October 29, 1982: The leaves on the towering maple trees surrounding the Hill Street Baptist Church in Dallas were tinged with brown. Because the parking lot was full and the Gonzales family was late as usual, they had to park their ten-year-old Ford Fairlane on the street.

            He was in the backseat, his eyes glued on the shiny mirrored strip of chrome running along the door frame. He wasn't looking at it but through it, or even into the chrome itself. Yesterday he had touched it with his thumb and now found himself fascinated with the outline of his fingerprint—fuzzy and milky on the outside, shiny and reflective on the inside. In his mind the fingerprint became something else, just as everything he touched or saw became something else. He was looking at a large lake, frozen solid, snow piled high all around. Overhead, the sky was gray, heavy clouds ready to spit forth more snow, and a fierce wind whipped across the icy surface. There were no people in his imagined landscape. There were never any people.

            Noises drifted by his ears. He felt the vibration of the sounds against his cheek. In the front seat his parents were fussing, trying to find their prayer books, rushing so they would not have to walk into the sanctuary after the service had began.

            "Rosie," his mother said. "Hurry, get Raymond out of the car. We're going to be late."

            Madonna Gonzales was a thin, dark woman who always seemed to be in a hurry, always late, always anxious. She no longer allowed people to call her Madonna, including her husband. Since her separation from the Roman Catholic church two years ago, she asked that she now be called Donna. She didn't like the connotations of the name Madonna, she told people. It sounded too Catholic; Donna was now a Baptist.

            Rosie circled to the rear passenger door and peered at her brother through the window. At eleven years old to his thirteen, she was smaller and far more childlike. Her golden brown skin had a warm, healthy glow, and she was wiry and active like her mother. She reached for the door handle and then sighed, watching her brother's face, the detached look in his eyes, the pronounced stare. Why couldn't he talk to her? Why couldn't he share things with her? Why couldn't he go to school like she did every day, maybe even walk with her to the bus stop?

            Ever since she could remember, Rosie had been asking her parents the same questions. "Raymond is sick," her mother would say. For Rosie this was a difficult concept to grasp. Her brother's body was strong and well developed. He was big for his age, while Rosie was small and delicate. He never coughed or upchucked in the bathroom. He never ran a fever or broke out with spots as Rosie had last year when she had come down with the chicken pox. But Raymond was sick. And Rosie knew he was sick. He was sick in his head.

            "Get out, Raymond," Rosie said softly, taking his hand and puffing, while his eyes remained fixed on the door frame. Quickly she moved her free hand in front of his eyes, breaking his eye contact. Sometimes this worked. His eyes would follow her hand, and his body would follow his eyes. Today it didn't work. She leaned back with all her weight and pulled on his hand. "Momma," she yelled, frustration and annoyance in her young voice, "I can't do it. He won't move."

            While Roberto Gonzales stood by the driver's door, his arms limp by his side, an unconcerned look on his face, his wife ran to the back door and tried to get her son out of the car. Her eyes would find her husband's and narrow, as if to say, Why can't you help me? Then she would yank Raymond's arm with all her might. "Please, Raymond," she exclaimed. "Get out of the car. We're late for church. Don't you want to go to Sunday school? You can color. You know how you love to color."

            He didn't answer. She didn't expect an answer. Her husband always gave her that look when she tried to communicate with their son. He had long ago given up.

            The pond disappeared from his mind like a slide from a projector, and he quickly found another vision: a forest, a blur of vibrant emerald green mixed with a soft cocoa brown. His lips spread in a smile as he dived inside the colors, felt the warmth of the brown caress his skin, heard the rushing of the green like water in a small stream. Then his eyes expanded and his breath came faster. Sounds were echoing around him, but he didn't hear them.

            "Raymond," his mother said. Her voice was loud now, insisting. She had managed to pull him to his feet, but he was still firmly planted and would not move, his head tilted back and his eyes trained on the leafy branches of the maple tree.

            Inside the tree was a blue bird. He had never seen anything so lovely in his life, so mesmerizing, so blue. The bird was perfectly still, strangely undisturbed by the people beneath the tree. He let the blueness fall over him like a blanket on a cold winter day. Suddenly the blue changed to many colors, all of them fluttering. The green rushed and twittered, the brown throbbed, the blue shook as the bird cleared the tree branches and took flight.

            "Roberto, help me," his mother pleaded. This time her husband responded, slowly walking around the front of the car and grabbing his son around the waist. Roberto Gonzales was a large, heavy-set man who made his living with the strength of his body as a furniture mover for Bekins Van Lines. He had a look about his face like a beagle, long and sad, his eyes large brown orbs in his expressionless face. Carrying his son under his arm like a sack of potatoes, his eyes down in embarrassment as other congregants hurried to the sanctuary, he set him down on the steps in front of the church and walked away. Roberto had done his job, done what his wife had asked. That was all he was capable of doing. He'd yearned for a son to help carry the workload of the family as he had done when he was thirteen, a son to laugh with and discuss the things a man should discuss with his son. Sometimes on sleepless nights he found it difficult to believe that this strange being was really his child. He had even gone so far on one occasion of accusing his wife of being unfaithful.

            Rosie was dressed in her best dress, the white one with the red sash at the waist that she was allowed to wear only on Sunday. It was almost too small now; she had received it several years ago, a gift from the social worker who came about Raymond. And her skinny legs were getting longer. Tugging at the hem of her dress, she shuffled along behind her mother and Raymond, her father having gone on ahead. They would drop Raymond off at the Sunday school classroom; Rosie would go inside the sanctuary. She would have preferred the Sunday school class but her mother insisted that she listen to the preacher. That's where it would occur, her mother always told her. If it was going to happen, it would happen inside the sanctuary, during the prayers.

            Rosie had liked their old church. She had liked the smell of the incense, the robes of the priests, walking to the altar with her hands in a praying position to take communion at the rail. Right after her First Communion, when she was so proud and happy, her mother had suddenly decided to attend the Baptist church. She had sat Rosie and her father down one day and told them why.

            "I have prayed and prayed," she told them, tears streaming down her face. "I have asked God for a miracle for Raymond. I have asked the priests to pray for a miracle, but they tell me I have to accept this—the way he is—that it is God's will. I cannot do that," she said, her head jerking upright and the tears drying on her face. "I can't accept that this is God's will, that God wants my child to be this way."

            A week later, a doctor recommended by the Social Services Agency had diagnosed Raymond's illness, giving it a name none of the family had ever heard before: autism. Rosie couldn't pronounce it. Her father shook his head; his son was not right. That's all he knew. Names meant nothing. But his mother was certain her son's affliction was a curse, a possession by evil spirits—that only by being close to religious people, only by prayer could her son ever be free of the demons that held his soul captive. If they believed, she told them, if they prayed for a miracle, then possibly it would occur. The people who attended this church believed in miracles. They also believed in the devil and his power to destroy innocent lives. Within these walls, Raymond's mother was certain she would find God and He would cure Raymond.

            After depositing Raymond in the Sunday school class, Rosie and her mother made their way to the sanctuary. Her mother liked to sit in the front row. Her father's job was saving them a seat. One of the church's deacons nodded to them as he walked in the opposite direction, accompanied by a strange-looking young woman. Donna Gonzales stopped and stared. For a second, her eyes met the woman's and she felt a chill, wrapping her arms around her body and clasping Rosie's hand even tighter. She had never seen this woman before today. She knew most of the members now for she tried to attend every function possible: the Wednesday prayer meetings, the coffees held for the altar guild, the Friday morning gathering that was specifically for the purpose of healing. She had even learned how to pray for a miracle. She had been told that she should not ask, but rather thank God as if the miracle had already occurred. This way she was affirming it, Reverend Whiteside had said, demonstrating her faith.

            While Rosie was pulling her toward the door leading to the sanctuary, the church's organ already playing a hymn, Donna stared at the young woman and the deacon. The woman wasn't dressed appropriately for church, even for someone her age. Wearing a navy blue T-shirt with the words California Angels emblazoned on the front and a large letter A crowned by a halo, blue jeans, and house slippers, the woman looked very different from the women and girls who attended the church every Sunday in their finest dresses, their best shoes, carrying their nicest bags. The woman's bright red hair flared out around her face as though she was standing in a strong wind. The face, however, was enthralling. Donna stared, watching as the woman's lips moved, her words too soft to be heard.

            Her skin was soft and pink, unlined and unblemished; her eyes were distinctly green, not blue-green or gray-green or hazel, but the very essence of green. Her prominent forehead showed a widow's peak, a little point in the front where her hairline dropped down. Donna thought it was like an arrow, pointing at the rest of her lovely face. Her nose sloped evenly but was small, almost snipped off at the end. It was the kind of nose that sometimes made an Anglo person look stuck-up, as if they thought they were better than everyone else. Her mouth was pale pink, like the skin of her face, and as compact and perfectly formed as a rose. High cheekbones delineated her face, and in the center of her chin was a small dimple.

            "Mom," Rosie pleaded, pulling harder on her mother's hand, "I hear the preacher talking. Everyone's going to look at us when we walk in. Please."

            Donna pulled her eyes away from the woman and followed her daughter into the sanctuary.

            Deacon Miller pulled Mrs. Robinson out of the Sunday school class after entering and depositing the woman in one of the small chairs designed for children. "Who is she?" the teacher asked, puffing up her chest, thinking Deacon Miller was bringing in a new teacher.

            "She didn't tell me her name," Deacon Miller said. "She just walked in off the street, and someone found her roaming around in the halls. She says she's from California. She wanted to see the children."

            "Why are you leaving her here?" Mrs. Robinson could hear the children laughing and making a ruckus inside the classroom. She needed to return before complete pandemonium broke out. She was an older woman, in her late sixties. A retired schoolteacher, she had been teaching the Sunday school class at Hill Street Baptist Church for over fifteen years, never once missing a Sunday.

            "Look at how she's dressed. I don't think it's a good idea to take her into the sanctuary. She may have walked away from a mental institution or something. She doesn't appear to be coherent. All she said was that she was from California and she didn't know why she was here, and then kept asking me to take her to the children."

            "Well," Mrs. Robinson said, sighing, her hand on the door to the classroom, "maybe she's drunk or on drugs. How old is she anyway? She looks so young. Why don't you call the police?"

            Deacon Miller grimaced. Tall, emaciated, dressed in a dark suit, the sixty-nine-year-old man resembled an undertaker. His skin had a pasty, almost waxy appearance.

"This is a church, Mildred. If a person can't come here when they need help, where can they go?"

"Did you offer her money?"

"Yes," he said, running his hands through his thinning gray hair. "She said she doesn't want money. She only wants to spend time with the children.

            "Mrs. Robinson wrapped her arms under her heavy breasts and gave Deacon Miller the kind of look she reserved for unruly children. "But if she's mentally unstable, she sure shouldn't be around the children. That doesn't make sense, Bob. Get her out of here. Take her someplace else."

            "You can watch her, Mildred. What can she do? She appears harmless, just lost and confused. I didn't smell alcohol on her breath."

            "Oh, all right," she snapped, the noise in the classroom getting louder every second. When Mildred Robinson entered the room, she was mumbling under her breath, "Now I'll never get them to sit still.”

            The first thing she did was clap loudly to bring the class to order. She glanced at the young woman and then looked away. Just let her sit there, she thought, seeing the blank look in her eyes. She wasn't a psychiatrist. She had no idea what to say to a mentally disturbed person, and she resented Deacon Miller's invasion of her routine. "Get in a circle," she ordered the children, "it's story time. Today I'll be reading to you the story of Jonah."

            "Jonah and the whale," a little boy chirped, obviously liking this story, squatting on the floor in the front row.

            The woman was sitting in the back of the room next to Raymond Gonzales. A pair to draw to, Mildred Robinson thought. The boy's head craned to the side at an unnatural angle as he studied the designs in the wallpaper while his palms moved in small circles. Any moment she expected to see the woman do the same: start staring at the wallpaper. She looked dazed and disoriented, and her eyes were swollen as if she had been crying. Mildred couldn't stop herself from gawking at the funny bedroom slippers on her feet, the baseball T-shirt, the wild, bushy red hair. Normal women didn't dress like that in Dallas, particularly when they attended church, entered the house of the Lord.

            "Okay," she said, opening the small biblical storybook and reading, "Jonah was . . ." Soon she was into the story, the children's eyes all on her, the woman forgotten. Mildred had read this story hundreds of times but she never tired of it.

            As Raymond looked at the woman, he experienced a strange sensation. It was as if he and the woman were suddenly wrapped in soft white cotton, as if they were the only people in the room. Just then, a child squealed from the reading circle across the room. The sound was no longer jarring and frightening, but instead became a perfectly pitched note in a beautiful serenade that only Raymond could hear. His breath rushing in and out of his nostrils became an instrument, along with the familiar sound of his heart beating inside his chest. But the rhythm was not the same, and Raymond knew the sound well. His heartbeat was the only sound that never changed, that remained constant and recognizable.

            He held his breath and listened, trying to figure out what it was that was different. Then he heard it. His heart would strike a beat and then instantly, another identical beat would follow, as if someone was walking directly behind him on a cobblestone street, following in his footsteps. Raymond became alarmed, finding the sensation uncomfortable.

            No one could enter his world, he told himself. It wasn't possible. It had never been possible. But Raymond's instinctive urge to retreat vanished as he dived into the vibrant red of the woman's hair, fascinated by the way the strands twisted into shiny loose curls, so airy and light that they seemed to float weightless around her head. As his concentration intensified, his pupils expanded and he saw a montage of brilliant, dancing colors. The woman's head was turned away but he could see her face looking directly at him, feel the green of her eyes wash over him. Somehow he knew. He knew it wasn't her physical face he was seeing, but the visage of her soul. He wanted to drink it, touch it, smell it, preserve it. The image was so pure, so perfect. His lips trembled. His mouth opened and then shut. The beating in his chest was stronger now, and he could no longer hear the secondary heartbeat. He had never felt this way, never seen this way, never heard this way. His joy became a gurgling, pulsating sensation in the pit of his stomach, an enormous humming engine that was pushing him to speak, act, be.

            His eyes jerked to the ceiling, but he didn't see the water spots, or the dirty glass of the light fixture, the graveyard of dead flies trapped inside. He saw magnificent images and enthralling scenes, wanting to stare at them forever, study them, add new images to the existing ones. But his vision suddenly strained and the images became fainter, the colors dull and fading. Something wasn't right, he thought sadly, as a solitary tear escaped and made its way down one side of his cheek. He saw jagged cracks, thinking the images were withering and dying right before his eyes. Heavy strokes had been layered over delicate strokes, trapping microscopic particles of dust and dirt between them and distorting the once flawless images. Many of the colors were now too bright, too harsh, so much so that they burned into his eyes and caused him to look away.

            Near the part in the story that related how Jonah is swallowed by the whale, Mildred Robinson observed the woman on the floor with Raymond. To her surprise, she thought she heard them speaking to one another. Raymond was making no eye contact with the strange woman but his lips were moving, and what appeared to be words were coming out of his mouth. Mildred leaped from her seat, abandoning the story and the children, and immediately crossed the floor to the woman and child. She shoved her eyeglasses tight on her nose, wondering if her eyes had deceived her. She knew Raymond Gonzales was autistic. The only sounds she'd ever heard the boy make were grunts and groans. He didn't speak, he didn't make eye contact, and from all appearances, he didn't hear when people spoke to him.

            "He's talking," she said, as if God had come down and performed a miracle. "I heard him. Wasn't he talking? What did he say?

            "The redheaded woman ignored the teacher, mesmerized by the child. She stretched out on the floor, grabbing a handful of crayons and a sheet of paper. As the stunned teacher watched, she began to draw images on the paper with the crayons. Raymond's head drifted to the left and then to the right, but never did he focus on his new playmate, and no sound now came out of his mouth.

            "Please," the teacher pleaded, "talk to him some more. He said something, didn't he? He's never spoken.”

            Like a child herself, the woman gazed up at the teacher and then dropped her eyes, proceeding to draw more images on the paper, filling them in with bright colors. The teacher's chest fell. She must have been mistaken. The woman was obviously an escapee from a mental institution or deranged in some way, and the child was the same as always.

            She returned to the now unruly and rambunctious crowd of children she had previously abandoned, vowing to have both her eyes and her hearing checked next week.

            With her back turned, Mildred heard the same sounds again and instantly spun around. This time there was no mistake. Not only did she hear a voice that had to be the boy's, he was staring directly into the woman's eyes, only inches from her face. Returning quickly to the two, the teacher knelt down on her hands and knees. What she heard completely amazed her.

"My name is Michelangelo," the boy told the woman in a clear, distinct voice. He snatched the crayons out of her hands and started drawing circles within circles. A few seconds later, he handed the woman a crayon, and she filled in the circles with red, then blue, then green, each time receiving the color in her outstretched hand from the boy, like a surgeon accepting a scalpel. The teacher was awestruck. She didn't speak, too fearful to disrupt the magic that was happening right before her eyes. She'd known other autistic children during her long career as a schoolteacher. She was all too aware of Raymond's handicap and resulting limitations.

"Here," he said to the woman, removing an orange plastic ring shaped like a pumpkin from his little finger.

            The woman acted like this was a common occurrence and promptly removed a ring from her own finger and placed it on Raymond's. Just as casually she slipped on the pumpkin ring and continued coloring. Raymond immediately flashed a smile like no other, a smile that released small bubbles of saliva from his mouth. "I love you," he said through the bubbles.

            "I love you, too," the woman said, briefly letting her eyes drift up to his in exquisite gentleness and then dropping them again to the paper. "But I have to go." While the teacher watched, still kneeling on the floor beside them, the woman stood, dusted off her pants, and walked out of the Sunday school class.

            The teacher's eyes darted from the woman to Raymond. The children were running around in circles on the other side of the room, chasing one another and screaming. "Raymond," she said. "Can you hear me? Do you understand? You spoke. Praise God. You did speak, didn't you?"

            "Yes," he said calmly, staring deep into her eyes.

            "Oh, Raymond!" the teacher exclaimed. "You can talk. You can hear." Few, if any autistics, would look a person directly in the eye. This was a major breakthrough, Mildred decided, a spectacular act of divine intervention. It had to be nothing short of a miracle, particularly as it had occurred in a church, in God's house, in her own Sunday school class.

            She suddenly saw Raymond's hand and the ring. On his little finger was what appeared to be a genuine piece of jewelry: a tiny ruby ring surrounded by diamonds. The teacher's heart fluttered. No matter what had happened, she couldn't let the boy keep something so valuable. She stood and went to look for the woman, carefully slipping the ring off Raymond's finger. "I'll be right back," she told him. "Keep coloring. I'm going to get your parents.

            "The woman was gone. The teacher searched the entire building and she was nowhere to be found. The ring pressed in her hand, she found Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales, the pastor, and several deacons in the church, insisting that they follow her to the classroom and observe the miracle.

            Over the next six months, Raymond made remarkable progress. He spoke: first in disjointed sentences consisting of a few words, then in more sophisticated sentences involving verbs and adjectives. And he drew. Circles became scenes of life: trees, clouds, grass, flowers. From crayons he graduated to pastels, donated by a member of the church. With these, he drew lovely images of pastoral scenes with delicately shaded hues. The scenes were almost surreal and possessed of an unnatural breathtaking beauty. The church, the school, the Gonzaleses, and their friends and family were astounded.

            Having no way to find the woman and return her ring, everyone decided it belonged to Raymond. She had given it to Raymond; it had to remain with him. In the beginning there was some discussion that the ring should be sold, the money used for Raymond's education and future treatment. Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales refused. Like a visit from the Virgin Mary, they began to think of the strange woman as a messenger from God, the ring physical proof of the existence of the divine.

            The church and its members, even Mildred Robinson, although overjoyed at Raymond's progress and recovery, quickly delegated the entire incident to the unknown and uncharted nature of autism itself. Raymond had simply snapped out of it.

            He wore the ring every day. He went to school in it, bathed in it, slept with it on his finger. To make certain that he didn't lose it, the family wrapped the back with masking tape so it fit snugly. Like a person possessed, Raymond drew, colored, and painted almost incessantly.

            At the end of two years, he was reading and writing almost at his grade level. Placed in the public school, his progress was remarkable. But his progress in speech and language, as well as subjects such as mathematics, was minor compared to his rapid growth as an artist.

            Raymond was acclaimed, even if on a small basis. Many of his fantastical images hung on the school walls and in various classrooms, framed and covered with glass, his distinctive scrawl at the bottom.

            At age eighteen, Raymond was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Willard Art Institute. The ruby-and-diamond ring had been enlarged to fit his growing fingers, and Raymond still never removed it. In the beginning he claimed he didn't remember the woman at all, nor the orange pumpkin ring he had given her. But a few years later her image began to appear in his paintings.

            Raymond was no longer painting landscapes, he was painting human beings. And the human being he painted again and again was the redheaded woman wearing the California Angels T-shirt.