The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Forty-two

It was hard to drive when she felt so awful, but Catie was determined to make one last trip to see the Virgin. She hadn’t realized she would feel quite this bad, but then it had been a couple of days since she had even attempted to drive her van. During all that time she had eaten almost nothing. Now she had pain and she had a fever that had been rising higher for the last day or so, but she felt light as air, ethereal, angelic. It was a beautiful night and Catie would have liked to be able to lean her face out the window and look up at it, but it was increasingly all she could do to hold the van on the highway.

She was veering across the center line, she knew she was, but she couldn’t do anything about that. There wasn’t much traffic and she always managed to pull the van back onto her side of the road when a car passed her going the other way. Catie didn’t want to be a danger to anybody, she told herself; she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She just wanted to park in the cemetery one more time and crawl, if she had to, up to the grave and lie on her back again and tell the Virgin how grateful she was for the gift of peace.

It hurt to turn the steering wheel when she made the turn onto Highway 177.

Once she got the van going straight again, it hurt a little less.

In another couple of miles, she would be there.

Catie felt excited…and also calm…at the thought of what she was doing. It just felt right. It was going to be the perfect ending to a miraculous trip. And then she could drive home and get into bed and stay there until she died, if that’s the way things worked out. Or maybe she would have a miraculous cure of her body to match the one she’d already had of her heart, and then she would be able to flounce into her doctor’s office and laugh and say, “Look at me!” She would even call that reporter back and say, “I told you so!”

In the moment when she first saw the cemetery she also saw something else.

“Oh!” she breathed, her palms relaxing on the steering wheel.

It was so beautiful…she was so beautiful…the vision Catie saw of a beautiful dark-haired girl who was smiling at her, just ahead of her. Catie knew immediately that it was the Virgin. She didn’t know how she could be so lucky, but for some reason she was being blessed again…

As the vision filled her eyes, Catie’s foot relaxed its pressure on the gas pedal; her hands dropped off the steering wheel entirely and fell into her lap. She just stared at the Virgin, smiling back into the beautiful face that was blessing her. The big van traveled straight down one side of the highway for quite a way, cresting one hill and then picking up speed on the other side. Halfway down the long hill, the van began to swerve toward the other side of the road, where a black Cadillac was coming from the other direction. But Catie didn’t see the two men staring in horror at her in the front seat of the Cadillac. All she saw before she died was the most beautiful light she had ever seen, surrounding a beautiful dark-haired girl whose image vanished as the light accepted Catie into its warmth and glory.