Thrilled to have inspired this awe in her, he closed the book. "Remember what we talked 
about a long time ago? You asked me how come, if I could walk where the rain wasn't. . . "
  ". . . then how come you couldn't walk where your eyes were healthy and leave the 
tumors there," she remembered.
  "I said it didn't work that way, and it doesn't. Yet ... I don't actually walk in those 
other worlds to avoid the rain, but I sort of walk in the idea of those worlds. . . ."
  "Very quantum mechanics," she said. "You've said that before."
  He nodded. "The effect not only comes before a cause in 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 so briefly, as if something transforming welled out of 
her, a perfect light, her essence.
  Out of respect for his mother, Barty struggled to hold fast to his eyeless second 
sight, living in the idea of a world where he still had vision, until she had been 
accorded the honors she deserved and had been laid to rest beside his father.
  He wore his dark blue suit on the day.
  He went in a pretense of blindness, gripping Angel's arm, but he missed nothing, and 
etched every detail in his memory, against the need of them in the coming dark.
  She was forty-three, so young to have left such a mark upon the world. Yet more than 
two thousand people attended her funeral service-which was conducted by clergymen of 
seven denominations-and the subsequent procession to the cemetery was so lengthy that 
some people had to park a mile away and walk. The mourners streamed across the grassy 
hills and among the headstones for the longest time, but the presiding minister did not 
begin the graveside service until all had assembled. None here showed impatience at the 
delay. Indeed, when the final prayer was said and the casket lowered, the crowd hesitated 
to depart, lingering in the most unusual way, until Barty realized that like he himself, 
they half expected a miraculous resurrection and ascension, for among them had so 
recently walked this one who was without stain.
  Agnes Lampion. The Pie Lady.
  At home again, in the safety of the family, Barty collapsed in exhaustion from the 
sustained effort to see with eyes that he didn't possess. Abed for ten days, feverish, 
afflicted with vertigo and migraine headaches, nauseated, he lost eight pounds before his 
recovery was complete.
  He hadn't lied to his mother. She assumed that by some quantum magic, he had regained 
his sight permanently, and that this came with no cost. He merely allowed her to go to 
her rest with the comforting misapprehension that her son had been freed from darkness.
  Now to blindness he returned for five years, until 1983.
  
  Chapter 83