a half. I watch as she is shattered by a shard of silver light ricocheting from within my mother’s grave.
Helene darts sideways to avoid the shard, and I suddenly understand that my mother’s grave has been desecrated.
That it’s being desecrated.
That I’m watching it happen.
The stone angel falls sideways from her rectangular platform. With a heavy thud she hits the ground, her head and shoulders, the top of her wings, separated from the rest of her sculpted figure. They topple away several feet and sink inches deep into the upturned mud.
“Why?” The word forms in my mind. I’ve no idea if I actually say it, but it’s the only thing I can think. Over and over it hums in my chest. Why? Why? Why?
Dirt flies from the grave en masse, and then a face appears, rising from the mud.
Glowing. Radiant.
Angelic.
He rises from the gaping hole, wings of blade lifting and then holding him in place before us. I can do nothing but stare.
Helene speaks to him, leaving her mind open, allowing me to hear the conversation.
“Virtue,” she says.
Her mind is quiet but sure.
“Helene,” he says, giving me the same courtesy. “I am sorry to arrive with the sound of destruction.”
“If it’s necessary . . .”
“It is, and I am not yet finished.”
Helene pushes back with her wings, deferring to him, giving him room, but the angel doesn’t move. The tilt of his head makes me think he’s looking at me, and indeed his words seem to be for me alone.
“I am sorry for your pain,” he says, pressing closer to us.
Which pain? Which one?
“But you’ve chosen truth. It is best that you have it all.”
And then he opens his mouth, worship pouring forth as he rises into the sky again and plummets to the earth, his dagger-like wings tearing through the gigantic hole he’s created and into my mother’s casket. It’s a violent, forceful thing that pulls my stomach into my mouth. It’s sick. Whatever this is, this is a desecration of something . . . sacred?
Is my mother’s grave sacred? I don’t know. But it’s special. It’s where her body was laid to rest, and while I know deep down that it’s her soul that’s most important, her body surely has some value.
Surely it doesn’t deserve to be unearthed like this, exposed in its decay.
I lash out. Or try to. My legs squirm in an attempt to kick against the sinewy wings holding me tight; my elbows and fists press against them too, but I’m useless against Helene’s embrace. Exhausted, I give up, sinking deeper and deeper into confusion and hating the beautiful creature clawing away at my mother’s resting place.
“There’s a reason, Brielle,” Helene tells me. “There has to be.”
I can’t see it. The possibility that this senseless, frenzied devastation can have reason.
And then Helene is singing. Something about the kindness of God. About His holiness and truth. They’re words I’ve heard before, words I’ve mouthed at the little church in town, words I’ve learned much from. But now, in the midst of the flying mud and the shivering lightning, they anger me.
Holy? Kind? Just?
Canaan arrives, Jake tucked to his chest. I stare through his inner wings and into Jake’s face, into eyes that burn with compassion, and then I pinch my eyes shut. I close him out and let fear take me. I let it shake me. I let it consume every part of me, because it’s better than the disappointment that comes with watching God destroy the tiniest shred of something I never had. Of something I always wanted.
Of the thing I lost before I knew I needed it.
My mother.
And then it’s quiet. Even Helene’s voice is gone. I open my eyes. Before me is nothing but a silver sheen. I squint at it, beginning to make out the silhouette of a man-like head and shoulders.
Virtue.
He’s close, so close to my face.
I burrow back into Helene.
“Finding truth is hard. But yesterday’s knowledge is a lie. The grave is empty, child of God. See. Understand.”
The grave is empty? Isn’t that what the angel said at Christ’s tomb? What is he talking about?
The sheen before me increases, brighter and brighter until I have to close my eyes to be rid of it. When at last the shimmer beyond my lids fades, I open them to find that Helene has set me down and released me from her inner wings. I stand in the mud before my mother’s grave, the silver angel and his wings of destruction gone. And then