A sudden strange weakness, a formless dread, dropped Agnes out of her crouch and onto her knees beside the boy.
'Sometimes it's sad here, Mommy. But it's not sad every place you are. Lots of places, Daddy's with you and me, and we're happier, and everything's okay.'
Here again were these peculiar grammatical constructions, which sometimes she had thought were just the mistakes that even a prodigy could be expected to make, and which sometimes she had interpreted as expressions of fanciful speculations, but which lately she had suspected were of a more complex-and perhaps darker-nature. Now her dread took form, and she wondered if the personality disorders that had shaped her brothers' lives could have roots not just in the abuse they had taken from their father, but also in a twisted genetic legacy that could manifest again in her son. In spite of his great gifts, Barty might be destined for a life limited by a psychological problem of a unique or at least different-nature, first suggested by these occasional conversations that seemed not fully coherent.
'And in a lot of somewheres,' said Barty, 'things are worse for us than here. Some somewheres, you died, too, when I was born, so I never met you, either.'
These statements sounded so convoluted and so bizarre to Agnes that they nourished her growing fear for Barty's mental stability.
'Please, sweetie please don't?'
She wanted to tell him not to say these queer things, not to talk this way, yet she couldn't speak those words. When Barty asked her why, as inevitably he would, she'd have to say she was worried that something might be terribly wrong with him, but she couldn't express this fear to her boy, not ever. He was the lintel of her heart, the keystone of her soul, and if he failed because of her lack of confidence in him, she herself would collapse into ruin.
Sudden rain spared her the need to finish the sentence. A few fat drops drew both their faces to the sky, and even as they rose to their feet, this brief light paradiddle of sprinkles gave way to a serious drumming.
'Let's hurry, kiddo.'
Bearing roses upon their arrival, they hadn't bothered with umbrellas. Besides, although the sky glowered, the forecast had predicted no precipitation.
Here, the rain, but somewhere we're walking in sunshine.
This thought startled Agnes, disturbed her-yet, inexplicably, it also poured a measure of warm comfort into her chilled heart.
Their station wagon stood along the service road, at least a hundred yards from the grave. With no wind to harry it, the rain fell as plumb straight as the strands of beaded curtains, and beyond these pearly veils, the car appeared to be a shimmering dark mirage.
Monitoring Barty from the comer of — her eye, Agnes paced herself to the strides of his short legs, so she was drenched and chilled when she reached the station wagon.
The boy dashed for the front passenger's door. Agnes didn't follow him, because she knew that he would politely but pointedly express frustration if any attempt was made to help him with a task that he could perform himself.
By the time Agnes opened the driver's door and slumped behind the steering wheel, Barty levered himself onto the seat beside her. Grunting, he pulled his door shut with both hands as she jammed the key in the ignition and started the engine.
She was sopping, shivering. Water streamed from her soaked hair, down her face, as she wiped at her beaded eyelashes with one dripping hand.
As the fragrances of wet wool and sodden denim rose from her sweater and jeans, Agnes switched on the heater and angled the vanes of the middle vent toward Barty. 'Honey, turn that other vent toward yourself.'
'I'm okay.'
'You'll catch pneumonia,' she warned, reaching across the boy to flip the passenger's-side vent toward him.
'You need the heat, Mommy. Not me.'
And when she finally looked directly at him, blinked at him, her lashes flicking off a spray of fine droplets, Agnes saw that Barty was dry. Not a single jewel of rain glimmered in his thick dark hair or on the baby-smooth planes of his face. His shirt and sweater were as dry as if they had just been taken off a hanger and from a dresser drawer. A few drops darkened the legs of the boy's khaki pants-but Agnes realized this was water that had dripped from her arm as she'd reached across him to adjust the vent.
'I ran where the rain wasn't,' he said.
Raised by a father to whom any form of amusement was blasphemy, Agnes had never seen a magician perform until she was nineteen, when Joey Lampion, then her suitor, had taken her to a stage show. Rabbits plucked out of top hats, doves conjured from sudden plumes of smoke, assistants sawn in half and mended to walk again; every illusion that had been old even in Houdini's time was a jaw-dropping amazement to her that evening. Now she remembered a trick in which the magician had poured a pitcher of milk into a funnel fashioned from a few pages of a newspaper, causing the milk to vanish when the funnel, still dry, was unrolled to reveal ordinary newsprint. The thrill that had quivered through her that evening measured I on the Richter scale compared to the full 10-point sense of wonder quaking through her at the sight of Barty as dry as if he'd spent the afternoon perched fireside.
Although rain-pasted to her skin, the fine hairs rose on the nape of her neck. The gooseflesh crawling across her arms had nothing to do with her cold, wet clothes.
When she tried to say bow, the how of speech eluded her, and she sat as mute as if no words had ever passed her lips before.
Desperately trying to collect her wits, Agnes gazed out at the deluged graveyard, where the mournful trees and massed monuments were blurred by purling streams ceaselessly spilling down the windshield.
Every distorted shape, every smear of color, every swath of light and shudder of shadows resisted her attempts to relate them to the world she knew, as if shimmering before her were the landscape of a dream.
She switched on the windshield wipers. Repeatedly, in the, arc of cleared glass, the graveyard was revealed in sharp detail, and yet the place remained less than fully familiar to her. Her whole world had been changed by Barty's dry walk in wet weather.
'That's just? an old joke,' she heard herself saying, as from a distance. 'You didn't really walk between the drops?'
The boy's silvery giggles rang as merrily as sleigh bells, his Christmas spirit undampened. 'Not between, Mommy. Nobody could do that. I just ran where the rain wasn't.'
She dared to look at him again.
He was still her boy. As always, her boy. Bartholomew. Barty. Her sweetie. Her kiddo.
But he was more than she had ever imagined her boy to be, more than merely a prodigy.
'How, Barty? Dear Lord, how?'
'Don't you feel it?'
His head cocked. Inquisitive look. Dazzling eyes as beautiful as his spirit.
'Feel what?' she asked.
'The ways things are. Don't you feel? all the ways things are?'
'Ways? I don't know what you mean.'
'Gee, you don't feel it at all?'
She felt the car seat under her butt, wet clothes clinging to her, the air humid and cloying, and she felt a terror of the unknown, like a great lightless void on the edge of which she teetered, but she didn't feel what ever he was talking about, because the thing he felt made him smile.
Her voice was the only dry thing about her, thin and parched and cracked, and she expected dust to plume out of her mouth: 'Feel what?
Explain it to me.'
He was so young and untroubled by life that his frown could not carve lines in his smooth brow. He gazed out at the rain, and finally said, 'Boy, I don't have the right words.'
Although Barty's vocabulary was far greater than that of the average 'three-year-old, and though he was reading and writing at an eighth grade level, Agnes could understand why words failed him. With her greater fund of
