From the Corner of His Eye

cardiac arrest was most likely secondary to a massive cerebral incident. She was disoriented, paralysis on the right side… with the distortion of the facial muscles that you saw. Her speech was slurred at first, but then something strange happened…
        Phimie's speech had been slurred later, as well, immediately following the birth of the baby, when she had struggled to convey her desire to name her daughter Angel.
        An affecting but difficult-to-define note in Dr. Lipscomb's voice brought Celestina slowly out of the office chair, to her feet. Perhaps it was wonder. Or fear. Or reverence. Perhaps all three.
        For a moment," Lipscomb continued, "her voice became clear, no longer slurred. She raised her head from the pillow, and her eyes fixed on me, all the confusion gone. She was so… intense. She said… she said, 'Rowena loves you.'
        A shiver of awe traveled Celestina's spine, because she knew what the physician's next words would surely be.
        "Rowena," he said, confirming her intuition, "was my wife."
        As if a door had briefly opened between this windless day and another world, a single gust rattled rain against the windows.
        Lipscomb turned to Celestina. "Before lapsing into semicoherence again, your sister said, 'Beezil and Feezil are safe with her,' which may sound less than coherent to you, but not to me."
        She waited expectantly.
        "Those were Rowena's affectionate names for the boys when they were babies. Her private nonsense names for them, because she said they were like two beautiful little elves and ought to have elfin names."
        "Phimie couldn't have known."
        "No. Rowena dropped those names after the twins' first year. She and I were the only ones who ever used them. Our private little joke. Even the boys wouldn't have remembered."
        In the physician's eyes, a yearning to believe. In his face, a squint of skepticism.
        He was a man of medicine and science, who had been served well by hard logic and by an unwavering commitment to reason. He wasn't prepared easily to accept the notion that logic and reason, while essential tools to anyone hoping to lead a full and happy life, were nevertheless sufficient to describe either the physical world or the human experience.
        Celestina was better equipped to embrace this transcendental experience for what it appeared to be. She was not one of those artists who celebrated chaos and disorder, or who found inspiration in pessimism and despair. Wherever her eyes came to rest, she saw order, purpose, exquisite design, and either the pale flicker or the fierce blaze of a humbling beauty. She perceived the uncanny not merely in old houses where ghosts were said to roam or in eerie experiences like the one Lipscomb had described, but every day in the pattern of a tree's branches, in the rapturous play of a dog with a tennis ball, in the white whirling currents of a snowstorm-in every aspect of the natural world in which insoluble mystery was as fundamental a component as light and darkness, as matter and energy, as time and space.
        "Did your sister have other curious experiences?" Lipscomb asked.
        "Nothing like this."
        "Was she lucky at cards?"
        "No luckier than me."
        "Premonitions?"
        No.
        "Psychic ability-"
        "She didn't have any." -might one day be scientifically verifiable."
        "Unlike life after death?" she asked.
        Hope, on many wings, hovered all around the physician, but he was afraid to let it roost.
        Celestina said, "Phimie wasn't a mind reader. That's science fiction, Dr. Lipscomb."
        He met her stare. He had no response.
        'She didn't reach into your thoughts and pluck out the name Rowena. Or Beezil or Feezil.'
        As though frightened of the gentle certainty in Celestina's eyes, the doctor turned away from he, and toward the window once more.
        She moved beside him. "For one minute, after her heart stopped the first time, she wasn't here in St. Mary's, was she? Her body, yes, that was still here, but not Phimie."
        Dr. Lipscomb brought his hands to his face, covering his nose and mouth as earlier they had been covered with a surgical mask, as though he were in danger of drawing in, with his breath, an idea that would forever change him.
        "If Phimie wasn't here," Celestina said, "and then she came back, she was somewhere during that