“The proof that you were bom is here.”
“So is the proof of the other,” he said.
She bent her head to hide a spasm of some painful emotion.
“I didn’t believe it would work. It was like a miracle.” 223
“It must have heen hard, waiting,” he said gently.
“It was. What he still hasn’t told you is—it went wrong. You disappeared! Vanished entirely!”
He stared at her white face.
“Funny to sweat cold when the danger’s over,” he said, and wiped his face. “And I wasn’t there for over twelve hours. I was surely dead!”
“Do you think it was a Heaven you went to?” She was searching. He realized that she wanted to know, perhaps to have something to hold to she had never had before.
“I can’t remember,” he said. “All I keep remembering is my childhood, the sort of feelings I had then, the troubles I got into, the little problems that seemed so big. I don’t know why I should think of those things unless it’s the drowning man seeing his life in review. . . But would I have gone to Heaven direct? Wouldn’t there have been a trial scene somewhere? Or do you think that’s just part of the old lore?”
“David always says there’s a reason for every seemingly idle thought a man thinks,” she said. “I think he gives them too much.” She looked at the phone. “Oh God! why doesn’t
he ring?”
But when the ringing began at two-fifteen, hoth she and John Brunt stood and looked at it, as if it were some Pandora’s box, defying opening. Yet there could be only one caller.
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