Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [106]
She reached out and gently grasped one of Dinah's hands. 'Don't try to talk,' she said quietly. 'If you're awake, Dinah, don't try to talk - just listen. We're in the air. We're going back, and you're going to be all right - I promise you that.'
Dinah's hand tightened on hers, and after a moment Laurel realized the little girl was tugging her forward. She leaned over the secured stretcher. Dinah spoke in a tiny voice that seemed to Laurel a perfect scale model of her former voice.
'Don't worry about me, Laurel. I got . . . what I wanted.'
'Dinah, you shouldn't -'
The unseeing brown eyes moved toward the sound of Laurel's voice. A little smile touched Dinah's bloody mouth. 'I saw,' that tiny voice, frail as a glass reed, told her. 'I saw through Mr Toomy's eyes. At the beginning, and then again at the end. It was better at the end. At the start, everything looked mean and nasty to him. It was better at the end.'
Laurel looked at her with helpless wonder.
The girl's hand let go of Laurel's and rose waveringly to touch her cheek. 'He wasn't such a bad guy, you know.' She coughed. Small flecks of blood flew from her mouth.
'Please, Dinah,' Laurel said. She had a sudden sensation that she could almost see through the little blind girl, and this brought a feeling of stifling. directionless panic. 'Please don't try to talk anymore.'
Dinah smiled. 'I saw you.' she said. 'You are beautiful, Laurel. Everything was beautiful ... even the things that were dead. It was so wonderful to ... you know ... just to see.'
She drew in one of her tiny sips of air, let it out, and simply didn't take the next one. Her sightless eyes now seemed to be looking far beyond Laurel Stevenson.
'Please breathe, Dinah,' Laurel said. She took the girl's hands in hers and began to kiss them repeatedly, as if she could kiss life back into that which was now beyond it. It was not fair for Dinah to die after she had saved them all; no God could demand such a sacrifice, not even for people who had somehow stepped outside of time itself. 'Please breathe, please, please, please breathe.'
But Dinah did not breathe. After a long time, Laurel returned the girl's hands to her lap and looked fixedly into her pale, still face. Laurel waited for her own eyes to fill up with tears, but no tears came. Yet her heart ached with fierce sorrow and her mind beat with its own deep and outraged protest: Oh, no! Oh, not fair! This is not fair! Take it back, God! Take It back, damn you, take it back, you just take it BACK!
But God did not take it back. The jet engines throbbed steadily, the sun shone on the bloody sleeve of Dinah's good travelling dress in a bright oblong, and God did not take it back. Laurel looked across the aisle and saw Albert and Bethany kissing. Albert was touching one of the girl's breasts through her teeshirt, lightly, delicately. almost religiously. They seemed to make a ritual shape, a symbolic representation of life and that stubborn. intangible spark which carries life on in the face of the most dreadful reversals and ludicrous turns of fate. Laurel looked hopefully from them to Dinah ... and God had not taken it back.
God had not taken it back.
Laurel kissed the still slope of Dinah's cheek and then raised her hand to the little girl's face. Her fingers stopped only an inch from her eyelids.
I saw through Mr Toomy's eyes. Everything was beautiful ... even the things that were dead. It was so wonderful to see. 'Yes,' Laurel said. 'I can live with that.' She left Dinah's eyes open.
10
American Pride 29 flew west through the days and nights, going from light to darkness and light to darkness as if flying through a great, lazily shifting parade of fat clouds. Each cycle came slightly faster than the one before.
A little over three hours into the flight, the clouds below them ceased, and over exactly the same spot where they had begun on the flight east. Brian was willing to bet the front had not moved so