From the Corner of His Eye

always?"
        He pushed back the bedclothes and sat up, leaning against the pillows and headboard. "This is maybe a hard thing for you to do, but it's really important."
        Sitting on the edge of the bed, taking his hand, she stared at his sweet little bow of a mouth, whereas before she would have met his eyes. "Tell me."
        "Don't be sad. Okay?"
        Agnes had believed that through this ordeal, she'd largely spared her child from an awareness of the awful depth of her misery. In this, however, as in so many other instances, the boy proved to be more perceptive and more mature than she'd realized. Now she felt that she had failed him, and this failure ached like a wound.
        He said, "You're the Pie Lady."
        "Once was."
        "Will be. And the Pie Lady-she's never sad."
        "Sometimes even the Pie Lady."
        "You always leave people feeling good, like Santa Claus leaves them."
        She gently squeezed his hand but couldn't speak.
        "It's there even when you read to me now. The sad feeling, I mean. It changes the story, makes it not as good, because I can't pretend I don't hear how sad you are."
        With effort, she managed to say, "I'm sorry, sweetie," but her voice was sufficiently distorted by anguish that even to herself, she sounded like a stranger.
        After a silence, he asked, "Mom, you always believe me, don't you?"
        "Always," she said, because she had never known him to lie.
        "Are you looking at me?"
        "Yes," she assured him, though her gaze had dropped from his mouth to his hand, so small, which she held in hers.
        "Mom, do I look sad?"
        By habit, she shifted her attention to his eyes, because though the scientific types insist that the eyes themselves are incapable of expression, Agnes knew what every poet knows: To see the condition of the hidden heart, you must look first where scientists will not admit to looking at all.
        The white padded eye patches rebuffed her, and she realized how profoundly the boy's double enucleation would affect how easily she could read his moods and know his mind. Here was a littler loss until now shadowed by the greater destruction. Denied the evidence of his eyes, she would need to be better at noting and interpreting nuances of his body language-also changed by blindness-and his voice, for there would be no soul revealed by hand-painted, plastic implants.
        "Do I look sad?" Barty repeated.
        Even the Shantung-softened lamplight blazed too bright and did not serve her well, so she switched it off and said, "Scoot over."
        The boy made room for her.
        She kicked off her shoes and sat beside him in bed, with her back against the headboard, still holding his hand. Even though this darkness wasn't as deep as Barty's, Agnes found that she was better able to control her emotions when she couldn't see him. "I think you must be sad, kiddo. You hide it well, but you must be."
        "I'm not, though."
        "Bullpoop, as they say."
        "That's not what they say," the boy replied with a giggle, for his extensive reading had introduced him to words that he and she agreed were not his to use.
        "Bullpoop might not be what they say, but it's the worst that we say. And in fact, in this house, bulldoody is preferred."
        "Bulldoody doesn't have a lot of punch."
        "Punch is overrated."
        "I'm really not sad, Mom. I'm not. I don't like it this way, being blind. It's… hard." His small voice, musical as are the voices of most children, touching in its innocence, spun a fragile thread of melody in the dark, and seemed too sweet to be speaking of these bitter things. "Real hard. But being sad won't help. Being sad won't make me see again."
        "No, it won't," she agreed.
        "Besides, I'm blind here, but I'm not blind in all the places where I am."
        This again.
        Enigmatic as ever on this subject, he continued: "I'm probably not blind more places than I am. Yeah, sure, I'd rather be me in one of the other places where my eyes are good, but this is the me I am. And you know what?"
        "What?"
        "There's a reason why I'm blind in this place but not blind everywhere I am."
        "What reason?"
        "There must be something important I'm supposed to do here that I don't need to do everywhere I am, something I'll do better if I'm blind."
        "Like what?"
        "I don't