Excited, almost giddy with relief, I went directly to my bedroom and opened the nightstand drawer and took out the La Florentine candy tin. I intended to take scissors to the Polaroid of me sleeping and throw the pieces in the Dumpster in the alleyway.
Thus far I had kept the photograph because it seemed to be proof that Eve Adams had threatened me. I couldn’t have taken a snapshot of myself in sleep, especially considering that we didn’t own a Polaroid camera. If someday events unfolded in such a way that Mother learned part of what I had been withholding from her and I was required to explain myself, or if Eve Adams, under one name or another, became aggressive toward me again and I needed at last to ask for help, my Polaroid and the one of Mr. Yoshioka’s tiger screen—and to a lesser extent the photo of Manzanar torn from a book—would serve as proof, if thin, that she had threatened us.
Now that she had left our building, where obviously she would never again be welcome, the photo would not be needed as proof of anything. But it could serve as evidence, evidence that I had kept secret from my mother events of considerable significance. Although she would never invade my privacy, if by some chance she saw the Polaroid, she would wonder who had taken it, why, and when. I could imagine no satisfactory explanation—except the truth. Whatever she might decide was proper punishment for deception, nothing could be worse than her disappointment in me and the sorrow in her eyes. But with Eve Adams gone, I had no need of proof against her and no desire to keep evidence that would convict me of being less of a good son than I wished to be.
In retrospect, as a man of fifty-seven, it’s difficult to reconstruct the reasoning of my nine-year-old self, because at that age the brain is literally still forming; the power of reason is not as strong as the power of fantasy. Yet if I remember correctly, when I took the lid off the La Florentine box, my mood was akin to that of a prisoner freed, for the architecture of deceptions and evasions I’d built seemed to be dissolving like a structure in a dream, freeing me from the prospect of one day being shamed before my mother.
Of the familiar items in my eccentric collection—two were missing. The photograph of me sleeping. The fabric eye. I had not looked in the box for more than a week. I knew instantly that Eve Adams had been in the apartment during the day, one day or another, when the security chain was not engaged, that she—no one else—had taken the items. I couldn’t imagine why she wanted the fabric eye.
One thing had been added to the collection: a strip of glossy paper clipped from a magazine, two inches by six or seven inches, cut from what must have been a full-page photo of a woman’s face, perhaps a glamour shot: the eyes and eyebrows and the bridge of her nose. The subject of the photo must have had blue eyes, but with a purple art pencil, they had been colored to approximately match the shade of Eve Adams’s eyes.
I rubbed one of those eyes, and some of the soft purple color came off on my finger.
With the Polaroid, she had taken the evidence of my deception but also the proof of her interest in me. I assumed that the eyes clipped from a magazine meant, I won’t forget you, snoop. I know where to find you, and if you ever speak of me to anyone, I’ll have great fun cutting you to pieces.
Maybe she would start with my eyes.
At that moment, I realized how foolish I had been to think that she was out of my life forever. I had seen her in a dream before I’d seen her for real, which must mean the dream was true, prophetic. So her name indeed was Fiona Cassidy, not Eve Adams, and she would not be out of my life until sometime after I switched on a penlight and found myself in a staring match with her fixed, dead eyes.
33
What I did next may seem ridiculous and perhaps amusing, but I can assure you that nothing about it struck me as funny at the time.
I sat there on the edge of my bed, the strip of paper stretched between the thumbs and forefingers of my hands, staring at the eyes clipped from a magazine photo. Those eyes weren’t hers, weren’t real, and yet I felt that Fiona Cassidy could see me clearly through them, no matter where she might be at the moment, that they were juju for sure. She wasn’t just strange, not merely mentally disturbed. I had wanted to believe that she was a master lock-picker; but now I felt dead certain that she could conjure herself through doors and walls, that she possessed some occult power of which I had thus far seen only the simplest manifestations.
My first intention was to tear the eyeful strip into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet. But the next thing I knew, I was in the kitchen, opening a cabinet door under the sink. Among the items stored there was a can with a tightly fitted lid, in which my mother kept a box of six-inch-long matches that she used to reignite the pilot light on the gas oven when occasionally it went out. From a drawer near the cooktop, I withdrew a pair of chef’s tongs.