“That’s a narrow definition,” I said. My organs were so exhausted I almost fell over.
Dawn shook her head again. “You need evidence. Everyone has to agree that it happened. Who wants to pray to a saint that’s going to give them a feeling?”
“Okay,” I said, and proceeded to describe the most poignant and personal scenes I’d accessed in her memory. As I talked, she melted like a candle, her face slackening, her proud chest and shoulders hunching. I stopped only when she fell to the ground and pilgrims lighting candles rushed to her aid.
“Who are you?” she screamed. “Did you hire some kind of detective to find this out? What con are you and that husband running? Is this blackmail? You think I’ll give you money?”
I didn’t know why I’d told her what I’d seen, except that she refused to believe me. And it felt vital that she believe me, much more so than Matteo.
“Miracles heal!” she shouted. “This is the work of the devil!”
The monk in Tevas came out of the chapel, where he’d been praying. He knelt on the flagstones and spoke to Dawn in Castilian Spanish, which sounded like a shallow stream running over pebbles. She had a decent command of the language from her time as a nurse, and she spoke back in her flat American accent. After a few minutes, she stood and brushed dirt from her shorts, then drew her shoulders back as if on the verge of sprouting wings.
“He said I shouldn’t pay attention to you. He said God knows my heart, no matter what you think you know. He said your ‘experience’ is nothing compared to faith. La devoción no necesita estímulo. Devotion needs no encouragement.”
The monk glared at me. I remembered how he hadn’t touched the Madonna, only prayed before her. I had the uneasy feeling of carrying inconvenient, complex knowledge among people who wanted relief from pain and sorrow. Then again, I knew nothing of faith. And nothing of the sorrows in my life to come.
“I guess we have flights to catch,” I said. Dawn glanced at her watch. I reached into my purse for the phone I’d turned off and grazed my father’s rosary. My fingers came out flecked with cheap paint.