A Single Eye Read online

  “What do you mean, Roshi called! Roshis aren’t stock brokers; they don’t make cold calls to round up business for sesshins. Students apply for sesshin and just hope they’re lucky enough to get in. What do you mean, Roshi called you?”

  Unleashing a great sigh, she heaved herself over onto her stomach and plunged her arms under her breasts.

  “When he found out Aeneas had never gone to Japan he called to tell my parents. But they don’t answer the phone anymore; I do that for them. Even if they did they wouldn’t have talked to him.”

  “Aeneas is your brother?” I said, astounded.

  I stared at her huddled in her red sleeping bag like a kid on an overnight. How could she have a brother who had walked off into nothingness? I thought about my own brother. How could she bear this enormous grief? Just hours ago she was giggling about boys throwing peanuts at her. I was still staring, expecting her to transform, to age before me.

  “Yeah, my brother,” she said as if commenting that she was considering lavender nail polish.

  I swallowed my amazement. In a lavender nail polish voice I said, “What did Roshi want?”

  “To know if Aeneas had called us, of course. Well, of course, he hadn’t. Aeneas didn’t use the phone.”

  “After he disappeared, you mean?”

  “Well, ye-ah.”

  I pulled a dry sock from my suitcase. Still standing I pulled it on. “Your parents blamed Roshi for Aeneas’s disappearance?”

  “Not entirely. I mean, they did and didn’t. You know, they wanted to blame someone, and so sometimes they did, but the thing is Aeneas had gotten strange before he ever came here. The last couple years he lived at home he wouldn’t touch the phone.” Her sleepy face quivered; I thought she was going to cry. She was looking down at the floor beyond her pillow and when she spoke I had to strain to make out her words. “I adored him . . . when I was little. He was the best big brother, he always took me with him everywhere and he was, like, happy to have me there, like I was some special expensive gift he’d been given. He was always happy.”

  Her face had gone pink; her voice was shaky. I dropped down beside her on her futon and sat rubbing her shoulder, willing myself not to think of my own family. She smelled of cream and peppermint from either muscle ointment or a stash of sweets.

  “And then,” she said, “I guess he was about fifteen when he started getting strange. He was ten years older than me.”

  “Strange? More than with the phone?”

  “Quiet. At first that’s all it was, just quiet. I had started to school, so I didn’t care so much that he didn’t want to have me with him all the time. I mean, I didn’t realize that it was that he didn’t want me, I just figured . . . I don’t know what I thought. I mean, I was six years old. But first it was the phone, then he started staying in his room more—most of this I got from what my parents said later, you know? He started making rules. I mean, my mother would say, ‘Don’t brush your teeth with hot water.’ And he’d say, ‘How cold does it have to be?’ And she’d say, ‘Well, just let it run a minute.’ Then that was law for him, and he had to do it for sixty seconds, not”—she started to swallow and ended up gulping back tears—”not sixty-one.”

  I rubbed her shoulder softly, giving her time to pull herself together.

  “When you’re quiet, people don’t always notice your strangeness, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, surprised. “How’d you know that?”

  I shrugged. “No wonder Aeneas made such a great facsimile of a Zen student. Sits quietly; adores rules. He must have been in heaven here.”

  “He was,” she said, and despite the irony of my question she spoke of him in the soft tone of pride. “When I saw him that weekend the Japanese roshis came, he was, like, walking on air. He knew every line of every ceremony. He could do all the chants in Japanese. I mean, he always was really really bright anyway, and a better mimic than anyone I ever saw. But here he was a star. And Roshi really liked him, and the Japanese were really impressed.”

  “Amber,” I said slowly, hating to bring up the stains on this cherished memory of him, “I have to ask you this. The Buddha on the altar at the opening, did Aeneas—”

  A guffaw exploded from her. The shock of it threw me back, and I watched as she turned toward me, still laughing. She pulled the bag around her shoulders. “The Buddha the Japanese brought, did he lift it right off the altar? Yeah, of course. He liked it. So he took it.” She was staring at me now, and my shocked expression made her laugh all the more. “Darcy, it was funny. I mean, I knew the minute the Buddha disappeared that Aeneas had snagged it. It’s what he did. He had no sense of boundaries. He used to pocket things in stores in San Francisco. Little Buddha statues, staplers—for some reason he adored staplers—pens, other odd things. At first it really scared me; I mean, I was still a little kid and I knew you shouldn’t steal. It could have been a big problem, but the thing was Aeneas didn’t want most stuff. But when something attracted him, he just figured he should have it.”

  “How did you handle that?”

  “Luck. We were really lucky. Part of the not-wanting thing was that once he did pocket something it slipped out of his mind. You know, as if he wanted the ‘wanting’ more than the actual thing. So when I saw him pocket something, I’d distract him. Then I’d borrow his coat, take the thing out, and return it. I got so I could do it all in under a minute. Even in shops, we never had a problem; I always got stuff back before we left the stores. But I had to watch him all the time.”

  “Didn’t your parents—”

  “They couldn’t have handled it. I just made sure Aeneas never went to a store alone.”

  “You were in grammar school?”

  “Yeah. I was in junior high when he came here.”

  “That’s a huge responsibility for a kid. You must have been so relieved when he came here—”

  I just caught myself before speaking the last two words: and died.

  When he came here and died.

  Suddenly the sadness of it was too much. Sweet Amber’s sweet, helpless brother. How could he have died, here, in this place where he should have been safe? I wanted to clasp Amber to me, to ease the gnawing around the hole, to fill her emptiness.

  Her round sweet face tightened like an apple suddenly dried, as if all the life had gone long ago.

  “It was a miracle; that he found a place he could fit in, where he could shine. A miracle. My parents said that all the time. When I told them how central he was to everything at the opening, it was like their son had graduated from Harvard. They loved it that the important Japanese teachers focused on him. Like he wasn’t crazy, didn’t have a tumor or some weird disease; he was just in the wrong place before. But now, in the monastery, with the Japanese masters, he was a star.” She took a breath, and her face relaxed back to normal. “So, like, when we heard that he’d gone to Japan we weren’t surprised. My parents were worried about him being in a foreign country, but they were proud of him, and really, really relieved.”

  I had to swallow before I could say, “But your parents didn’t really believe Aeneas went to Japan, did they?”

  “Why’d you think that?” she demanded. But before I had to answer, she slumped back on her stomach, face propped on forearms, gaze into a neutral distance. “Yeah, okay. You know, the Japanese taking him, it was too happily-ever-after to really accept. And then when Roshi called and said Aeneas didn’t go to Japan, it made sense.”

  As I listened to her twisting what had been said and what might have been, a cold dread filled me. Roshi had said Aeneas never went to Japan. He didn’t say he’d gone anywhere else. But Amber was hanging onto that belief. I knew I should ask her, but I couldn’t, not yet. Not yet by far.

  I swallowed hard, and again, and forced out, “How’d your parents take what Roshi told you?”

  She shook her head and when she looked up at me it was with a different, far less innocent expression. “They didn’t. Why would I tell them? It wasn’t l
ike that changed anything. It’d only be a new obsession for them. That’s what they’ve got left of Aeneas; now they obsess.”

  I was impressed, and not a little shocked that she could be so controlled.

  “So you came to sesshin to find out, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Roshi let you.”

  “He didn’t want to, but I guilted him into it.”

  I was about to protest that Zen masters don’t act from guilt, but in this case, maybe Leo did. Guilt would explain why he let a novice come and why he put his assistant in the cabin with her. Why he introduced this sesshin with the question of Aeneas. Why he was doing exactly what Yamana-roshi warned him against.

  I sat in the dim light, looking at her in a vague half-seeing way, thinking about long-gone family, a brother vanishing, and feeling sad, knowing I shouldn’t let her go on hoping for a brother who was dead, and being unable to yank away that hope—

  And then words burst out of my mouth in such a flurry I only half heard them. But I did hear Amber’s reply. She cocked her head and stared at me as if I had asked where the nail polish bottle was, the one I had in my hand.

  She said, “Aeneas isn’t dead. We never thought Aeneas was dead. He sent us postcards every couple years.”

  I sighed so heavily she actually laughed.

  “From where?” I asked.

  “A temple in Kyoto, and later a temple in Seattle, one in Vancouver, the Japanese garden in Portland. My parents were hurt to think he’d gotten back here on trips or vacations and hadn’t called, and I actually had to remind them about him and the phone. Someday he’ll send a card with a return address, and then I’ll go get him.”

  Tears glistened in her eyes, and mine. I felt a huge wave of relief as if my whole body had been frozen in tension and now the sun had come out. I exhaled long and luxuriously. Only then did I feet the backwash of suspicion. “But the postcard from Japan? How do you explain that? I mean, he never went to Japan with the Japanese masters.”

  “He must have had one of them send it for him. They liked him; they would have done it as a favor.” She pulled her arms back inside her sleeping bag, and snuggled down on her side, her unclasped blond hair spread over her head like a fluffy kid’s blanket. “I only had to think about that now, after Roshi’s call. Because, see, it was easy to imagine Aeneas charming the Japanese masters. When I was a kid he’d take me downtown to Union Square or Coit Tower. He’d listen for tourists, and soon he’d be ‘talking’ to them. He was such a great mimic he could almost pass himself off as anything. He picked up sounds, just enough words in their language to make them wonder. But it was more than that; he stood like them, gestured like them, his face was their faces. When he was doing it, he was one of them. It sounds like he was mocking them, but that wasn’t it at all—Aeneas would never be cruel; he just wanted to mirror them. Like stealing the Buddha; he just wanted to steal who they were for a minute. People were never offended. They were charmed. It was like they had met the one really tasteful person in all of San Francisco.”

  I swallowed; even the thought of the question I was about to—had to—ask, filled me with a cold no shiver would ease. “Amber,” I said, “did he eventually become only that? A mirror of other people?”

  She nodded. Then she bawled. I pulled her to me, let her sob on my shoulder until the cold and wet forced us both back into our sleeping bags. It must have been the first time she had really wept for Aeneas, the sweet brother who became no more than a mirror. I thought of the tale of the Sixth Patriarch, the first student’s poem:

  The body is the Bodhi-tree

  The mind is like a clear mirror standing

  And the Sixth Patriarch’s retort:

  The body is not like a tree,

  There is no clear mirror standing,

  Fundamentally nothing exists

  Fundamentally, Aeneas did not exist, except as a mirror. People see through their own eyes, Yamana-roshi had said. With Aeneas it must have been so easy for them. And the descriptions people had given me of Aeneas were not of him at all, but of themselves.

  Eventually, I blew out the oil lamp, sure that I would lie awake in the cold dark, wondering about Aeneas who lost his self, and about Rob and Maureen and everyone who mistook a mirror for a man, and were afraid. And Amber, who admitted her brother didn’t go to Japan after the opening, but nevertheless believed he was in Japan.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WEDNESDAY

  Rain came sharp and hard, and worse, the wind was blowing. It was the kind of night to be tucked in bed, curled around a lover. But at 4:15 A.M. the kitchen was warm and bright in that cozy way of rooms lit when the world still sleeps. The winy bouquet of cocoa mixed with the aroma of coffee. Barry’s winnower rattled companionably as it did its part to bring us cocoa. Best of all, Barry was alone in here. I stood for a moment, inhaling luxuriously. I was operating at capacity. One look at Barry told me he was, too. He looked as jumpy as a great bald bear startled out of hibernation. He wasn’t even in his black robe yet, but still in sleep-rumpled gray sweats. He stood over the sink splashing water on his face again and again and again, inadvertently spraying the counter and a good bit of the floor.

  “Barry, it’s not going to help. You could step outside and douse your whole body and it would still be four-fifteen in the morning.”

  He jerked up. “I didn’t realize—Oh, it’s you, Darcy.” He lurched over to the stove, rubbing a paper towel over his scalp like he was drying the outside of a bowl. “Oh, Roshi’s cocoa. Oh, sorry, I was up till, till, uh, I don’t know, uh, late.”

  I gasped. It was too early to control reactions. But another lethal cup of cocoa anywhere near Leo—no way. “That’s okay. I’ll just make him some tea.”

  “Didn’t he like the cocoa? It was the old batch. Around too long? New batch . . . tomorrow. But I could, uh, make . . . He didn’t like it?”

  He stood there in his wrinkled water-stained sweats, his big feet bare on the floor, his thick hands open-palmed and held out as if begging for a redeeming answer.

  “He didn’t complain to me,” I said truthfully. “But he said he’s got a fever. ‘Starve a fever,’ right? He’s better off with tea.”

  “A fever? Oh, I better make him special broth. I can . . .”

  His worried gaze shifted to the steel table that had reminded me of an autopsy site. It was covered with yet another a layer of cacao beans. I wondered how many times during the night Barry had covered the table with criollos and sorted them, bean by bean. He had the stiff walk of one who’d spent the night bending over. I noticed a staircase behind him, which led to a loft. “Barry, do you live in the kitchen?”

  It was a big kitchen, a warm, bright room, with access to food, drink, fire, and light. But it was still a kitchen.

  “Huh?” Barry said, still rubbing his eyes. “Oh, yeah. I mean, I could have a cabin, but what’s the point? I’m always here. When it’s not sesshin, I haul in an armchair from the shed. But nights like now, I wouldn’t get to bed anyway, not with the rain.”

  “The rain?”

  “It’s the chocolate. It’s conching.” He nodded toward what looked like a clothes dryer. “This is the key part, mixing the nibs with the sugar and lecithin. Too fast and it’s grainy; too long and the volatiles float off and you end up with”—he looked revolted—“bland brown paste. It’s the aromatic compounds that give chocolate its ‘vive.’ Time! Time is so short. I’ve got to finish conching, and the tempering, the cooling, and give it time to set, all finished so I can get down to the city by the weekend. No second chance. No time. But the way it’s raining, I’ll be lucky if the road holds till tomorrow.”

  He was scanning the room frantically, as if his precious time were hiding in cupboards and under pots. Reliable Barry had disintegrated. Suddenly I realized even this distracted Barry was going away. Tomorrow! That would leave me with only Gabe, and I trusted him only because he had arrived too late to poison Leo. I couldn’t let Barry leave tomorr
ow.

  “What are you doing with the chocolate in San Francisco?”

  “The Cacao Royale, the international chocolatiers’ tasting. The Royale comes only every seven years. It’s vital for new entries.”

  “But you already sell your chocolate, don’t you?” Maureen had said he supported the monastery.

  “I do, but this batch will be a whole different class. The butterfly compared to the, uh, uh . . .” The simile was too much for that hour of the morning.

  “Worm-like thing,” I put in. “So you’ll be down there with lots of old chocolate friends, huh?”

  “Yeah. It’s fun.” The creases in his forehead eased, his whole face relaxed and he smiled. “That’s if you don’t mind eating like a pig.”

  I laughed. “Right, Barry, I’ll be pitying you all weekend, particularly at dinner when I’m eating gruel.”

  I relaxed too. Barry was going to spend the weekend with his old cooking friends. If he had been involved with the Big Buddha Baker who poisoned his wares he wouldn’t have been accepted back into the food fraternity, him or his chocolate. But here he was, rushing around to get his fine new chocolates down there to show them off. In fact, while he was there, maybe he could ask if anyone remembered the bakery scandal and if they recalled Aeneas hanging around.

  “Barry, about the Big—”

  A rush of icy air slapped my face. Rob hurried in and over to the coffee table. With his gaunt, drawn face, with his black robes hanging out from under his black slicker he looked like the Grim Reaper dropping in for a cup of java before his first kill of the day.

  I picked up Roshi’s tea and took a warm, wonderful sip of my own coffee. Rob stood drinking his slowly, as if tasting each drop separately.

  “Barry,” I whispered. “You were in San Francisco. What did happen at the Big Buddha Bakery?”

  The beans dripped out of his hands back into the unsorted pile. He didn’t seem to notice. He braced his two big hands against the edge of the metal table, and stared down. The table shook from the quivering of his hands.