that was foolish. She was aware of him all the time, winking at her
from the flowers, serenading her in the song of a bird, smiling at her
from the fury face of a kitten, touching her with a soft summer breeze.
She found a line in a book that she thought was apt, from Dave Tyson
Gentry: “True friendship comes when silence between two men is
comfortable.” Well, who was your best friend, if not God, and what did
you really need to say to Him or He to you when you both already knew
the most-and only important thing, which was that you would always be
there for each other.
Lindsey came through the events of those days less changed than she had
expected. Her paintings improved somewhat, but not tremendously. She
had never been dissatisfied with her work in the first place. She loved
Hatch no less than ever, and could not possibly have loved him more.
One thing that made her cringe, which never had before, was hearing
anyone say, “The worst is behind us now.” She knew that the worst was
never behind us. The worst came at the end. It was the end, the very
fact of it. Nothing could be worse than that. But she had learned to
live with the understanding that the worst was never behind her-and
still find joy in the day at hand.
As for God-she didn’t dwell on the issue. She raised Regina in the
Catholic Church, attending Mass with her each week, for that was part of
the promise she had made St. Thomas’s when they had arranged the
adoption. But she didn’t do it solely out of duty. She figured that
the Church was good for Regina-and that Regina might be good for the
Church, too. Any institution that counted Regina a member was going to
discover itself changed by her at least as much as she was changed-and
to its everlasting benefit. She had once said that prayers were never
answered, that the living lived only to die, but she had progressed
beyond that attitude. She would wait and see.
Hatch continued to deal successfully in antiques. Day by day his life
went pretty much as he hoped it would. As before, he was an easy-going
guy.
He never got angry. But the difference was that he had no anger left in
him to repress. The mellowness was genuine now.
From time to time, when the patterns of life seemed to have a grand
meaning that just barely eluded him, and when he was therefore in a
philosophical mood, he would go to his den and take two items from the
locked drawer.
One was the heat-browned issue of Arts American.
The other was a slip of paper he had brought back from the library one
day, after doing a bit of research. Two names were written on it, with
an identifying line after each. “Vassago-according to mythology, one of
the nine crown princes of Hell.” Below that was the name he had once
claimed was his own: “Urie-according to mythology, one of the archangels
serving as a personal attendant to God.”
He stared at these things and considered them carefully, and always he
reached no firm conclusions. Though he did decide, if you had to be
dead for eighty minutes and come back with no memory of the Other Side,
maybe it was because eighty minutes of that knowledge was more than just
a glimpse of a tunnel with a light at the end, and therefore more than
you could be expected to handle.
And if you had to bring something back with you from Beyond, and carry
it within you until it had concluded its assignment on this side of the
veil, an archangel wasn’t too shabby . . .
the end.