* * *

We don’t need to dwell too long on what actually happened, do we? The doctors’ explanation was—to coin a phrase—an old stand-by, an ace-in-the-hole, a backup used when the fact was they had no rational reason for what happened. Lucy was a young, strong, healthy woman with no physical or physiological abnormalities, no viruses, no environmental factors that could have contributed to the miscarriage—but of course you can’t tell such a thing to a young woman who’s just lost her first child, you can’t just shrug your shoulders, shake your head, and say, “I have no idea what caused this”; so you make an informed guess, you hypothesize and hope that will be enough.

What happened was: when Ronald James Williamson lay his hands on Lucy, he felt a Hurting beyond any he’d encountered before, one so black and hopeless and filled with physical suffering he almost cried out from the sheer agony of it, and Knew that Lucy’s unborn child was, at a very young age, going to suffer a death that would be slow and terrifying and too horrific for any human being to face. He couldn’t allow that to happen, and so made his Wish to stop the Hurting.

But there was more to it than that, some new facet to his power that Ronnie didn’t understand at the time; something about this incident felt different from the others, and it would be several years before this new facet made itself clear to him; he would, in fact, awaken at four in the morning, soaked in sweat, alone in a motel room somewhere in Kentucky, knowing that he had only a small handful of hours to get back to Cedar Hill and find Lucy Holcomb (for that would be her name then).

Right now, though, we need to get back to Lucy.

* * *

She came back from the hospital dazed and tired, weak and enormously sad. She tried to remember if she had ever experienced such deep emotional pain before, then decided it didn’t matter. The loss was great and complete in the way only death is. For the first few days she couldn’t talk to anyone, but at the same time it hurt too much to be alone. She would just cry and cry without stopping; over this, she had no control. One of the clearest reminders that she was no longer pregnant was the speedy change her body went through. Within three days her breasts, once tender and swollen, were back to their normal size; her stomach, which had grown hard, was soft again. Her body was no longer preparing for the birth of a child: It was simple and blatant and cold. And then there was the bleeding. Her body would not let her forget. Mom and Aunt Eunice didn’t know how to help, and she didn’t know how to ask for it. They were much more comfortable talking about the physical and not the emotional side of the miscarriage. She needed to talk about both, but words seemed so pitifully inadequate to express her feelings. She understood the depth of the loss but realized she had never experienced the depth of the joy that should have been hers all along.