Sage's Eyes Read online

  “What we do know is that she wasn’t married and her parents were too old to help raise you,” my mother had eventually told me, and left it for me to make the right conclusions. Of course, I knew other girls and boys who lived only with their mothers after a divorce, but children of divorced mothers were different from orphans like me. At least the children of divorced parents could see themselves in their fathers and mothers.

  This was constantly on my mind. I spent a great deal of time studying myself in a mirror, but not like someone looking for flaws in her beauty. It was more like I was looking for a sign revealing who was inside me, who I really was. Using my own features, I tried to imagine what my real mother must have looked like.

  One day, I drew a picture of her and showed it to my parents. After they looked at it, they looked at each other, their eyes wide and full of surprise. Neither said anything. They didn’t tell me it was awful or that it was wrong to have drawn it, but they wouldn’t let me pin it on the wall or show it to anyone else. I finally did hear my father whisper, “Remarkable,” more to himself than to my mother. My mother took the picture, telling me to forget it, and I imagined that she hid it somewhere or maybe destroyed it, as if she was afraid I might see someone who resembled this woman on the streets of our city. I supposed that was possible. I didn’t know where she came from or where she lived.

  We lived just outside of Dorey, Massachusetts, a town of about twenty thousand residents, only fifty miles from Cape Cod, a place they had yet to take me to visit. Our house was a Tudor, with half-timbering. The space between the timbers was filled with white stucco, so my parents referred to their home as a black-and-white house. It had decorative woodwork, which my father explained was really false half-timbering, diamond-pane windows, and a steeply pitched roof with arches and bay windows. My room was upstairs, two doors down from my parents’ room, and it looked out at the section of woods between our property and a small lake that was only a half mile long and wide. It was on an empty plot of land tied up in some family feud regarding its deed.

  For me, it was like having our own private lake and park next door. We had barely more than one acre, so I was eager to step off our property and spend time next door exploring, especially around the lake. I wasn’t permitted to go there by myself until I was ten and always with a warning to be careful around the lake, as if something in it, some lake monster, might jump out and pull me under the water. Often I did sense something shadowy moving in the woods nearby. I would pause and search among the trees. Sometimes I would hear the rustling of leaves and branches, even the sound of footsteps, but I never saw anything or anyone.

  I did hear the breeze whisper, “Be careful. Always be careful.”

  My father made sure that I learned to swim when I was five. He took me to his sports club in Dorey on Saturdays, when children of members could have lessons with a certified swimming instructor. My instructor was amazed, because I was swimming well after only a half hour of instruction.

  “You sure she never swam before?” he asked my father.

  “Never.”

  “All my students should be like her,” the instructor said.

  Dad nodded and looked at me as if he had expected no less. He stood back and, without any surprise, watched me swim across the pool, unafraid, unhesitant, and confident. Later, at dinner, he reported how I had done. I watched for my mother’s reaction. She seemed more disappointed than proud. Both of them did, in fact. I didn’t understand it. It was as if I was confirming some evil suspicion they had of me.

  But swimming seemed natural, something I remembered having done.

  “I swam in the ocean, which is more difficult than a pool,” I blurted.

  They shook their heads, but I could sense the seeds of concern were planted again, this time even deeper.

  “We never took you to swim in the ocean, Sage,” my mother snapped back at me with her teeth clenched. “Don’t dare tell anyone that. Are you listening?”

  As usual back then when I was so young, I just shrugged. I never argued with anyone about what I knew and what I saw. It was as if I understood that they wouldn’t understand. However, I think my self-confidence when I spoke was eventually even more of a concern for my parents than the things I said. They could see I wasn’t ever going to admit that I was making something up.

  “I’m afraid she really believes what she says,” I heard my mother tell my father once when I was nearly eleven. “You can’t blame it on a wild imagination anymore or talk her out of it or stop her from saying these things.”

  “Maybe she’ll grow out of it,” he replied. “She’s still quite young. The older she gets, the further away she might get from these visions and imaginings. Some of it is simply what all kids do. It’s still too soon to tell.”

  “No sense in fooling yourself. I’m afraid she won’t stop, Mark. I’ll admit, it’s more difficult to predict what will happen with her, what the end result of this will be. She’s not like the others.”

  “That’s why we have to be patient. Let’s wait and see,” my father told her. “We promised.”

  “We promised to try.”

  “And we will,” he said firmly. “We have to, for her sake.”

  I wanted to ask what he meant by “the others” and “for her sake,” but I was afraid to start them talking about me again, warning me, practically begging me to shut myself up tightly and bury my thoughts and dreams so deeply that they would be smothered and die. I thought I might die, too. If I kept everything locked up, I wouldn’t be able to breathe because of the weight of it all on my chest.

  Finally, when I was twelve and still telling them and other people about things I remembered, things they knew I hadn’t done while I was with them, which was basically forever, I heard them discussing me very intently one night in the kitchen after dinner. Both of them raised their voices at times. They decided that maybe it would help for me to speak with a child psychologist. After all, besides others my age in school, I was also telling my teachers things that my parents couldn’t validate when they were asked about them.

  “We can’t ignore her, ignore the things she is telling people, anymore, Mark. Everyone will wonder why we’re not trying to do something about it, especially her teachers. I hate doing this. It’s basically admitting failure, but it’s getting out of hand,” my mother said. “This is another one that might very well be beyond us.”

  What did she mean by “another one” and “beyond us”? I wondered. That was the same as saying “the others,” but, just like before, I was afraid to ask.

  “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 kne
es 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.

  1

  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 m
y 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.