One Last Rainy Day: The Legacy of a Prince(87)
I nod and walk around the car to help her out. She practically falls against me when she hits her feet, sweat beading her brow and upper lip as I grip her tightly to keep her upright. “You okay?”
Her lips tremble, her pride at stake as she eyes the distance to the building. “I’m weaker than . . . we don’t have to—”
“I’ll walk you,” I assure her. Her eyes again mist and I clutch her to me, walking her toward the building. When we reach the steep stairs leading to the door, she looks at them warily, shaking her head. “Dominic, I’m too wea—”
“I’ve got you.” Sweeping her securely in my arms, I take the stairs toward the doorway just as a man opens it and spots us, quickly ushering his wife through and holding it for us to pass.
“Thank you,” I mutter, and Delphine echoes it. Her eyes trail the couple, who curiously stare back at us as I step in, cradling her to my chest.
“Don’t be embarrassed, Tatie,” I tell her just as she buries her face in my shoulder before I slowly start descending the heavily inclined steps passing the vacant pews which sit to our left and right.
Once I reach the bottom, I glance around satisfied before nudging her with the lift of my shoulder. “Just in time for the show. Look at your sunset, Tatie.”
She slowly lifts her head and gasps when she sees the view before us. Feet ahead stands a twelve-foot cross secured in a brick foundation, and to both sides of it lies a lowlying border wall. Beyond that is an endless sea of Blue Ridge Mountain peaks, which are quickly becoming saturated in various hues of orange, gold, and pink.
“Mon Dieu!” My God! She exclaims, her voice shaking as I lift her gently to her feet. She soaks in the scenery for several quiet seconds, her hand still clutched to my bicep as we watch mist and color steep through the mountaintops. “What is this?”
“It’s called Pretty Place Chapel,” I answer, just as taken aback by the sight before us, which is almost too surreal to believe.
She shakes her head, shock and awe in her expression, appreciation in her voice, and follow-up question. “How do you know about it?”
“I’ve been here a few times,” I admit.
She narrows her eyes in suspicion. “You do believe.”
“Still in negotiations,” I tell her.
We spend a few quiet minutes as I glance around the small chapel and back to the blocked out view the size of a theater screen. It’s when I look back and glimpse the fear that’s been crippling her expression since she was diagnosed that I speak up. “I did a little research a few years back . . . when I was curious.”
“Curious about what?”
“Your good book of morals,” I grin, “the climactic ending, and what happens after.”
She nods in encouragement for me to continue.
“During my dive, I read a dozen or more stories and testimonies and came across one that took place back in the eighties. It has kind of stuck with me since.”
I glance over to see her focus on me.
“It was an account from a Texas housewife who was driving a station wagon on her way to JCPenney to pick up some curtains she’d ordered. Her two young daughters were coloring in the back of it.” I search my memory for the details that stuck out. “What that housewife didn’t know as she sped down that highway to run her everyday errand was that she would die three times that day.”
Delphine’s eyes widen.
“She didn’t know that just ahead, an eighteen-wheeler had stopped on the highway due to some debris—rolls of chicken wire. He hadn’t turned on his signals or laid out traffic cones, so she didn’t slow or brake and slammed into the back of it at full speed.”
Delphine listens, rapt, her eyes drifting back to the view.
“The woman was considered medically dead three times. Twice on the way to the hospital—once while waiting for the helicopter, once in transit, her longest flatline took place on the operating table. The medical staff wanted to call her death, but the doctor who’d been working on her refused to stop trying to bring her back—he was thinking of her two daughters being stitched up just a few rooms away. She was considered medically dead for longer than acceptable to have a decent prognosis if revived—to ever fully function again—but the doctor tried one last time and brought her back.”
The chapel fills with a misty pink hue as I relay the rest. “She had significant brain damage, had to learn to walk and talk again, read and write, but she made a full recovery.” I turn to Delphine and see she’s hanging on every word. “And do you know what her only complaint was?”
She gives a subtle shake of her head.
“That they brought her back.” I grin. “She’d seen what was waiting on the other side and didn’t want a damn thing to do with the world anymore.”
Simmering tears fill her eyes.
“She claimed that in the time she was down, she experienced enough of the afterlife that she never wanted to exist anywhere else. That for the entirety of the time she spent there, she was enveloped in a perpetual state of love—nothing like the human love we experience, but magnified by a billion and then some. That every being there reverberates that love, and the second you brush against them or pass through them, you know every single thing about them, every detail of their lives. That the first time it happens, you become part of a collective consciousness. There’s no judgment, no shame, no suffering, regret, or pain. Nothing but an inconceivable type of feeling no human mind could ever begin to comprehend. She swore that no living soul should ever worry about the question of an afterlife.”