Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [95]
“He appeared to her and the wizard as a blinding light. He cast the wizard straight to hell. Then He spoke to my mother.
“ ‘Weep not, my lost little angel, I have come to take you and Manuel home.’
“She saw Manuel’s soul rise from his body into the light and soon she was beside him. They were going to God.
“ ‘But what of our child?’ they asked.
“ ‘He has a life to live before he can join us. He has many things to do on Earth. One day, you will all be together again.’
“And I was blinded by the light of God.”
Lydia didn’t say anything, trying to understand what kind of person you had to be to believe a fairy tale all your life. How innocent, how trusting, how pure he had to be never to imagine that his uncle had lied. What kind of world did he imagine, where the mystical existed so believably? “And you believed this until when?”
“I think until just now. You must think I am an idiot. Someone like you, always searching for the truth. I have hid from it all my life in this little church. The world is nothing like I have believed it to be. I think on some level, I knew. But I just never examined it. I didn’t want to know the truth.”
“God, why would you? The world can be a twisted, fucked-up place. What a gift you had all these years, to live like you have. You had something that I’m not sure even exists anymore. Pure faith.”
“Blind faith. If everything you believe in is a lie, then you’re a fool, not a saint.”
She marveled at the change in him. The monklike demeanor he had held was gone, and an ordinary man, angry, confused, and grief-stricken, sat beside her, clutching her hand. He’d lost his glow of inner peace. And she grieved for that loss, almost more than for his other losses.
“Just because your uncle told you a story meant to protect you doesn’t mean that everything he taught you was false. Plenty of people who are not fools have faith—faith in God, faith in the basic goodness of human nature. You don’t have to give those things up.”
“What about you, Lydia? What do you have faith in?”
She searched her mind, wanting to come up with something to satisfy them both. But she didn’t know. She didn’t want to say what she’d realized in that moment, that she had been searching for faith in him. She’d started to convince herself that he could heal the pain she had been carrying inside her since the death of her mother, that he held the truth that could set her free. It was that search that had been drawing her to him.
“Because you see the truth,” he said, when she didn’t speak, “you don’t need faith.”
“Because I see the truth, I need it even more; faith that there is something larger, something better than what we see. There are people who believe you healed them. What about that?”
“I never healed anyone. People lied to themselves. And I was starting to believe it, too. They were searching, just like you were. For something larger, something that could fix the injustice of suffering. They let themselves believe a fairy tale. Just like I did.”
“But I saw you in my dreams,” she said.
“I can’t explain that, Lydia.”
“And that’s the space that faith occupies. In things we can’t explain and can’t understand.”
Now he sat silent, trying to grasp at the fading concept of himself and his world. He wondered who he would be, now that everything he had known was slipping away. “So, do you know what happened to them?”
“Yes. Do you want me to tell you?”
“Yes.”
As carefully as she could, she relayed the fate of Serena and Manuel Alonzo, giving him the whole truth as she had learned it from archived articles from the newspaper. She felt he deserved that. “Your parents were poor, living here in