The Half That You See Rebecca Rowland (smart books to read txt) 📖

and had plenty of time to worry about declining property values.

The letters said things like:

Get it together!  No more eyesores!

Your blinds!  Do something

Look smart!  Have some pride.

How can you not see?  Clean up your act!

I didn’t take these correspondences well.  Someone who writes such things to a neighbor should at least have courage in their convictions and sign the goddamn letter.  I tossed them all in the trash. Didn’t even recycle them. After that, I made a point of leaving the window blinds crooked and allowing the vines to grow up the walls and windows. Soon, the house had an abandoned look.

I couldn’t imagine the police wanting to come see me here. Especially not in the middle of the night.

I hadn’t paid the electric bill in two months, so the house had no power, no lights, and I’d become accustomed to just going to sleep when it grew dark.

When you sleep deeply and begin to dream, your eyes roll up into the back of your head.  Imagine what you could see if you could remain conscious.

My perception remains acute, even in sleep, so I could see the intruder even before I awoke.  I knew he used a small pen-light to find his way to where I slept. He must have searched through the entire house, leaving my room for last. He sat at the foot of my bed and waited for me to awaken. Sitting up, I showed no surprise at his presence, nor at the sharp, narrow beam of light cutting into my face. Even though I now squinted, I’d already seen him very clearly.

“It’s you,” I said.

The thin beam of light streaming from his penlight didn’t waver when I said this. He seemed to study me for several seconds. Finally, he said my name.

“Yes, yes,” I said, “you remember me?”

“Remember you?” The light remained steady. I thought of what some people say about dying, that it involves moving toward a source of light. I felt like that now. I wanted to go into that light. “Did you know I was coming here?” he said.

“Yes. Or no.  Not exactly.” I told him how my boss warned me that I’d receive a visit from the authorities. “I just didn’t know he meant you.”

“Me?”

“Officer Baby Boy Blue.”

Instead of replying, he moved the penlight so that it shown onto his own face.  I saw the mirrored sunglasses and the unlined, white cheekbones, the lips turned up in a half-smile. He wore a police uniform, the exact one I saw in the hospital all those years ago.  He moved the light around his form so I could verify that he’d returned.

“I’m not here officially,” he said. “I just had a hunch, really. Looked like no one was home, so I came in to see.”

“About the eye,” I said.

In the penlight’s illumination, I saw the smile grow, the same one he showed me on that day in the hospital. And there, at the corner of his mouth, a tremor of anticipation.

“The eye,” he said, “you have it?”

All those years ago, I put the eye into that box containing unassembled model pieces.  But now, it felt like I did that in a dream just minutes ago. As I stumbled out of bed, I felt a pang of anxiety.  Did I know for sure that the box remained undisturbed this whole time? Could I say for certain that my mother never snuck into my room and removed it without my knowledge?  Maybe she wanted to save me from the trauma of seeing that box and having it awaken memories, so she tossed it into the trash. I delayed my steps, afraid to find out, and it seemed to take me forever to get across the room. Officer Baby Boy Blue remained sitting behind me patiently, following my steps with his penlight. I could feel him there, waiting.

A sudden realization: he had always been there, at the back of my head.

I opened the cabinet and began moving around old magazines and comics until I found it there: the box with the painting of the Frankenstein monster, lumbering forward with his arms outstretched. Now a new fear. What did the contents of the plastic bag look like now? A yellowish liquid had already formed by the time I returned from the hospital. What kind of unimaginable mess must it contain now? Would any of it remain at all?

I sat on the floor like a kid and opened the box, then stared at what it contained, afraid to move. Officer Baby Boy Blue remained at the foot of the bed, the penlight shining.

“Well?” he said.

I stood up and carried the box to him. He seemed to expect this. He followed me with the light, his free hand reaching for something near his side. I returned to the bed and together we looked down at the contents of the box.

“It hasn’t changed at all,” I said.

Officer Baby Boy Blue didn’t reply.  He reached into the box with a hand now gloved in plastic and withdrew the bag. He held it at eye-level and I watched as he took off his mirrored sunglasses so he could study it more closely.

The eye in the bag showed a perfect blue iris.  With his other hand, also covered by a plastic glove, he reached in and touched it. “Glass,” he said. He looked at me as if he expected an explanation.

But I had none, nothing adequate at least, nothing to explain how I’d misplaced his perfect eye with this—what should I call it?—this imitation. How had it come to be here? He wanted to know, and so did I. Then he said it:

“Search the back of your mind.”

I did, in that way I had perfected over time. To not disappoint Officer Baby Boy Blue, I looked far, far back, as far as I could see with my left eye, searching for the pictures I might have stored there.

“My god,” I heard him say, as I felt it, the scar on my cheek opening.  It