A magazine still loosely held in her hand. The image dissipated and the ringing in his ear returned. He shook his head and held tightly to the phone, feeling nauseous. He counted to ten and resisted the urge to puke inside the house.

The ringing stopped and a slurred voice said: “This better be an emergency.”

“It’s me, Mags,” Hopewell said. “I’m on my way over. Me and Kate got into it a little. It didn’t go well.”

He heard Maggie’s voice sharpen and he imagined—or saw—her sit up on the bed. “What the hell happened?”

Hopewell peered into the hall mirror, looking for an answer. “I have no fucking idea,” he said.

“Are you hurt?”

Hopewell laughed, and it sounded hysterical even to him. “My face is a little messed up,” he said. Then, suddenly rediscovering his anger, he added: “She took Billy.”

Maggie didn’t sound particularly surprised. “Do you want him back?” she asked.

“Of course I want the little fucker back! He’s my son.”

There was a pause on the line and Hopewell drew in a long, shallow breath. Maggie waited.

“He belongs to me,” Hopewell said softly. “He’s my boy, damn it.”

“It’s okay,” Maggie said. “I understand. And I’m sure we can sort it out. It’s hardly the first time the two of you have fought.”

Hopewell sighed. “Billy wasn’t the only thing she took,” he said slowly, as if explaining some complex moral code to a child.

“She stole your wallet?” Maggie said.

Hopewell glanced at himself again in the mirror and saw the ragged black hole that Kate had bestowed upon him, seamlessly blending with the dark interior of the hall.

“No, Mags,” Hopewell said. “She took my left eye. She ripped the fucking thing from my head.”

Another pause; this time Hopewell listened to the sound of his own grim statement reverberating down the line. He thought he could hear Maggie pulling on her clothes.

“I’ll help you find her,” she said flatly. “The boy too.”

Then the phone went dead in Hopewell’s hand.

He discarded the receiver and hobbled out of the house. He dragged himself inelegantly down the drive, climbed behind the wheel of the Land Rover and began driving slowly in the direction of Maggie’s apartment. He had no idea where that old prick McCray had taken his wife and boy, but he had a feeling that, if he probed the cold light that swam in the darkness of the empty socket, their destination, or, at the very least, a nebulous sense of it, would be disclosed in the misfiring synapse of the weeping, absent eye. He didn’t know why this might be so; didn’t even understand if this kind of demented vision would be at all reliable. But he felt a prism of heat and light in his left socket when he focused that flashed pulses of color into his brain, fractured images that he seemed instinctively able to decode: Kate and Billy in McCray’s truck. Billy fast asleep. His head resting in his mother’s lap.

How he was seeing such things he had no idea, nor did he have the inclination to dwell upon it. The fact that he had retained a connection to his family, no matter how indefinable, was enough to drive him on.

He stared hard through the windshield at the wash of the headlights and thanked the Lord that there were hardly any other vehicles on the road. His depth perception had been horribly compromised and, while he seemed to have gained something dark and inexplicable with the loss of his left eye, he was finding the simple task of driving almost beyond him.