'She wasn't making fun of your English, dear. It's just an old riddle.' When Maria didn't understand that word, Agnes spelled and defined it. 'No one can answer it, good English or not. That's the point.' 'Point be to ask question without can have no answer? What sense that make?' She frowned with concern. 'You not to be well yet, Mrs.
Lampion, your-head not clean.'
'Clear.
'I answer to riddle.'
'And what was your answer?'
'First chicken to be come with first egg inside already.'
Agnes swallowed a spoonful of Jell-O and smiled. 'Well, that is pretty simple, after all.'
'Everything be.'
'Be what?' Agnes asked as she sucked up the last of the apple juice through a straw.
'Simple. People make things to be complicated when not. All world simple like sewing.'
'Sewing?' Agnes wondered if, indeed, her head was not yet clean.
'Thread needle. Stitch, stitch, stitch,' Maria said earnestly as she removed Agnes's bed tray. 'Tie off last stitch. Simple. Only to decide is color of thread and what is type stitch. Then stitch, stitch, stitch.'
Into all this talk of stitchery came a nurse with the news that baby Lampion was out of danger and free of the incubator, and with the simplicity of a ring following the swing of a bell, a second nurse appeared, pushing a wheeled bassinet.
The first nurse beamed smiles into the bassinet and swept from it a pink treasure swaddled in a simple white receiving blanket.
Previously too weak to lift a spoon, Agnes now had the strength of Hercules and could have held back two teams of horses pulling in oppo- site directions, let alone support one small baby.
'His eyes are so beautiful,' said the nurse who passed him into his mother's arms.
The boy was beautiful in every regard, his face smoother than that of most newborns, as if he had come into the world with a sense of peace about the life ahead of him in this turbulent place; and perhaps he had arrived with unusual wisdom, too, because his features were better defined than those of other babies, as though already shaped by knowledge and experience. He had a full head of hair as thick and sable-brown as Joey's.
His eyes, as Maria told Agnes in the middle of the night and as the nurse just confirmed, were exceptionally beautiful. Unlike most human eyes, which are of a single color with striations in a darker shade, each of Bartholomew's contained two distinct colors-green like his mother's, blue like his father's-and the pattern of striations was formed by the alternation of these two dazzling pigments within each orb.
Jewels, they were, magnificent and clear and radiant.
Bartholomew's gaze was mesmerizing, and as Agnes met his warm and constant stare, she was filled with wonder. And with a sense of mystery.
'My little Barty,' she said softly, the affectionate form of his name springing to her lips without contemplation. 'You're going to have an exceptional life, I think. Yes, you will, smarty Barty. Mothers can tell. So many things happened to stop you from getting here, but you made it anyway. You are here for some fine purpose.'
The rain that contributed to the death of the boy's father had stopped falling during the night. The morning sky remained iron-dark, plated with knurled clouds, like one giant thumbscrew turned down tight upon the world, but until Agnes spoke, the heavens had been for some time as silent as iron unstruck.
As though the word purpose were a hammer, a hard peal of thunder crashed through the sky, preceded by a fierce flash of lightning.
The baby's gaze shifted from his mother, in the direction of the window, but his brow didn't furrow with fear.
Don't worry about the big, bad crash-bang, Barty,' Agnes told him. 'In my arms, you'll always be safe.'
Safe, like purpose before it, set fire to the sky and rang from that vault a catastrophic crack that not only rattled the windows but also shook the building.
Thunder in southern California is rare, lightning yet more rare.
Storms are semitropical here, downpours without pyrotechnics.
The power of the second blast had elicited a cry of surprise and alarm from the two nurses and from Maria.
A quiver of superstitious dread twanged through Agnes, and she held her son closer against her breast as she repeated, 'Safe.'
On the downbeat of the word, as an orchestra to the baton of a conductor, the storm flared and boomed, boomed, brighter and far louder than before. The windowpane reverberated like a drum skin, while the dishes on the bed tray clinked xylophonically against one another.
As the window became totally opaque with reflections of the lightning, blank as a cataract-filmed eye, Maria made the sign of the cross.
Gripped by the crazy notion that this weather phenomenon was a threat aimed specifically at her baby, Agnes stubbornly responded to the challenge: 'Safe.
The most cataclysmic blast was also the final one, of nuclear brightness that seemed to turn the windowpane into a molten sheet, and of apocalyptic sound that vibrated through the fillings in Agnes's teeth and would have played her bones like flutes if they had been hollowed out of marrow.
The hospital lights flickered, and the air was so crisp with ozone that it seemed to crackle against the rims of her nostrils when Agnes in haled. Then the fireworks ended, and the lights were not extinguished.
No harm had come to anyone.
Strangest of all was the absence of rain. Such tumult never failed to wring torrents from thunderheads, yet not a single drop spattered against the window.
Instead, a remarkable stillness settled over the morning, so deep a hush that everyone exchanged glances and, with hairs raised on the backs of their necks, looked up at the ceiling in expectation of some event that they couldn't define.
Never did lightning vanquish a storm rather than serve as its advance artillery, but in the wake of this furious display, the iron-dark clouds slowly began to crack like cannon-shattered battlements, revealing a blue peace beyond.
Barty had not cried or exhibited the slightest sign of distress during the tempest, and now gazing up at his mother once more, he favored her with his first smile.
Chapter 20
When a glass of chilled apple juice at dawn stayed on his stomach, Junior Cain was allowed a second glass, though he was admonished He was also given three saltines.
He could have eaten an entire cow on a bun, hooves and tail attached.
Although weak, he was no longer in danger of spewing bile and blood like a harpooned whale. The siege had passed.
The immediate consequence of killing his wife had been violent nervous emesis, but the longer-term reaction was a ravenous appetite and a joie de vivre so exhilarating that he had to guard against the urge to break into song. Junior was in a mood to celebrate.
Celebration of course, would lead to incarceration and perhaps to electrocution. With Vanadium, the maniac cop, likely to be found lurking under the bed or masquerading as a nurse to catch him in an unguarded moment, Junior had to recover at a pace that his physician would not find miraculous. Dr. Parkhurst expected to discharge him no sooner than the following morning.
No longer pinned to the bed by an intravenous feed of fluids and medications, provided with pajamas and a thin cotton robe to replace his backless gown, Junior was encouraged to test his legs and get some exercise. Although they expected him to be dizzy, he had no difficulty whatsoever with his balance, and in spite of feeling a little drained, he wasn't as weak as they thought he was. He could have toured the hospital unassisted, but he played to their expectations and used the wheeled walker.
From time to time, he halted, leaning against the walker as if in need of rest. He took care occasionally to
