higher design was far crueler than the coldest shoulder an indifferent universe would have to offer.
Gabrielle was barefoot now with her slacks rolled up, and he watched her feet on the warm ground, watched the dust cake between her toes. What a privilege that he’d been able to see them over so many years, in so many circumstances — child-size to full-grown, wading in streams and kicking in lakes, running through grass and skipping over hot pavement, and, more languidly, tracing chills of pleasure along his legs, his chest. Her feet. He thought of them in New York, crammed aching into professional shoes, and could scarcely tolerate the thought. Her dear feet.
Congratulations, she was telling him, and he knew she meant it but there was bitterness too. Congratulations, you solved the grand mystery of your life, and was it worth everything you gave up to do it? Worth your blood and scarred skin and the pain you caused others when they realized they could never possess you more than a vision from a head injury? Congratulations, after years of obsessive pursuit you tracked down your angel, and is he all you hoped he would be? Does his conversation answer all the questions that roasted your heart alive? Now you must know things the rest of us can only guess at or dream about, and how pleased with your choices that must make you feel. So congratulations. Was it worth the life with me you traded for it? Was it worth the children we never had?
Suddenly Austin wasn’t sure if she was saying all this, or only part of it and he was filling in the rest with everything she left unsaid but smoldering in her eyes. Or maybe she’d said none of it and this had lain in his heart all along, waiting until the sight of her would make it scream.
He wasn’t even sure she was really here.
Was it worth it — and what price Paradise for those who refuse to wait?
He left the splintery porch, found Gabrielle to be as solid as anything he could hope to believe in. Her jacket was gone now and she wore a sleeveless top, buttery-gold skin of her shoulders so real to the touch, hot with the sun. Stiff and resistant at first but this was good; illusions wouldn’t bother to fight. No illusion would give in so sublimely. And then, such quiet bliss to hold each other again after eleven years of forever.
“I hate you,” she murmured into the side of his neck, her eyes and nose almost as wet as her mouth.
They held each other in the silent heat, before towering watchers of red stone, their bare feet curled firm into kingdoms of dust.
And for now — and only now, he feared — it was enough. It was the world, or at least the best this one had to offer.
*
After that day on the tracks and in the tunnel, he had a harder time finding anyone who believed him than he thought he would. Disturbed kids looking for attention, some said, and making a bad joke of it in the doing. While it had happened before Austin’s time, the town still felt a persistent soreness over three boys even younger, killed on those same tracks.
Believers? Certainly not his parents. The intercession of a divine guardian made no difference. Angels didn’t eat beans from cans. Period. He’d hoped that the preacher at his parents’ church would take his side, but while Reverend Hollis showed no annoyance over suspicions of hoax or the price of a ruined pair of Levi’s, even at that age Austin knew when he was being talked down to.
Believers? Even then there was only Gabrielle.
Over the next few years they looked for angels in the clouds, in the trees, in the tall fields of summer corn. They hunted for them in the black dust of coal piles and in the muddy waters of river, pond, and stream. They watched for them among the stars that flickered or streaked in night skies, and it was here they always felt closest to their quarry, but still too far away.
Year by year they grew taller, grew hair in places they’d never had it before, as the world grew wider to accommodate them, then swallow them altogether. Humanity’s seething mass and the questions it forced about slaughters and plagues and planes that fell from the sky — none of it boded well for the presence of holy messengers.
He was willing to admit defeat — maybe it really had been a dream — but Gabrielle wouldn’t let him. Telling him, “Even if you did fall and hit your head, so what? I know what I saw happen to you and
It was years before he walked the tunnel all the way back to the wall again, and when at last he did, he did it alone because that was the way he was spending much of his time anymore, gawky and bespotted with acne that no prayer seemed able to scrub away, and Gabrielle by now had friends who’d never had ten words for him and never would.
Over the years he’d entered the tunnel often but only so far, as if stayed by some inner hand from violating the sanctity of a chamber whose threshold should not be crossed until he was ready. It had, of course, been checked out by the rescuers he hadn’t needed after his fall from the train. He heard they’d found nothing. The cold ashes of a dead fire — meaningless in an area known for transients. No bedroll, no empty can of beans.
Once a child, now an adolescent, he remembered a declivity in the ground, in one corner where the defaced concrete wall met the wall of rock. Seepage had always filled it before, a wide pool of cold, inky water. He’d chucked his share of rocks into it, taking pains to never get
But when he turned his flashlight on it now, it was nothing but a hollow, sharply sloping walls of moist earth with a few inches of stagnant water in the bottom. And a body. It lay on its side, curled like a discarded fetus, little more than bones, rags, scraps of leathery hide, and the scraggly seaweed of a wild beard. Something about it — the scorching of an exposed collarbone splitting through the thin flesh, maybe — seemed seared to him, as if it had charred halfway to mummification, then fell in the pool and sank to the bottom. Preserved by minerals, maybe, and waiting to be found. Time capsule. Message in a water bottle. A cold gust of laughter blown into his face from the past.
There was no rational reason to step into that shallow grave, feel the chilly water flood his sneakers, sluice at his ankles. No rational reason to lay hands on that soggy husk or peel back the shriveled flaps of its eyelids. He did it anyway.
Because there was no rational reason to expect those peculiar eyes to be anything but ooze by now … yet they’d survived to stare from their otherwise ruined sockets, the whites untarnished by rot, the irises unfaded — one brown, the other blue. It occurred to him this time — it would not have before — that these were eyes for two worlds, one turned toward earth, the other toward sky.
