Niall Williams: As It Is in Heaven

The rain fell above them, and the sea sighed in thin chains of surf in the night outside. The cottage creaked like a ship, anchored at last in the known coordinates of Hope and Love, and secure in its own fastness. In the small hours Stephen and Gabriella lay by the low fire with a blanket pulled over them. They did not move. They slept like swimmers stilled in painted waters, one's arm around the other, leading towards the shore.

And there was a morning of brilliant light that came across the surface of the sea and arrived so brightly that at first it seemed the dazzlement of magic. The sky was cloudless and blue with the perfect weather of peaceful dreams. And into that morning Stephen dressed himself and was waking Gabriella and bringing her tea and carrying Alannah in his arms through the cottage to tell her mother how they could take the morning and drive into Ennis and buy a new cooker to replace the one that was broken. And he had to find the baby's cloth shoes and pack the bag with nappies and powder and cream and the bottle and the bibs, while Gabriella dressed in a burgundy dress and a black cardigan. And then they were driving into that brightness that was not the brightness of November. They were packed into the car, with Gabriella holding Alannah in her lap in the back seat and humming a tune for her and humming it over and over as the car drove on into Miltown Malbay and out the other side and on past all the watery fields where cattle watched across the strands of barbed wire for the coming of fodder and where none was coming, because there was nothing else on that road, no tractor or car, no man or woman, only the bright sunlight that was too bright and the polished surface of the puddles that looked like glassy tears or the fallen fragments of a cold heaven. And Stephen was driving and watching his hands turning the wheel and the road unspooling like a destiny before him as they sped onward, and he was able to look in the mirror at Gabriella and Alannah behind him and behind them the road they had come from and the fields flowing backward like a film blurring green and grey, and then there was suddenly the flooded bend by Inagh and the car flashing into it and across the water until it hit the stone wall and Stephen flew forward into the windscreen and felt the crash and the glass and the tremendous shattering and arrived in the terrible silence and the taste of blood and looked back and saw that Gabriella and Alannah were dead.

The enlightenment that comes from dreams is sometimes more potent than that which comes in the daylight. When Stephen lifted his head, Gabriella was lying in his arms on the rug on the floor before the fire. He was bathed in the sweat of his dream and drew back the blanket that covered them, to be reassured by the coolness of the morning. He turned towards Gabriella and watched the sleeping body of her and heard across the cottage the infant noises of Alannah sounding in her crib. There was a thin drizzle falling in the stillness outside.

It was some moments before the dream had left Stephen. He lay on the floor of the cottage, and Gabriella stirred beside him, and he leaned over and kissed the top of her head. Then he rose and walked out of the room and lifted Alannah and brought her back and placed her into the warmth of her mother. And he turned on Puccini's music and then lay down beneath the blanket once more.

The music rose. And for the first time Stephen heard not grief but an aching joy. He heard in that music the long-enduring love of his father, which had been undiminished by tragedy and had carried on like a difficult faith through all the lonely days of his living. He heard the victory of Love over Death. And while the music played on and washed over the three of them like grace, Stephen Griffin knew something of the puzzles of the world and understood that all love did not perish and could survive beyond pain and hardship and loneliness; and in that innocent vision with which he was gifted that morning he saw that the world fit together, each piece in its proper place, like the pieces on a chessboard, and that though the patterns that emerged were complex and difficult and grew more so all the time, there was a design nonetheless, for though we live in the impotency of our dreams to make better the world, the earth and its stars spin through the heavens at the rate of our loving and is made meaningful only in the way in which we give ourselves to each other.

Stephen saw. He saw and understood the way you do in the middle of a chess game when the openings have been played and the position takes on a beauty that belongs neither to one player nor to the other but is the perfect expression of both. He lay on the floor in the cottage and knew now that he would live with Gabriella without being afraid. That in the puzzle of love he was for her and Alannah, and they for him, and that what had happened so far was no more than the opening movement of the pieces.

He turned to Gabriella. The drizzle was falling. She reached and touched his face, then they moved closer together and held the child between them.