And now, the finale. The transition was seamless, and without pause. It began with warmth, a solo for two, like a prayer from the noble brass.

The house of Yan Peshka warped before our eyes. The darkling sky turn bright, smiling in blue and fog and gray. The floor repaved itself, like a serpent shedding its skin. Bricks gave way to a plain pattern of mortar and canyon-hued terra-cotta. Great, colorful pots, glazed and shining sprung up from the transfigured ground. Through little Ileene’s eyes, they loomed like the iron-bellied galleons of the Second Empire’s privateers, spewing up plants like smoke. Exotic trees creaked up from the towering pots, with twisting trunks and artful branches that reached up and out, making a roof for the sky. Soon the gnarled wood filled out, green and full, with broad deciduous leaves and the needles of stoic pines.

Soon, the last traces of Peshka’s manse evaporated into the ether of their memories. Instead of chaos and quarrels, silence. A hear-a-pin-drop peacefulness hung beneath the sky, over the patio of the Plotskies’ house in posh Flanders’ Ridge. A bevy of bonsais lay side by side on a moldering wooden bench. They were large in Ileene’s child-eyes. Her mother’s words about the plants—facts and fancies—were like enchantments in the girl’s ears. Then something moved, green and odd shaped—a praying mantis, hidden among the leaves of a pomegranate tree. It startled Ileene as it emerged, but her mother showed her the way. Gently, Babra guided the insect into her own palm, to show Ileene there was nothing to fear. Goodness and beauty were all around them; they only needed to reach out to find it.

All the doctrines of tradition and scripture on filial piety wilted before the tenderness of that moment. It made them seem like little more than moldy thoughts on the pages of a crumbling codex.

“I know that feeling, Ileene,” her father’s spirit said. “I shared it with my own father. It wasn’t bonsais, though; it was fish and potato fritters. We always had them whenever Dad took me down to the Wharf to run errands.”

The finale was accumulation. A climax of beauty to be reached through an inexorable climb as everything warmed and brightened, rising to meet the Light.

He was connecting. They all were. It was just what I’d hoped for!

“You’re doing it, Mr. Genneth!” Andalon said, with a smile. “You’re doing it!”

It was like playing the clarinet. And the more I realized the connection, the easier the navigation became.

I let Jed memories sweep us through the next cadence, out to a once upon a time in a café on the Wharf, where a little boy giggled and burped as he gulped down orange soda, sweet and fizzy. Both the boy and his father greedily eyed the caramel apples they saw for sale in the cart of a nearby street vendor.

Jed remembered it with nostalgia and longing. And we all felt it. He didn’t have many more memories of his father; illness had taken him before Jed had even turned fifteen.

And we all felt it.

“That’s what love tastes like, Ileene,” Jed’s spirit said. “It tastes like orange soda and caramel apples in a lunch with Dad on an afternoon by the sea. Treasure your moments, your memories. They’re gems.”

And Babs felt it, and wept.

“I wish I could have met your father, Jed. He’s…” But she couldn’t bring herself to say it, but she didn’t need to. We all knew what had been going through Babs’ mind. Jed’s memories showed the kind of father she’d always wished her own to be.

Robert Plotksy died of chronic Engoliss’ disease. And though Jed and his mother were spared Robert’s fate thanks to swift treatment by benznidazole, the agonizing questions raised by his death would not be so easily felled. The man was loving and faithful—in every sense of the world; there was no logical reason for Jed’s father to have contracted the sexually transmitted condition.

More memories trickled out from Jed’s spirit. We watched a scene from a little over a year ago. Jed’s trembling hands reached for a paper notebook he’d stumbled across at the bottom of a forgotten box among Robert Plotsky’s belongings. The notebook’s yellowed pages held the one and only diary entry his Jed’s father ever wrote.

We all felt the tightness in Jed’s chest as he read the words and learned the truth.

At the age of thirteen, Robert had been molested by a priest: Father Nicholas Borkly. With a bit of research, the riddle of Robert’s death was unraveled: Father Borkly had succumbed to Engoliss’ disease several years before Robert’s passing. The circuit was complete. Yet it brought the opposite of consolation.

And then, only a few months later, Ileene ran off to join the Innocents.

The memories coming off Jed thickened, the rivulets coalescing into a stream. The symphony rose, passing through the dark night of these souls. I let the memories take the lead, and the scene changed again. We found ourselves in the depths of a Church, floating above a vivid marble floor. Shadow, Light and stained Light intermingled in the Church’s quietude, disturbed only by the resonant whispers of Jed and his priest. Jed and the Father sat among the pews; Mr. Plotsky had invoked the rite of Surcease—a kind of counseling, if you will, only with theology instead of psychology.

Jed’s voice got caught in his throat, mixed with the thick spit that curdled on his tongue. He felt guilty at disturbing the Church’s hallowed stillness. Jed’s instincts told him bringing this terrible trouble to the Church was almost tantamount to blasphemy. But he had to speak.

“I couldn’t escape the pain,” Jed said, in the now. Even here, his spirit trembled. “I don’t know what hurt more: the abuse my father had suffered, or the fact that the abuse was covered up. The Church cared more about its stature and its reserves of land and treasure than the holy Light vouchsafed it by Angel, Beast, and Queen.” His spirit quavered. “The Church was supposed to make us better people. It was supposed to help, not harm.”

“Father,” Jed asked, in the memory, “why did my Dad have to die? Why did he…” he trembled, “why did the Moon punish him for having been molested? He didn’t deserve Engoliss! He was a good man. Why… how could the Godhead allow something so awful to happen? It’s evil! The man who did this to him was free to live as he pleased. The people that protected and enabled him have not been brought low. How can the Church claim honor when it has none to hold?”

The symphony plunged into fugue.

The moment duplicated itself. A second image superimposed itself atop the vision of Jed’s past. A different church, a different priest, and a different believer—and, yet also the same.

We saw Babra on the verge of defeat.

“Mother,” she said, asking her priest, “my daughter’s mind has been snuffed out. She was the candle of my life, and now she’s darkened, forever. I want to know why,” Babs pleaded. “Why did the Angel let this come to pass?”

Mrs. Plotsky wept, both then and in the now.

“My father,” she said, “he says it was punishment. Ileene hadn’t lived a life of faith, and so she was brought low, and that I’m to blame. Do you know what it’s like to hear that? I don’t care if it’s true or not—well, I do care,” she shuddered, “but I just can’t…”

Oh God.

“Do you know what it’s like to be told, as a mother, that it’s your fault that these evils came upon your house? It’s not like I didn’t try to instill virtue in her. It’s all I’ve done. All I’ve ever done has been to bring her closer to the light of love and goodness.” She wept tears like a bleeding wound. “That’s all I’ve done for everyone. I’m trying to do what’s right and bring joy where I go. But…” she shook her head, “why would the Angel let my works amount to nothing?”

“Why?” the voices asked.

Then the third voice joined the round.

We saw Ileene, burdened with life in a world that never seemed to give her a fair chance.

“I keep trying to choose the right, Father,” she said, “to follow the good. But it’s never enough. I don’t understand. I always end up getting sold short. Why does this happen to me? I didn’t ask to be made, Father. I didn’t ask to live. I didn’t ask to be broken. Why would the Angel make us so broken and miserable? It’s not right.”

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“Why?” the voices asked.

Then the priests responded. Their answers layered atop one another, fugue matching fugue. Their words echoed through the serene emptiness in those churches of memory, like a spoken hymn.

“Only the Godhead is perfect,” they said. “This world is full of pain and sorrow. It is a vale of tears, and we are to blame. Because of our disobedience and sin, the world is fallen and broken. We brought death and sin into the world. We separated ourselves from our Creator and His Will. There is no Evil here. What we call suffering are but shadows; the aches and pains of a world that has been broken off from the source of all Light, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. No good thing can exist without God. Human beings made the world impure and unclean; the Godhead cannot dwell amidst corruption.”

“This is why your father died, Jed. It was no one’s fault; no, we are all to blame.”

“But why?” the spirits asked.

“This is why your daughter suffered, Babra. It was not your fault. Not all will be saved. Those, like your daughter, who choose to reject the Angel and His Light consign themselves to the darkness. The Angel loves us; He will not twist us to make us love Him. That would be a terrible thing. All we can do is hope that Ileene chose the right before the final end, and chose to dwell in Paradise rather than cast herself into endless Night.”

“But why?” the spirits asked.

“Ileene, if your life seems broken and empty, it is only because you have not opened your eyes to the Truth of the Godhead’s Love. The Triun is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. They know all the possibilities. They cast us out, and break us, and show us our culpability so that we might know Their Power. They send us low so that They might reach out in Love to raise us high. We are pebbles in the river, my child. Marvel at the waters, Ileene. Surrender yourself to them. Open yourself to the Angel’s love. Surrender to God’s will, and God will make you whole. And through the Glory of divine might and goodness, you will come to know the Angel for yourself.”

I was about to contradict the priests, myself, when Ileene’s spirit rose above the tumult and spoke her truth.

“I did open myself to the Angel,” she said, in the now. “I did surrender. That’s how…” her voice broke, “that’s how I lost everything.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “What happened to me was my fault and mine alone. So either the Angel couldn’t save me, or…” her voice broke, “He did not think me worthy of it.”

Revulsion crawled up out of Babs’ soul, and we felt it. It clambered over our spirit-faces like flies and slime and rapsing slugs. Her daughter’s words were sacrilege. They assailed something beautiful; something immaculate. And we knew more: we knew why the woman felt the way she did.

Babra needed the Angel. With all that she had done, all the troubles she had caused, all the mistakes she had made… she needed the Angel. God was the only one left who could still love her. If there was no Godhead to love her, she would be forever alone, unloved and un-known.

Words rose up to the surface, words Babra had learned long, long ago. “The Godhead does not punish us; by rejecting Its Love, we punish ourselves, cutting ourselves off from the source of all Light and Goodness. The Angel respects our choices. He does not force those to be with Him who don’t wish it; that would be agony for them.”

“If that were true,” I said, speaking at last, calming the fugue, “if we really are broken beings in a broken world, why not let us stay in this mess of ours following death? Why not let us be reborn? Maybe we might finally learn our lesson. Why do we have to suffer above and beyond what life already forces us to endure? If the Godhead is everywhere, and if It can tolerate mankind’s fallibility while we live, why not also in death, as well?”

And then, words came from my memories.

My son, as much as it pains me—as much as I wish it weren’t true—the revelation of scripture is absolute. For her obstinacy, your sister will suffer torment without end. This is the fate in store for all of us who spurn God’s free offering of Love, and it is as terrible as it is inevitable. No good can come except from God.

Dana had been an atheist for as long as I could remember. In the wake of her death, such had been the words in the mouths of the priests who tried to console me, and instill newfound faith in the ordinances of the divine that supposedly kept the world whole. They said Dana was going to suffer, because she had rejected God’s forgiveness.

“Mercy isn’t transactional,” I’d said. “Love gives all, while asking for nothing in return. A gift that is withdrawn if it is not accepted and praised isn’t really a gift at all. You give a gift to make someone happy, not to extol yourself. And… to punish someone for not acknowledging a gift freely given? To make things worse for them than they already are? That’s not love, it’s manipulation, and it’s not forgiveness either; it’s graft and cruelty.”

Babra’s spirit was aghast. “How could you say that?”

“Maybe because he thinks it’s true?” Jed said.

We all felt Babra’s loss and confusion. “Jed…?”

Jed felt it; he wanted to stop it. And so, he did.

“I stopped believing a while ago.”

“What? Jed? You…”

And when Jed answered, we all felt his words the way he felt them. Wife and daughter lost their subjectivity, if only for a moment.

“When my father was a boy, Father Borkly raped him,” his spirit said. “Was that because Borkly was an evil man, or just a man plagued by evil? I don’t know. I can’t know. But… my father did not deserve to die when he did, in the way that he did.”

We saw and knew and felt Jed’s agony as his father unbecame and wasted away. We felt terror at the man’s meaningless rage; we knew the young son’s torment as he watched his father dissolve into a meaningless tempest, vaulting between wild-eyed giggles and despair too deep for any kind word to break. We lived the young man’s grief and as his father faded, immured by paralysis in the coffin his body had become.

“No one deserves that,” Jed said, “not my father, not Prelate Zoster, not Nighttouched Sakuragi, nor Lassedite Athelmarch. That was when I realized the priests were wrong—or, at least, that they weren’t right. Evil wasn’t an absence of good; the world wasn’t forsaken. The bug that caused Engoliss’ disease existed long before human beings came onto the scene. Our world isn’t fallen, nor has it ever been exalted. It just was. It is what it is. Free will isn’t really free at all if it is allowed to break things, but is denied the possibility of fixing them. That’s why my father’s fate hurts so much, Ileene. That’s why… that’s why your fate hurts so much.”

The grown man cried a ghost’s tears.

“The world is what it is,” he said, “but we don’t have to be. We don’t have to be selfish. We don’t have to be cruel. It’s a choice, and it’s one where we actually can ‘choose the right’.”

“Daddy…?”

We felt the child in Ileene reach out. Her fingers grazed our hearts, gracing them with her yearning. Turning, Jed stared at his daughter, seeing her as if for the first time.

“I didn’t know you’d felt so lost, Ileene. For what it’s worth,” he said, “in your mother did choose the right, in the end, and in a way that really, truly mattered.”

Now came the coda. The swell. The radiance and the glory.

Twin streams of memory flowed from Babra and Jed, filling gaps in their daughter’s knowledge. I didn’t have to lift a finger. They were doing it on their own!

I smiled at Andalon, and she smiled back at me.

We watched through broken eyes as the fragile invalid was rolled out the hospital to meet them. We wept cold sunshine with them as they gazed at the slack-jawed puppet perched atop the wheelchair’s seat and realized the haunted, crumpled thing before them had once been their daughter. Their wrinkled, stinking hands were one with ours as they lifted Ileene’s body out of soiled diapers and carried her into the bath and gently cleaned her with soap that smelled of blueberries—her favorite fruit. We walked with them through the park at Dressfeldt Court and across the city, watching Ileene’s empty eyes look up in befuddlement at the dance of sunlight through the cypresses and the palm trees. The Plotskies had forsaken Mass and Unction that weekend. Rain was expected to fall not long after noon. They would have preferred to have both—to renew the Bond through the Sun’s Holy Light, and to spend a day with their daughter, having fun, but… not all possibilities come to pass. So they had to choose, and they did, and no matter how much guilt Babra felt at skipping Unction, something told her that things would be alright, somehow.

“But… but… but…”

Ileene’s spirit stammered, not believing—but desperately wanting to.

Babra answered her daughter’s need. A memory surfaced from her. It was a recent one; one of Babs talking to her father on a videophone call through the console mounted on the wall by the kitchen sink. The memory was like a door opening; banal, almost unworthy of notice. And yet, it was everything.

The kettle whistled atop the kitchen stove. Babs was looking forward to some strawberry peach tea. She’d just finished loading Ileene’s soiled clothes into the washing machine.

And her father called. Yan’s face groused through the console on the wall, by the sink.

“What are you doing now, Babs?” he asked.

She answered him, explaining how the lobotomy had left Ileene incapable of caring for herself. For Babra Plotsky, taking care of her daughter was now her round-the-clock job.

“You know, Babs,” the old man replied, clicking his tongue, “this…” he shook his head, “this is not a good life you have for yourself. I wish you could have done better, Babs. It makes me look like a fool of a father. A failure of a man.”

Babra turned off the fire on the stove and then stood in the middle of the kitchen, facing the console, and then took a deep breath.

“Deddy… for so long, I tried to make you proud. I tried so hard, and…” her voice broke, “because of that… because of me,” a tear crystallized in her eye, “I’m never going to hear my daughter laugh ever again. I’m never going to see her smile.”

Her words were definitive; exhausted, but definitive. Every last straw had broken a thousand times over. Her words passed through the console’s speakers to the failure of a father staring back at her through the liquid crystal window. He heard every single word. They went in through one ear, and out the other.

“Ileene made her choice,” Yan said. “She threw away her health for sake of heretics. And now… is too late. She died in sin, and she will freeze in darkness.”

At that moment, in the memory, Yan Peshka ended the call. But, for once, Babra didn’t step aside. Instead, she rose to the occasion. It was a simple thing; simple and clear, but it was golden and brilliant. It was a eucatastrophe; it was dissonance resolved. It held Illeene’s soul spellbound

In the memory, Ileene’s mother called her father. She wasn’t going to let him have the last word.

As Yan Peshka’s face popped back onto the console screen and grumbled “What is it?”, Babra’s spirit reached into the memory and grabbed hold of her bitter pater and pulled him out of the memory and into the present. He was an insubstantial creature; a memory of a memory of a memory, photocopied into an ugly oblivion that matched the grotesquerie within his heart. She glared at him with anger, but only for a moment, because it quickly melted into bitter pity.

The man had had a hard life. That wasn’t his fault, just like it wasn’t his fault that he was awful and cruel.

But…

It was his fault that he did not care. It was his fault that he did not try to be better.

His and his alone.

In the now, she tore through him, her hand morphing into a great feline paw, its claws unfurled. The malicious specter broke up and disappeared, sliced to ribbons.

In the memory, Babra stepped forward, finally rising to the occasion.

Ileene’s spirit flamed.

“Deddy,” Babs’ words echoed through the memory, “I didn’t have the courage to say this then, but… I should have.” She pursed her lips. “You’re an asshole. You’re a viper. And you’re a shit father. I’m sorry for having hoped you could have been better. The love I thought I wanted was the love I could never get, and…” she barely held back a sob, “The love I thought I’d lost was the one I should have listened to, and embraced.”

I swear, Mrs. Plotsky’s next words made the sky split in two.

“I just wish Ileene could hear me say this. But now… she never will.” And then she ended the call.

“M… Mama?” Ileene was all eyes and mouths at that moment. All were gaping and wide. “You. You… told him off?” She shivered. “I never… I never, ever thought you’d—”

“—He deserved it,” Babs replied. “Ileene, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

We returned to the patio in the balmy night.

Ileene’s form precipitated out from the aether. Her mother’s words painted her back into existence by her mothers words.

She wept. “I… I miss my baby.” Ileene tottered about on her feet. “I wanted to be a mom.”

Jed Plotsky melted into view.

Babra inhaled sharply, smiling through her tears. “I think you would have been a wonderful mother.”

“Mama… Mommy… I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”

And weeping, the family embraced, to be parted nevermore.