Jack Morrow’s injuries had been explicated in detail by the coroner, an insistence of his mother’s after they were advised— strongly—not to view the body before embalming. The car had dipped slightly over the curb at forty miles an hour, jamming its front axis, launching into a roll that crushed its roof against the side of a nearby crafts store. The top of Jack’s skull had been lopped off by bent metal; broken windshield glass had severed his nose and ears. He had died in the brief amount of time it had taken for his lungs to collapse. Fortunate, the coroner said. Priya had raised her head, ablaze upon hearing the word, but did not speak. She gave a lasting look to the wall, behind it the empty room where her son lay.
Saul Morrow squeezed his wife’s hand. The coroner had finished his report and was waiting for them to leave his office. The little television in the reception area outside was blaring an account by a neighbor of the Levitts. Priya listened, only vaguely. The embalmers could reconstruct Jack’s nose and ears in time for a funeral service next week. Jack’s grandparents needed to be told, as well as the parents of Jack’s two friends—two boys he’d known since preschool. She looked at Saul, at a space beyond his eyes, and smiled. Saul would recount later how that little curve of his wife’s lips had, for just a brief moment, righted their tilting planet, though she would not remember it that way, nor would she remember smiling at all, for what was there really to smile about, anymore?
They went home that afternoon to their other son, sixteen- year-old David, who had not been allowed to go to the morgue and had waited an hour for their return. Saul placed a hand on his youngest’s shoulder. They stood apart, unsupported, the three of them still as granite pillars on their aged blue lawn. David waited for his father to speak. After a minute of silence, they walked together into the house.
In Busan, doctors placed Bek Ki-Jung under strict observation. A sociable girl who was known to often spin far-flung stories at bedtime to the amusement of her parents, Ki-Jung remained jovial amid her new surroundings, asking after friends and school assignments. The emergence of her light had been seized upon by clergy of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, intent on proving the girl’s luminous skin a miracle from God. Within the week, six cases had emerged in Africa, twelve more in the Americas, and eighteen combined in Europe and Asia, the majority of which were co-opted by various religious groups and sects as similar divine acts. Ki-Jung pointed to a photograph of herself that appeared one evening on television, saying nothing. Her mother, Ki-Won, requested the cable disconnected.