As It Is in Heaven Read Online Free

not supposed to. But I
     just thought I’d mention it to somebody. I wonder, will I? … I just can’t seem to.” He was not distressed, he spoke about
     it as if telling a mildly unusual facet of his diet.
    Tim McGrath did not know what to say; he looked out the window. (He did not yet know the prescription for loss, and would
     not even understand the ailment until four years later, when he would return from golf at the Grange on a Saturday afternoon
     and find his wife, Maire, dead on the bed upstairs. Then the loss would descend upon him and he would walk out across the
     manicured summer lawns of his front garden and feel nothing. Then he would recall the tailor and realize with a blow that
     made him sit down on the grass that in fact he knew nothing about healing.)
    But he did not know yet that the incredible world could vanish from the living as easily as from the dead. He looked out the
     window and watched the traffic in a practised way that he knew looked as if he were thinking. Finally Dr. Magrath turned around
     to face his patient. “Are you sleeping at night?” he asked.
    And that was it. When Philip walked back across the city to the shop, he had a bottle of sleeping tablets in his jacket pocket.
     He had never taken them, and gradually allowed the promise of spring to die away into the wet summer of that year, taking
     with it the faint prompting at the corners of his mind that perhaps there was a way back to joy. By the autumn, the relentless
     and immutable progress of sorrow had continued like an intimacy in Philip Griffin’s heart. He anticipated affliction and imagined
     that by doing so his life was more bearable.
    No, happiness did not run in the Griffin family, it fled away; for them there was no relief to balance tragedy. In quiet moments
     after Stephen had moved to the west, Philip had begun to hope that his son’s life would simply escape into ordinariness, that
     nothing remarkable would happen. But now, sitting opposite him at the chessboard in the dark, he realized that was not the
     case. And worse, that he was to live to see it.
    He looked at the chessboard and memorized the position. He would lay it out again after Stephen had driven away and study
     it for clues. He knew the woman Stephen was in love with was unsuitable, but was not sure yet why. Perhaps she was married
     or did not care for him at all.
    It was a little time before Philip stood up and moved past the sleeping figure. He moved out into the hallway and in the hot
     press found a blanket. When he came back and laid it over his son, the young man seemed to him to have grown younger. He was
     smaller, too. And for the four hours that remained until morning Philip decided to sit there in the armchair opposite him.
    They had had so much time together since the day, that day; years of living in the same house that had taught them the fine
     skills of walking in empty rooms and being aware of the ghosts. They had lived around each other as much as with each other.
     But the invisible bond that held them together was the searing memory of those first moments after the accident when they
     had seen each other for the first time and stood in mute but tearless rage as they felt the burning pain of love and the perishing
     of hope. The funeral had been automatic; it was as if two other people and not Philip and Stephen were there. But afterwards,
     in the unnaturally stilled days when father and son came from their rooms in the house only when they knew they would not
     encounter each other, when they stole down the stairs laden with the guilt of having survived, the bond between them had grown.
     It grew without their speaking of it. It grew while they lay in their beds in the dark, sleepless and angry, asking God over
     and over why it was they who had lived. Why not kill me? And as week after week passed and they still lived on, the man and
     his son washing the dishes at the counter, hanging out the clothes on the line where the