Hideaway

compatriots.
     
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    In the years following the events at the abandoned amusement park, Jonas Nyebern lost interest in resuscitation medicine. Other men took over his work and did it well.
    He sold at auction every piece of religious art in the two collections that he had not yet completed, and he put the money in savings instruments that would return the highest possible rate of interest.
    Though he continued to practice cardiovascular surgery for a while, he no longer found any satisfaction in it. Eventually he retired young and looked for a new career in which to finish out the last decades of his life.
    He stopped attending Mass. He no longer believed that evil was a force in itself, a real presence that walked the world. He had learned that humanity itself was a source of evil sufficient to explain everything that was wrong with the world. Obversely, he decided humanity was its own—and only—salvation.
    He became a veterinarian. Every patient seemed deserving.
    He never married again.
    He was neither happy nor unhappy, and that suited him fine.
     
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    Regina remained within her inner room for a couple of days, and when she came out she was never quite the same. But then no one ever is quite the same for any length of time. Change is the only constant. It's called growing up.
    She addressed them as Dad and Mom, because she wanted to, and because she meant it. Day by day, she gave them as much happiness as they gave her.
    She never set off a chain reaction of destruction among their antiques. She never embarrassed them by getting inappropriately sentimental, bursting into tears, and thereby activating the old snot faucet; she unfailingly produced tears and snot only when they were called for. She never mortified them by accidentally flipping an entire plate of food into the air at a restaurant and over the head of the President of the United States at the next table. She never accidentally set the house on fire, never farted in polite company, and never scared the bejesus out of smaller neighborhood children with her leg brace and curious right hand. Better still, she stopped worrying about doing all those things (and more), and in time she did not even recall the tremendous energies that she once had wasted upon such unlikely concerns.
    She kept writing. She got better at it. When she was just fourteen, she won a national writing competition for teenagers. The prize was a rather nice watch and a check for five hundred dollars. She used some of the money for a subscription to Publishers Weekly and a complete set of the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray. She no longer had an interest in writing about intelligent pigs from outer space, largely because she was learning that more curious characters could be found all around her, many of them native Californians.
    She no longer talked to God. It seemed childish to chatter at Him. Besides, she no longer needed His constant attention. For a while she had thought He had gone away or had never existed, but she had decided that was foolish. She was aware of Him all the time, winking at her from the flowers, serenading her in the song of a bird, smiling at her from the furry face of a kitten, touching her with a soft summer breeze. She found a line in a book that she thought was apt, from Dave Tyson Gentry: “True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.” Well, who was your best friend, if not God, and what did you really need to say to Him or He to you when you both already knew the most—and only—important thing, which was that you would always be there for each other.
     
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    Lindsey came through the events of those days less changed than she had expected. Her paintings improved somewhat, but not tremendously. She had never been dissatisfied with her work in the first place. She loved Hatch no less than ever, and could not possibly have loved him more.
    One thing that made her cringe, which never had before, was hearing anyone say, “The worst is behind us now.” She knew that the worst was never behind us. The worst came at the end. It was the end, the very fact of it. Nothing could be worse than that. But she had learned to live with the understanding that the worst was never behind her—and still find joy in the day at hand.
    As for God—she didn't dwell on the issue. She raised Regina in the Catholic Church, attending Mass with her each week, for that was part of the promise she had made St. Thomas's when