And then everything changed in one stunning moment.  Changed profoundly and forever.

The day before Christmas, along the California coast...Agnes Lampion made deliveries to those friends who were on her list of the needful, but also to friends who were blessed with plenty.

...Barty rode with his mother in her green Chevrolet station wagon.

...For Agnes and Barty, one stop remained, where some of the joy of Christmas would always be buried with the husband she still missed every day and the father that he would never know.

Cypresses lined the entry drive to the cemetery...Joey rested not under the stern watch of the cypresses, but near a California pepper tree.  With its graceful, cascading boughs, it appeared to stand in meditation or prayer... At the grave, they arrived with red and white roses. Agnes carried the red, and Barty brought the white.

..."Does my dad like Christmas?" Barty asked, sitting on the grave grass in front of the headstone.

"Your dad didn't just like Christmas, he loved Christmas. He started planning for it in June.  If there wasn't already a Santa Claus, your father would have taken the job."

...Barty said, "Is he good with numbers like me?"

"Well, he was an insurance agent, and numbers are important in that line of work.  And he was a good investor, too. Not the whiz you are with numbers, but I'm sure you got some of your talent from him."

"Does he read Father Brown mysteries?"

Crouching beside the boy...Agnes said, "Barty, honey, why are you...?"

He... met her stare. "What?"

Although she would have felt ridiculous phrasing this question in these words to any other three-year-old, no better way existed to ask it of her special son: "Kiddo...do you realize you're speaking of your dad in the present tense?"

Barty had never been instructed in the rules of grammar, ..."Sure. Does and is."

"Why?"

The boy shrugged.

..."Honey, you do understand...of course you do..that your dad is gone."

"Sure. The day I was born."

"That's right." 

..."I wish your dad could have known you," Agnes said.

"Somewhere, he does."

At first, she thought that Barty meant his father watched him from Heaven, and his words touched a tenderness in her, overlaying an arc of pain across the curve of her smile.

Then the boy put new and puzzling shadings on his meaning when he said, "Daddy died here, but he didn't die every place I am."

His words echoed back to her from July: My cold's just here, not every place I am.

..."It's lonely for me here," said Barty,"but not lonely for me everywhere."

From a bedtime conversation in September: Somewhere, there's kids next door.

And somewhere Selma Galloway, their neighbor, was not a spinster but a married woman with grandchildren.

A sudden strange weakness, a formless dread, dropped Agnes out of her crouch and onto her knees beside the boy.

"Sometimes it's sad here, Mommy.  But it's not sad everyplace you are. Lots of places, Daddy's with you and me, and we're happier, and everything's okay."

..."And in a lot of somewheres," said Barty, "things are worse for us than here. Some somewheres, you died, too, when I was born, so I never met you, either."

These statements sounded so convoluted and so bizarre to Agnes that they nourished her growing fear for Barty's mental stability.

"Please, sweetie... please don't..." 

She wanted to tell him not to say these queer things, not to talk this way, yet she couldn't speak the words.  When Barty asked her why, as inevitably he would, she'd have to say she was worried that something might be terribly wrong with him, but she couldn't express this fear to her boy, not ever. He was the lintel of her heart, the keystone of her soul, and if he failed because of her lack of confidence in him, she herself would collapse into ruin.

Sudden rain spared her the need to finish the sentence. A few fat drops drew both their faces to the sky, and even as they rose to their feet, this brief light paradiddle of sprinkles gave way to a serious drumming.

"Let's hurry, kiddo."

...Here, the rain, but somewhere we're walking in sunshine.

This thought startled Agnes, disturbed her--yet, inexplicably, it also poured a measure of warm comfort into her chilled heart.

...Monitoring Barty from the corner of her eye, Agnes paced herself to the strides of his short legs, so she was drenched and chilled when she reached the station wagon.

The boy dashed for the front passenger door...  By the time Agnes opened the driver's door and slumped behind the steering wheel, Barty levered himself onto the seat beside her.

She was sopping, shivering. Water streamed from her soaked hair, down her face, as she wiped at her beaded eyelashes with one dripping hand.

...Agnes switched on the heater and angled the vanes of the middle vent toward Barty. "Honey, turn that other vent toward yourself."

"I'm okay."

"You'll catch pneumonia," she warned, reaching across the boy to flip the passenger's side vent toward him.

"You need the heat, Mommy.  Not me."

And when she finally looked directly at him, blinked at him, her lashes flicking off a spray of fine droplets, Agnes saw that Barty was dry.  Not a single jewel of rain glimmered in his thick hair or on the baby-smooth planes of his face.  His shirt and sweater were as dry as if they had just been taken off a hanger and from a dresser drawer...

"I ran where the rain wasn't," he said.

...(She experienced a) sense of wonder quaking through her at the sight of Barty as dry as if he'd spent the afternoon perched fireside.

Although rain-pasted to her skin, the fine hairs rose on the nape of her neck.  The gooseflesh crawling across her arms had nothing to do with her cold, wet clothes.

When she tried to say how, the how of speech eluded her, and she sat mute as if no words had ever passed her lips before.

Desperately trying to collect her wits, Agnes gazed out at the deluged graveyard...

She switched on the windshield wipers...Her whole world had changed by Barty's dry walk in wet weather.

"That's just...an old joke," she heard herself saying, as from a distance.  "You didn't really walk between the drops?"

The boy's silvery giggles rang as merrily as sleigh bells, his Christmas spirit undampened.  "Not between, Mommy. Nobody could do that. I just ran where the rain wasn't."

She dared to look at him again. 

He was still her boy. As always, her boy. Bartholomew. Barty. Her sweetie. Her kiddo. But he was more than she had ever imagined her boy to be, more than merely a prodigy.

"How, Barty?  Dear Lord, how?"

"Don't you feel it?" His head cocked. Inquisitive look. Dazzling eyes as beautiful as his spirit.

"Feel what?" she asked.

"The way things are. Don't you feel...all the ways things are?"

"Ways?  I don't know what you mean."

"Gee, you don't feel it at all?"

She felt the car seat under her butt, wet clothes clinging to her, the air humid and cloying, and she felt a terror of the unknown, like a great lightless void on the edge of which she teetered, but she didn't feel whatever he was talking about, because the thing he felt made him smile.

..."Feel what? Explain it to me."

...He gazed out at the rain, and finally said, "Boy, I don't have the right words."

...Agnes could understand why words failed him.  With her greater fund of language, she had been rendered speechless by his accomplishment.

"Honey, have you ever done this before?"

He shook his head. "Never knew I could."

"You never knew you could..walk where the rain wasn't?"

"Nope, not until I needed to."

...Pushing a tangle of wet hair away from her face, she realized her hands were shaking.

"What's wrong?" Barty asked.

"I'm a little..a little bit scared, Barty."

Surprise raised his eyebrows and his voice: "Why?"

Because you can walk in the rain without getting wet, because you walk in SOME OTHER PLACE, and God knows where that place is or whether YOU COULD GET STUCK THERE somehow, get stuck there AND NEVER COME BACK,  and if you can do this, there's surely other impossible things you can do, and even as smart as you are, you can't know the dangers of doing these things...

She thought all that, but she closed her eyes and said: "I'll be okay. Give me a second here, all right?"

"There's nothing to be scared about," Barty assured her.

She heard the door, and when she opened her yes, the boy had already slid out of the car, into the downpour again. She called him back, but he kept going.

"Mommy, watch!"  He turned in the deluge with his arms held out from his sides. "Not scary!"

Breath repeatedly catching in her throat, heart thudding, Agnes watched her son through the open car door.

Turning in circles, he tipped his head back, presenting his face to the streaming sky, laughing.

She could see now what she hadn't seen when running with him through the cemetery, because she was looking directly at him. Yet even seeing did not make it easy to believe.

Barty stood in the rain, surrounded by the rain, pummeled by the rain, with the rain. Saturated grass squished under his sneakers. The droplets, in their millions, didn't bend-slip-twist magically around his form, didn't hiss into steam a millimeter from his skin.  Yet he remained as dry as baby Moses floating on the river in a mother-made ark of bullrushes.

...Moving around the front of the station wagon, waving at his mother, reveling in her astonishment, Barty shouted, "Not scary!"

Rapt, frightened yet wonderstruck, Agnes leaned forward, squinting between the whisking wipers. 

Onward he came, past the left front fender, gleefully hopping up and down, as if on a pogo stick, still waving.

...To the window in the driver's door, Barty came with a repertoire of comic expressions, mugging at his mother, sticking one finger up his nose and exaggeratedly boring with it as though exploring for nasal nuggets. "Not scary, Mommy!"

In reaction to a terrible sense of weightlessness, Agnes's two-fisted grip on the steering wheel grew so tight her hands ached...

Beyond the window, Barty failed to do any of the things that Agnes expected of a boy not fully enough part of the day to share its rain:  He didn't flicker like an image on a static-peppered TV screen; he didn't shimmer like a phantom figure in Sahara heat or blur like a reflection in a steam-clouded mirror.

He was as solid as any boy.  He was in the day but not in the rain. He was moving toward the back of the car.

Turning in her seat, craning her neck, Agnes tried to keep her son in sight. 

She lost track of him. Fear knocked, knocked, on the door of her heart, because she was sure he had vanished the way ships supposedly disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle.

Then she saw him coming forward along the passenger's side of the car.

Her awful sense of weightlessness became something much better: a buoyancy, an exhilarating lightness of spirit.  Fear remained with her--fear for Barty, fear of the future, and of the strange complexity of Creation that she'd just glimpsed--but wonder and wild hope now tempered it.

He arrived at the open door, grinning. No Cheshire-cat grin, hanging disembodied on the air, teeth without tabby.  Grin with full Barty.

Into the car he climbed. One boy. Small. Fragile. Dry.

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In our imagination, or illusion, we humans fragment ourselves into separate Beings that we call "Spirit Guides", "ancestors" "future-selves", "past-lives", etc, when these "parts" of ourselves are really integrated into our one "Great Self", and our Great Self and the Great Selves of others are integrated and merged together into the All-That-Is! There is No Separation!