was of no interest whatsoever when compared to the source of the light
above.
From the day of Jimmy’s death until Hatch’s resuscitation, Lindsey had
refused to take solace from any god who would create a world with death
in it. He a priest suggesting prayer as a route to acceptance and
psychological healing, and Lindsey’s response had been cold and
dismissive: Prayer never works. Eat no miracles, Father. stay and the
living only wait to join them. Something had changed in her now.
The black rose in the painting was death. Yet it had no power over
Jimmy.
He had gone beyond death, and it meant nothing to him. He was rising
above it. And by being able to conceive of the painting and bring it
off so flawlessly, Lindsey had found a way to say goodbye to the boy at
last,.
goodbye without regrets, goodbye without bitterness, goodbye with love
and with a sag new acceptance of the need for belief in something more
than a life that ended always in a cold, black hole in the ground.
“It’s so beautiful,” Regina said with genuine awe. “Scary in a way, I
don’t know why… … . but so beautiful.” Hatch looked up from the
painting, met Lindsey’s eyes, tried to say something, but could not
speak. Since his resuscitation, there had been a rebirth of Lindsey’s
heart as well as his own, and they had confronted the mistake they had
made by losing five years to grief. But on some fundamental level, they
had not accepted that life could ever be as sweet as it had been before
that one small death; they had not-let Jimmy go. Now, meeting Lindsey’s
eyes, he knew that she had actually embraced hope again without
reservation. The full weight of his little boy’s death fell upon Hatch
as it had not in years, because if Lindsey could make peace with God, he
must do so as well. He tried to again, could not, looked again at the
painting, he was going to cry, and left the room.
He didn’t know where he was going. Without quite remembering taking any
step along the route, he went downstairs, into the den that they had
offered to Regina as a bedroom, opened the French doors, and stepped
into the rose garden at the side of the house.
In the warm, afternoon sun, the roses were red, white, yellow, pink, and
the shade of peach skins, some only buds and some as big as saucers, but
not one of them black. The air was full of their enchanting fragrance.
With the taste of salt in the corners of his mouth, he reached out with
both hands toward the nearest rose-laden bush, intending to touch the
flowers, but his hands stopped short of them. With his arms thus
forming a cradle, he suddenly could feel a weight draped across them.
In reality, nothing was in his arms, but the burden he felt was no
mystery; he remembered, as if it had been an hour ago, how the body of
his cancer-wasted son had felt.
In the final moments before death’s hateful visitation, he had pulled
the wires and tubes from Jim, had lifted him off the sweat-soaked
hospital bed, and had sat in a chair by the window, holding him close
and murmuring to him until the pale, parted lips drew no more breath.
Until his own death, Hatch would remember precisely the weight of the
wasted boy in his arms, the sharpness of bones with so little flesh left
to pad them, the awful dry heat pouring off skin translucent with
sickness, the heart-rendingfragility.
He felt all that now, in his empty arms, there in the rose garden.
When he looked up at the summer sky, he said, “Why?” as if there were
Someone to answer. “He was so small,” Hatch said. “He was so damned
small.”
As he spoke, the burden was heavier than it had ever been in that
hospital room, a thousand tons in his empty arms, maybe because he still
didn’t want to free himself of it as much as he thought he did.
But then a strange thing happened-the weight in his arms slowly