She never set off a chain reaction of destruction among their antiques. She never embarrassed them by getting inappropriately sentimental, bursting into tears, and thereby activating the old snot faucet; she unfailingly produced tears and snot only when they were called for. She never mortified them by accidentally flipping an entire plate of food into the air at a restaurant and over the head of the President of the United States at the next table. She never accidentally set the house on fire, never farted in polite company, and never scared the bejesus out of smaller neighborhood children with her leg brace and curious right hand. Better still, she stopped worrying about doing all those things (and more), and in time she did not even recall the tremendous energies that she once had wasted upon such unlikely concerns.
She kept writing. She got better at it. When she was just fourteen, she won a national writing competition for teenagers. The prize was a rather nice watch and a check for five hundred dollars. She used some of the money for a subscription to Publishers Weekly and a complete set of the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray. She no longer had an interest in writing about intelligent pigs from outer space, largely because she was learning that more curious characters could be found all around her, many of them native Californians.
She no longer talked to God. It seemed childish to chatter at Him. Besides, she no longer needed His constant attention. For a while she had thought He had gone away or had never existed, but she had decided 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 furry 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 people 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: “Uriel — 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.