Magda thought that Isidore looked at the edge of composure. She covered her mouth with a hand, as if in her mind’s eye seeing again the horror of what she had seen that night. Her brow wrinkled into tight furrows. Her chest heaved with each ragged breath. Magda realized that Isidore was sobbing in the only way she could even though she had no tears.

Feeling a sudden pang of sorrow for the woman, for her terrible loss and crushing loneliness, Magda lifted the cat and scooted around to sit close beside Isidore. Magda set the cat down to the side, where she stretched from her long nap. Magda put a comforting arm around the frail young woman. Isidore melted into the embrace, burying her face against Magda’s shoulder.

Magda held Isidore’s head against her shoulder. “I’m sorry for asking you to recount such terrible memories.”

Isidore pushed away, swallowing back her emotion. “No, I wanted to tell you. I’ve never had anyone to tell, except, of course, for the one who took my eyes from me. I wanted you to know, much like I had to know, what it means to be a spiritist, to practice such a sorrowful skill that puts you there in the midst of death.”

“I understand,” Magda said.

“I’m afraid that you really don’t.” It wasn’t said in a cruel or condescending way, merely as Isidore’s expression of the simple reality. “I didn’t understand myself until we actually pulled the veil of life aside and faced the unimaginable.”

Magda listened to the silence for a while, then finally had to ask, “What did you see beyond that veil?”

Isidore stared off blindly into the memory.

“I saw a place of darkness beyond dark,” she finally said in a haunted voice. “An endless place of souls that would take forever to see, and yet I glimpsed it all in an instant.

“In that instant I saw what I had come to see, learned the truth I had come to learn . . . and I was horrified.”

“Horrified by seeing the world of the dead?”

“No,” Isidore said. “Horrified by the truth.”

Chapter 30

“I don’t understand,” Magda said. “What truth did you see?”

For a time, the only sound was the sputtering of a few of the candles glowing around the room. The cat sat silently on her haunches, as if waiting to hear what Isidore would say.

“I saw Joel there,” Isidore finally said. “His spirit, anyway. That much of it was a comfort—seeing the light of his soul there at peace.”

Magda, her arm around the woman, squeezed Isidore’s opposite shoulder. She didn’t want to sound suspicious, or disbelieving, but she found it hard to imagine.