“And very, very small.”
“Smaller than atoms, smaller than the atoms inside of atoms. Small to the point of nearly not existing at all, but they do. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed. Once upon a time, atoms did not yet exist. There was no Dalton, no Rutherford. Albert Einstein was nothing more than a theorist, but you only have to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know that things invisible exist and bear great power. The power to destroy. Or the power to create.”
Margaret thought of her husband and the secret he tried to keep from her all those years.
“Atoms and angels, reason and faith,” he went on. “One without the other is less than half as strong and can be a danger to our vitality. Reason is subject to the tests of logic and observable, demonstrable phenomena. Faith is tested by our desire and will. One cannot see faith, just as one cannot pour out hope or love from a beaker. Self-sacrifice and devotion escape the strongest microscope, but such qualities of spirit can be shown and known by us all, my dear. And so with God's messengers, more believed than seen, more felt than touched, our angels exist in open hearts, if we have but faith.”
Dead silence followed, too many measures without a note.
He cleared his throat. “The question is: does the child believe what she says she is? And do you think she is a messenger of the Lord?”
In the next room, Norah slept without a sound. Margaret had checked earlier to make sure before readying herself for bed. They had spoken briefly of the incident at the school and the calls from her teacher and the principal, but she had not pressed the child for explanation. Truth be told, she did not want to know, but hoped instead that the notion would pass in time, that the girl would settle into the role Margaret desired.
“You lied to protect her, protect yourself. Lied to everyone, your sister. Thought you could keep her. What will you do for this perfect stranger?”
He held his gaze, and she looked into his eyes, expecting her reflection on the black pupils, but there was nothing but misery. Margaret snapped off the light, covered her ear with the pillow, and drew the blanket to her forehead to banish him from sight. Pain snuggled against her spine and shared an intimate hour wrestling in the darkness.
2
Watching the roseate clouds darken as the morning crept in from the east, Sean stood waiting for her in the yard, half expecting the bathroom window to part at the sash and Norah to fly through with white wings unfurled and land at his side. The winds had shifted from the southwest in the early hours, pushing warmer air over the Alleghenies, teasing at springtime. Sean opened his overcoat, unwound his scarf, wondering how much of this warmth could be attributed to the rising temperature and how much to his state of anticipation. Ever since he had heard her confession to the entire class, he had five hundred questions he longed to ask her. All night, from supper to bedtime and in his dreams, he carried on an imagined conversation with Norah, supplying both sides of the dialogue and providing the answers to all that plagued his mind. He stamped his feet in the snow, begging her to hurry, and his sudden motion startled a gang of crows, shouting alarms from a bare oak as they hopped and scattered to safer branches. From their new perches, they scrutinized the stranger in their midst.
Frightened by the birds, Sean did not notice how she arrived—magically, perhaps—red-cheeked from her exertions. Norah welcomed him with a wide grin, her face framed by the gray hood of her coat, her glasses fogged. She appeared no different than any other morning, though he felt they were meeting for the first time.