They watched a big, long-legged sand crab move across the beach, select a nesting place, and burrow out of sight.
Finally she said, ‘Why won’t you open your heart?’
‘I will. When the time’s right.’
‘When will the time be right?’
‘When I learn not to hate.’
‘Who do you hate?’
‘For a long time — you.’
‘Because I’m not your Nina.’
‘I don’t hate you any more.’
‘I know.’
‘I hate myself.’
‘Why?’
‘For being so afraid.’
‘You’re not afraid of anything,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Scared to death of what you can show me.’
‘Why?’
‘The world’s so cruel. It’s so hard. If there’s a God, He tortured my father with disease and then took him young. He took Michelle, my Chrissie, my Nina. He allowed Rose to die.’
‘This is a passage.’
‘A damn vicious one.’
She was silent a while.
The sea whispered against the strand. The crab stirred, poked an eye stalk out to examine the world, and decided to move.
Nina got up and crossed to the sand crab. Ordinarily, these creatures were shy and scurried away when approached. This one did not run for cover but watched Nina as she dropped to her knees and studied it. She stroked its shell. She touched one of its claws, and the crab didn’t pinch her.
Joe watched — and wondered.
Finally the girl returned and sat beside Joe, and the big crab disappeared into the sand.
She said, ‘If the world is cruel . . . you can help me fix it. And if that’s what God wants us to do, then He’s not cruel, after all.’
Joe did not respond to her pitch.
The sea was an iridescent blue. The sky curved down to meet it at an invisible seam.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please take my hand, Daddy.’
She had never called him daddy before, and his chest tightened when he heard the word.
He met her amethyst eyes. And wished they were grey like his own. But they were not. She had come with him out of wind and fire, out of darkness and terror, and he supposed that he was as much her father as Rose Tucker had been her mother.
He took her hand.
And knew.
For a time he was not on a beach in Florida but in a bright blueness with Michelle and Chrissie and Nina. He did not see what worlds waited beyond this one, but he knew beyond all doubt that they existed, and the strangeness of them frightened him but also lifted his heart.
He understood that eternal life was not an article of faith but a law of the universe as true as any law of physics. The universe is an efficient creation: matter becomes energy; energy becomes matter; one form of energy is converted into another form; the balance is forever changing, but the universe is a closed system from which no particle of matter or wave of energy is ever lost. Nature not only loathes waste but forbids it. The human mind and spirit, at their noblest, can transform the material world for the better; we can even transform the human condition, lifting ourselves from a state of primal fear, when we dwelled in caves and shuddered at the sight of the moon, to a position from which we can contemplate eternity and hope to understand the works of God. Light cannot change itself into stone by an act of will, and stone cannot build itself into temples. Only the human spirit can act with volition and consciously change itself; it is the only thing in all creation that is not entirely at the mercy of forces outside itself, and it is, therefore, the most powerful and valuable form of energy in the universe. For a time, the spirit may become flesh, but when that phase of its existence is at an end, it will be transformed into disembodied spirit once more.
When he returned from that brightness, from the blue elsewhere, he sat for a while, trembling, eyes closed, burrowed down into this revealed truth as the crab had buried itself in the sand.
In time he opened his eyes.
His daughter smiled at him. Her eyes were amethyst, not grey. Her features were not those of the other Nina whom he had loved so deeply. She was not, however, a pale fire, as she had seemed before, and he wondered how he could have allowed his anger to prevent him from seeing her as she truly was. She was a shining light, all but blinding in her brightness, as his own Nina had been — as are we all.