Epilog 2: Heart Strong

Amanda Malreaux gazed with an aching heart at the little face looking out at her and calling her Mommy.

When she’d awakened on Bernal Heights, she had leaned her head back and taken in the sunshine with a lazy languor which was utter delight, flexing every limb just to feel herself do so. But her mind had been in turmoil.

After the ecstasy, some of which lingered deliciously on, she didn’t want a celibate life but leaving the Community of Saint Francis and all its good works would break her heart. She had joined the Community about a year after her painful decision about the abortion.

She had decided … no.

She had carried the child while the increasingly loveless relationship with Kendal blew into sad fragments. Miserable and guilty, she had given the child up for adoption and joined the Community. She’d been a novitiate for an especially long time, proving to herself and the Community that she was not just on the rebound. But now she was a nun and she didn’t want to stop being a nun.

Looking at the sky, she spoke to God (careful not personify Him as the sun or anything).

“Is this ecstasy a temptation which I must avoid? Or is this a core reality which I have missed? Dear God, tell me what I must do.” At least there was no fear now that she would try to drink blood.

At least, there was one thing now which she could do. When she had seen all those faces while helping Sally, she had recognized one, and she knew where she would find it.

As recently as the week before, she’d thought of the child she’d given up. He’d be in fifth grade

, she’d thought. But now she knew better. He had been made a vampire and had stopped aging five years ago.

Leaving other decisions for other days, she had walked down the hill and through the brightening streets.

And now there was the little face, so like Kendal’s.

But there beside him was a woman who looked at once stricken, determined, guilty and protective. That woman had fallen in love with the boy and wanted more than anything to call him her own.

And who was she, Amanda Malreaux, to take that away? She had given her child away, she had no claim on him. How had he even recognized her? He could have no conscious memory of her.

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And so she blessed and released her last living memory of Kendal, willing the boy to knew with absolute certainly, that the loving woman inside was his mother now.

She was halfway down the street, lifting her eyes to the sun, still in her robes, not quite ready to feel the ecstasy she knew awaited her when she took them off – when she heard the door open behind her and a voice call “wait, wait” with quiet intensity.

She turned and saw the woman she had blessed running madly toward her. Her hair was a tangled storm and she wore a wrinkled nightgown and hastily donned slippers lined with decaying fuzz. But her eyes were filled with tears and her face was radiant (if beet red).

She stopped in front of Amanda, face working with emotion, jaw quivering. Amanda quietly held out her hands and the woman took them. “Thank you,” she tried to say, but the words dissolved in sobs. Amanda held her for a few moments.

“I’m Charity C—Charity Heartstrong,” she managed to say at last. “Please, please come back and come in, he’s your son too, you can be in his life as much as you want, I don’t want you to just walk away. Please come in?”

Amanda, moved beyond words, allowed herself to nod the yes that her heart sang. She followed Charity back up the stairs and into the open door.

Would she have been able to enter without Charity’s welcome, now that the world had changed? Probably the old restrictions were gone. But of course she never would

have entered Charity’s home without that invitation.

And there he was, her and Kendal’s son. He leaned shyly against Charity, put his hand in hers and looked at Amanda from the safety of her side. Embarrassed, Charity said, “I could make some tea. Or is anybody hungry for breakfast?”

I willed him to know that this woman, Charity, is his mother,

thought Amanda, and he does indeed.

At the word “breakfast,” Tommy bounced from shyness to eagerness as only little kids can and cried, “Yet’s dough outside and eat some sun, shall we?!” Charity laughed a tear-filled yes.

Charity and Peter, Amanda and Tommy, the gray-haired German grandmother and the tall long-haired young man walked into the sunny streets. Charity watched them all stretch in delight. Tommy threw his clothes off without asking (he had already

asked if he could eat sun, what else could that mean?) and zipped into the air as if he’d been born there.

Peter lifted off the ground and Charity remembered only then, with a shock that might have made the old Charity fall over, that Peter had never put a stitch of clothing on when they got out of bed. She looked guiltily at Sister Amanda. The nun gave her the same reassuring smile she had once given Malcolm (who, in another part of the city, walked dazedly as he wondered what to do with his life now that most of the battles he had fought were won).

Charity felt how good, how literally ecstatic, the sun felt on her arms and her legs. She had a vision of throwing off her nightgown and jumping into Peter’s arms in front of everybody, but she smiled and shook her head. Peter came back down to stand beside her…

No. She had drifted up to float beside him. Somewhere in the hours and hours of lovemaking, he had put inside her whatever it was that made him a supernatural being. Even half clothed as she was, she was one of them.

Tommy flitted three times around her, laughing with delight and said words that made her heart melt with final joy.

“Mommy fwine!,” he cried. “Wook, Mommy fwine!”