A Single Eye (49 page)

“But you
saw
me walking toward the monastery!”

“Gabe, please! You could have trotted a hundred yards up the road, turned around, and walked back!”

He was still checking terrain, planning his move. I couldn't risk a look. It was a moment before he said, “Coulda! Assistant, anyone coulda!”

“Anyone” wouldn't have a rental car with a rental agreement signed a day earlier than he'd told me it was. But that clincher I wasn't about to tell him, not here. The smoke was getting thicker. Even close as we were, it veiled his face so I couldn't see his eyes flicker before he made a move.

“Besides,” he said, widening his stance, bending his knees, “why would I poison Leo?”

I blinked against the soot. Leo and Gabe were above us, where the smoke was thicker, the flames—“Leo knows you, Gabe. He knows you crashed sesshin; he didn't accept you. He knows Yamana didn't vouch for you, probably never heard of you. You just made use of Yamana-roshi's name after you asked me who my teacher was at home.”

His hand inched to the right. Was he reaching for a stick, a loose branch? I didn't dare move my gaze from his face.

“Mostly, Gabe, because you need Leo sick, but not dead, so Rob could get a clear shot at being his successor!”

“Rob! The asshole! Why would I do anything to help him!”

“Because Rob will keep the monastery as is. He will keep the road as is. He won't pave it. He won't widen it. And most important, he won't dig up the red maple, won't find Aeneas's body, and he won't find your manila envelope buried with him.” I saw his flinch. “That document was the key to your future. You wouldn't chance it getting wet, would you? You'd seal it in heavy-duty plastic in the envelope. How many years does plastic survive in the ground? How long will it tie you to the murder?”

Something rustled behind him. Barry? Down here, safe? Carrying Leo? Not safe at all, not if Gabe spotted them.

“Oh, Gabe, you are the original hard luck guy. They're right, at home, calling you the paste diamond schlimazel. You couldn't get lucky if luck was for sale.”

His knees bent more, like he was ready to pounce.

“First you get screwed for another writer's mistake, then Aeneas steals the documentation that would have saved your story, made your career. You chase him onto the bridge, you grab for the envelope, and he falls—”

“Okay, okay, Assistant. You're right. He fell! I didn't push him, I just grabbed. He just fell. I didn't kill him. He goddamn fell.”

“He fell, the envelope went with him. He struck his head. And you, Gabe, did you help him, drag him out of the water, give him mouth to mouth? You didn't, did you? Because your envelope was gone. Gone downstream, you thought. Under the bridge, back toward the zendo. You left Aeneas to die; you went hunting for your envelope, peering under the dark bridge, trying to see if it washed up in there, or did the current carry it downstream while you were looking under the bridge? Was it floating farther and farther away every minute? Which way to go? You never gave Aeneas a thought, did you?”

He didn't protest. It was too late for that game. His body was tensed; he was in full crouch now.

I should have stopped, but I couldn't. “You left a man to die. For an envelope you never did find, because—” I laughed with a touch of hysteria. “—you can't buy luck. What were the chances the envelope would be under Aeneas's body? If you had stopped to help him, you'd have gotten your papers back; your article would have sold; you'd be big time now! Oh, the irony, Gabe. You—”

He pushed off and jumped straight at me, arms outstretched. I leapt to the side. He smashed down, swung hard with both arms, clipping my shoulder.

I fell against a tree. I pushed up. He was running downhill, sending scree flying. In a second I'd lose him in the dark. I lunged, hung onto his back. We rolled till we smacked into a tree.

I do rolls for a living. Gabe Luzotta didn't have a chance. He was bleeding, and panting. Before he could clear his head, I said, “How come you were so sure Aeneas was buried under the maple?”

“When I came back . . . Maureen . . . was walking . . . away with the shovel.”

It wasn't till after Barry arrived and found something to tie Gabe's hands behind him that my skin went clammy, my stomach churned, and I disgraced myself.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-FOUR

T
he moment Gabe had feared all these years came while we were all in the zendo. The sheriff dug up the red maple, exhumed Aeneas's body, and found the plastic-wrapped manila envelope with the signed admission statement from the curator in San Francisco, the paper that could have made Gabe's career but ended up drawing him back here year after fearful year until it testified to his guilt.

After that, sesshin took on a surreal quality. The sheriff questioned everyone individually in a macabre simulacrum of dokusan interviews. Then people were free to leave, but only a few did. Most of the students had barely been aware of the events, much less endangered. I thought Amber would be the first out, but she stayed. I guess she, like Maureen before her, really came for reasons other than what she had assumed.

On Sunday, we had the long-overdue memorial service for Aeneas. We walked slowly in a circle in the zendo, chanting the Heart Sutra, and offering incense. Amber could have spoken about her brother, but she didn't. It was Rob's words that I remember. He quoted the second poem from the tale of the Sixth Patriarch.

                    
The body is not a bodhi tree

                    
There is no clear mirror anywhere

                    
Fundamentally nothing exists

                    
Nothing for dust to cling to
.

“Did Aeneas understand there had never been a mirror? I don't know. But he was a mirror for me, and I have more dust clinging than I let myself realize.” Rob's wide shoulders slumped, the light of his startlingly blue eyes dulled. He stumbled and caught himself on Maureen's outstretched hand. I had never respected him more.

Roshi, seated on his zafu, his robes tucked neatly under his knees, said what he had in his opening talk three days ago. “Things change.” He looked slowly around the room, meeting each person's eyes, then repeated, “Things change.”

We all waited for him to go on, but he said no more. Indignation rattled me; I almost cried out,
Is that all, Roshi? A man died here. One of your students killed him. You did nothing for years! Can't you at least give us some closure?
But in the end I decided Roshi was right in giving no final words that would have framed Aeneas's death and Gabe's murdering, would have made it suitable for display, discussion, finished, and done. One of the familiar symbols of Zen is the circle. The circle is never complete; there's always an opening through which life flows.

In the remaining days, we returned to the rule of total silence, and moved in that state of closeness and separation it provided. I thought of the irony of my life, that I had been so focused on being accepted by the big kids I had never let on how scared I'd been and so I spent my life being scared. But even now, I knew I would keep the events of the family hike in Tilden Park to myself. They were still John's to keep or tell.

But as the days passed and I wore out those considerations, I found myself just sitting on my zafu in the zendo. The weather cleared and I felt the sun on my shoulders; it worsened and I listened to the rain battering the windows; I heard the leaves rustle, the oil lamp sputter, Marcus's breathing to my right, the occasional odd glucking noise from Amber, and my own sudden laugh—aloud, there in the zendo.

Fundamentally nothing exists

I had misplaced the emphasis as: fundamentally nothing
exists
. Now I heard it as: fundamentally
nothing
exists. And I sat enjoying those sounds and feelings I had always considered nothing but filler between my thoughts. Momentarily a veil lifted.

After that I spent my breaks learning to walk in the woods, feeling the pounding of my heart as thumps of flesh, catching thoughts of danger that no longer existed, seeing trees as plants. Until Amber popped out from behind a redwood and just about panicked me into the stream.

Barry was different, too, and Maureen. Barry just cooked. Only twice in the remaining days did I see him look longingly toward his big silver winnower or the great orange conche. One day in the second week, when we all came back to the zendo, cold and tired from work period, the servers offered each of us tea and a small block of wonderfully rich chocolate, with a hint of wine, a soupcon of gardenia. I nibbled slowly, savoring each morsel, and shot a glance at Barry in time to see him smile.

Maureen, on the other hand, was more distracted than ever. Had it not been for the silence I would have asked her where she'd be going when Leo left.

Roshi saw each one of us in a dokusan interview. When my turn came, there was too much to say, and no way to focus it and what tumbled out of my mouth was, “I feel so bad for everyone. But you know who I keep thinking about? Gabe. I had liked Gabe.”

“We all liked Gabe,” Roshi said as if discussing someone who was still here. “We do the best we can, even though sometimes it doesn't seem anywhere near good.”

We all do the best we can
. He had said that to me on the drive in, as he laughed about my suitcase filled with tubes of shark cartilage ointment for everyone's knee pain rather than the wool pants and socks to make my own mornings here bearable.

“Leo—Roshi,” I said slowly, knowing I was on the edge of speaking out of turn—again—“if you had known the killer was Gabe, instead of thinking it was Maureen, would you still have set up this sesshin for him?”

I thought he would ponder that, or tell me
Of course
or
Hardly
. But in an instant he leaned forward and snapped his finger against the back of my hand. He meant that what exists is the present, not speculation about what might have been in the past. He didn't have to say that we had all benefited from this sesshin.

But I wasn't quite ready to give up on the question of Gabe. “It just shouldn't have had to end like this. I mean, someone else was lazy with their research, and he ended up losing his big chance to get his piece in the
New Yorker
. He managed to get an interview with a woman at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, an interview that would have clinched his documentation. Then Aeneas snatched the admission she signed, and left Gabe without ‘the thing someone didn't want to give to begin with.' Gabe's real good at poking till he gets an answer. I can imagine him getting that curator to say more than she intended, particularly when she had time to think about it afterwards. All for a magazine expose that wasn't going to do her any good. But once Gabe lost the verification, he was cooked. No wonder he was frantic. And now he'll be going to prison and his life is over.”

Roshi picked up his cocoa, poured a bit on the floor. Then he looked at me and added, “Or not.”

I smiled. Then I bowed and reached for the rag.
Or not
.

I started to leave.

“Darcy, your fear of the woods, you do know it was—”

“A great gift?” I said sarcastically.

He grinned. “A great gift. If you'd never had this fear that so embarrassed you, that you had to keep working to overcome or at least hide, would you ever have been in shape or brave enough to be a stuntwoman?”

“Well, no.”

“Or tough enough to sit facing the wall day after day, not knowing what would cross your mind the next moment, if you'd see something you didn't want to know, or if you'd suddenly forget all that and just be.”

I nodded. “I guess it was a gift.”

At that cliché he grinned and gave me the half-wink I had hoped would pass between us when things got too-too in the zendo, when he was still the funny guy in the old truck, before I had any idea he was the teacher.

“Thanks for sharing.”

I bowed and walked out. He was laughing.