From the Corner of His Eye

this case, but completely without a cause. The effect is staying dry in the rain, but the cause-supposedly walking in a dryer world-never occurs. Only the idea of it."
        "Weirder even than Tom Vanadium made it sound."
        "Anyway, something clicked in me on the roller coaster, and I grasped a new angle of approach to the problem. I've figured out that I can walk in the idea of sight, sort of sharing the vision of another me, in another reality, without actually going there." He smiled into her astonishment. "So what do you say about that?"
        She wanted so badly to believe, to see her son made whole again, and the funny thing was that she could believe, and without emotional risk, because it was true.
        To prove himself, he read a little of Dickens when she requested it, a passage from Great Expectations. Then a passage from Twain.
        She asked him how many fingers she was holding up, and he said four, and four it was. Then two fingers. Then seven. Her hands so pale, the palms both bruised.
        Because his lacrimal glands and tear ducts were intact, Barty could cry with his plastic eyes. Consequently, it didn't seem all that much more incredible to be seeing with them.
        This trick, however, was far more difficult than walking where the rain wasn't. Sustaining vision took both a mental and physical toll from him.
        Her joy was worth the price he paid to see it.
        As mentally demanding and stressful as it was to maintain this borrowed sight, the harder thing was looking once more upon her face, after all these years of blindness, only to see her gaunt, so pale. The vital, lovely woman whose image he had guarded so vigilantly in memory would be nudged aside hereafter by this withered version.
        They agreed that to the outside world, Barty must continue to appear to be a sightless man-or otherwise either be treated like a freak or be subjected, perhaps unwillingly, to experimentation. In the modern world, there was no tolerance for miracles. Only family could be told of this development.
        "If this amazing thing can happen, Barty-what else?"
        "Maybe this is enough."
        "Oh, it certainly is! It certainly is enough! But… I don't regret much, you know. But I do regret not being here to see why you and Angel have been brought together. I know it'll be something lovely, Barty. Something so fine."
        They had a few days for quiet celebration of this astonishing recovery of his sight, and in that time, she never tired of watching him read to her. He didn't think she even listened closely. It was the fact of him made whole that lifted her spirits so high as they were now, not any writer's words nor any story ever written.
        On the afternoon of November ninth, when Paul and Barty were with her, reminiscing, and Angel was in the kitchen, getting drinks for them, his mother gasped and stiffened. Breathless, she paled past chalk, and when she could breathe and speak again, she said, "Get Angel now. No time to bring the others."
        The three of them, gathered around her in the quick, held fast to her, as if Death couldn't take what they refused to release.
        To Paul, she said, "How I loved your innocence… and giving you experience."
        "Aggie, no," he pleaded.
        "Don't start walking again," she reminded him.
        Her voice grew thinner when she spoke to Angel, but in this new frailty, Barty heard such love that he shook at the power of it. "God's in you, Angel, so strong you shine, and nothing bad at all."
        Unable to speak, the girl kissed her and then gently placed her head against Agnes's breast, capturing forever in memory the pure sound of her heart.
        "Wonderboy," Agnes said to Barty.
        "Supermom."
        "God gave me a wonderful life. You remember that."
        Be strong for her. "All right."
        She closed her eyes, and he thought that she was gone, but then she opened them again. "There is one place beyond all the ways things are."
        "I hope so," he said.
        "Your old. Mom wouldn't lie to you, would she?"
        "Not my old mom."
        "Precious… boy."
        He told her that he loved her, and she slipped away upon his words. As she went, the haggard look of the terminal leukemic patient passed from her, and before the gray mask of death replaced it, he saw the beauty he had preserved in memory when he was three, before they took his eyes, saw it