Free As It Is in Heaven by Niall Williams

immobile and deaf and mute, and the darkness had fallen in like earth on a coffin. He imagined with terrible clarity the anguish
     of it, the sheer and merciless shattering as the other car came crashing in on them, the jerking backward of his mother and
     Mary, and the cries; if there was time for cries. Stephen imagined it as he sat there in the crashed car, and he could not
     move. He felt the steering wheel, but it seemed unreal, and the pallor of his hands upon it was the lone white thing in the
     darkness.
    I cannot move, he thought. I cannot move from here.
    And if the car had blown up and burned there on the side of the road, Stephen Griffin would have burned with it and not regretted
     it, surrendering to the ceaseless prompting of his life that grief triumphs on earth and that all our plots unravel in the
     end.
    But then Moira Fitzgibbon arrived. When she pulled open the car door, the rain lashing down on her head made freakish streaks
     of her hairdo and the taste of her makeup washed into her mouth. She spat and called out, but Stephen did not move. He was
     like a deep-water swimmer uncertain whether to kick for the surface and kept his eyes looking at the long-gone world where
     the spirits of his mother and sister were so close it made him ache.
    “Mr. Griffin, is that you? Do you hear me? Mr. Griffin?”
    There were mudspatters on Moira’s stockings, the heel of her left shoe was loosened, and the navy-blue outfit she had bought
     for the evening of Venetian music was soaked against her back. She had no idea why the sky had fallen in or why hers had to
     be the car to first come upon the crash, knowing that she could not drive past it although everything in her had wanted to.
     She understood nothing yet, but cursed God and cursed the weather and cursed Tom and the west of Ireland and the godforsaken
     roads like this that were full of holes and went on for miles and made this man crash in front of her.
    “Feck it. Feck it. Oh God, forgive me, feck it. Mr. Griffin! Mr. Griffin!”
    She cried out his name, as if he could help her understand. She looked out the back window to see if help might be coming,
     but saw only the emptiness of the dark fields unrelieved by light or hope in the harsh, starless wind. She said Stephen’s
     name loudly again, and then, as she reached in to shake him by the shoulder, her knee touched something on the passenger seat,
     and she discovered a fragment of meaning and held up close to her face in the darkness the tickets for the concert.

14
      Gabriella Castoldi, Paolo Mistra, Piero and Maria Motte were already sitting at the front of the concert room in the Old Ground
     Hotel by the time Stephen Griffin arrived there with Moira Fitzgibbon. He was still in a daze and passed up the red carpeted
     stairs of the hotel unsure in which world he was walking. When he had felt the woman’s hand on his shoulder in the car, he
     had imagined at first it was the buffeting of the storm. Then she smacked his face and turned him towards her. He remembered
     her: the woman from the staff room, the woman they said afterwards was the dimmest pupil the school had ever had. He remembered
     her. Moira shook him from himself. They had gotten out of his car together and were blown along the road to hers. When they
     sat into it, Moira turned the heat full on and they drove towards Ennis in a gusting tropical balminess that dried their clothes
     and hair stiffly and made the rain-run places of Moira’s makeup look like the tracks of ancient tears. She was taking him
     to the hospital, she told him, even though she would be late for the concert.
    “I want to go to the concert,” he said. He said it very calmly, without looking at her. He was stooped forward towards the
     windscreen, with his black hair fallen over his right eye. “I want to go to the concert.”
    (Later, when he was sitting at the fire in the house by the sea, listening to another storm blowing in across the invisible