From the Corner of His Eye

'Peanut-butter chiffon. Coconut cream. And chocolate cream.'

'Three pies, huh? You'll be a fat little piggy.'

'I'll share,' he assured her.

Thus began the first day of the last weekend of their old lives. Maria visited on Saturday, sitting in the kitchen, embroidering the collar and cuffs of a blouse, while Agnes baked pies.

Barty sat at the kitchen table, reading Between Planets. From time to time, Agnes discovered him watching her at work or studying Maria's face and her dexterous hands.

At sunset, the boy stood in the backyard, gazing up through the branches of the giant oak as an orange sky darkened to coral, to red, to purple, to indigo.

At dawn, he and his mother went down to the sea, to watch the rolling waves filigreed with foam and gilded with the molten gold of morning sun, to see the kiting gulls and to scatter bread that brought the winged multitudes to earth.

On Sunday, New Year's Eve, Edom and Jacob came for dinner. Following dessert, when Barty went to his room to continue reading Starman Jones, which he had begun late that afternoon, Agnes told her brothers the truth about their nephew's eyes.

Their struggle to put their sorrow into words moved Agnes not because they cared so deeply, but because in the end they were unable to express themselves adequately. Without the relief provided by expression, their anguish grew corrosive. Their lifelong introversion left them without the social skills to unburden themselves or to provide solace to others. Worse, their obsessions with death, in all its many means and mechanisms, had prepared them to expect Barty's cancer, which left them neither shocked nor capable of consolation, but merely resigned. Ultimately, in great frustration, each twin was reduced to fragmented sentences, crippled gestures, quiet tears-and Agnes became the only consoler.

They wanted to go up to Barty's room, but she refused them, because there was nothing more they could do for the boy than they had done for her. 'He wants to finish reading Starman Jones, and I'm not letting anything interfere with that. We're leaving for Newport Beach at seven in the morning, and you can see him then.'

Shortly past nine o'clock, an hour after Edom and Jacob had gone, Barty came downstairs, book in hand. 'The twisties are back.'

For each of them, Agnes put one scoop of vanilla ice cream in a tall glass of root beer, and after changing quickly into their pajamas, they sat together in Barty's bed, enjoying their treats, while she read aloud the last sixty pages of Starman Jones.

No weekend had ever passed so quickly, and no midnight had ever brought with it such dread.

Barty slept in his mother's bed that night.

Shortly after Agnes turned out the light, she said, 'Kiddo, it's been one whole week since you walked where the rain wasn't, and I've been doing a lot of thinking about that.'

'It's not scary,' he assured her again.

'Well, it still is to me. But what I've been wondering? when you talk about all the ways things are? is there someplace where you don't have this problem with your eyes?'

'Sure. That's how it works with everything. Everything that can happen does happen, and each different way of happening makes a whole new place.'

'I didn't follow that at all.'

He sighed. 'I know.'

'Do you see these other places?'

'Just feel 'em. '

'Even when you walk in them?'

'I don't really walk in them. I sort of just walk? in the idea of them.'

'I don't suppose you could make that any clearer for your old mom, huh?'

'Maybe someday. Not now.'

'So? how far away are these places?'

'All here together now.'

'Other Bartys and other Agneses in other houses like this-all here together now.'

'Yeah.'

'And in some of them, your dad's alive.'

'Yeah.'

'And in some of them, maybe I died the night you were born, and you live alone with your dad.'

'Some places, it has to be like that.' some places it has to be that your eyes are okay?'

'There's lots of places where I don't have bad eyes at all. And then lots of places where I have it worse or don't have it as bad, but still have it some.'

Agnes remained mystified by this talk, but a week before, in the rain-swept cemetery, she had learned there was substance to it.

She said, 'Honey, what I'm wondering is? could you walk where you don't have bad eyes, like you walked where the rain wasn't? and leave the tumors in that other place? Could you walk where you have good eyes and come back with them?'

'It doesn't work that way.'

'Why not?'

He considered the issue for a while. 'I don't know.'

'Will you think about it for me?'

'Sure. It's a good question.'

She, smiled. 'Thanks. I love you, sweetie.'

'I love you, too.'

'Have you said your silent prayers?'

'I'll say them now.'

Agnes said hers, too.

She lay beside her boy in the darkness, gazing at the covered window, where the faint glow of the moon pressed through the blind, suggesting another world thriving with strange life just beyond a thin membrane of light.

Murmuring on the edge of sleep, Barty spoke to his father in all the places where Joey still lived: 'Good-night, Daddy.'

Agnes's faith told her that the world was infinitely complex and full of mystery, and in a peculiar way, Barty's talk of infinite possibilities supported her belief and gave her the comfort to sleep. Monday morning, New Year's Day, Agnes carried two suitcases out of the back door, set them on the porch, and blinked in surprise at the sight of Edom's yellow-and-white Ford Country Squire parked in the driveway, in front of the garage. He and Jacob were loading their suitcases into the car.

They came to her, picked up the luggage that she had put down, and Edom said, 'I'll drive.'

'I'll sit up front with Edom,' Jacob said. 'You can ride in back with Barty. '

In all their years, neither twin had ever set foot beyond the limits of Bright Beach. They both appeared nervous but determined.

Barty came out of the house with the library copy of Podkayne Of Mary, which his mother had promised to read to him later, in the hospital. 'Are we all going?' he asked.

'Looks that way,' said Agnes.

'Wow.'

'Exactly.'

In spite of major earthquakes pending, explosions of dynamite hauling trucks on the highway, tornadoes somewhere churning, the grim likelihood of a great dam bursting along the route, freak ice storms stored up in the unpredictable heavens, crashing planes and runaway trains converging on the coastal highway, and the possibility of a sudden violent shift in the earth's axis that would wipe out human civilization, they risked crossing the boundaries of Bright Beach and traveled north into the great unknown of territories strange and perilous.

As they rolled along the coast, Agnes began to read to Barty from Podkayne of Mars: ' 'All my life I've wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of course-just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation.''