He laughed lightly. “I’m honored.”
“As you should be.” A pause; then she spoke again. “Do you ever think about them? Your parents.”
The question, though unexpected, did not seem strange. “Once in a while. It was a long time ago, though.”
“I don’t really remember mine. They died when I was so young. Just little things, I guess. My mother had a silver hairbrush she liked. It was very old; I think it belonged to my grandmother. She used to visit me in the Sanctuary and brush my hair with it.”
Michael considered this. “Now, that sounds right to me. I think I recall something like that happening.”
“You do?”
“She’d put you on a stool in the dormitory, by the big window. I remember her humming—not a song exactly, more like just notes.”
“Huh,” Alicia said after a moment. “I didn’t know anyone was paying attention.”
They were quiet for a time. Even before she said the words, Michael sensed their approach. He did not know what she was about to tell him, only that she was.
“Something … happened to me in Iowa. A man raped me there, one of the guards. He got me pregnant.”
Michael waited.
“She was a girl. I don’t know if it was what I am or something else, but she didn’t survive.”
When Alicia fell silent, Michael said, “Tell me about her.”
“She was Rose. That’s what I named her. She had such beautiful red hair. After I buried her, I stayed with her awhile. Two years. I thought it would help, make things easier somehow. But it never did.”
He felt, suddenly, closer to Alicia than he had to anyone in his life. Painful as this story was, telling him was a gift she had given him, the heart of who she was, the stone she carried and how love had happened in her life.
“I hope it’s okay I told you.”
“I’m very glad you did.”
Another silence, then: “You’re not really worried about the anchor, are you?”
“Not really, no.”
“That was nice, what you did for them.” Alicia tipped her head upward. “It’s such a beautiful night.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, more than beautiful,” she said and squeezed his hand, nestling against him. “It’s perfect.”
81
So, at the last, a story.
A child is born into this world. She is lost, alone, in due course both befriended and betrayed. She is the carrier of a special burden, a singular vocation that is only hers to bear. She wanders in a wasteland, a ruin of grief and tormented dreams. She has no past, only a long, blank future; she is like a convict with an unknown sentence, never visited in the cell of her interminable imprisonment. Any other soul would be broken by this fate, and yet the child abides; she dares to hope that she is not alone. That is her mission, the role for which she has been cast at heaven’s cruel audition. She is hope’s last vessel on the earth.
Then, a miracle: a city appears to her, a bright walled city on a hill. Her prayers have been answered! Shining like a beacon, it has the aspect of a prophecy fulfilled. The key turns in the lock; the door swings open. Ensconced within its walls she discovers a wondrous race of men and women who have, like her, endured. They become hers, after a fashion. In the eyes of this wordless child, the most prescient among them perceive an answer to their most persistent questions; as they have relieved her loneliness, so has she relieved theirs.
A journey commences. The world’s dark arrangement is revealed. The child grows; she leads her companion to a glorious victory. By her hand, seeds of hope are scattered over the land, promise bubbles forth from every spring and stream. And yet she knows this flowering is an illusion, the merest respite. There can be no safety; her triumphs have but scratched the crust. Below lies the dark core, that great iron ball beneath all things. Its compressed weight is fantastic; it is older than time itself. It is a vestige of the blackness that predates all existence, when a formless universe existed in a state of chaotic un-creation, lacking awareness even of itself.