was to do. And I heard Malchiah’s gentle reproof and ultimate insistence, and I heard the prayers so thick and wondrous that it seemed I would never need a body again to live or love or think or feel.
Yet something changed. The scene shifted.
I saw the great rise of the Earth beneath me and I drifted downwards feeling a slow but certain and aching chill. Let me stay, I wanted to plead, but I didn’t deserve to stay. It was not my time to stay, and I had to feel this inevitable separation. Yet what opened now before me wasn’t the Earth of my expectations but vast fields of wheat blowing golden under a sky more vivid in the brightening sun than I had ever beheld. Everywhere I looked I saw the wildflowers, “the lilies of the field,” and I saw their delicacy and their resilience as the force of the breeze bent them to and fro. This was the wealth of the Earth, the wealth of its blowing trees, the wealth of its gathering clouds.
“Dear God, never to be away from You, never to wrong You, never to fail You in faith or in heart,” I whispered, “for this, all this You have given me, all this You have given us.”
And there followed on my whisper an embrace so close, so total, that I wept with my whole soul.
The fields grew vague and large and a golden emptiness enveloped the world and I felt love embracing me, holding me, as if I were being cradled by it, and the flowers shifted and turned into masses of colors I couldn’t describe. The very presence of colors we did not know struck me deep and rendered me helpless. Dear God, that You love us so very much.
Shapes were gone. Colors had detached themselves effortlessly from shapes, and the light itself was rolling now as if it were a soft and consuming smoke.
There appeared a corridor and I had the distinct impression, in words, that I had passed through it. And now, down the long corridor there came to me the tall slender figure of Malchiah, clothed as he always was, a graceful figure, like that of a young man.
I saw his soft dark hair, his oval face. I saw his simple dark suit with its narrow lines.
I saw his loving eyes, and then his slow and fluid smile. I saw him reach out to me with both arms.
“Beloved,” he whispered. “I need you once again. I will need you countless times. I will need you till the end of time.”
It seemed then the other voices sang from their hearts, in protest, in praise, I couldn’t tell.
I wanted to hold him. I wanted to beg him to let me stay just a little while more with him here. Take me again into the realm of the lamps of Heaven. I wanted to cry. I had never known as a child how to cry. And now as an adult, I did it repeatedly, awake and in dreams.
Malchiah came on steadily as though the distance between us was far greater than I had supposed.
“You’ve only a couple of hours before they come,” he said, “and you want to be ready.”
I was awake.
The morning sun flooded the windows.
The noise of traffic rose from the streets.
I was in the Amistad Suite, in the Mission Inn, and I was sitting back against a nest of pillows, and Malchiah sat, collected and calm, in one of the wing chairs near the cold stone fireplace and he said again to me that Liona and my son would soon come.
CHAPTER TWO
A CAR WAS GOING TO PICK THEM UP FROM THE LOS Angeles airport and bring them straight to the Mission Inn. I’d told her I’d meet her under the campanario, that I’d have a suite for her and for Toby—that was my son’s name—and that I’d take care of everything.
But I still didn’t believe she’d really come. How could she come?
I’d disappeared out of her life, in New Orleans, ten years ago, leaving her seventeen and pregnant, and now I was back via a phone call from the West Coast, and when I’d found out she wasn’t married, not even engaged, not even living with someone, when I’d found that out, I’d almost passed out on the spot.
Of course I couldn’t tell her that an angel named Malchiah told me I had a son. I couldn’t tell her what I’d been doing both before and after I met that angel,