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By Root 585 0

the morning I’d have to soak the area with a wet Kleenex because the lid would have crusted shut in her sleep. The lid itself sagged—sulcus, her oculist called it—and was also puffy, especially since it had been damaged by the acid and had been partially reconstructed with a small flap of skin from Celia’s inner thigh. (Apparently eyelid augmentation has developed into a fine art because of high demand in Japan for anglification of Occidental features, which in better days I’d have found a horrifying testimony to the powers of Western advertising.) The swelling and slight purpling made her look like one of those battered children in posters that encourage you to turn in your neighbors to the police. With one eyelid depressed and her other eye open, she seemed to be winking hugely, as if we shared a lurid secret.

I’d told Sahatjian that I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to clean that hollow daily; he assured me that I’d get used to it. He was right in the long run, but I fought a swell of nausea when I first lifted the lid myself with my thumb. If it wasn’t quite as harrowing as I’d feared, it was disturbing on a subtler level. No one was home. The effect recalled those almondeyed Modiglianis whose absence of pupils give the figures a hypnotic mildness and tranquillity, though a dolorousness as well, and a hint of stupidity. The cavity went from pink at the rim to a merciful black toward the back, but when I got her under the light to administer her antibiotic drops, I could see that incongruous plastic conformer, which kept the socket from collapsing; I might have been staring into a doll.

I know you resented my fawning over her so much, and that you felt bad for resenting it. In compensation, you were firmly affectionate with Celia, drawing her into your lap, reading her stories. Me, I recognized too well the mark of deliberateness about these efforts—so this was trying to be a good father—but I doubt that it looked to Kevin like anything other than surfaces would suggest. Clearly his little sister’s injury had won her only more doting—more Do you need an extra blanket, honey? more Would you like another piece of cake? more Why don’t we let Celia stay up, Franklin, it’s an animal show. Checking out the tableau in the living room as Celia fell asleep in the crook of your arm and Kevin glared at “My Granny Had My Boyfriend’s Baby” on Jerry Springer, I thought, Didn’t our little stratagem backfire.

In case you’re wondering, I did not ply Celia unduly for details about that afternoon in the bathroom. I was every bit as shy of discussing the matter as she was; neither of us had any desire to relive that day. Yet out of a sense of parental obligation—I didn’t want her to think the subject taboo, in case its exploration would prove therapeutic—I did ask her just once, casually, “When you got hurt? What happened?”

“Kevin—.” She pawed at the lid with the back of her wrist; it itched, but lest she dislodge the conformer she had learned to always rub toward her nose. “I got something in my eye. Kevin helped me wash it out.”

That’s all she ever said.

Eva

MARCH 11, 2001

Dear Franklin,

It looks as if that Andy Williams thing sparked off a rash of copycat crimes. But then, they’re all copycat crimes, don’t you agree?

There were four more School Shootings that spring of 1998. I remember clearly when news came in of the first one, because that was the same day Dr. Sahatjian did the drawings for Celia’s prosthesis and then took a mold of her socket. Celia was entranced when he painstakingly painted the iris of her good eye by hand; I was surprised that it wasn’t scanned by computer, but still limned with fine brushes in watercolors. Iris-painting is apparently quite an art, since every eye is as unique as a fingerprint, and even the whites of our eyes have a distinctive color, their fine red veins a personal skein. It was certainly the only element of this agonizing process that could have passed for charming.

As for the mold making, we’d been assured that it wouldn’t be painful, though she might experience “discomfort,