In the park, rocketing along on the roller coaster, Barty had an experience, a reaction to more than the canted turns and steep plunges. He grew excited in much the way that Agnes had seen him excited when grasping a new and arcane mathematical theory. At the end of the ride, he wanted to get back on immediately, and so they did. There are no long waits for the blind at amusement parks: always to the head of the line. Agnes rode twice again with him, and then Paul twice, and finally Angel accompanied him three times. This roller-coaster obsession wasn't about thrills or even amusement. His exuberance gave way to a thoughtful silence, especially after a seagull flew within inches of his face, feathers thrumming, startling him, on the next-to-last rollick along the tracks. Thereafter, the park held little interest for him, and all he would say was that he'd thought of a new way to feel things-by which he meant all the ways things are-a fresh angle of approach to that mystery.
After the amusement park, no hospital for the Pie Lady. With Wally near, she had a doctor all her own, capable of giving her the anticancer drugs and transfusions that she required. While radiation therapy is prescribed for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, it is much less useful to treat myeloblastic cases, and in this instance, it wasn't deemed helpful, which made treatment at home even easier.
In the first two weeks, when she wasn't on pie caravans, Agnes received guests in numbers that taxed her. But there were so many people she wanted to see one last time. She fought hard, giving the disease all the what- for that she could, and she held fast to hope, but she received the visitors nonetheless, just in case.
Worse than the tenderness in the bones, the bleeding gums, the headaches, the ugly bruises, worse than the anemia-related weariness and the spells of breathlessness, was the suffering that her battle caused to those whom she loved. More frequently as the days passed, they were unable to conceal their worry and their sorrow. She held their hands when they trembled. She asked them to pray with her when they expressed anger that this should happen to her-of all people, to her, and she wouldn't let them go until the anger was gone. More than once, she pulled sweet Angel into her lap, stroked her hair, and soothed her with talk of all the good times shared in better days. And always Barty, watching over her in his blindness, aware that she would not be dying in all the places where she was, but taking no consolation from the fact that she would continue to exist in other worlds where he could never again be at her side.
As terrible as the situation was for Barty, Agnes knew that it was equally difficult for Paul. She could only hold him in the night, and let herself be held. And more than once, she told him, 'If worse comes to worst, don't you go walking again.'
'All right,' he agreed, perhaps too easily.
'I mean it. You have a lot of responsibilities here. Barty. Pie Lady Services. People who depend on you. Friends who love you. When you came on board with me, mister, you bought into a whole lot more than you can walk away from.'
'I promise, Aggie. But you're not going anywhere.'
By the third week of October, she was bedridden.
By the first of November, they moved his mother's bed into the living room, so she could be in the center of things, where always she had been, though they admitted no guests now, only members of their family with its many names.
On the morning of November third, Barty asked Maria to inquire of Agnes what she would like to have read to her. 'Then when she answers you, just turn and leave the room. I'll take it from there.'
'Take what from there?' Maria asked.
'I have a little joke planned.'
Books were stacked high on a nearby table, favorite novels and volumes of verse, all of which Agnes had read before. With time so limited, she preferred the comfort of the familiar to the possibility that new writers and new stories would fail to please. Paul read to her often, as did Angel. Tom Vanadium sat with her, too, as did Celestina and Grace.
This morning, as Barty stood to one side listening, his mother asked Maria for poems by Emily Dickinson.
Maria, puzzled but cooperative, left the room as instructed, and Barty removed the correct book from the stack on the table, without anyone's guidance. He sat in the armchair at his mother's side and began to read:
'I never saw a Moor-never saw the Sea-Yet know I how the Heather looks-And what a Billow be.'
Pulling herself up in the bed, peering at him suspiciously, she said, 'You've gone and memorized old Emily.'
'Just reading from the page,' he assured her.
'I never spoke with God-Nor visited in Heaven-Yet certain am I of the spot-As if the Checks were given.'
'Barty?' she said wonderingly.
Thrilled to have inspired this awe in her, he closed the book. 'Remember what we talked about a long time ago? You asked me how come, if I could walk where the rain wasn't? '
'? then how come you couldn't walk where your eyes were healthy and leave the tumors there,' she remembered.
'I said it didn't work that way, and it doesn't. Yet? I don't actually walk in those other worlds to avoid the rain, but I sort of walk in the idea of those worlds?'
'Very quantum mechanics,' she said. 'You've said that before.'
He nodded. 'The effect not only comes before a cause in this case, but completely without a cause. The effect is staying dry in the rain, but the cause-supposedly walking in a dryer world-never occurs. Only the idea of it.'
'Weirder even than Tom Vanadium made it sound.'
'Anyway, something clicked in me on the roller coaster, and I grasped a new angle of approach to the problem. I've figured out that I can walk in the idea of sight, sort of sharing the vision of another me, in another reality, without actually going there.' He smiled into her astonishment. 'So what do you say about that?'
She wanted so badly to believe, to see her son made whole again, and the funny thing was that she could believe, and without emotional risk, because it was true.
To prove himself, he read a little of Dickens when she requested it, a passage from Great Expectations. Then a passage from Twain.
She asked him how many fingers she was holding up, and he said four, and four it was. Then two fingers. Then seven. Her hands so pale, the palms both bruised.
Because his lacrimal glands and tear ducts were intact, Barty could cry with his plastic eyes. Consequently, it didn't seem all that much more incredible to be seeing with them.
This trick, however, was far more difficult than walking where the rain wasn't. Sustaining vision took both a mental and physical toll from him.
Her joy was worth the price he paid to see it.
As mentally demanding and stressful as it was to maintain this borrowed sight, the harder thing was looking once more upon her face, after all these years of blindness, only to see her gaunt, so pale. The vital, lovely woman whose image he had guarded so vigilantly in memory would be nudged aside hereafter by this withered version.
They agreed that to the outside world, Barty must continue to appear to be a sightless man-or otherwise either be treated like a freak or be subjected, perhaps unwillingly, to experimentation. In the modern world, there was no tolerance for miracles. Only family could be told of this development.
'If this amazing thing can happen, Barty-what else?'
'Maybe this is enough.'
'Oh, it certainly is! It certainly is enough! But? I don't regret much, you know. But I do regret not being here to see why you and Angel have been brought together. I know it'll be something lovely, Barty. Something so fine.'
They had a few days for quiet celebration of this astonishing recovery of his sight, and in that time, she never tired of watching him read to her. He didn't think she even listened closely. It was the fact of him made whole that lifted her spirits so high as they were now, not any writer's words nor any story ever written.
On the afternoon of November ninth, when Paul and Barty were with her, reminiscing, and Angel was in the kitchen, getting drinks for them, his mother gasped and stiffened. Breathless, she paled past chalk, and when she could breathe and speak again, she said, 'Get Angel now. No time to bring the others.'
The three of them, gathered around her in the quick, held fast to her, as if Death couldn't take what they refused to release.
