I’LL BE SEEING YOU

By

Kay Wilde

© copyright August 2005, Kay Wilde

Cover art by Eliza Black, © copyright August 2005

ISBN 1-58608-596-4

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, GA 31636

www.newconceptspublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Prologue

Lyssa Ryan awoke with a start, her heart pounding and roaring in her ears like a drum roll on a huge kettle drum. Raising her hand to her chest, she took deep, calming breaths in an attempt to slow her erratic heart rate.

Her dreams the past two nights had been filled with unfamiliar, disjointed images which caused her to wake with an acute sensation of loss that went beyond what she had felt every morning during the past six months when she awoke to darkness. Deep, impenetrable darkness.

Two days ago she’d received the cornea transplant she prayed would restore her sight. Although most cornea transplants were simple procedures performed on an outpatient basis, hers was more complex. Because her vision loss had been caused by burns and scars on her corneas resulting from the careless use of bottle rockets by a group of teenagers at a Fourth Of July celebration, Lyssa’s ophthalmologist was being more cautious and was unfortunately less optimistic regarding a successful outcome. He’d insisted that she remain in the hospital and wanted to wait an extra day before removing the eye patches. Under those circumstances, strange dreams and turbulent emotions were to be expected.

For the past six months she’d had hope, slim at best, but hope nonetheless. That ray of hope had allowed her to survive the worst six months of her life. And now, today, she would know if the cornea transplant would restore her vision, or if she would be forced to live the rest of her life in darkness. For Lyssa, an artist, that would be worse than no life at all.

Sliding her hand along the bed rail until she reached the controls, Lyssa pressed the button to raise the head of the bed. Her legs began to rise instead. Damn it. The next button lowered the legs. The third had the desired effect. She kept the button depressed until the head of the bed was in a comfortable, slightly reclining position. Her heart rate steadied to a more normal rhythm, and the strange images from her dream began to fade.

Lying quietly and listening to the sounds in the corridor outside her room, Lyssa attempted to judge the time. It was relatively quiet. There was a ding indicating that someone had rung for a nurse. She could hear the squeak-squeak-squeak of rubber soled shoes against the tile floor and indistinguishable words from lowered voices in the direction of the nurses’ station. All in all, the sounds told her very little. The time could be anywhere between the time she went to sleep and six-thirty in the morning. Activity picked up around six-forty-five prior to the seven A.M. shift change, followed closely thereafter by the clickety-click clatter of wheels from the carts carrying the breakfast trays. Accompanying the sound would be the aroma emanating from the food trays; eggs, bacon, sausage, oatmeal, and coffee. She’d never realized that oatmeal had a distinct aroma, or that coffee smelled differently depending upon the blend and even the setting.

Lyssa’s rehab therapist told her that most people who lost a sense compensated with their other senses. In her case, the heightened sense of smell had been a less than pleasant acquisition. She was now acutely aware of odors she hadn’t noticed before. While in the hospital, Lyssa found the smell of antiseptic mingled with the aroma of multiple food choices almost nauseating.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of her sightless state, beyond the obvious, was the inability to distinguish day from night and to gauge the passage of time, which seemed to stretch out before her like a deep, dark, endless tunnel. A suggestion from her therapist had helped to a degree. In Lyssa’s sighted past, she rarely watched television, but instead listened to music or read. Now, Lyssa turned on the television as soon as she awoke each morning, using the programming schedule as an audio clock: early morning talk shows, afternoon soaps, then more talk shows, the six o’clock news, evening sitcoms, and news at eleven.

She had taken so much for granted. The accident had cost her much more than she could ever have imagined. In addition to losing her sight and her career, Lyssa had also lost the independence and the self-reliance that she had guarded so jealously.

As the only child of a single mother who was content to live on welfare and any other government assistance she could wrangle from the system, Lyssa had grown up determined not to follow in her mother’s footsteps. She had spent most of her evenings alone, while her mother sat on a stool at the local bar, experiencing role reversal at an early age. The daughter caring for the mother, forced to be the adult in the family without ever being the child.

More out of her need to escape the freeloading man of the month than a desire to desert her mother, Lyssa had moved out on her own when she was only seventeen and just out of high school. When she went back to check on her mother a couple of weeks later, Lyssa found someone else living in their old apartment. Neighbors told her that merely days after Lyssa left, her mother had packed up and moved out, leaving no forwarding address and owing two months back rent. Nearly eight years passed without a word from her mother, eight years of not knowing whether she was dead or alive, eight years of working two minimum wage jobs and selling her paintings on the sidewalk or in Central Park to make ends meet.

Then two years ago, on a beautiful spring afternoon, one of Lyssa’s paintings caught the eye of Martina Sheffield, owner of a prestigious art gallery. She’d been extremely lucky and was the first to admit it. While many truly gifted artists work their entire life without making it, Lyssa, at only twenty-five, had been given the opportunity of a lifetime. In the process, she’d not only gained the support of an influential art dealer, she’d also found a trusted friend in the flamboyant Martina.

Barely two days after Lyssa’s first successful gallery opening and rave reviews from the newspaper art critics, Lyssa’s mother showed up on her doorstep. Gloria Ryan’s tearful remorse had been eloquent, as was her profuse praise of Lyssa’s success. While Lyssa’s mother never asked for money outright, her unannounced visits and frequent phone calls were liberally peppered with less than subtle hints. Lyssa, responsible daughter that she was, fool that she was, always ended up writing her a check. Then, after the accident, when it looked like Lyssa’s career was over, when she was frightened and in excruciating pain, Gloria Ryan was nowhere to be found.

Before the accident, Lyssa had been so busy that she could barely find enough hours in the day to accomplish everything she needed to do. Now there was so little Lyssa could do on her own that she was left with too much idle time on her hands and too much time to think. It was all too easy to dwell on the past, bemoan what might have been, and to wallow in self-pity. Whenever Lyssa felt herself falling into that particular emotional trap, she pulled herself up and refused to give in to it.

Lyssa slowly moved her hand across the Formica top of the table next to the bed, fumbling only slightly in her attempt to locate the clock. She lightly touched the clock hands with her fingertips, wondering if the hospital ordered the clocks specially made without the covers or if they had to remove them like she had. It was six-fifteen. Dr. Bartlett made his morning rounds between eight and nine. Less than three hours to go ... then she’d know.

Too on edge to just lie there, Lyssa pushed aside the blanket covering her. She knew from past experience that attempting to lower the bed rails was an exercise in frustration, so she scooted downward toward the foot of the bed. When she was beyond the rail on the right side, she slid her legs over the side and stood. The tile floor was cold beneath her bare feet, but she wasn’t in the mood to hunt for her slippers. She put her right hand on the bed rail and her left on the corner of the foot board to get her bearings. Hands stretched out in front of her, Lyssa began to walk toward the bathroom--exactly twenty steps, as she’d counted out her first day here. When her hand felt the door frame, she reached inside to the left of the door for the light switch and flipped it on.

Stupid. As if turning on the light made a bit of difference. She had discovered early on that old habits died hard. After relieving herself, Lyssa stood at the sink, turned on the water and reached for the soap dispenser attached to the wall just beneath the mirror.

She dried her hands on the towel hanging to her right and ran her hands toward the back of the sink to where she’d left her toothbrush and toothpaste the night before. Lyssa’s hands shook so badly as she unscrewed the cap from the toothpaste that she dropped the lid. She heard it hit the floor, bounce, and then roll. To hell with it. She wasn’t about to crawl around on the floor attempting to locate the damned thing by feel. Using the tip of the index finger of her left hand as a guide, she carefully applied the paste to her toothbrush and proceeded to brush her teeth. Misjudging the location of the glass, she bumped it with the back of her hand and knocked it off the sink. Like the toothpaste cap, it hit the floor with a plastic-upon-tile clatter.

Lyssa’s anxiety over the outcome of the surgery was mounting and her sense of helpless frustration was pushing her to the breaking point. She recognized the warning signs of an approaching panic attack, which she knew from past experience could wrap itself around her like a suffocating shroud, rendering her incapable of functioning. Lyssa gripped the cold porcelain of the sink for support and mentally fought it off.

I am not a quitter. I will beat this thing. I will see again. Lyssa repeated the mantra over and over again until she felt the mind-and-body-numbing panic begin to subside. She refused to believe that God would allow her to reach her lifelong dream of becoming a successful artist, then take it all way from her just when she was beginning to make a name for herself.

Lyssa ran her fingertips over the cool, smooth surface of the mirror mounted to the wall behind the sink. How many times over the years had she looked at her own image staring back at her without really seeing it? As an artist, she had the ability to see something once, then later recreate it in her mind and transfer that image to canvas with amazing accuracy. Yet were she to attempt a self-portrait, Lyssa knew she would run into difficulty. She had never been overly concerned about her appearance, never been one to spend a lot of time in front of a mirror. It had never bothered her that she hadn’t been blessed with the striking features attributed to beautiful women, but she knew she was considered attractive. Actually, cute was the term most often applied to her and it irritated the hell out of her. She didn’t care if she was only five-foot-two and one hundred and ten pounds; puppies, kittens, and babies were cute, not twenty seven year old women.

Like so many things in the past six months, now that she couldn’t see her own reflection staring back at her, the need to do so had taken on monumental importance.

For convenience sake, she’d always worn her long, light to medium brown hair pulled back and secured at the nape of her neck with an elastic band. Now it was all she could manage. Mousey brown she called it, not a particularly creative description, especially since she had never seen a brown mouse. The color of the gleaming walnut furniture in her bedroom, with natural blonde highlights in the grain of the wood was a more apt description.

Smoothing her fingertips over her face as she’d done countless times since the accident, Lyssa attempted to detect any permanent reminders from the accident. The burns to her face had been superficial, healing quickly with no residual scarring ... at least that’s what everyone told her. But had they told her the truth?

Friends always told Lyssa that her eyes were her best feature. They were dark brown with gold flecks and thick, slightly curved lashes that required no mascara. It was just as well because she’d rarely taken the time to apply makeup. Her eyes began to burn with the onset of unwelcome tears, which she ruthlessly fought back. She had never been one to give into weeping, least of all now when the salt in her tears burned like hell.

Bringing all her mental clarity and concentration to bear, Lyssa gazed sightlessly toward the mirror as she attempted to visualize her reflection looking back at her. In her mind’s eye, a hazy, darkened silhouette began to form. Through the mist clouding her mind, a face began to emerge, growing clearer, the features more distinct, until it looked back at her with sad, compassion-filled eyes. Deep, emerald green eyes. Short blonde hair, cut and styled to feather around the face and accentuate the delicate features of an incredibly beautiful woman. The face she pictured in her mind ... belonged to a stranger.