I lean forward to peer into the whirlpool forming directly in front of the barrier. What is behind this border at the edge of the sea of the dying? What is beyond the barrier . . . or inside it? The whirlpool gapes beneath me like a waterfall. It begins to tug my boat down into the deep and toward the pipe, and all I can think is, Yes, I want to find out. I want to find out what’s there! For an instant the boat teeters on the watery brink before plummeting down, end over end. I feel like I’m being torn apart, head, arms, and spine.

Please. Please! PLEASE!

Suddenly a great, flat, chill surface looms over me, and then the shadow comes crashing down on me like a giant hand, swiping me into the sea and into the pipe. I’m falling, I’m being washed away, lights and colors and voices wrap themselves around me. I’m sinking, I’m dissolving, I’m falling ever faster. I’m falling and . . .

Sam

I hear her heart beating close to my ear. I can smell her perfume and feel her fingertips resting lightly on my hair, as if my skull were made of fine glass. I can hear the crackle of her panic and her surge of hope, but there’s something else beneath those things. Something warm and good that enables me to breathe.

I can hear her breath and then, with my soul snuggling against her heart, I hear her breath become a note. The note becomes a tune, a breeze, but it’s not like Madelyn’s piano music. This wind has been scouring the earth for a long time and is now slowly rising, growing brighter, as it continues its quest over the cool, silvery, frost-rimmed, icy coating of a long, broad, frozen river. It is changing into a warming ray of sunlight, which captures the sparkling silence and then alights on a motionless ice sculpture, inside which a heart is beating. My heart.

Her singing warms the ice until the melody envelops my heart, and the mild breeze carries me away over thousands of mountains and dark woods, back to where all is bright and fine.

TWO HEARTBEATS LATER , the chapel door opens. Dr. Saul comes over to us, sits down on the floor, leans his head against the wall, and shuts his eyes. Eddie stops singing.

“Samuel,” Dr. Saul says. I know it’s not a good sign when God calls me by my first name.

DAY SEVENTEEN

Eddie