The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense

19

They buy a used car with cash. He is too young to drive, but at sixteen — looking eighteen — she is just old enough. Her driver’s license is a forgery, but she’s pretty good behind a wheel, anyway.

No longer alone, she gives up the security of Broderick’s for the wonderful uncertainty of the world beyond. Neither of them has any reason to stay in this city, where their families were taken from them.

They don’t know where they’re going, but they both know without doubt that there is somewhere they need to be.

With their dog and cat, they leave on Christmas morning, which seems an ideal time to start the world anew.

By virtue of her great suffering, she is his sister, and by virtue of his great suffering, he is her brother. They are not yet adults, but neither are they children anymore. A hard-won wisdom has settled upon them and with it that quality with which true wisdom is always twined — humility.

Later, in open land, with evergreen forests rising up slopes to the north of the highway and descending to pristine lowlands in the south, he puts into words for her the most important thing that they have learned or perhaps ever will.

The true nature of the world is veiled, and if you shine a bright light on it, you can’t expose that truth; it melts away with the shadows in which it was cloaked. The truth is too awesome for us to stare directly at it, and we are meant to glimpse it only at the periphery of our vision. If the landscape of your mind is too dark with fear or doubt or anger, you are blind to all truth. But if your mental landscape is too bright with certitude and arrogance, you are snow-blind and likewise unable to see what lies before you. Only the moonlit mind allows wonder, and it is in the thrall of wonder that you can see the intricate weave of the world of which you are but one thread, one fantastic and essential thread.