Free A Single Eye by Susan Dunlap Page B

even smiled. After all he wasn’t the roshi, not even the jisha anymore.
    He motioned me off the path behind a bench. Before now, I hadn’t taken in quite how tall he was. I was staring at his chest. I looked up and caught him glaring at my copper curls the way strangers had at Mom’s red frizz, like it made the head beneath incapable of linear thought.
    â€œYou had something to say?” My sharp tone must have startled him. It startled me .
    He cleared his throat, then covered his mouth with a hand. “As the sesshin director,” he said, “I need to know Roshi’s plans. You can meet with me each morning after breakfast. Come to where I caught the truck this afternoon.”
    Where you pulled me out of the truck this afternoon, I thought. “A meeting half a mile down the road? What are we, spies?”
    He breathed in through his teeth. “We don’t want to disturb people.”
    The clappers struck again.
    â€œI’ll take it up with Leo.”
    He hunched toward me and for an instant I thought he was going to grab my shoulders like he did in the truck. Then he straightened to almost military erectness and ordered, “Go ahead, ask Roshi. He’ll tell you to meet with the sesshin director.”
    He was right, and what really got to me was that it wasn’t for the reasons he assumed. I’d have bet my cocoa and Amber’s that if I went to Leo to complain about meeting anyone on the road to the woods, Leo would just laugh. There was no way I’d let Rob see me cringe at the sight of trees. But there was no way out.
    â€œRight then,” Rob said smugly. “Tomorrow at the beginning of work period.”
    I could have laughed. “Sorry. Can’t. I have to get Leo— Roshi’s —newspaper from the meadow then.”
    â€œNo problem. We can talk on the way.” He turned and strode across the knoll toward the zendo, black robes flying out behind him as if he were a pirate ship in full sail.
    Monasteries have buildings; sesshin directors have use of rooms. Teachers meet with sesshin directors. A sesshin director doesn’t set up a rendezvous with an underling to find out the topic of the next day’s lecture and the dokusan schedule. Not unless he knows the teacher is making a point of not letting him know. And that would be stranger yet. In all the sesshins I had sat, nothing like that had ever happened. It would be like the president planning a summit and not telling his chief of staff.
    Whatever Rob was going to ask me or tell me was something I could not afford to miss. I had thought the last thing I wanted to do was walk through the woods to get Leo’s newspaper. I’d been wrong. The last thing was to head in among the trees to meet the guy whose job I had usurped. And that was just what I had to do—somehow.

C HAPTER S EVEN

    T he clappers sounded again, wood on wood but cutting like a bell through the thick wet air. No longer the three preliminary hits that meant there was ten minutes to get to the zendo. Now the roll-down had begun, with strikes frustratingly slow to begin with but picking up speed steadily. Move toward the zendo. Sesshin’s about to begin .
    Cabin doors opened. Two women with blue umbrellas hurried across the path. A man in a dark green slicker came out of the men’s dorm, stopped dead and rushed back inside, as if an item left behind now would be lost forever. On the path a tall man put his arm around a woman’s shoulder and whispered urgently, then he kissed her ear and both of them smiled nervously. Three women passed by, wrapping thick shawls around their own shoulders. They ambled across the grass, one grabbed the others, stopped, and all three laughed softly in the rain before they moved on. The knoll filled with people, some college-aged to some fiftyish and one man who looked almost seventy. The clappers sounded again, an odd melodic ring of expectation. I felt the draw of