be able to eat anything he wanted and burn it off without gaining weight
or turning soft. And what he wanted to eat, for some reason he didn't
understand, was what he had liked when he'd been a kid.
He opened a root beer and took a long, warm swallow.
He withdrew a single cookie from the bag of Oreos. He carefully
separated the two chocolate wafers without damaging them. The circle of
white icing stuck entirely to the wafer in his left hand. That meant he
was going to be rich and famous when he grew up. If it had stuck to the
one in his right hand, it would have meant that he was going to be
famous but not necessarily rich, which could mean just about anything
from being a rock-'n'-roll star to an assassin who would take out the
President of the United States. If some of the icing stuck to both
wafers, that meant you had to eat another cookie or risk having no
future at all.
As he licked the sweet icing, letting it dissolve slowly on his tongue,
he stared up the empty elevator shaft, thinking about how interesting it
was that he had chosen the abandoned amusement park for his hideaway
when the world offered so many dark and lonely places from which to
choose.
He had been there a few times as a boy, when the park was still in
operation, most recently eight years ago, when he had been twelve,
little more than a year before the operation closed down. On that most
special evening of his childhood, he had committed his first murder
there, beginning his long romance with death. Now he was back.
He licked away the last of the icing.
He ate the first chocolate wafer. He ate the second.
He took another cookie out of the bag.
He sipped the warm root beer.
He wished he were dead. Fully dead. It was the only way to begin his
existence on the Other Side.
"If wishes were cows," he said, "we'd eat steak every day, wouldn't we?"
He ate the second cookie, finished the root beer, then stretched out on
his back to sleep.
Sleeping, he dreamed. They were peculiar dreams of people he had never
seen, places he had never been, events that he had never witnessed.
Water all around him, chunks of floating ice, snow sheeting through a
hard wind. A woman in a wheelchair, laughing and weeping at the same
time. A hospital bed, banded by shadows and stripes of golden sunlight.
The woman in the wheelchair, laughing and weeping. The woman in the
wheelchair, laughing. The woman in the wheelchair. The woman.
In the fields of life, a harvest sometimes comes far out of season, when
we thought the earth was old and could see no earthly reason to rise for
work at break of dawn, and put our muscles to the test.
With winter here and autumn gone, it just seems best to rest, to rest.
But under winter feels so cold, wait the dormant seeds of seasons
unborn, and so the heart does hold hope that heals all bitter lesions.
if he were an accused infidel on trial for his life during the
Inquisition.
Two priests were present in the attorney's office. Although only of
average height, Father Jiminez was as imposing as any man a foot taller,
with jet-black hair and eyes even darker, in a black clerical suit with
a Roman collar. He stood with his back to the windows. The gently
swaying palm trees and blue skies of Newport Beach behind him did not
lighten the atmosphere in the mahogany-paneled, antique-filled office
where they were gathered, and in silhouette Jiminez was an ominous
figure. Father Duran, still in his twenties and perhaps twenty-five
years younger than Father Jiminez, was thin, with ascetic features and a
pallid complexion.
The young priest appeared to be enthralled by a collection of Meiji
Period Satsuma vases, incensers, and bowls in a large display case at
the far end of the office, but Hatch could not escape the feeling that
Duran was faking interest in the Japanese porcelains and was actually
Louis XVI sofa.
Two nuns were present, as well, and they seemed, to Hatch, more
threatening than the priests. They were of an order that favored the
voluminous, old-fashioned habits not seen so often these days. They
wore starched wimples, their faces framed in ovals of white linen that
made them look especially severe. Sister Immaculata, who was in charge
of St. Thomas's Home for Children, looked like a great black bird of
prey perched on the armchair to the right of the sofa, and Hatch would
not have been surprised if she had suddenly let out a screechy cry,
leapt into flight with a great flap of her robes, swooped around the
room, and dive-bombed him with the intention of pecking off his nose.
Her executive assistant was a somewhat younger, intense nun who paced
ceaselessly and had a stare more penetrating than a steel-cutting laser
beam. Hatch had temporarily forgotten her name and thought of her as
The Nun with No Name, because she reminded him of Clint Eastwood playing
The Man with No Name in those old spaghetti Westerns.
He was being unfair, more than unfair, a little irrational due to a
world-class case of nerves. Everyone in the attorney's office was there
to help him and Lindsey. Father Jiminez, the rector of St.
Thomas's Church, who raised much of the annual budget of the orphanage
headed by Sister Immaculata, was really no more ominous than the priest
in Going My Way, a Latino Bing Crosby, and Father Duran seemed
sweet-tempered and shy. In reality, Sister Immaculata looked no more
like a bird of prey than she did a stripper, and The Nun with No Name
had a genuine and almost constant smile that more than compensated for
whatever negative emotions one might choose to read into her piercing
stare.
The priests and nuns tried to keep a light conversation going; Hatch and
Lindsey were, in fact, the ones who were too tense to be as sociable as
the situation required So much was at stake. That was what made Hatch
jumpy, which was unusual, because he was ordinarily the most mellow man
to be found outside of the third hour of a beer-drinking contest. He
wanted the meeting to go well because his and Lindsey's happiness, their
future, the success of their new life depended on itWell, that was not
true, either. That was overstating the case again.
He couldn't help it.
Since he had been resuscitated more than seven weeks ago, he and Lindsey
had undergone an emotional sea change together. The long, smothering
tide of despair, which had rolled over them upon Jimmy's death, abruptly
abated. They realized they were still together only by virtue of a
medical miracle. Not to be thankful for that reprieve, not to fully
enjoy the borrowed time they had been given, would have made them
ungrateful to both God and their physicians. More than that-it would
have been stupid. They had been right to mourn Jimmy, but somewhere
along the way, they had allowed grief to degenerate into self-pity and
chronic depression, which had not been right at all.
they were more stubborn than
he had thought. The important thing was
that they had been jolted and were determined to get on with their lives
at last.
To both of them, getting on with life meant having a child in the house
again. The desire for a child was not a sentimental attempt to
recapture the mood of the past, and it wasn't a neurotic need to replace
Jimmy in order to finish getting over his death. They were just good
with kids; they liked kids; and giving of themselves to a child was
enormously satisfying.
They had to adopt. That was the hitch. Lindsey's pregnancy had been
troubled, and her labor had been unusually long and painful. Jimmy's
birth was a near thing, and when at last he made it into the world, the
doctors informed Lindsey that she would not be capable of having any
more children.
The Nun with No Name stopped pacing, pulled up the voluminous sleeve of
her habit, and looked at her wristwatch. "Maybe I should go see what's
keeping her."
"Give the child a little more time," Sister Immaculata said quietly.
With one plump white hand, she smoothed the folds of her habit. "If you
go to check on her, she'll feel you don't trust her to be able to take
care of herself. There's nothing in the ladies' restroom that she can't
deal with herself. I doubt she even had the need to use it. She
probably just wanted to be alone a few minutes before the meeting, to
settle her nerves."
To Lindsey and Hatch, Father Jiminez said, "Sorry about the delay."
"That's okay," Hatch said, fidgeting on the sofa. "We understand.
We're a little nervous ourselves."
Initial inquiries made it clear that a lot-a veritable army-of couples
were waiting for children to become available for adoption. Some had
been kept in suspense for two years. After being childless for five
years already, Hatch and Lindsey didn't have the patience to go on the
bottom of anyone's waiting list.
They were left with only two options, the first of which was to attempt
to adopt a child of another race, black or Asian or Hispanic. Most
would be adoptive parents were white and were waiting for a white baby
that might conceivably pass for their own, while countless orphans of
various minority groups were destined for institutions and unfulfilled
dreams of being part of a family. Skin color meant nothing to either
Hatch or Lindsey. They would have been happy with any child regardless
of its heritage. But in recent years, misguided do-goodism in the name
of civil rights had led to the imposition of an array of new rules and
regulations Agencies enforced them with mind-numbing exactitude. The
theory was that no child could be truly happy if raised outside of its
ethnic group, which was the kind of elitist nonsense and reverse
racism-that sociologists and academia formulated without consulting the
lonely kids they purported to protect.
The second option was to adopt a disabled child. There were far fewer
disabled than minority orphans-even including technical orphans whose
parents were alive somewhere but who'd been abandoned to the care of the
church or state because of their differentness. On the other hand,
though fewer in number, they were in even less demand than minority
kids. They had the tremendous advantage of being currently beyond the
interest of any pressure group eager to apply politically correct
standards to their care and handling. Sooner or later, no doubt, a
marching moron army would secure the passage of laws forbidding adoption
of a greeneyed, blond, deaf child by anyone but greened, blond, deaf
parents, but Hatch and Lindsey had the good fortune to have submitted an
application before the forces of chaos had descended.
Sometimes, when he thought about the troublesome bureaucrats they had
dealt with six weeks ago, when they had first decided to adopt, he
wanted to go back to those agencies and throttle the social workers who
had thwarted them, just choke a little common sense into them. And
wouldn't the expression of that desire make the good nuns and priests of
St. Thomas's Home eager to commend one of their charges to his care!
"You're still feeling well, no lasting effects from your ordeal, eating
well, sleeping well?" Father Jiminez inquired, obviously just to pass
the time while they waited for the subject of the meeting to arrive, not
meaning to impugn Hatch's claim to a full recovery and good health.
Lindsey-by nature more nervous than Hatch, and usually more prone to
overreaction than he was-leaned forward on the sofa. Just a touch
sharply, she said, "Hatch is at the top of the recovery curve for people
who've been resuscitated. Dr. Nyebern's ecstatic about him, given him
a clean bill of health, totally clean. It was all in our application."
Trying to soften Lindsey's reaction lest the priests and nuns start to
wonder if she was protesting too much, Hatch said, "I'm terrific,
really. I'd recommend a brief death to everyone. It relaxes you, gives
you a calmer perspective on life."
Everyone laughed politely.
In truth, Hatch was in excellent health. During the four days following
reanimation, he had suffered weakness, dizziness, nausea, lethargy, and
some memory lapses. But his strength, memory, and intellectual
functions returned one hundred percent. He had been back to normal for
almost seven weeks.
Jiminez's casual reference to sleeping habits had rattled Hatch a
little, which was probably what had also put Lindsey on edge. He had
not been fully honest when he had implied he was sleeping well, but his
strange dreams and the curious emotional effects they had on him were
not serious, hardly worth mentioning, so he did not feel that he had
actually lied to the priest.
They were so close to getting their new life started that he did not
want to say the wrong thing and cause any delays. Though Catholic
adoption services took considerable care in the placement of children,
they were not pointlessly slow and obstructive, as were public agencies,
especially when the would-be adopters were solid members of the
community like Hatch and Lindsey, and when the adoptee was a disabled
child with no option except continued institutionalization.
The future could begin for them this week, as long as they gave the
folks from St. Thomas's, who were already on their side, no reason to
reconsider.
Hatch was a little surprised by the piquancy of his desire to be a
father again. He felt as if he had been only half-alive, at best,
during the past five years. Now suddenly all the unused energies of
that half-decade flooded into him, overcharging him, making colors more
vibrant and sounds more melodious and feelings more intense, filling him
with a passion to go, do, see, live. And be somebody's dad again.
"I was wondering if I could ask you something," Father Duran said to
Hatch, turning away from the Satsuma collection. His wan complexion and
sharp features were enlivened by owlish eyes, full of warmth and
intelligence, enlarged by thick glasses. "It's a little personal, which
&
nbsp; is why I hesitate."
"Oh, sure, anything," Hatch said.
The young priest said, "Some people who've been clinically dead for
short periods of time, a minute or two, report ... well ... a certain
similar experience....
"A sense of rushing through a tunnel with an awesome light at the far
end," Hatch said, "a feeling of great peace, of going home at last?"
"Yes," Duran said, his pale face brightening. "That's what I meant
exactly."
Father Jiminez and the nuns were looking at Hatch with new interest, and
he wished he could tell them what they wanted to hear. He glanced at
Lindsey on the sofa beside him, then around at the assemblage, and said,
"I'm sorry, but I didn't have the experience so many people have
reported."
Father Duran's thin shoulders sagged a little. "Then what did you
experience?"
Hatch shook his head. "Nothing. I wish I had. It would be ...
comforting, wouldn't it? But in that sense, I guess I had a boring
death. I don't remember anything whatsoever from the time I was knocked
out when the car rolled over until I woke up hours later in a hospital
bed, looking at rain beating on a windowpanee-" He was interrupted by
the arrival of Salvatore Gujilio in whose office they were waiting.
Gujilio, a huge man, heavy and tall, swinging the door wide and entered
as he always did-taking big strides instead of ordinary steps, closing
the door behind him in a grand sweeping gesture. With the unstoppable
determination of a force of nature-rather like a disciplined tornado-he
swept around the room, greeting them one by one.