Sage's Eyes (3 page)

“I agree,” Dad said. I heard him sigh deeply. “But who knows?
Professional help might slow it down and give us a real chance to evaluate her properly.”

“I have no illusions about this, Mark. It won't stop her if it's in her to be what she is. We can only hope it's the right sort. I hate to think of what it means if she's not.”

Now I was full of new questions. “Be what she is”? “The right sort”? The right sort of what? What would I be? Something she hated to even think about? Perhaps I did have serious mental issues. No one was more eager to get the answers than I was, and if seeing a therapist would lead me to them, then I was all for it.

Shortly afterward, I met with the child psychologist, Irma Loman, a forty-two-year-old woman with graying dark brown hair and hazel eyes with tiny black spots in them. She didn't sit behind a desk or have me lie on a couch or anything. She said we were going to be just like two friends talking.

“You can even call me Irma,” she said. “I'm not worried about protocol or formalities. Honesty, honesty. That's the only important thing.”

She settled on her chair across from me like a hen sitting over newly laid eggs. Her thighs seemed to inflate beneath her knee-length dark gray skirt. She wore a white blouse with a frilly collar and frilly cuffs. Her straight hair was trimmed just below her cheekbones, which made her eyes and lips look bigger. She was only five foot four, with thick ankles and shiny rounded knees that looked like large Mason jar caps for homemade jelly, something I had never seen in our house but could easily envision.

“People who have spots in their eyes were touched by the devil's
tears when they were born,” I told her before she could ask me a single question.

She smiled, her cheeks bubbling and her small nose sinking. “What? Where did you learn such a thing?”

“A fortune-teller told me. She was blind and had a dog who led her around. He had silver fur and silvery gray eyes that glowed in the dark.”

“Blind?”

“She wasn't always blind. She had been cursed,” I explained.

“Why was she cursed?”

“Not everyone likes to hear about his or her future, especially when it's bad. Gypsies don't make the future; they just see it faster than anyone else, and in this case, she tampered with the wrong person.”

“Tampered with the wrong person? What do you mean?”

“She annoyed someone with more power, someone who could put a curse on her.”

“If she could see the future, why didn't she know that would happen to her?”

“Fortune-tellers can't tell their own fortunes, only the fortunes of others,” I said, making it sound like something very obvious, something everyone should know.

She stared for a moment and then smiled again, this time with a slight nod, as if I had just confirmed something she had thought about me from the first moment she set eyes on me. “That doesn't make sense from the start, Sage. Think about what you're saying. How could she see if she was blind?”

“She had eyes behind her eyes,” I said.

Irma tightened her pale thick lips and scrunched her nose even more, like someone who had just smelled something horrible. She glanced at her notebook, sighed deeply, and began to ask me questions about my dreams. I tried to answer everything as truthfully as possible, because she had emphasized honesty.

“What's wrong with me?” I blurted before my session was over. “I know my parents are growing more and more upset about it.”

“Now, stop your worrying,” she ordered. She told me that some people don't stop dreaming just because they wake up, and maybe I was one of those people. “It's not bad,” she said quickly. “But maybe we should work on helping you leave your dreams behind when you wake up in the morning.”

She asked me more questions about my daily life, what I liked, what I thought of this or that, even colors and shapes. I saw her fill pages and pages of her notebook.

In the end, after two more sessions, she told my parents that I had a delusional disorder, a mixed type, but she felt I might outgrow it. She thought regular therapy sessions with her over time would quicken my recovery.

My mother wasn't as enthusiastic about it as my father was, but I told them I didn't mind seeing Irma now and then.

“I might even be able to help her more than she can help me,” I said.

My mother gasped and brought her right hand to
the base of her throat, something she always did when she was a little shocked or surprised. “Why do you say that?” she asked. She looked at my father, and they both waited for my response.

“She has tiny black dots in her eyes,” I explained. “She's going to do something very bad someday if no one helps her.”

“How would she know something like that?” my father asked my mother. “You can see.”

She shook her head. “No. Obviously, she's not going to do Sage any good,” she concluded. “This is going nowhere, and it might even take her in the wrong direction altogether.”

Eventually, things settled down enough for them to stop sending me to Irma anyway, but I felt bad for her. A year later, she drank too much at a party and, driving home, hit a woman and a man crossing the street at night. The woman died, and Irma was charged with vehicular manslaughter. My father was the one who read about it and remembered what I had predicted.

“Did you ever tell anyone about Irma Loman?” my father asked me. “About what you thought would happen to her?”

“No. I didn't tell anyone anything about her at all, not even that I had seen her.”

“Thank heavens for that,” my mother said. “Finally, at least this once, anyway, you listened to us.” She looked relieved.

But by then, it was too late for lots of reasons.

Our house had a wide but short entryway with a narrow closet for hanging up coats and jackets. The floor was a grayish white slate, and there was a large hanging lamp of clear hammered glass in a detailed black finish. The two curved metal hooklike decorations at the base of it always seemed like two cat eyes to me, especially when the lamp was on and the yellowish glow bounced off the light brown front door. They looked like frightened eyes, hinting of danger and not suggesting any of the warmth and security I should find in the house that was my home, something everyone should find in his or her home.

Periodically, my mother would hang a small garland of garlic just to the right of our front door. She would dress it up with some artificial flowers. I never thought it was that pretty. In fact, I hated looking at it and wondered why it was so important to her to do it. When I asked, however, she grew very angry.

“Don't you ever touch it, and don't ask me about it again,” she said.
Then she paused like someone who had just thought of something important, narrowed her eyes, and asked, “Why? Does it bother you? Make you feel sick?”

“No,” I said, and shrugged. “I just wondered. There are nicer things to hang outside a house.”

Her shoulders and neck seemed to inflate with rage. “When you have your own house, you'll hang what you want. That's what I want,” she said, and walked away.

The garland of garlic wasn't the only odd thing that drew my curiosity. I remembered, one afternoon when I was seven, seeing my father go out to the front stoop, loosen one of the steps, and slip a knife under it. He saw me watching him and said, “Don't ever tell anyone about this, Sage. Understand?”

“Yes, Daddy,” I said.

He nailed the step down, gave me another look of warning, and went into the house.

I never forgot it, but I didn't mention it again, either. There were too many things like that around our house and too many other strange things my parents did to concentrate on just one. The doorbell button outside, for example, was housed in a circle that had a black side and a white side, with the button in the white side. I think few people who came to the house and pressed it understood they were pressing on yang, for the circle was the symbolic yin-yang, yin being the black side and yang the white.

My mother explained it to me when I came home from school one day and remarked that our front
doorbell button looked like a yin-yang picture we had been studying in art class.

“That's exactly what it is,” she told me. “Yin and yang are the two energies believed to exist in everything in nature and in human beings.”

I nodded, eager to show off my new knowledge. I was just thirteen at the time, a year away from entering high school, and despite everything, I wanted my parents to approve of me. “Yin is the female energy,” I said, “cold, passive, and wet, and it's associated with the night, the winter, and the moon. Yang is male, hot, active, and fiery, associated with daytime, the summer, and the sun.”

“Exactly,” my mother said. “And you understand one cannot exist without the other. Light can't exist without darkness. They are always moving energies, and neither is good or bad in and of itself.”

I wanted to ask why she had never explained the doorbell button before, but there was really nothing unusual about her withholding information. It seemed she always waited for me to bring home something that would permit her to tell me more, and until I did, it was better if I lived in the darkness of ignorance. It was almost as if knowledge was dangerous for me, especially if it had anything to do with good and evil.

I was even more afraid to ask questions about such things when I grew older. My questions usually caused my mother to look at me more intensely, just as she had done when I had asked about the garland of garlic. Her eyes would search my face, looking for some underlying evil reason for why I would dare to ask, no
matter how innocent the questions were. She would often follow one of my questions with “Why do you want to know that? Why did you ask? What gave you the idea to ask?” Or she might ask, “Did you dream about this?” This was especially true for any questions about her or my father, their families, or their pasts. They never seemed to want to talk much about those things, so I stopped asking years ago. But wasn't it normal to wonder about your own family?

Although I rarely heard them talk about their families even when they were with dinner guests, I couldn't help wondering why we didn't have pictures of their parents or grandparents on our shelves and walls like other people had. Whenever my parents and I went to their friends' homes, that was the first thing I looked for and asked questions about. In the house of one of my classmates, her family had two rows of pictures of her grandfathers going back generations, with one picture taken around the time of the Civil War.

How different we were. Wouldn't you think so if, from the day you could talk, comments and questions about almost anything brought intense scrutiny, if not some sharp reply, a warning to you not to think about something or ask about something? Surely, like me, you would tend to go elsewhere for answers, even about the most common things. Maybe that was why I became such an avid reader. There were times when I felt the air go out of the room after I had asked about something, times when I would find myself tiptoeing around my parents and retreating to the silence in my own room to read and to learn.

I used to wonder if maybe I was too inquisitive after all, whether there really was something wrong with me for thinking so much and wondering so much. However, it was pretty obvious that my classmates and friends knew a great deal more about their families than I knew about mine. Of course, almost all of that mystery could be attributed to my being an adopted child and that I knew nothing about my biological parents, but the truth was that I didn't know all that much more about my adoptive parents, either.

I could summarize what I knew about them on a single page. Both of them had lost their parents years ago, but I wasn't sure exactly when. To explain why their parents were gone even though they were still so young, they told me their parents had married late in their lives. They made it sound as if their mothers had them at the very last possible minute.

They both said they had lived in Massachusetts all their lives. My father was from Boston, my mother from Salem. My mother was an only child, so there were no aunts or uncles on her side, but my father had a younger brother, Wade, who fascinated me. He was a professional magician who went under the stage name the Amazing Healy. He lived in New York City, but he traveled a great deal because of his performances, not only in America but also in Europe and even Asia, and he always managed to visit us when he was anywhere nearby.

Uncle Wade had a reason for not answering my questions about himself, a reason I could accept and understand.

“A good
magician never reveals the secrets of his tricks, Sage, nor should he tell too much about himself. He must guard the mystery as he would guard his life. One can't be separated from the other when you're a magician. There's an aura about you that enables you to say, ‘Now you see it; now you don't.' And people are hooked, amazed, and fascinated. That's how I earn a living. You wouldn't want to hurt my doing that, right?”