Dust of Eden by Thomas Sullivan Page B

anything special you’d like?"
    Color ebbed back into Molly’s face. "I won’t lie about that, Ariel. I have a granddaughter too. I mean, you can’t help but think about things when you see what’s happened here. You remember Lindsay—you saw her at my birthday party five years ago. She has cystic fibrosis. I don't even know if she's still alive. She should be, though. Five years. She should be alive. And . . . and sometimes I’ve just wondered, you know, what if she were painted healthy again?"
    "Molly, you know I can't."
    "But it would be as easy for you as Jesus Christ touching the lame."
    â€œHardly.”
    â€œYou could do it, though. And how do you know God didn’t intend for you to perform miracles?”
    â€œWell.” Ariel shook away a dazed smile. “Whatever happened after you died, it didn’t destroy your belief in God and Christ.”
    Molly darkened.
    "I don't even remember what Lindsay looks like,” Ariel said. “I'd have to get a photo. And then what would the others want me to do for them? I'd have to deal with that. There would be no limit to the things we'd all want for the people in our past. It would get out of control and jeopardize everything."
    "She was so young, is all. Barely three. She'd be eight now."
    "You don't know what you're asking. The sick child her parents have now would die, just like my Amber did."
    "— Paavo or Dana could go and make some excuse to take a photograph. I don't think my daughter would recognize Dana. Or Kraft could go, for that matter."
    "Kraft doesn't remember the past, so how could we trust him to not get lost in the present? If he was picked up wandering and taken to a hospital, his picture could get into the paper. Someone might recognize him."
    "Sometimes he remembers."
    "Kraft? He told you he remembers?”
    â€œHe called me Mollypop one day. No one has called me that since high school.”
    â€œInteresting. But it doesn't make any difference as far as your granddaughter, Molly. Even if I did paint her back, she would be here with us. How would we return her to her parents? And even if we could do that, what would they think when they saw her healed and alive after they had just buried her? No, Molly . . . no."
    Â 
    K raft remembering? Molly had said Kraft was remembering. Mollypop . Ariel looked in the mirror, patted the bags under her eyes, stroked the sagging flesh beneath her jaw, drew her shoulders back.
    Why don't I paint myself younger?
    A fold of gravity here, a tuck of time there. A half-dozen brush strokes could correct what she saw in the mirror. Call it her own health insurance. Her own life insurance. She had a different vanity from Ruta's . Ruta needed to fool herself. Ariel could use vanity like a utilitarian thing, fooling just the world.
    She descended through the house without turning on lights, waggling her cane to touch familiar objects, groping through the rooms to the school corridor. When she reached Kraft Olson's room, she made three faint raps with the neck of the cane.   Not surprisingly, there was no response. And when she gently pushed open the door, he was sitting at the window, his features hidden in silhouette.
    Why don't I paint myself younger?
    In she came, setting the cane aside and crossing the moonlit floor with as easy a gait as she could manage.
    "Hello, Kraft."
    "Hello," he said after a moment.
    She presented her face full in the moonlight and looked into his eyes, but they were empty, hollow, vacant.
    He might not recognize her, but, oh, how she recognized him! Right down to the last brush stroke with which she had brought him back; the last atom – she thought – of the man she still loved. She had done a wonderful job, especially the hair and the eyes. Perfect hair that he had always seemed to take for granted. No preener , Kraft Olson, grooming himself with surreptitious sweeps of a comb. She had spent more time brushing his hair to life on