CHAPTER 19 #2
Word of Annunciata’s cure must have reached the stranded tourists too, because dozens of them had come down to An El.
As soon as Avelyn and Annunciata came out, camera flashes went off everywhere, and the silver-clad Polaroids made their old-fashioned chucking sound as they rolled out the photographs.
“Come on, pack it in, you’ll blind her all over again,” Avelyn said. “What are you doing? Leave her alone.”
“Something strange is happening in the pictures,” Fabian protested.
“See? It isn’t just a lens flare, it follows her around!” someone else said excitedly. “It’s like a halo—a real halo!”
Avelyn dove on the chance. “Yes, there’s about ten of you with it.”
Instant clamour.
“Ten! Which ten? Do I have it?”
“Do I?”
Suddenly everyone was much more interested in him than in Annunciata, who crept along the wall and towards the passageway that led to the bridge.
“You’ll see, if you take pictures of each other,” he said, and hurried after Annunciata as quickly as the stitches would allow. He caught up in the passage. Her halo lit the way brighter than any lamp.
“A halo?” she said to him, voice echoing.
“It’s salt light,” he said. “It clings to you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.
” He felt freshly exhausted at the prospect of an entire conversation in Hreod.
He wanted to turn back and claim to be too hurt and tired to do anything but curl up on the couch and be read to, but then Jericho would ask him what he had meant about his grandmother, and .
. . Oh God, he was up and walking in the right direction.
And it was true that suffering was character-building.
His least favourite humans were the ones who had never known an iota of unpleasantness or difficulty.
Suffering made you appreciate the times when you were all right, instead of becoming righteous and vengeful about being asked to come into the office instead of working from home.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to find some of the miners, see if they know.
What time is it—half seven? We might catch someone from the Balen coming up from the deep. ”
“Well, I’ll tell you now, maybe I have a halo but I’m no saint,” she said. “I eat popcorn during Mass to aggravate Sister Michael.”
“Annunciata, if that isn’t saint material, I don’t know what is,” Avelyn said. “But Reyes has it too, and he seems like a narcissistic pervert.”
“Anyone can be redeemed,” she pointed out.
“Well, he’ll be redeemed with a much higher voice if he tries anything here.”
She laughed, but not as much as he’d hoped. “I just wonder . . .”
“What?” he said.
“It’s just—I always thought of my blindness as a kind of—I don’t know, my burden to carry.
I was glad of it. It made my faith stronger, and it gave me so many opportunities for patience and perseverance and all the rest, and now it’s gone, I just—well, I think it’s going to take me further from God, not closer.
I’m a goldfish person, Avelyn. I’ll forget what it’s like to struggle, I’ll forget what it was like for Christ—”
Avelyn kicked her ankle. “All right, Saint Sebastian.”16
She paused. “That was a little bit Saint Sebastiany, wasn’t it,” she admitted.
They had come out close to the bridge over the lake.
For him, the water had its own violet-gold luminescence.
Under the surface, the eels swung to follow them as they made their way across the bridge; they hunted by salt light, and they could see Annunciata.
Annunciata herself must not have been able to see much at all.
The great chandeliers were lit, sometimes dripping wax into the lake with what would have sounded like raindrop plinks if they hadn’t hissed, but that light was barely enough to go by.
To her, the water must have looked eerie and black, swimming with the reflections from An El’s windows.
Maybe she wouldn’t even be able to make out the gleam of the salt-encrusted rocks along the lake shore.
To Avelyn, they glowed only a little less than the candles.
“I walk around the lake every day,” she said when he asked if she needed a lamp. “I’m grand. It’s nice, it’s so warm.”
“That’s the salt light,” Avelyn agreed. “It is nice.” It was warmer now than he had ever known it as a child.
“Avelyn,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you still speak Hreod pretty well?”
“It’s not great now, but . . . I didn’t really speak English till I was sixteen. Why?”
“Well, it would be brilliant if you’d let me ask you a few questions about it—once you’re feeling better obviously, I can’t be torturing a sick man. But before I have to leave?”
“No, ask me now, I’m fine. Although . . . why . . . Hreod?” he asked, trying not to wrinkle his nose.
She smiled. “Hreod is the linguistic mystery of the twenty-first century. Oh: you’re going to have to tell me what you’re doing with your face, I don’t know many expressions yet . . .”
“It’s my that’s-obviously-a-lie face.”
“It’s not! I mean it. Hreod shouldn’t exist. Or not anymore.”
“Sorry?”
“Do you want me to do this to you?” she said, giving him an assessing look. “Probably we should have a code word for when you need to stop.”
He laughed. “Candlestick.”