only one of the three of us fully here. “Maureen could be in the fire tower, right, Barry? You said she'd go there to get off by herself, right?”