Tunnel Vision Read Free Page A

Benedictine monks at the other end of the state. They divorced, and in so doing Nick had left a gaping hole in Zack’s young life and Maggie full of grief and contempt. Three years ago, Nick died of cardiac arrest and was cremated.
    Volker and Gretch .
    Even after all these years, the very syllables of the killers’ names made Maggie’s stomach leak acid.
    For maybe twenty minutes, she and Kate sat by Zack’s bed without speaking. Then Maggie said, “I don’t even know him anymore. Since Nick died, he barely talks to me. He’s like a stranger, like someone else’s son.”
    “He’s on his own now,” Kate said. “He’s got school, he lives in the city. Kids do that. They grow up and go off on their own. It happens to every parent.”
    “Does it? Weeks after he and Amanda broke up, he finally told me. I’m like the last person to know what’s going on in his life. I sometimes feel childless.”
    “What was he doing biking in the middle of the night anyway?”
    “At a friend’s house playing cards.” Then she added, “He’s got a gambling problem.” The moment the words hit the air, she wished she could pull them back.
    Kate glared at her in dismay. “He has?”
    “He’s in debt. I don’t know how much, but he’s been trying to gamble his way out.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Bills and overdraft notices used to come to the house till I spoke to him.” She shook her head. “I’m a lousy mother.”
    “No, you’re not. And you’re not responsible for his financial problems.”
    “I wish I believed in God so I could pray. I really do.”
    At the foot of the bed, she spotted Zack’s backpack with his laptop in it. He brought it wherever he went because he was working on his master’s thesis to meet a deadline. The topic was the influence of Darwinian theory on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . As he had explained it, he was using a core argument in an early Darwin essay, that revenge is the strongest human instinct, and applying that to understanding character motivations in the novel. His main argument was that revenge drove Victor Frankenstein to create life artificially in hopes of killing death.
    Maggie looked at the backpack, knowing how much he had put into the paper. Then she began to sob again. Kate put her arm around her. “He’ll be back.”
    Maggie’s eyes roamed over the monitors, coming to rest on the orange squiggle monitoring his heart. As she fixed on it, she sent up a silent prayer that there would be billions left in that big stallion heart. “The last time I was here was when he was born. Twenty-four years ago. June six, seven eleven at night. I can still remember when they handed him to me.”
    “Of course you can,” Kate said.
    Zack had arrived a week early, while Kate and her husband, Bob, were in California on business. “Did you know he was born with a caul?”
    “A caul?”
    “Part of the amniotic sac had covered his head. The nurse gasped. I guess she was new and hadn’t seen that before. The doctor broke the sac and removed it from his face. Later he said that in olden times a caul was a sign that the baby would have mystical powers.”
    “I never knew that.”
    “Others believed it was a sign the child would grow up to be a demon.”
    “And like most legends, it’s just that—an empty legend.”
    “I suppose, but I wish I hadn’t heard that.” She glanced at Zack. “Like maybe there’s some kind of curse or something.”
    “Pardon my French, but that’s plain bullshit.”
    Maggie squeezed her hand again. “What if he doesn’t wake up?”
    Please bring him back, she prayed.
    But, ironically, Jake’s murderers killed God for her. For a year or more she had stumbled along with her life on autopilot, her will all but extinguished. Eventually she moved out of near lethal grief to a state of seminumbness in order to raise Zack. Three years after Nick secreted himself in his monastery, a Brother Thomas Albani from the same order showed up with an