by John Saul
“Good heavens! I thought you would have forgotten about that years ago. You were only two.”
“Forget it?” Angel echoed. “I’ll never forget it—I thought I was going to burn up!”
“Well, there you are, then,” Myra told her. “That’s probably where the dream came from—maybe moving into our own house made your subconscious decide to start clearing out a bunch of old memories. And if lighting your head on fire scared you as much as it scared me, I’m amazed you haven’t had nightmares about it for years.” She moved the oatmeal off the stove and started scooping it into the three bowls Angel had rinsed and dried. “But if it scared you that much, how come you never told me? We could have talked about it.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was a baby.”
Myra laughed out loud. “But you were a baby! And I don’t know why I didn’t understand that you must have been even more scared than I was.” Abandoning the oatmeal, she put her arms around Angel. “I’m sorry, honey. Really I am.”
“Come on, Mom,” Angel groaned, pulling away from the embrace. “I hardly even remember it. Maybe I don’t—maybe I only remember Daddy talking about it on every birthday I’ve ever had, and I just feel like I remember.”
“If you didn’t really remember, I don’t think you would have had that nightmare. And if you thought you smelled smoke, why didn’t you wake me up? Or wake your father up?”
At the mention of her father, the memory of him walking in on her when she’d been changing her clothes yesterday rose in her mind.
Walking in on her and looking at her and—
The image of her father framed in the doorway of her room was abruptly replaced by the reality of his figure framed in the kitchen door.
“Wake me up?” he asked. “I’m awake—what’s going on?”
“It’s Angel,” Myra explained. “She had a nightmare last night.”
“About me?” Marty Sullivan asked, his eyes fixing on Angel with an intensity that made her pull the bathrobe more tightly around her. “Why would she have a nightmare about me?” he asked, speaking to his wife, but his eyes remaining fastened on Angel.
“It wasn’t about you,” Myra said, barely glancing at her husband as she put the dishes of oatmeal on the table. “She had a nightmare about a fire, and when she woke up, she thought she still smelled smoke.”
“In the house?”
“Well, of course in the house,” Myra replied. “She wasn’t sleeping in the backyard, was she?” She glanced at her watch, then shifted her gaze to her husband and daughter. “You’ve got half an hour before we have to leave for church.”
“Today?” Marty groaned. “You gotta be kiddin’ me! We got all this stuff to unpack, and there’s a game on, and I haven’t even got the TV hooked up yet. How about you go, and me and Angel’ll stay here and take care of some of this mess?”
Feeling the same strange knot in her stomach that she’d felt a moment ago, Angel shook her head. “I—I want to go to church,” she said. “And I better go up and get dressed.” She started toward the door and the stairwell beyond, but her father blocked her way.
“Hey,” he said. “Doesn’t daddy still get a kiss from his little Angel?”
Angel froze, but rather than run the risk of getting into a fight with him, she gave her father a quick peck on the cheek.
“I’ve just got to take a shower and get dressed, Mom,” she said as she slipped through the door and started up the stairs. “I’ll be as fast as I can.”
“All right,” her mother called back. “But be quick—if you take too long, I’ll have to leave you here.”
Hurrying upstairs, Angel turned on the hot water in the combination shower and bathtub, took off her bathrobe and hung it on the hook on the door, and started to step into the tub.
But before she did, she locked the bathroom door.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Myra asked as she and Angel left the house twenty minutes later.
“I—I guess,” Angel stammered.
The note of uncertainty in her daughter’s voice made Myra turn to look at her. “Angel, it was only a nightmare. Nothing to worry about.”
What about Daddy? Angel thought. Should I worry about him?
“Is there something else?” Myra asked. “Did something happen that you haven’t told me about?”
Maybe I should tell her, Angel thought. Maybe— A flicker of movement distracted her, and she turned to see a cat coming out of the woods.
A black cat.
A black cat with a single blaze of white in the exact center of its chest.
“Houdini?” Angel blurted as the cat ran across the patch of lawn surrounding the house. It came right to Angel and began rubbing up against her legs.
Myra looked disapprovingly down at the cat. “Houdini?” she repeated. “How on earth would you know its name?”
“I don’t,” Angel said, leaning down to scratch the cat’s ears, then picking it up. “It’s just what I call him.” She nuzzled the cat’s neck. “Where’d you go?” she whispered into its ear. “How’d you just disappear like that?”
“What do you mean, it’s what you call him? Where did you even see him before?”
“He was in my closet,” Angel replied. “Remember when I went up to change my clothes yesterday? He was up there, meowing to get out of the closet.”
“And how did he get in the closet?” Myra asked.
Angel shrugged. “I don’t know—that’s why I call him Houdini. He came out of the closet, and then, when it started thundering again, he disappeared.”
“Cats don’t just disappear,” Myra told her.
“Houdini did. Just like that magician I read about—the one who got out of jail cells and locked trunks and everything.” She scratched the cat again. “Can I keep him?” she asked. “I mean, he doesn’t have a collar or anything, and he likes me.”
“No, you can’t keep him,” Myra said. “Your father’s allergic to cats.”
Angel remembered, then, how Houdini had hissed yesterday, just before her father walked in on her. Again, Angel wondered if she should tell her mother, but the words died in her throat long before they reached her lips. What was she supposed to say? That her father had walked in on her while she was changing her clothes? That he’d looked at her funny?
And even if she told her mother, what would happen? If her mom told her dad, then he’d get mad at her, and she’d seen him mad enough times that she didn’t want that to happen.
“Houdini could live in my room,” she finally said. “Then Dad would never even have to see him.”
“Cats don’t stay in one room,” Myra told her. “Now put it down and forget about it. The longer you hold it and pet it, the more you’ll want to keep it.”
Reluctantly, Angel put the cat back on the ground. As if understanding exactly what had happened, the cat sat down, curled its tail around its feet, and glared up Myra.
“I don’t like you much either,” Myra said, reading the cat’s expression as clearly as if it had spoken out loud. “Shoo!”
The cat ignored her, and began licking its forepaw.
They walked on into the village in silence, but Angel glanced back several times when she thought her mother wasn’t looking.
The cat was behind them, keeping pace.
They were near the church when Myra felt a sudden chill in the air. As she buttoned the collar of her thin wool coat, she looked up at the sky, where fast-scudding clouds were quickly graying the crisp blue the sky had been only a moment earlier. Beside her, Angel seemed oblivious to the sudden cold, and when Myra told her to button up her jacket, her daughter ignored her. They turned the corner, and Myra found herself facing the small white clapboard structure that was the only Catholic church in Roundtree and stopped short, feeling a twinge of something almost like anger.
The tiny Church of the Holy Mother stood kitty-corner from the far larger Congregational church that dominated the east side of the Roundtree common. It didn’t seem
right to Myra that a church named for the Blessed Virgin who had actually given birth to the Lord Jesus—who was the true Mother of God, for heaven’s sake—should be completely overshadowed by a temple built by heathen apostates whom Myra knew deep in her heart were condemned to spend eternity in the fires of Hell for having turned their back on the one true Church.
Her anger gave way to sadness as she gazed at the little church, its white paint peeling from the graying clapboard, the shutters at its windows no longer quite straight, the small stained-glass windows themselves coated with grime. The church seemed to huddle beneath the heavy gray sky as if it weren’t certain how much longer it could continue even to stand. And then, as the clouds suddenly parted to let the sun shine through, Myra gasped as the stark silhouette of a cross slashed across the church’s front doors like some mighty sword cleaving the very foundation of her faith. She crossed herself and began a prayer for salvation, and when a voice murmured at her side, she didn’t hear it for a moment. Then, peripherally, she saw the black material of a priest’s cassock, and looked up to see a gentle face with twinkling eyes that transported her back to the day when she was only eight years old . . .
She’d gone to visit her grandfather, who lay dying in the hospital. She’d been terrified, but her grandfather, even in the last hours of his life, saw her fear and did his best to reassure her. “It’s all right, lassie,” he’d told her, smiling at her as if they were about to be off on some great adventure together. “Soon I’ll be returnin’ to the blessed Isle.”
“Can’t I go with you?” Myra had asked.
Her grandfather shook his head. “This is a trip I have to take by meself,” he’d said. “But not to worry,” he added, his eyes twinkling brightly. “I’ll still be lookin’ after you.”
A few seconds later, his eyes had closed, and until this moment Myra had never seen such a twinkle again.
“I think they did it on purpose,” she heard the priest saying now, a smile playing around the corners of his lips.
“Did what?” Myra asked, coming out of her reverie.
“That,” the priest said, his smile broadening, his right hand sweeping upward. “Now you can’t tell me that’s a coincidence.” He was pointing up to the steeple that towered above the Congregational church across the street. Unlike the humble wood-frame building that was the Church of the Holy Mother, Roundtree First Congregational was built of huge blocks of granite hewn from a quarry a mile from the center of town. Its style was Gothic, with a steep slate roof from which the steeple soared another fifty feet toward the sky.
The priest was pointing at the cross that surmounted the steeple. “I can’t prove it,” he said, “but I suspect an engineer spent weeks figuring out exactly where that steeple had to be, and exactly how high, in order for the shadow of their cross to fall across our door. Now of course,” he went on, “it only happens a couple of times a year, you understand, so I suppose it could be only the coincidence they claim it is. But if you ask me, it is just another way for those Protestants to try to stick it to us!”
“Father!” Myra breathed, shocked by the priest’s words. Her eyes flicked toward Angel, who didn’t seem as shocked by what the priest had said as she was.
“It’s a joke, my child,” the priest quickly assured her, his smile fading as he saw the look on Myra’s face. “I’m sure they meant no harm at all.” He held out his hand. “I’m Father Michael Mulroney, but everyone calls me Father Mike,” he offered.
Myra took his hand for only the briefest of moments, introducing herself and Angel as she did so. “We just moved here from Eastbury.”
Father Mike nodded. “Ah, the very ones Father Raphaello wrote me about,” he said. “It will be wonderful to have you as part of our parish. Not as many of us as there are in Eastbury, I’m afraid.” The mischievous twinkle came back into his eyes. “Maybe we just didn’t get here in time.” He nodded toward the huge stone edifice across the street. “If we’d come in 1632, the way they did, maybe we’d have a building like that too.” Now he sighed heavily. “Not that we could fill it, even if we did. These days . . .” He let his voice trail off, but Myra knew exactly what he meant. The last few years, donations even to the church in Eastbury—where there hadn’t been even a breath of scandal—had dropped so low that she’d been the last person Father Raphaello had been able to pay to take care of the rectory.
“Well, now you’ve got us, and I have a husband too, so that’s three,” Myra said.
“And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it,” Father Mike told her. Then his voice and expression took on a note of regret. “But I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to give you the work you had with Father Raphaello. We’re just too—well, I’m sure you know as well as I do what the last few years have been like.” Taking Myra’s arm, he led her up the steps toward the front door of the church, with Angel following. “And where might you be living?”
“On Black Creek Road,” Myra told him. “It’s a small house, and it needs some work, but I understand it’s one of the oldest houses in town.”
The priest’s eyes clouded. “The house at the Crossing?” he asked. “Where all those terrible—” He stopped abruptly, then said, “Oh, dear—what am I saying? I—”
“It’s all right,” Myra said stiffly. “We know what happened in the house.”
More people were coming up the steps now, and Father Mike began introducing Myra and Angel, then excused himself to go prepare for the mass.
Just before she followed her mother into the church, Angel looked around for Houdini one more time.
The cat was sitting across the street, its tail neatly curled around its feet.
An hour later, as they were leaving the church and saying good-bye, Father Mike took Myra’s hand in both of his. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “And it occurs to me that maybe I can find some work for you. Not in the rectory, but here in the church itself.”
“But you said—” Myra began.
“I know what I said,” the priest cut in. “But I’ll find the money someway.” His eyes shifted over to Angel, then returned to Myra. “It’s a good place to be,” he said. “The church can shelter you from many, many things. So I’ll just find the money, and that’s all we’ll say about that.”
A few minutes later they started the walk home, Father Mike’s words echoing in Myra’s thoughts.
The church can shelter you from many, many things.
What had he meant by that?
Did he think there was something she needed sheltering from? Maybe she should have told him that the Holy Mother had been looking after her for years already, coming to her in visions when her problems were the worst.
And why had he looked at Angel just before he said those words?
The questions so completely occupied her that Myra Sullivan never noticed the black cat following them home.
Chapter 12
NGEL SULLIVAN TURNED THE CORNER ONTO PROSPECT Street and saw the old brick building that had once been all of Roundtree High School and now served as the main building. It sat in the middle of a large lawn studded with huge pines that looked even older than the building itself. Behind it were the newer buildings, scattered over the four full blocks the school now occupied, but none of them had the warm and friendly look of the old original building. White shutters flanked its windows, tall columns rose a full three floors to support the roof in front, and the roof itself was ornately peaked and dormered. There was even a widow’s walk high on the main peak, though Roundtree was nowhere near the coast, so there would have been no captains’ wives waiting for their husbands to return from the sea.
Angel paused across the street from the school, just to enjoy the warm feeling running through her. It was a completely different feeling than the one that had gripped her in Eastbury every morning, and she was certain it wasn’t just because the school in Roundtree was so much prettier than the drab block of grime-covered bricks that was Eastbury High. No, this was something more.
This was a whole new beginning, in a town where no one knew her except for her cousin.
Where no one had ever heard of Mangey-Angey, or Daddy’s little Angel, or any of the other things she’d been called ever since kindergarten.
As she started across the street, she found herself smiling, wondering who Nicole Adams would start in on now that she was gone. But she banished the thought as it came into her head—nobody should be treated the way Nicole and everyone else had treated her.
But that was all behind her now, and when she got up that morning to see a bright and sunny sky, Angel wished she had clothes just as bright as the morning. But there was nothing in her dresser or closet, and in the end she’d dressed in her usual drab sweatpants and a blouse with a bulky sweater over it. Still, she felt different, and that was what counted.
At her feet, Houdini rubbed up against her leg. Just as he had yesterday when she and her mother had gone to church, the cat had appeared this morning—seemingly out of nowhere—and walked along with Angel all the way to school. The only difference was that with her mother not there to shoo him away, the cat had never been more than a foot from her. Now, across the street from the school, Angel bent down to scratch his ears. “See you later.”
Crossing the street and starting up the steps toward the front door, she smiled at two girls who were talking to a wavy-haired boy with eyes that were the same blue as the clear autumn sky.
Neither of the girls nodded back, and the boy didn’t seem to notice her.
They were busy talking, Angel told herself. They probably didn’t even see her.
She found the principal’s office, got registered, and was given her class schedule and a locker assignment. “Here’s your combination,” the secretary told her, handing her a slip of paper with four numbers written on it and instructions on how many times to turn the lock in each direction. Angel gazed glumly at the combination—she’d just barely learned the one in Eastbury, and now she had to learn a brand new one.
