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Somewhere in that long, cold night, I had a visitor, only it wasn’t Elias. I was in my dream church, staring into that candle flame on the windowsill and trying to suck all the warmth from its little yellow center into my bones. Imaginary warmth isn’t as good as real, but sometimes it will do if there’s nothing else. As I was staring, the flame grew and filled my head, and inside it was Saint Agnes with her flowing hair and her eyes looking up.
Daddy had told me that, in order to be made a saint, you had to have what the churchmen called a beatific vision. This was when you looked eye-to-eye with God, with nothing in between. In fact, according to the things Daddy had read, it was supposed to be as if your eye and God’s eye just melted into one. That’s what the mystics said, anyway, a
