Prologue

The Spokane River stretches a long, winding green through the city of Spokane, in the eastern portion of Washington State, toward the larger Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean. North of the city, the river follows a shallow gorge, lined by pine trees, where squirrels and osprey, the hawk, the red-winged blackbird, the rabbit, the deer, and the gray mouse all live in a kind of wildlife refuge. At the margin of this refuge stands Lucia Court, a subdivision on the land east of the river gorge and south of a low dam. Its residents provide a small scent of human companionship.

From the time the Spokane Indians left due to the city expansion of the late 1980s, no humans have lived in this area. When the Lucia Court subdevelopment arrived in 1987, it came like a growing organism, rumbling on bulldozers that dug holes with a badger's ferocity, buried power lines like packrats, and built human nests out of plaster, wood, and steel. The air near the river, accustomed for so long to its cycle of quiet breathing, adapted to the breathing of the new families moving one by one into houses that remained unlandscaped for a year or more for lack of time, interest, or money.

The Romers were among the first to move into Lucia, with their son Jeffrey, not yet two. Others came soon, knowing one another not at all until the wind broke a pine tree from Sarbaugh's yard to McDonald's, the earth broke a cable under both the Svobodas' and Basses' yards, and the thunder scared the children of two homes, who hid together in sudden community. Slowly, the people in Lucia came to know their neighbors, first by face, then name, then handshake, an embrace or two, and even, between two adolescent children on a winter night, a kiss of the richest quality. And then the most dramatic event.

Jeffrey Romer was six years old. He had no hair. The chemotherapy had removed his blond hair along with about one-third of his body weight. Despite spending large parts of many days in hospitals, he knew his alphabet, and knew how to sign his name. He loved to be read to, something his mother, Marti, and his father, Landry, did as often as possible. He liked stories from the Bible, and from other religious epics, Western and Eastern. He loved listening to stories of people who possessed exceptional gifts, people like Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus. Jeffrey's eyes gazed into the middle distance as he listened to these stories, his face alert with a kind of laconic recognition.

Jeffrey spent about half his time in bed, about a quarter of his time in a wheelchair, and about a quarter of his time trying to walk. Sometimes he could be seen crawling from one spot to another, rarely ashamed of his weakness, mainly determined. Once, Marti saw him get down out of his wheelchair and crawl toward a butterfly that, wing-wounded, could not rise. Marti had learned not to interrupt Jeffrey's concentrations -- with doctors and parents poking at him so often, his concentrations were some of his only privacies. She watched him lift the brown, black, and gold monarch butterfly onto his finger and caress it, and she watched it pause upon him for breath then, healed, fly away. Turning back to his mother, Jeffrey grinned with the pleasure of being so close to the immensely delicate and beautiful. And he allowed her to help him back to his chair.

Jeffrey had become a kind of young legend in Lucia Court. Many of the neighbors baby-sat him or just came over to sit with his parents as they looked at the sun setting over the river. Twice Jeffrey had looked at neighbors and told them something extraordinary about themselves. He told Mrs. Greta Sarbaugh that she had grown up "in a town with one tall building in the middle that went up to a point, but not a cross." Greta, seventy-five, had indeed been born and raised, until seven, in a tiny town near Maribor, in Slovenia, in which the tallest structure was a mosque with a single minaret pointing up toward heaven. When Greta asked Jeffrey to tell her what else he "saw," he said, "There is an old woman by your house who is blind like your sister Trudy." Greta, an anthropologist who had been all over the world and seen just about everything, nonetheless found herself teary-eyed. The old woman in Jeffrey's vision was her blind grandmother, long gone, the woman who had raised her and her sister after their parents died.

On another occasion, Jeffrey told his mother, "Our house is going to shake during the night." He advised her to take an expensive vase down from the top of the china cabinet. When she questioned him for more detail, he couldn't provide it. He said, "It has already happened in my head." Marti tucked him in, became distracted by other chores, and neglected to prepare the house for the quake of her son's vision. At 2:04 a.m., the eastern part of Washington State did indeed experience a 4.8 earthquake. Marti's china was disturbed but unharmed. The Japanese vase, however, an heirloom from her mother, fell onto the hard wood floor and broke into pieces.

In a small neighborhood the gifts of a gentle child who had been diagnosed with cancer at twenty-two months of age can hardly be hidden. And because Jeffrey radiated a kind of grace, a quietness, and a lack of desperation that was the envy of most adults, he quickly became news -- first as a feature article in Spokane's newspaper, and then in a brief Family Life spot onCNN Sunday Morning. Marti and Landry had hoped to keep the extent of their son's paranormal abilities hidden, but he spilled the whole can of beans.

"You have three sons," Jeffrey told the CNN cameraman. "Two are older than me and the other one is my age." He said it as matter-of-factly as only a child can speak, and the cameraman stopped in his tracks.

"You're right," he said to Jeffrey, "how did you know?"

"I can see them," Jeffrey said. "You carry their picture in your wallet and I can see the picture in my head." The man's wallet was well concealed in his pants pocket.

"Can you see anything else?" the man asked.

Jeffrey shook his head. "Just the picture."

The episode with CNN only added to the neighborhood's sense that Jeffrey Romer was a special child. His cancer, spreading first from lymph nodes to lungs, then into the bone, became the community's cancer. When the Romers had to drive to Seattle for bone marrow transplants, their house became the charge of their neighbors, and when their stay in Seattle lasted two months, and Landry, a police officer, had to return to Spokane to resume work, the elderly Svobodas drove to Seattle to help Marti move into a studio apartment just near the Seattle hospital. When Jeffrey returned to Lucia Court, the neighbors were all there within hours, bringing food and news and comfort. Jeffrey would live a long time, they all promised one another. He would become very important one day, a great thinker or an amazing teacher of some kind.

It was as if the community willed him to keep on living. They adored this boy, so emaciated, eyes deep brown and incapable of despair, his long arms almost like transparent sticks. With Annie, herself crippled, who hobbled over from four houses down, he would say, "Are you dying?" He felt a special affinity for her affliction. "No -- just losing my walking, like you," she would say with a smile, as she guided his weakened fingers to piece together a puzzle on the living room table. Sally, thirteen, from across the street, brought him candy, hoping it would somehow heal him. Sammy, twelve, who had no brother of his own, made Jeffrey his brother. So it was with all the other neighbors sitting beside Jeffrey, whose tiny hands stroked, on his lap, Toby, his calico cat.

Jeffrey had a special friend, Beth Carey. The day he met her, he called her Rachel, though she and Marti told him her name was Beth. "I know you, Rachel. You are the friend of the Teacher." The friend? The Teacher? Marti asked. But he smiled, and then slept, and when he awoke he called her Beth. Pondering the moment, Marti and Beth decided he meant she was Greta's friend -- Greta had been a Unitarian minister -- hence "teacher." The "Rachel" was a mystery to them, though Beth did point out that her grandmother had been named Rachel. Jeffrey, of course, had never met Beth's deceased grandmother.

Marti asked for Beth's help with her son when she learned that Beth was not only a nurse, but also a woman who had been, like Jeffrey, a gifted child. Beth insisted her gifts were dry, yet Marti saw the smile of a hidden life in the large woman's eyes.

"Come over and meet the Romers," Greta had said one day to Beth. "Their son is so special." Beth, who lived across town, sometimes spent weekends with Greta, whom she regarded as her second mother. They had met at the Unitarian church years before, at a workshop put on by Matthew Fox and a Huichol medicine woman whose workshops in the United States Greta had helped organize. The two women had gradually become close friends, with Greta pushing Beth into spiritual excitements that she, quite often, resisted.

Beth deeply admired Greta, who, now in her seventies, had been an anthropologist before becoming a Unitarian minister. Beth had laughed the first time she heard the old woman call herself a "mutt," but she didn't like it when her boyfriend, Nathan, had joked in private, "and she looks like one." Greta was indeed an odd combination of bones, flesh, and history -- part Slovenian, English, Scottish, German, and whatever else; she let her hair hang almost like a dog's long hairy ears, and with her long nose and seemingly unblinking dark brown eyes, yes, she looked a little like an old dog. A lover can provide questions, Beth often thought, but old women provide answers.

Beth had never felt she quite fit in. A salesman's daughter, brown-skinned from her father's Cherokee blood, blue-eyed from her mother's Norwegian side, she was overweight from age ten. Beth hid in books and disbelieved Catholic rigidities. She helped raise her two brothers when her mother died of lung cancer. Beth was proud of having lived a difficult, tenuous childhood -- her father a drinker, her mother an emotional recluse -- and never to have been broken. At twenty-nine, she was a large woman, at least seventy-five pounds overweight and short, five two, so that the weight showed more than it might otherwise. She did not fit social conventions for dressing well. When not at the hospital, she wore old jeans and white V-necked flannel shirts, and cared little for makeup. Beth was one of those people who do not get much love as children but somehow, as if raised by angels, bond naturally and wholly with the vulnerable around her. Jeffrey, she saw, was beloved by all, and she became his special friend. She baby-sat him often, reading The Chronicles of Narnia aloud and telling him stories, as she had done with her own younger siblings. She listened to Jeffrey and watched him and wondered if she would one day have a child like him. He shared with her his dreams and visions.

"I saw a tube of light, as long as the valley," he reported one evening, when Marti and Landry went out to a movie. "It was like God's long finger."

On another occasion he said, "I talk with spirits, you know. They're very nice."

Beth confessed, "When I was really young, about seven or eight, I saw my dead grandmother standing right beside me as if she were alive. I talked to her."

"I know." Jeffrey smiled, as a child will do when he does know.

Near Christmas, Jeffrey told Beth and his mother that there was a bad man by the river who only liked to talk to dead children. This man came to Jeffrey in nightmares that scared him far more than his own cancer. Everyone had heard about the two children who had disappeared, and the man who wrote letters to the newspaper claiming to have killed them. Landry had often spoken of this sad case at the dinner table -- everyone at the precinct worried over it, but when Jeffrey's nightmares began, Landry promised not to talk anymore about these occurrences in front of his son. One night, when Beth was over for dinner, Jeffrey said, "Daddy and Beth and I are going to stop the bad man, you know." Already, Beth thought, the little boy is planning to become a hero. Her own brothers had been that way, from very young: plotting their future victories.

Beth once told her boyfriend that Jeffrey had taught her how to love children again. A part of her heart had been closed to children since finishing raising "the brats" -- her father's name for her brothers. Beth told herself that she had become a pediatric nurse out of the habit of child care, but she knew that she wanted the chance to love children again. Over the years, her chosen profession had healed a part of her, but Jeffrey softened her heart more than anyone could.

If this were to be all he did for Beth, or for any of those in the neighborhood who loved him, they would have considered it enough. But it was not all, not by far.

Around four in the afternoon of July 5, 1992, a 1989 Toyota Camry turned off Driscoll Boulevard and headed west, toward the river, on Fairview Road. It picked up speed and began weaving left to right, right to left, like a race car in trouble, veering off Fairview onto Lower Riverview Drive, righting its course, then picking up speed again, turning, as if on impulse, onto Henderson Road, the ingress to Lucia Court. Harry Svoboda, in his backyard watering plants, remembered hearing tires squeal just east of him. He remembered hearing the harsh rev of an engine. He remembered hearing Greta cry out from her front yard, then the squeal of brakes, then impact.

Sally McDonald, thirteen, sitting at her desk in her second-story bedroom, heard the crash and froze, a book by Judy Blume open in front of her. She knew in that frozen second that someone was dead. She ran out of her room and saw her brother, seventeen, wearing a headset, listening to music -- later she was to learn that he had on U2, and heard nothing outside the stream of the rhythmic noise. Her parents were not home. She ran out to see Sammy Range, from across the street, running out of his home.

Sammy, twelve, glanced at the sun for a second as he left his front door then, momentarily blinded by a golden orb in his vision, staggered more than ran toward the other adults at the carnage. Amid cries and calls, he stopped some feet away from the toppled car, mesmerized by what he saw.

Greta Sarbaugh had been weeding her planters on her front porch when the maroon Camry sped through their street. She turned and watched the car crash through the peace of the evening, weave, jump the curb, and smash into Jeffrey, who sat in his wheelchair up on the lawn, watching, Greta said later, "with wide-eyed fascination."

Alex Bass, sixteen, who was on the phone with his best friend, Brent, also sixteen, heard the crash and looked out his second-story window. Dropping the phone -- "Jesus!" -- he ran down the stairs and out the door and toward the wreck, recalling later that the right front tire of the uprooted Camry spun and spun like a roulette wheel. He stopped for a second near Sammy Range, who was trembling.

Annie Trudeau, twenty-eight, who lived with her brother at the house nearest the subdevelopment ingress, sat drinking an iced tea beside her 1986 Honda Civic. Her back problems had gotten so bad that it had taken her nearly all day today just to wash her car. Exhausted, but filled with the hope of a job attempted and completed, she watched the whole locomotion of the Camry as it sped into the neighborhood then jumped the curb. For a second, she thought it appeared as if it had targeted Jeffrey Romer long before it entered the court.

Inside Greta and Trudy Sarbaugh's house, Beth and Nathan, over for the weekend from his duties as a resident at First Memorial Hospital in Seattle, lay resting on the bed in the guest room. From Beth's home across town, they had called Greta earlier and asked if they could use her house as a base for a two-day camp-out down at the river. They had both woken up that morning around 3:00 a.m. with a jolt, each of them having dreamt about the river. Beth had dreamt of a small boat moving toward the Spokane Falls, a boat that toppled over then became a bird of some kind. Nathan had dreamt that he was a boy again, fishing with his parents by a river like the one behind Greta's house. Both Beth and Nathan lay awake talking, feeling called to the river, calling Greta.

Now the sound of the crash, Beth shouted and Nathan jumped up and ran out. Beth followed him, seeing Sally, Sammy Range, Annie from down the street, Harry and Laura Svoboda from next door, and Greta all converging on the wreck. Landry and Marti Romer had run out of their own house toward their son. Marti was screaming.

Nathan took charge. Beth and Greta ran to hold Marti, and Landry grabbed for his cellular phone. Beth did not know how many of the loving neighbors saw that Jeffrey could not be saved, but she knew from Nathan's grim face, and the feeling in her own stomach as she gasped with adrenaline and tears, that Jeffrey Romer would soon die -- his head covered in blood, right arm and leg awry and broken, mouth dripping blood. Landry, just back from his shift, his shirt open and shoes off, yelled his address into the phone. Estimating that six or seven ribs had broken and sliced into Jeffrey's lungs, Nathan provided Landry with information for EMS, which Landry passed on breathlessly, his voice choked, face stiff and pale, his hand trembling. Marti wept beside her son's head, her body also trembling, the edges of her short brown hair already matting with moisture of tears and blood.

Beth dropped down next to Marti and helped her boyfriend gently right the broken left leg. Tears flowed from her eyes, but Beth focused as she knew she needed to for life to be nursed, even if only for a few more moments. Sammy and Sally stood back, both of them swaying with the terrible reality of a body broken nearly to pieces. Annie, signaling young Sally to help her, hobbled on her cane to the woman in the Camry, calling out that she was unconscious. Nathan yelled not to touch her as he rose and ran over. The cry of the fire engine cut through the air, station #61 only a mile upriver. Nathan saw that the woman had broken her neck, confirmed that she was dead, then rushed back to Jeffrey, whom Beth so often spoke of, and cared for like a mother.

In the far distance, if anyone could have seen it, they would have noticed Donnell Wight, eighty-one, from across the river, holding his binoculars on the scene, mesmerized. Above the river a hawk shrilled its song, flying above Jeffrey Romer, whose eyes were closed, his wheelchair thrown up against the house, his delicate body lying like a rag of flesh on the blood-red grass.

When Jeffrey tried to say something, the boy's dimming eyes moved to Beth and he murmured, "Don't be afraid. The Teacher is coming," and again, "Don't...afraid...Beth..." then his eyes closed and Beth, confused, weeping, looked at the others around her as if singled out.

"Oh, don't die," Marti cried, and Beth held the boy's mother in her big arms.

A golden light began from within the Camry, then moved just above it. It began just after the sound of the fire engine came from the west. It went unnoticed at first, until Jeffrey's murmur, and his own attempt to look toward the Camry.

"What is that?" Alex cried, pointing at the light rising above the spinning tire. It seemed to be a tube of light, rising from within the grass, pushing through the base of the car, up through the wheel, up through the woman so awkward in death, up through the car roof and up toward a point about twenty feet into the sky. Alex and Sammy bent heads upward to watch it (it was close to them, not twenty feet away), and Sally and Sammy and the elder Svobodas saw it hovering above the Camry. Wordlessly, Sammy pointed and everyone stared.

"What is it?" Laura Svoboda whispered, and Sally said, "It's an angel." The sound of the fire truck came closer, louder.

"Look! There!" Annie cried. Now the light appeared above Jeffrey and his mother and Greta and Beth and Nathan. It was a kind of three-dimensional tube of light as tall as a house. It reappeared now as a light reappears after a doorway reopens. This was the first thing Beth thought of, that a door had opened and closed and opened as the light burned bright, then flickered, then disappeared, then burned bright again. It was white-gold, like both moonlight and sun reflected off glass, so that nearly imperceptible lines of rainbow showed. It pulsed in its tall form, then seemed to reach gradually toward the river valley, forming a three-dimensional, rounded wall that spread from above Jeffrey toward the cottonwoods in the Svobodas' yard, then past them toward the tamarack and ponderosa pines and the river, then across the river to Donnell Wight's large red wood house.

It was not a flashing image -- it was a wall of light as tall as a house and stretching at least a quarter mile, from a fallen boy to a house on a cliff. It brought a hypnotic calm to the scene of injury before it. No one said anything, except Nathan, who seemed to be talking to himself about what it could be. Everyone would later report feeling calmed, and hearing a sound like pure wind. Greta stood up from Jeffrey to reach toward the light and to touch it, but she held back her hand, wondering if it would disappear. Beth recalled having the presence to look around at everyone and see if they saw what she saw. Everyone was mesmerized. Everyone saw it. Only blind Trudy, standing alone across the street, did not see it with her eyes.

No one could tell exactly how long the light lasted, and none of them knew that there was a tall man in a hooded sweatshirt watching this scene from about fifty feet away, concealed at the edge of the river gorge, between a white pine and a tall cedar, mesmerized by the light and the violent death of the very boy he had come to see.

Nor did any of them know that Donnell Wight, across the river, knew exactly the time of the occurrence, 4:47 p.m. Donnell saw it with binoculars that gave the distance of the focused object as well as the date and time. The wall of light reaching the high Wight house did not show through the binoculars, only the light as a distant rectangle across the river, above the dying boy. Donnell did not realize that the light reached across the river toward him. He only saw it emerge, saw the people mesmerized, then saw it disappear at 4:50 p.m., as the people came out of their trances and the fire truck roared down Henderson Lane. Had Donnell moved his binoculars to the left, he might have seen the hooded man in the trees.

When commotion of rescue and procedure and talk became loud, the man in the hooded sweatshirt stole away, his throat constricted with sadness, drifting back into the river gorge, in a way he would later describe in his journal. "I moved silent as Light itself."

The three firefighters, dressed in their yellow robelike coats, jumped from the truck, one moving to the Camry and two to the boy on the grass. Whatever strange serenity had existed for a moment -- whatever complete sense within each person of their own mortality and weakness and strength -- disappeared as the bustle of saving life began.

As Nathan and Landry briefed the firefighters, Beth stood back and away, noticing above the river a strange, hallucinatory flow of images. It was as if her mind was opening to a new modality, yet had not opened all the way. She felt a need to move toward the river, and yet frustration that her vision did not clarify. She saw children floating in the air. They appeared pale, like the dead. Greta came over to her, noting the immense concentration and focus on her young friend's face. She asked Beth what was happening.

"What was that?" was all Beth could say. "What was that?"

In very little time the miracle of light was washed away by the exigency of motion. Later, all present, young and old, would say that it seemed not as if the light disappeared, nor as if the door closed, but as if the light exploded into a million pieces, flying over toward the river, and fading into a filmy, imperceptible shroud. The noise of a saw in the Camry ground not only metal, but the ears of everyone nearby. The quick clang of gurney legs opening and the silty sound of bodies being lifted; the whimpers of adults in the face of a child's pain that return their large bodies to childhood itself; the indecency of blood and broken bones, irreparable, that call for silent words spoken by the pure needs of the hidden human soul; and the busy energy of crisis and terror and the sheer joy of not being the one smashed to pieces by fate -- these coalesced to move time forward, and bring out the best in everyone present. Each helped in whatever way needed.

Not until later did the witnesses speak about the miracle of light.

The ambulances were gone, the fire engines too. The tow truck driver, a dark-haired young man drinking a closed cup of Starbucks coffee, worked to latch the Camry to the winch. Landry and Marti had gone with their son in the ambulance, refusing offers of companionship from Annie and Greta and the Svobodas. Across the street, watching the Camry lift from Greta's yard, the neighbors sat together, the sun beginning to fall to the west. The adolescent children were each still crying in their own way, Sally with tears, Sammy with his head downturned, and Alex with eyes glazed in anger and grief. Sally's mother and father had returned from work and joined Sally and her brother at Greta's. Alex's mother had also come home, standing in shock now with her son amidst the crowd, listening to what had happened and voicing silent prayers for Jeffrey Romer. Even amidst the talk there were, for moments, different tones of silence. Children and adults stood firm in the desire to become quiet, each in their own way, before the events of destruction and light were fully discussed. None knew of discussions going on in the mind of the watcher from the trees.

Trudy, nearly eighty, dressed in her nightgown, sat without embarrassment, as the blind often do, sipping iced tea in the middle of the small crowd. Both Harry and Laura were spotted with blood, yet had not gone next door into their home to change clothes. They drank mineral water, their hands, like all the hands, still trembling with adrenaline and the need of each other.

Annie, less than half their age at twenty-eight, sat back-straight on a foamy futon Greta often used for herself. Everyone knew that Annie would be in a wheelchair very soon, and probably forever forward. But now, with her blond hair pulled back from her aquiline face, she looked younger and stronger than usual, as if the adrenaline had flushed her not only with energy, but with a new brightness in her eyes and cheeks. She sat next to Trudy, staring with the blind woman at the Romer yard, the mangled wheelchair up against the house, the stains of blood on the grass, and the wrecker, who was hoisting the car with the slowness of a man and a machine that cannot work any faster than mechanism allows.

Beth and Nathan, like Greta, had gone inside to change clothes. Beth now wore her backup pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt that outlined her large breasts. She helped Greta serve the lawn of guests who had gathered in sudden community. Never before, Beth suspected, had absolutely everyone on the block been together this way -- everyone except the Romers, of course. Greta, with gray hair past her shoulder blades, a gray moustache and thin beard, carried a tray of ice-sweating glasses. Greta's hair stood out in the lowered sunlight, so that Harry Svoboda, a silver-haired man himself, thought, "We are old. It should have been us." He clasped Laura's fingers, a public act of affection rare for him.

Nathan, gray-blond, muscular, with close-cut hair, a one-day blond stubble-beard, a quarter-sized rose-red birthmark on his left cheek and neck, his face always frowning in a look of concentration, was dressed in his backup jeans and a blue button-down shirt. His yellow button-down shirt had been drenched with blood, blood under his finger nails too; he had gone into the bathroom to clean up, stooping at Greta's bathroom mirror, mounted low. Whenever Nathan accompanied Beth on trips to the house by the river, he felt too tall for it, like a giant whose head is always just above the clouds.

He had wanted to cry heavy tears in the bathroom, and now, here, in the middle of the lawn. His throat was still tight with emotion and adrenaline. One year from taking his boards in neurology, he recalled, his eyes closing now, how he had gone instinctively toward the head of little Jeffrey, sensing even before he saw proof that there would be no saving the boy. Nathan stood now, listening to Annie saying something to him about how good it was he had been here, then Greta, standing beside the Svobodas, pointed upward at the rising moon, a near full white orb. "Was it the moon or the sun we all saw?" she asked rhetorically. "Is there anyone who thinks the moon or sun is all that we saw?"

No one did.

"Will you please tell me what it was like," Trudy asked, "that light?" She had gathered snippets over the last minutes as children had explained it to parents, and adults to each other.

"It was huge -- a whitish and yellow light," Annie recalled.

"It was like a long high wall," Beth said. "It stretched from Jeffrey to across the river, toward that house up there."

"Donnell Wight's house?" Trudy asked.

"Yes, Donnell's," Greta confirmed. Of all the people on this side of the river, Greta was the only one who had actually met Donnell Wight, a retired physician, world traveler, now more than eighty and dying, like Jeffrey, of cancer.

"I heard some kind of music coming from the light," Nathan added.

"Music?" Beth turned to him. "Or just a sound?"

"At least a sound, like wind, but maybe music in it."

"Maybe I heard it too." Laura Svoboda nodded. "I didn't think of it till you said it, but yes, maybe that's what I heard. It was like a beautiful tone."

Nathan agreed. "It was mainly one tone."

"There was a warmth to that long stretching light." Beth closed her eyes, seeing it, feeling it, again. Her arms reached out in front of her. "It was warm. Real. Alive."

"Alive?" Nathan asked. "What does that mean, when we talk about...light?" He shook his head. He didn't know what he was asking. "And Jeffrey spoke to you, Beth -- he spoke right to you."

"I know." Embarrassed, she pushed her black-rimmed glasses up her moistened nose. "Poor Jeffrey," she said, biting back tears. Laura repeated the words aloud and tears came to her eyes.

As Beth saw the path of light again in her mind, she knew, deep in a place that rarely spoke, a place beyond grief, that this light was not done here. It had not gone away. The miracle -- for it had been a flash of miracle -- was not dead. She felt it was just being born.

As if reading her mind, Greta said, "Whatever it is, the light is going to change us all. This was some kind of group religious experience. These things don't just explode then disappear. This is like the flashing sun in Yugoslavia, or the magical light in North Japan that the villagers see. This is like the light on the Aegean Coast of Turkey. This is something to take account of."

Alex Bass, standing with his mother, asked Greta, "What do you mean? Things like this happened in Yugoslavia?"

At sixteen, Alex was regarded by everyone in the neighborhood as one of those adolescent boys who can be trusted, not feared. He was a straight-A student, a quiet young man who often honored his elderly neighbors by asking them questions. He and Harry Svoboda had spent time in Harry's garage working on a 1957 Chrysler.

"In Mahjurredke in Yugoslavia," Greta told him, "100,000 people a year go as pilgrims to see the sun flash and pulsate as it does nowhere else. And people have visions there like they have nowhere else. Same near Kyoto, and near Bodrum in Turkey. In India there are a number of visionary places people go. Is what happened here like that?" she asked rhetorically. "It must be.

"Are we going to talk about this to others?" she asked.

Three or four voices at once said, "No," but there was no unanimity. Most of the neighborhood did not speak. Beth saw Sally's mother and father holding their daughter closely.

Nathan said, "We should do nothing about it until a day or two from now when we see if anything else...along the same lines should occur. How about that?"

Now more voices were heard, most in agreement. Mrs. Range, Sammy's mother, said, "Jeffrey was so kind. Maybe he'll live." She began to cry, a woman who had buried her own husband years before.

Nathan did not have the heart to speak the truth. In an hour he would call his colleagues at the hospital; he knew what their news would be.

Harry Svoboda came to Nathan and shook his hand, thanking him for his help. Nathan found himself in a number of conversations as people asked, without really asking, what would happen now with Jeffrey. Nathan found himself answering without really answering. He could see that everyone already knew that Jeffrey was gone.

Almost an hour later, the crowd began to disperse. Each person seemed lit a little to Beth, everyone walking in twos and threes together toward their own houses. When the two elderly sisters, Trudy and Greta, and their two young friends, Beth and Nathan, were left there in the yard, Beth and Greta cleaned up the glasses and Nathan moved the trays and the extra chairs. These tasks took them only a few minutes, then they were all four back on the porch again, talking a little, subdued, as they sat watching the moon rise, waiting to see if again the light would appear where Jeffrey had lain, or Jeffrey would reappear, as he was, smiling at the world from his wheelchair.

It was dusk when Nathan and Beth finished their packing, struggling through the inertia of emotional exhaustion to continue their trip down the slope behind Greta's house and to the river where they would set up a camp. They had agreed they would still go down to the river, though Greta and Trudy asked them to stay in the house.

"The open air will be better," Beth said, thanking her friends anyway. "I want to just cry by the river."

Nathan called his colleague at the hospital and Greta had called Landry on his cellular phone. Landry did not expect to return home till morning. Jeffrey had died. He would be immediately cremated. "Marti wants to go to her mother's for tonight," Landry said, holding back tears. "Will you watch the house, Greta? We'll be back in the morning." Of course, Greta agreed, crying as she gave her love. Landry asked if Marti could speak to Beth. Marti thanked Beth for being such a special friend to her son, then hung up, choking on tears. Beth and Greta wept, swollen with the helplessness that a dead child brings to the world. Nathan, sitting with them in the living room, remembered sitting at a place called Ann's Beach, on the Florida Keys near Islamorada, a few years before. He had been so filled with grief at the loss of a girlfriend that he sat as the tide lapped up nearly to his chest, pressing him and finally uprooting him so that he floated and had to return to the position of a standing human or be carried into the water.

After the phone calls, Beth, Nathan, and Greta walked across the street to the spot where Jeffrey had been. Looking at the bloodied area, Nathan asked whether he should hose the red-brown residue into the grass.

"No," Greta cautioned. "I think Landry will want to do it." Then she began to cry and Nathan and Beth held her.

"You should go get your camp set up," Greta told them, fighting her tears. "I'll go back to Trudy."

"You sure you'll be okay for tonight?" Beth asked her old friend.

"I will. You get going."

Beth and Nathan accompanied Greta back across the street then said their brief good-byes to the elderly sisters. Packs on their backs, they walked silently down to the river. They found the area they wanted for a camp at the river's edge -- a tiny meadow with its back to the east gorge wall, surrounded by forest, beside the river's flow. The two experienced campers worked with efficiency, setting up the pup tent, starting a small fire, and preparing for the night. Beth let Nathan, so much more used to giving orders, organize the evening. When the setup work was completed, she sat with her journal in the firelight, trying to write out not only her heartache at the boy's destruction, but also the strange occurrence of the light.

Nathan, who had informed parents on more than one occasion that their child would die, felt different today than any time before. He sat alone at the river's edge recalling his own troubled parents -- his father, who was generally depressed and withdrawn, and his brutal, enraged mother. Jeffrey, though he'd been physically sick for so long, had seemed to enjoy a loving childhood. Jeffrey would probably miss Marti and Landry. Nathan had never missed childhood at all and knew this was true of Beth as well. "Nathan and I are together," he once heard her explain to a friend, "because who else would understand us as well as we understand each other? Sometimes it feels like we went through the same childhood together."

Beth stopped writing in the fire's light and laid her head on Nathan's lap. Nathan thought, "What would Mom and Dad have thought of Beth?"

Suddenly, Beth's head bolted up. "Nathan!" she exclaimed. "I can see Jeffrey at the hospital."

She sat up very straight. "I see him with one of the doctors. I see him perfectly. How can I be seeing him?"

"You're seeing him right now?" Nathan asked. "Like some kind of remote viewing?"

"Yes! I see Landry, Marti, the doctor, a nurse, Jeffrey."

"Wait!" Beth put her hand up. "I see a man now. I don't see the hospital. I see a man. He's got a hood over his head. He's sitting at a table."

"Where?" Nathan asked.

"I don't know. Now he's gone. The hospital's gone."

"Gone?" Nathan repeated. "Is it like a flash or something?"

"It's just like a scene. I'm exactly right there. Then it's gone. It's like when I was a little girl. I saw things."

What had Nathan called it? Remote viewing? Beth thought the words described it: watching something else from a different -- "remote" -- location. But the words were so mechanical.

"I'm going to write this down. The exact scene. What if I could describe it to Landry and Marti later, when they're up to it? I could see if it's my imagination or it really happened."

"You should, yes," Nathan encouraged. Beth bent down again to her writing. The act of writing seemed very important now, as if Beth needed to record her internal experiences in order to make them real. She began to write words she had not completely realized as thoughts, words that must be coming in response to Jeffrey's dying. But why was suicide in them? She just wrote, until they were written down.

"There is nothing to fear about death. It is an ally to anyone who has made the life journey with an open mind. Among the million possible deaths, one of the finest is the death that we choose for ourselves. By this I do not mean suicide borne of despair; I mean the death chosen after a long breathing in of the Light itself.

"Often we hear, 'Is there a right time to die?' Of course there is: when one has been invited back home. The Light will invite you. The Doorway will open. You will look outward at the world and experience a sense of peace that only the opened Doorway and the Light can provide.

"If you have fulfilled your destiny in this lifetime, and have experienced the invitation, know that there is no moral boundary worthy of keeping you from the next step in your spiritual journey."

"Nathan!" she whispered, as the words finished in her. "Read this."

Nathan read, concentrating in the firelight.

As he raised his head she said, "I don't know why I thought those things, or who I'm writing them to. It's so weird! Jeffrey didn't commit suicide."

"Wow," Nathan said, rereading words that sounded a little like Beth, but somehow not altogether her. "He did die. The light is part of it somehow. This is interesting writing, Beth."

"It's like someone is speaking through me," Beth said. Suddenly, she saw a flash of image: a child carried by a hooded man toward a grave.

"Nathan! Jesus. I just saw a child. Not Jeffrey. A girl. Maybe nine or ten. Her head's limp. Her neck's broken. A man. That man. He's burying her. His face is covered in darkness. I'm having hallucinations, Nathan. What is going on?" Beth groaned, holding her head in her hands. Nathan sidled next to her in the dirt and reached his arms around her. She was trembling.

"That light we saw," Nathan said, puzzled. "It's affecting you somehow. You're having some kind of lasting neural impact?"

"Maybe Greta and the others, some of them are having these things too?"

Nathan had brought his on-call cellular phone with him, more out of habit than need. He hadn't planned on using it, but while holding Beth with one hand, he reached back for it behind him with the other. He dialed Greta, described Beth's hallucinations. "Has anyone else called you with similar experiences?" he asked. Beth could see Nathan's head shaking, "No."

"Okay," he said. He thanked her and apologized for the late call, then hung up. "I don't know what to think," he said. "Greta says she'll ask the others, and she'll keep in touch with everyone."

Beth was very tired. She saw tiredness in Nathan's eyes too. "Let me just write a little while longer," she said. "See if anything else happens." Nathan lay back as Beth returned to her journal. God how she loved that journal.

Nathan formed a picture in his mind of what might be happening in Beth's neocortex and limbic system. Her optic nerves had been stimulated by the light near Jeffrey. Its signal flooded through the occipital lobe, then spread through the limbic system into the hippocampus, the thalamus, then broke apart and flooded the right hemisphere, then shot into the left, creating both the disconnection and immersion of split brain and memory functions that hallucinations are. Yet in her brain might more be happening? What if these were not mere hallucinations? Was there a difference between how "visions" and hallucinations worked in the brain? There had been no class on this in med school. Nor had he learned anything about how a group could see the same light, that same optical stimulant.

Beth laid her head back down on Nathan's lap. She finished writing, no more visions or strange words coming to her -- just a description of this long life-swollen day. As she closed her eyes on Nathan's lap, she listened to him describe the path of light her "visions-slash-hallucinations" must be taking in her brain. She had always enjoyed his descriptions of the neural mysteries. In her exhaustion tonight, they were like a bedtime story that took her toward sleep. She thought of Jeffrey. She willed his life force to find its comfort. She tried to see the hooded man, the little girl. She tried to do the "remote viewing" again. Nothing came except sounds -- crickets, water flowing over rocks, a coyote far off, and then, the silence of the night.

Chapter One: The House of Light

Donnell had not slept much that night. After watching the swift drama of the wreck he had wept quietly; wept for Jeffrey, for all the pain of life, and for his own eighty-one years. It was a catharsis of weeping, there on his back deck overlooking the river. It was the river of tears that had remained at a distance since he'd learned, almost a year ago, that he was terminal. And now the brutality of life emerged again with a little boy, dying of cancer, who dies from a car wreck instead. Donnell had not cried that hard since his wife died.

The sky was a bright blue this morning, a few stray high clouds off to the east. This was a blue like Donnell had seen so often in the turquoise water of the Indian Ocean, the blue just before it splashes toward white. Donnell's mind was clearer this morning, and he knew that Jeffrey's death was also his own. He was an old man dying of colon cancer who would die, like Jeffrey, before the cancer took him, today. Watching death's bloody bath, Donnell realized that during his nine months of very painful decay, the cancer eating him alive, he had forgotten the brutality of life -- brutality he had known in two wars, and as a doctor, and as a man. He had observed his own decay so closely -- his constant pain, his emaciation from lack of appetite, his bald, liver-splotched head, his hairless arms and legs, tiny as sticks, his trembling hands, his deliriums -- that he had forgotten the real and quick randomness of life. Watching Jeffrey and the many people around the boy, then seeing that beautiful light, Donnell sensed suddenly that he had reawakened to life itself, like a dying soldier gets a last passionate vision before death.

Donnell Wight, now a widower for a decade, had been married fifty-two years. He and Mary Ann had two children, six grandchildren, and now three great-grandchildren. With his white hair and long white beard, living as he did on his huge house on the cliff above the river, isolating himself with no trespassing signs and few invitations, Donnell had long ago, even before his terminal illness, passed beyond communal murmurs about his character or state of mind. He had, in old age, become what he had yearned to be in his boyhood -- a part of the land, not a tree but not a talisman either, a human portion of Earth, attentive and stewardly.

His father and mother had bought this land after World War I. Donnell wasn't even ten, but he had felt the land enter him like an invisible breath. For three decades he'd been away in college, medical school, then private practice in Napa Valley; but thirty years ago when his father died and his mother moved into a condominium care facility, Donnell had moved back with Mary Ann; received from his grown son, Sandy, invaluable help in building a new place; lived with Mary Ann here; and felt the land grasp him again.

Donnell had always known that he would die here. For the last few months he'd known that he would die on his own initiative. When a grandchild would say, "Popper, you should be in a hospital," he would think, "Yes, I should," and then he would remember the hospital world in which he had done so much of his work. He always held a special feeling for the hospital. He knew spirits there others did not. But still, it was not where he wished to die. He wanted to die in the world of foals, moths, osprey, bats, and herons, and in the margin of the small neighborhood of people across the river who had become, through his telescope, a second family.

Donnell recalled all the arrivals to Lucia Court a few years before. He had resented them at first. Though he lived far across river, the noise and the smell of diesel fuel from the bulldozers, were like an invasion. He recalled being thankful that Mary Ann, an even more private person than he, had already died. Yet, invasion aside, the development was after all quite far away, and he lived peacefully in bereaved loneliness. Gradually, he came to enjoy his vision of the subdevelopment from far up on the plateau in his huge home, which to the new interlopers must have seemed eternal. He had even come to feel a personal resonance with each of the families across the way, as if his own life, pieces of it long forgotten, was now being reviewed in the lives of young families. Sometimes he found himself talking to them aloud from his back deck, carrying on conversations with Jeffrey's parents about what to do for their sick boy; with Greta Sarbaugh, whom he had met once, an elderly woman who, like himself, had seen much of the world; with Harry Svoboda, nearly Donnell's contemporary, so inflexible in his posture; with the younger teenagers, Sammy and Sally, encouraging them to become friends in an old man's voice that perhaps the children heard like a whisper on the wind.

Over the last few months, Donnell had spoken to them all about his cancer. He told them about preparations he had made -- his living will; a long letter to his nurse, a young man of thirty or so who had befriended him and his land; letters to each of his children; his memoirs. He told them he would take death into his own hands if need be, and probably soon. He told them he had been preparing his son, Sandy, to help him. Sandy, he knew, often walked in the door thinking this day was the day he would help his father die. Today, he would learn that it was.

"Dad," he had said a few weeks before, "you know I'll help, but I'll never feel completely right. I don't think a son can."

Donnell thought his son one of the most courageous men in the world, for Donnell himself could not imagine having to assist his own father die. Yet Sandy would help because he, like his father, believed in assisted suicide, and would always put love and truth above fear and guilt. Donnell told the young people across the river about his son and daughter and his own long life, his time in the second world war, the long marches in the snow. He told them about Mary Ann and what it had been like to watch her die. "And soon I, too, will rejoin the Universal," he had murmured across the river. He told them about his life with Mary Ann and the children, years ago, in New Delhi, and his more recent travels, as an old man, back to the teeming country of India.

"I have lived my life always hoping to justify my existence," he told his yogi, Muti Barunanda, a dark Punjabi half his age, at the ashram in Rajasthan on his last visit to India, at seventy-nine years old. "I have always worked to be acceptable to society and to God. Now I see that I no longer need to justify my existence on the Earth. I'm an old man, much closer to death than you. I have finished the fight that life is. I wonder what my purpose is now?" The yogi, an immensely gifted sensitive, and generous beyond the bounds of his youth, told the wealthy old American to watch out for a young American saint in India who would give him the answer to his questions before this life was done. "He is our little Krishna," the Yogi said. Soon Donnell went to the ashram near the seashore south of Madras and found Ben Brickman, thirty-two, his blond hair long and curly, his eyes a deep brown and eternal, a young man boyish in his enthusiasm for his elderly guest. "Yes, yes, I know you!" the saint cried. "You live in America in a house high up over a river. I see it very clearly. Let me describe it." He described it perfectly, down to the wood roof.

"My God!" Donnell thought. Even after all the years in India, all the squalor, all the people who were not saints, he was always shocked by the visionary gifts of some of these mystics.

"I see the day you will rejoin the Universal there," Brickman told him. "On that day, there will be a light that shivers through your world. I see a river dam far to your left. There is a wilderness all before you, a special place for animal life and animal spirits. I see a cemetery to your right. Your city has been surprised by the deaths of children, children of great promise. On the day you die will be another significant death, a boy, and the animals will speak; then there will be a significant spiritual birth, a woman. Your death, combined with the death of the boy and the woman's new visionary life, will be very special, my friend, more special that I understand. Good and evil will merge. Everything will be encased in death, and therefore awakened to hope. And a teacher will come."

"A teacher?"

"The woman of that day will know. Though yours will be a valley of pain and disease, she will become fearless. Many mysteries will become clear. This is what you live for now, sir. For that day. You will complete your life on that day."

"I will die?"

"I think so. Yes."

"When will this be? How many years from now?" Donnell asked.

"I don't know. But you will be very sick."

"How can you be sure?"

"I don't know."

The young guru smiled the eternal smile of the mystic, and became silent. Donnell stayed at the ashram another week, but "the young American saint" had no more visions for him, only questions about how things were going back home in the U.S.

Brickman's description, those years ago in India -- of the river valley, the houses, Donnell's land, the little boy, who must be Jeffrey -- so accurate. And Donnell had read in the news, as had everyone else in Spokane, about the killer who captured and killed several children over on the south side of town. Brickman had even seen those deaths, his eyes stretching through time. Donnell almost thought Brickman could be reading this morning's newspaper, in which the disappearance of a young child on the south side of town, transpiring a few weeks ago, was still a constant source of front-page news. For a few weeks, watching the terrible news unfold, Sandy talking about it, so many people worried, Donnell fantasized himself catching the killer -- a fantasy perhaps everyone able-bodied might be having now.

Looking over the river valley as the sun heated his cold face and hands, Donnell was not sure what Ben had meant by the woman, but as Ben predicted, animal spirits had spoken to Donnell today -- the great blue heron, the deer, the osprey, coming around to his house in the last few hours. Even the insects had come around in hordes -- moths everywhere, butterflies, horseflies -- coming around to say goodbye? At dawn, a beautiful doe and fawn had come to his back door. Though Donnell owned the hundred-acre wildlife refuge surrounding his house, no deer had come right to his door in fifteen years. And never a fawn. He tried to speak to the deer; he asked them what they needed. They stared, then walked off. With a sense of joy, he watched them go. A few hours later, a great blue heron startled into the air; instead of remaining away from the human, as it usually would do once in flight, it circled back and alighted on a branch twenty feet up and only a tree away. It looked directly into the human's eyes. Then, for ten minutes, the heron stared at the river without moving or, Donnell was sure, even blinking, as if clear in its vision, and heaven sent, sharing its life with an old man. And as Donnell ate a piece of soft bread on the deck just an hour ago, a flock of some fifty moths came to the deck's edge, fluttered there, flew off. Donnell found himself on his knees, in terrible pain, repeating a mantra to the Universal by which to focus himself toward his final hour.

In no time, Sandy would be here. Everything was in order. Donnell bowed and prayed and then sat back on the deck chair, near his telescope. He was in no hurry to be anywhere but here, in this place of refuge, afraid of the end of his life, and yet longing for it to unfold. He pushed his newspaper aside and continued writing the letter he'd begun to Sandy.

"Often we hear, ?Is there a right time to die?' Of course there is: when one has been invited back home. When the Universal is waiting. The Light will invite you. The Doorway will open. You will know this with either your senses or your intuition or both. You will look outward at the world and experience a sense of peace that only the opened Doorway and the Light can provide.

"If you have fulfilled your destiny in this lifetime, and have experienced the invitation, know that there is no moral boundary worthy of keeping you from the next step in your spiritual journey."

Donnell woke up with a painful jolt. He looked at his watch. It was 10:05. He'd taken a twenty-minute catnap. He pushed up, using the lounge chair and deck table as ballast to get him to the back door of his house. Entering the kitchen hallway, he used the walls to hold himself, padding in his socks, food-stained sweat pants, and gray V-neck T-shirt to the kitchen cabinet. Downing a Darvon on top of the morphine, he looked out the kitchen window for a moment, leaning there, then felt weak again, and moved to the wheelchair that sat by the back door. For a second, he felt the momentum of a body swan-diving off the cliff into the river.

As he leaned on the wheelchair, he was startled to hear knocking at the back deck door. No one ever came up the cliff-ridge to the back. Donnell was not expecting anyone until Sandy anyway. But there was someone. Donnell pushed the wheelchair into the hallway and saw a disheveled-looking man and woman, both in their late twenties or so. The young man had piercing eyes that twinkled in the light. His hair was blond-gray. He had a cherry-red birthmark along his neck and up under his hair, and a camper's early beard. He was dressed in jeans and a brown shirt. The young woman was short, large-breasted, overweight. Her brown hair was greasy and matted, her olive skin pockmarked. The man wore no glasses, but hers were thick, black-rimmed. Donnell recognized them. He'd seen them through the binoculars. They had ministered to Jeffrey last evening.

They smiled and peered in through the windows. Only the screen door was closed, so once they saw him pushing the chair, the man called out, "Hello, sir, we were walking down at the river and, well, we felt we had to come up here. It's very strange. You may kick us out. But we have a story to tell you."

Donnell got to the door and looked into the very serious eyes of young people who live for the mission of life. The woman chimed in, "It's hard to get up here. It was a heck of a climb." Indeed, the knees of their jeans, their hands, their cheeks, their forearms all looked silted in the red rock that comprised much of the cliff below Donnell's house. Donnell murmured -- "human visitors too, from the river, along with all the rest?"

"Excuse me?" the young man asked politely, hearing but not hearing. Donnell pushed at the screen door as the young man opened it for him and helped him cross the threshold. The young woman, too, let him lean on her corpulent body as they moved to the back table and chairs.

"I'm afraid I'm rather occupied right now," he said a little breathlessly, unused to strange company. "But let's sit a minute and you can tell me why you would risk that perilous climb." In thirty years very few people had climbed up the tiny trail along the cliff mainly because one section of it -- about thirty feet -- was nearly straight up.

"I'm Beth," the woman said, going for his blanket on the wheelchair and offering it to his lap.

"I'm Nathan," the man said. Once the old man was stationed, they sat too.

"Donnell Wight. I own this place. Generally I don't like trespassers. You must have seen the signs." He had enjoyed sounding grumpy for about ten years now, but knew his face showed welcome.

"We saw your signs," Nathan continued evenly, "But...have you noticed there's been a kind of light pulsating near your house?"

"Has there?" Donnell asked, his heart beating like a drum. Then he had not been the only one to notice it. Just as he was about to say that, he realized they did not mean just the light last evening; they meant this morning as well. "You've seen a light recently? Up here?"

"Yes. Even just minutes ago." Beth spread her arms. "We thought it was some illusion from the sunlight, but even as we moved closer it was there. Like it was on every animal and every tree. It didn't matter where we stood. But just now, as we started up the cliffside and came over the rim, the light was gone. So I don't get it." She looked at Nathan. "We don't get it. And yesterday...I don't know if you heard about the boy killed yesterday?"

"Jeffrey Romer?"

"Yes." She and Nathan had decided they could mention the miracle at Jeffrey's accident to this Donnell Wight, even despite Greta's admonitions. His house, after all, was somehow part of it.

Beth explained, "Well, there was a kind of light...a light that rose and spread over toward your house, then kind of shattered away. Then it was up here again today. It was so strong for all the time we were walking here, like for the last hour. Then when we got to the bottom of the ridge, it disappeared."

It was this woman, not the man, who seemed an open-hearted soul to Donnell. She seemed radiant -- like when he had first met his guru and felt a mysterious radiance. It was she whom he found himself looking at, feeling comfortable with. The man, Nathan, seemed a little remote, as if in a faraway world, but Beth leaned in when she talked, and even touched his hand. He found himself thinking he had known her a long time.

"A light," he mused aloud, as they fell silent, waiting for him. "A light." He wanted to close his eyes, to enjoy this warm woman's presence. The couple stared at him.

Donnell shook himself. "Do you want something to drink? You must be thirsty." They confessed they were. Nathan rose, insisting that he would go inside and get something. Donnell told Nathan where the bottle of cranberry juice would be, and the glasses.

While Nathan went inside, Beth told him how she and Nathan were camping out by the river, and how the morning felt -- filled with new experiences but sad too, confusing. She said she was finding herself embarrassingly "opened wide" today and last night, and hoped he wouldn't think her strange.

"No, I don't," he said, smiling.

"I feel like I'm awakening, or being born."

Donnell thought for a moment that he'd stopped breathing. "Who are you?" he asked silently, looking into the young woman's eyes. This must be the woman the young American guru in India had spoken of.

She told him about strange little things that had been happening -- visions, premonitions, insights.

Donnell yearned to tell her about Ben Brickman's prophetic words. Would she believe him? She probably would.

Nathan returned with the juice, Beth saying, "We're not on drugs, really. We have to follow that light, like we followed it up here to your house. Something's happening. We don't understand, but we know it's real somehow. Real like I've never seen things be real."

Donnell thanked Nathan for the juice, and raised it to his lips. For a moment there was nature's silence between them, then Donnell decided to open a little to this woman. It must be part of what he was meant to do.

"I too have been affected. I have felt Reality, as it is." He told the young people about the heron's visit, the moths, the deer. He did not mention that he had seen the light last evening through his binoculars, nor had seen them. He wanted to keep at least some dignity; not confess to being a kind of voyeur over Lucia Court. Thankfully, neither of the young people had said anything about the telescope and binoculars sitting just fifteen feet away. Instead, Donnell saw on their faces looks of relief, perhaps, that he shared their experience, and also, on Beth's, some other look -- as if her face were not wholly her own, but servant of some other image. A shiver went through Donnell, a voice speaking at his ear, and a breath chilling down his neck.

"Something happened two years ago," Donnell said, kneading his painful left abdomen with his hand. He explained about the American guru, falling short of saying, "He told me I would meet you, talk to you, then be free." To speak the last part was too much revelation to these strangers who were not strangers, and yet they were. Nathan and Beth waited for more.

"The light you saw," Donnell continued. "Mystics would probably call it an electromagnetic phenomenon, one that needs certain kinds of optical faculties in certain people at certain times if it is to be seen. What has allowed you and others to see it last evening? You may never know."

"It's like the light is always around us," Beth said. "Near us, within us, but we just can't always see it. Only at certain times."

"This field surrounds us," Donnell agreed. "At least, that's what the Hindus say. We're immersed in it. At various times in human history, the Field in which we all live, a field we have come to call ?God,' becomes manifest to human sensory reality, usually as light. In Yugoslavia, pilgrims go by the thousands to see the eerily pulsing sun."

"You're talking about at Mahjudderke, right?" Nathan confirmed. "We were thinking about it last night."

"Yes. I have not been there, but I have talked to others who have seen the light there, like a color of cream, undulating against the eye. In Mecca, late in the seventeenth century, this same kind of phenomenon was reported over a three-day period. In ancient Greece, the light from the mountain known as Olympus pulsed so heavily that the Hellenic people saw gods there. What they were seeing was the electromagnetic field made visible for some reason, unknown. Moses saw the Light Field in the burning bush.

"Just a few years ago, a light coursed through a small town in northern Japan so completely that residents were unable to account for five minutes of a Saturday."

"Yes." Nathan nodded.

"The saints in India have been saying for centuries that people are evolving with each generation -- more and more people -- who can see this Light. Humans are just now evolving into populations that can actually see things like this, actually experience them, as ordinary people, over and over. One of my gurus in India taught me that ?a new human' is emerging in the new millennium. One of these millennial mystics taught me that we are evolving as a race from Homo sapiens to an unlimited human he callsHomo infiniens.He told me to live until I shared that knowledge. Have you been to India before?" he asked Beth.

The big head and camp-dirty black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses moved side to side, gesturing "no."

"You've made me happy by pushing your way up here. Because of you and your eyes, I see not only the animals that came, but that there is a light all around me right now. Thank you for that."

"There is definitely light around you," Beth assured him. Donnell found himself silenced by emotion, his eyes tearing up and his chin creasing. Beth's eyes became teary with empathy.

"Freedom and free will," Donnell coughed, "these are to be beloved no matter the form they take, especially in circumstances such as mine. Nathan, I think you are a doctor of some kind, is that right?"

The young man nodded. "Resident. Neurology."

"I was a urologist. Let me ask you: Would you want to die in a hospital? You have gathered by now that I am terminal."

"Yes," Nathan admitted. "I'm sorry." He thought a moment and said, "Not if I could avoid it."

"And you won't die in a hospital, will you, Mr. Wight?" Beth said.

"Who is to say?" Donnell temporized, again avoiding her eyes. But Beth put her hand out across the patio table. She clasped his small hand, her hand warm with life. She was speaking into his eyes, clasping him with such sudden affection that he felt flushed. She filled him with something passionate and loving. It was almost as if he saw through her translucent spirit to the interior world where Mary Ann was. Mary Ann was on her face, in her eyes, on her flesh, like a shroud. Donnell held her hand and drank her gaze deeply. He experienced a rare clarity. He felt as if the young woman were healing him somehow -- not his flesh, but the soul behind the mask.

Then, suddenly, it was too much. He pulled out of Beth's hand. "My son is coming soon, and I must ask you to go," he said to Nathan, avoiding Beth's eyes but knowing she would go too, and missing her already.

"I think I have seen the new human. I'm sure you both will participate in stripping away some of the veils of consciousness."

As Donnell began to stand, the young people pushed up immediately. Nathan asked if he could help. No, no, Donnell assured him. It was time for them to go.

Beth's eyes were moist. "May we hug?" she asked Donnell.

They hugged tightly, and he felt her beautiful soul's warmth on his skin. Again, unbidden, Donnell felt Mary Ann's presence. She was suddenly here, close, perched on Beth, effacing all else that was real. Had she had come for her beloved? Could this be? Was this the morphine? What was this -- it was like a jolt of energy from Beth, like a shock. He did not want to let go of her.

"Are you sure we should go?" she asked, holding him hands to shoulders now, peering into him.

He said nothing for a moment, wondering if Mary Ann would go too. But he knew she would not. She had come to take him.

"Who are you, really?" he wanted to ask Beth, yet he wanted to be free of strangers.

He said, "Good luck to you both." Nathan gave him a crisp hug, and then a look touched with longing. Donnell saw Nathan as himself years ago. "You, like me, will have to search long and hard to regain your innocence," he thought silently into the young man's eyes.

"Please take care of yourself," Beth said. "Will you?"

"I will." Donnell smiled. "Go now. You must both enjoy the light while you can. And you, Beth, don't be afraid. You are like my Mary Ann. She shouldn't ever have been afraid. Neither should you."

"Thank you," she sighed, a tear dropping off her left eyelid. "You're the second person in twenty-four hours to tell me that, Mr. Wight, thank you."

Donnell breathed deeply as he watched the young people walk toward the cliff's edge and the small, barely passable trail. Beth turned, as if to speak or come back, but she kept on. Soon the two heads disappeared over the ridge and Donnell turned back, looking upward, at the tops of pine trees. Only sunlight shown on them now. He saw a blue jay, a sparrow, then a squirrel.

Donnell found himself trembling, and found his wheelchair. A sudden, immense fear of the reality of death swooped over him, like a dark shadow. He tried to divert it. It was almost as if they had never come, the muscular man and the big woman. But Mary Ann was definitely here. That feeling, so strange, distracted him from the trembling shadow of what he was now going to do. But then he trembled again, as if he were sitting beside a train track and a train rushed by. Donnell felt himself resisting the vibrations, then gave over to them. He opened his eyes and heart to the shadow, the great and terrible fear of losing even his broken, battered, diseased body. Donnell Wight swooned with the darkness and the vibrations of the locomotive death and looked for a light of some kind in the center. He did not see any light of a spiritual kind, now at this moment; but he felt something, something very warm, like the warm wake after the locomotive passes. "I'm afraid to die," he mumbled. "I'm afraid to die." He found his eyes tearing up, his body, though unmoving in its chair, nonetheless falling toward a deep hole. "But Mary Ann...you're here now." As he peered into the hole, he thought he saw Jeffrey now, that little boy, with Mary Ann, both bathed in light, reaching upward toward him. A swamp of tiredness overran him, and he drifted into the hidden world again, murmuring to his wife, who had, it seemed, never really left him.

Donnell was already in bed when Sandy arrived -- jolly, red-haired Sandy, a balding, smiling son of fifty-two, coming as he did nearly every day -- to find that his father had decided that today it was time to die. Donnell told him about the visitors, and that Mother was here.

For months, his emaciated father had talked about the end of life, absorbing Sandy in debates on the morality of suicide for the terminally ill. Sandy, an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon, took the con position, but knew that in his father's shoes he would not have chosen even to live this long. Then today his father talked about does, fawns, moths -- and after quixotic explanations, including his mother's presence, he said he would end his life today, using two thousand milligrams of Darvon, which he took in his son's presence now. He asked that his son give the gift of his assistance. Donnell confessed to being afraid, but confessed also to hope in the form of a large woman who had visited, and been predicted in India. Sandy had heard so many things from his father since the morphine began that he did not try anymore to sort them out. And he had been girding for this day since the previous Christmas, seven months before, when he realized his father would ultimately ask for his help in opening death's door.

"Dad, you could have called me at least, prepared me," Sandy said. "I have a cellular phone. You know the number." Sandy had decided months ago that when the moment came, he would assist his father, for the pain his father succumbed to, all day and night, was like a terrible disease all its own -- but now that the moment was here, Sandy was scared and sad and angry.

Yet the course had been set. Sandy knew this clearly. "I love you, Dad," Sandy said, hugging him. "I'll keep good memories alive. I'll take good care of your home. You'll never be far from our hearts. You're very brave."

I think I do know that, Donnell thought. Are you still here, Mary Ann? "I could not have a better son," Donnell said plainly to his oldest child. Sandy knew he meant it, and for this reason did not respond.

Donnell lay propped up on the bed, Sandy beside him now, facing him. Donnell reached for his son's left cheek -- he ran his finger along the old chainsaw wound that cut Sandy's face even now, the initial cut filled with that hard, wounded scar tissue that give spirits a place on which to perch.

"I remember the day it happened," Donnell said, remembering the roof work fifteen years ago, the buzz saw Sandy held, its blade hitting a wood-knot, then bounding into Sandy's flesh and cutting with a dull skin-tight roar down to his son's jawbone.

"You know, son" -- Donnell closed his eyes -- "you can't change the past. The cat gets its tail wet. It just happens."

What do we talk about now? Sandy wondered. He said nothing, maintaining a silence in which voices spoke that were more important than his. Should he also have given his father two Seconal, he wondered, which would have put him to sleep before termination from Darvon actually came. No, he would want to be awake to the last moment.

"I don't want our lives to run out of words," he said to his father, holding the bony hand. He busied himself checking his father's pulse.

"I know," Donnell murmured. "Your mother always admonished me for notsayinghow much I loved you kids. I love you, son. I love you all."

"I know. Jennifer...we all know. Have a safe journey, Dad," Sandy whispered, trying to hold on to his own confusing feelings. "You always were way ahead of all the rest of us." Donnell recalled a time when Sandy thought he was the worst father -- but that had passed long ago.

"A bunch of wildlife came to see me," Donnell whispered, forgetting he had said this already. "We're not alone," he whispered. "The movies make spirits out to be scary, angry ghosts. No. They aren't usually scary." Then Donnell thought he saw Jeffrey where his son was sitting. Jeffrey was bathed in light, saying something. And there was Mary Ann.

"That Coeur d'Alene Indian who used to come up here, forty years ago. Sandy, do you remember?"

Sandy remembered someone vaguely. "Sure, Dad."

"His people used to live up here. Had ?home spirits' here. Dead people he needed to talk to. I understand now."

"Yes." Donnell's eyes were shut and his pale face seemed to his son to have lost its life already. Old, more fragile than a baby, he broke his son's heart.

"Okay, Dad," Sandy said, his voice cracking. "I'm with you, Dad." He thought his father was going now, but Donnell seemed to be sleeping, not dying. Then he woke again, looking into Sandy's eyes without saying anything.

"Dad?"

"A clean break. My clean break." His voice trailed off into imperceptible words.

For a few seconds, his father's breath stopped.

"This is it," Sandy thought. He checked the pulse again, touched along the skin of the arm, and he melted into tears, holding his father's hand.

Donnell Wight did not speak again. He died in his own bed, in his own home, surrounded by the light of the river valley, and all the invisible encounters held there. His son could not see all the worlds of light right then, as they are seen by the dying; he simply experienced Donnell breathing, stertorous, his hand bony and limp, getting colder. The heat that comes with light was diminishing in the body, like rain drying. The son saw significance in the father's life, and powerlessness too. So suddenly it had all happened, and yet it was right -- it was okay. His father, shaped for many months by the indignities of dying, had found dignity again. Had Sandy known it, he would have thanked Jeffrey, Beth, his mother, and all the spirits who were at play today in his father's life; but Sandy Wight just held the old man's hand.

Excerpted from The Miracle: A Visionary Novel by Kathryn Laurel, Michael Gurian
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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The Miracle A Visionary Novel

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