BACK TO BOSTON

We took the bus down from Mount Shasta to the airport in Redding and flew east. We changed planes for Boston.

Yun and Randy sat a few rows behind us. Claire and I lifted the armrest between our seats and leaned into each other, and for the first few hours, the flight was exactly what I had hoped for: long, quiet, and uneventful. The sky outside the window was a clean, unbroken blue, and the country slid by beneath us like a map.

Then, somewhere over the Great Plains, a baby began to cry.

At first it was only a whimper near the front of the cabin. Within minutes it had become a series of shrieks so piercing that passengers were turning in their seats and flight attendants were hurrying up the aisle.

I got up and walked forward.

A young mother was rocking a baby in her arms. The child’s face was red and wet and twisted with pain, and he was drooling and screaming as though something inside him were on fire.

“It’s nothing, really,” she told me, before I could ask. She looked exhausted. “It’s colic. There’s nothing anyone can do.”

“His stomach hurts?”

She nodded.

“May I hold him for a moment?”

She looked at me for a long second. Then, with the desperation of a parent who has run out of ideas, she handed him over.

I sat down in the empty seat beside her and laid my right hand gently on the little boy’s belly. I felt Claire come up the aisle and stand behind me. She did not say anything. She knew what I was about to do.

I closed my eyes and breathed. A few slow, measured breaths. My mind fell silent. The dark, endless space opened, and the point of light appeared within it, right on schedule.

This time I did not let it grow. I held it at the size of a coin.

The familiar tingling began at my temples. I opened my eyes, and I felt the warmth leave my right hand and flow into the child.

He stopped crying.

Just like that. In the middle of a scream. He gave a long, shuddering sigh. His eyes drifted closed, and within seconds he was asleep.

His mother stared at him. Then at me.

“His attacks last for hours,” she whispered. “Sometimes all night.”

I handed him back to her. “Would you mind if I sat here for a minute?”

“Of course not.” She was holding him as though he might break. “Thank you. Thank you. You have a magic touch, sir.”

Claire’s hand rested on my shoulder. She bent down and quietly asked if I was all right.

“I will be,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

The cabin seemed to tilt a little when I stood. Claire took my arm and walked me back to my seat, and a few of the passengers who had watched the whole thing broke into soft applause.

As I sat down, Yun came up the aisle and leaned between the seats.

“If calming a baby’s colic leaves you this dizzy,” he said, “what do you imagine will happen when you try to bring Mrs. O’Brian back to life?”

I turned around.

“First, Mrs. O’Brian is not dead. Second, I prepared for two minutes to help that child. I have prepared for two months for her.” I softened my voice. “My friend, I know you’re afraid for me. I’m grateful for it. But this is no longer open to debate. You know that I must do this, and that I will.”

Yun looked at me for a long moment. Then he bowed his head and returned to his seat.

I leaned against Claire, and she held my hands in both of hers and rested her head on my chest. Somewhere over Ohio, we fell asleep.

Night had fallen by the time we landed in Boston. In the taxi line at Logan, I asked the others to go on ahead to Somerville without us. Yun looked at me sharply, and then at Claire, and then he understood, and he did not argue. Randy wrote the address on the back of a boarding pass and pressed it into my hand.

“One hour,” he said. “Please.”

“One hour.”

Claire and I took a second cab across the harbor and into the city, and I asked the driver to let us out at the corner of Arlington and Boylston.

The Public Garden was nearly empty. The lamps along the paths made small gold islands in the dark, and the wind came off the pond with the last of the winter in it. Claire put her arm through mine. She did not ask where we were going. I think she already knew.

The bench was where it had always been. In my mind I had put the Roxbury courthouse across the path. I had been waiting for Eli again.

I had sat on it a hundred times in the lost weeks, I knew now, in a filthy suit, on my way to a courthouse that had forgotten me. And I had sat on it once, with a stranger who smelled of my childhood, and been asked the only question that mattered.

We sat down.

Behind us, along the path, the magnolias were just beginning to open. Most of the buds were still closed tight, like small fists. But a few had loosened in the warm week before, and the scent of them drifted to us on the cold air, faint and sweet and impossibly familiar.

Claire leaned her head on my shoulder.

“This is where Yun found you,” she said.

“This is where I started to come back.”

For a long time we did not say anything. A couple walked past, arm in arm, laughing at something. A dog barked on Beacon Street. Somewhere across the pond, a bell in one of the old churches struck the half hour.

I wanted to tell her. I had rehearsed it on the plane, after the cabin went quiet, while she slept against my chest. I had built the case, the way I always had. And sitting on that bench with her, I found that I could not make a single word of it come out.

So I told her the only thing that was true.

“I love you, Claire. Whatever happens tonight, I want you to remember that I was happy. Here. Now. With you.”

She lifted her head and looked at me. Her eyes, in the lamplight, were very clear, and I saw that I had not needed to tell her anything at all. She had known since the cave. Perhaps since the train.

“Don’t,” she said softly. “Don’t say goodbye. You taught me there’s only this. So let’s just have this.”

She took my wrist and turned it over, so that the old beaded bracelet lay across my palm, and she held it there between both her hands.

We stayed until the hour was almost gone. When we stood, she reached up and broke a single half-open blossom from the nearest branch and tucked it into the pocket of my jacket, over my heart.

“For luck,” she said.

Then we walked back to Boylston Street.

At the corner there was a pay phone that still worked. I made one call, to a number I had carried on a small white card for nine years. It lasted less than a minute.

A little after ten, a cab carried us across the river into Somerville, a working-class city just north of Cambridge, and stopped in front of a narrow two-story Victorian on a side street. Its paint, white with pale-yellow trim, was peeling.

An old gray Buick was parked across the street with its lights off. A man got out of it as we pulled up: heavy, white-haired, in a raincoat that had once been brown.

“Wait for me on the porch,” I told Claire.

Paul Maurice had retired from the Boston Police Department four years earlier. He had aged the way big men do, all at once. But the eyes were the same ones that had watched me from the last row of a courtroom in 2000.

“Counselor,” he said. “Or is it Reverend?”

“Xavier will do.”

“You said on the phone you had something for me.”

I took the envelope from inside my jacket. I had written the statement that morning in the departure lounge at Redding, while the others went for coffee: six pages in longhand, signed and dated. It said that on a spring night in 1995, I had struck Norman Ross with a brass ornament and killed him. It said that I had put that ornament into the bound hand of Elizabeth Grant, so that it would carry her fingerprints and not mine. It did not say how the scales had found their way back to the floor of Ross’s office. It never would.

Maurice did not open it. He weighed it in his hand.

“Fourteen years,” he said. “I had a perfect set of prints on a pair of brass scales, and I never believed them for a day. Nobody holds a murder weapon like a teacup.” He looked at me. “I asked you about it once.”

“In the aisle. You asked whether I had anything to tell you about Norman Ross.”

“And you said, ‘Not yet.’”

“It’s yet.”

He almost smiled. Then he looked up at the one lit window on the second floor.

“What’s in the house?”

“A woman I owe more than I owe you.”

“I ought to put you in that car.”

“I know. I’m asking you for one hour. After that, I won’t give you any trouble.” It was the truth. I did not tell him why.

Maurice was quiet for a while. He had spent a long career listening to people ask him for one hour. Then he tucked the envelope inside his coat, unopened.

“One hour,” he said. “I’ll be right here.”

I bowed to him. He looked embarrassed. Then, stiffly, the old detective inclined his head.

Randy was waiting on the porch with Claire when I crossed the street. “This is it,” he said.

Winter was giving way to spring, but the night was cold and the wind was sharp. Inside, the house had the high ceilings and carved moldings of its era, but almost no furniture, and very little light. It had not been neglected. It had simply been allowed to fall into the slow disrepair that comes when every dollar goes to something else.

Randy lit a candle and led us up the stairs.

The electricity in that house, I realized, was reserved for one room.

At the end of the upstairs hall stood a closed door with light leaking from beneath it. Through it, I could hear the rhythmic hiss of a ventilator and the steady beep of a heart monitor.

Randy opened the door.

What had once been the master bedroom had become a hospital room. Machines stood on both sides of the bed. A young Black nurse sat in a padded chair beside it, reading aloud from a paperback to the woman lying there. Her name, I would learn, was Ashley. She worked one of the two shifts.

The other belonged to the young woman who stood up as we came in.

Carla O’Brian was twenty-four years old. She had been ten when her mother went into the coma, and she had spent most of the years since as her mother’s nurse. She was pale, with long hair the same red as her brother’s, and dark brown eyes that found mine and filled with a hatred so pure that I felt it physically.

“I don’t believe in your voodoo, Mr. Armand. I don’t expect anything from you. If it weren’t for my brother, I’d have you thrown out of this house.”

“May I go to her?”

“Do what you came to do,” she said. “And do it quickly, before I change my mind.”

I approached the bed.

Mrs. O’Brian’s condition was far worse than I had imagined. She was sixty years old, and she looked eighty. Tubes fed her. A machine breathed for her. Every piece of technology modern medicine could offer was keeping her body alive.

But I could feel at once that her mind was gone.

“I’ll need about thirty minutes of absolute silence,” I said to Carla, “before I try.”

She did not hesitate.

“Take all the time you need.” Her eyes filled with tears. “If this doesn’t work, they’re disconnecting her tomorrow.”

“It’s been fourteen years, Mr. Armand,” Randy said quietly. “We can’t do it anymore. You’re our last hope.”

“There’s one more thing.” I chose my words with care. “When I’m ready, I’ll need you to disconnect her from the machines. All of them. Just for a few seconds.”

Carla’s face went white, then crimson.

“Is that why you’re here?” She was in front of me in two steps, inches from my face, screaming. “To finish the job? You couldn’t kill her the first time, so you came back to make sure?”

Randy put himself between us.

“Carla. Listen to me. I’ve watched her fade in that bed every day, same as you. But I’ve looked into this man. I’ve seen what he can do. I can’t explain it. Please. Trust me. Let him do what he asks.”

Carla stared at her brother. Then she threw up her hands, as though surrendering, and walked out of the room.

I turned to the others.

“Now, please,” I said. “I need silence.”

The room went still. The only sounds were the hiss and beep of the machines keeping Mrs. O’Brian’s body alive.

I sat on the floor beside the bed and took the full lotus. Right foot on the left thigh, left foot on the right. Spine straight, as though a steel rod ran from my tailbone to the crown of my head. Chin slightly lowered. Ears aligned with my shoulders. Shoulders loose. Arms forming a gentle circle, not quite touching my sides. And in my lap, my hands formed the cosmic mudra: the left resting in the right, the tips of the thumbs barely touching, making an oval of empty space.

The silence came quickly. It always did now. But before the light could rise, something else rose to meet it.

A question.

Why are you here?

I knew that voice. It was not Deshan’s, though it had his patience. It was my own.

To save her, I answered.

Are you sure?

And there, in the dark behind my eyes, I saw him: the man I had been. Thirty-five years old, in a ten-thousand-dollar suit, standing on the courthouse steps with a smirk on his face while Eli walked away. The golden boy who could do no wrong. The man who had never in his life walked into a room he did not intend to win.

He was here too. Of course he was. He had come all the way from the mountain with me, as Deshan had warned me he would, and he was not dressed as an enemy. He was dressed as compassion.

This is your case, he whispered. The one that wipes the slate clean. Win this, and you’re forgiven. Win this, and the O’Brians, Ross, Rachel, all of it is paid. One last verdict, counselor. Go get it.

I sat with him. I did not push him away. I had learned that much, behind a woodshop, in the snow.

I looked at what he wanted. Not her life. His acquittal.

And I let him have his say, and then I let him go.

I am not here to win, I told him. I am not here to be forgiven. There is a woman in this bed, and her children are suffering, and I can help. That is all. If it works, it is not my victory. If it fails, it is not my defeat.

Deshan’s last lesson came back to me then, as clear as if he had been sitting beside me on the floor: an old man upright on his cushion, facing the mountain, his student’s hands resting quietly on his knees.

Sit to see who is carrying it.

I looked. And for the second time in my life, there was no one there.

Only the woman in the bed. Only her children. Only this.

Somewhere behind me, very softly, the bedroom door opened and closed again. I did not turn to look. I did not need to.

I began to breathe.

I let my lungs find their own rhythm, and I followed each breath in and each breath out. The vast, dark amphitheater opened and expanded in every direction. The pulsing point of light appeared.

This time, I let it grow.

With every breath it swelled, turning, gathering brightness, until it was a spinning orb of impossible radiance. I let it keep growing. Larger. Larger. Until there was only a thin rim of darkness around it, and the infinite space was gone, and in its place blazed a sun.

My temporal lobes no longer tingled. They pounded. The pain was beyond anything I had known, beyond anything I had believed a body could hold.

I knew the moment had come. One more breath, and I would lose consciousness.

I raised my hand.

Across the room, a figure moved out of the shadow by the door. Carla. I had not seen her come back in. Her arms were folded and her face was wet.

She looked at her brother. Then at me. Then at her mother.

Then she crossed to the wall, put her hand on the switches she had guarded for fourteen years, and turned them off, one by one.

The ventilator sighed and stopped.

Yun and Claire lifted me to my feet. I could barely stand. I could barely see. I laid both my hands on Mrs. O’Brian’s head.

The energy left me in a flood.

I could not see it, but I could feel it, rushing out through my palms and into her. Beneath my hands, her body began to convulse violently. Someone screamed. Then everyone was screaming. It went on for nearly a minute.

And as it went, I felt my own life draining out with it, steadily, irreversibly, toward its end.

For one moment, I was afraid.

Then I looked at Claire. Her innocent beauty. The lessons she had taught me without ever trying. The train, the hill above the Mississippi, the cave, our last night. My endless love for her.

With the last of my strength, I turned to my Cholo. My best friend. Reverend Dr. Xu Yun.

He looked into my half-closed eyes and must have seen in them what I had seen in his on a park bench in Boston: the soft glimmer, the tenderness, of a dying man.

And he spoke, very clearly.

“Even what you treasure most must be surrendered. It’s the only way to secure the continuing course of compassion.”

I smiled.

Then I fell.

Claire was on her knees beside me before I reached the floor, weeping, holding my face in her hands, the face she had loved.

I knew I was dead.

I was above them, looking down. I saw Yun sobbing as he checked his watch and formally pronounced the time of my death. I saw Claire bent over my body.

I saw her hand go to the pocket of my jacket, over my heart, and draw out the magnolia blossom she had put there for luck. In the warmth of that room, in the last hour, it had opened all the way. She held it against her cheek, and the scent of it filled the room, and for one moment it carried me back to a walled garden in Ecuador, and a bench in a Boston park, and a girl running barefoot down a stone path under a white tree.

And I saw Randy and Carla cry out as their mother opened her eyes, looked at them, and spoke their names.

“Randy,” she said. “Carla.” Her voice was a dry whisper, fourteen years unused. She lifted one hand an inch from the blanket, toward the daughter who had been ten years old the last time she saw her. “Look at you. When did you get so tall?”

I saw, through the wall as though it were glass, an old detective standing beside a gray Buick under a streetlight. He had heard the screaming, and then the other sound, the one that was not grief. He took an envelope from his coat and looked at it for a long time. Then he took off his hat.

I smiled without a face. I had no boundaries now. I was held in a love and a beauty that had no edges at all.

You did all right, Francis Xavier, I thought. Attorney turned monk.

And I understood everything.

Then the orb of light appeared one last time.

Without the slightest hesitation, I surrendered, and went home.