Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

Or was it because I was one of them, a dark prince who could only emerge from nothingness when the time came to parade down the halls of hate? Had they recognized me as one of their own? Perhaps the devil did not wait until death to claim his followers. Maybe prison was just an anteroom to Hell, a holding pen where few escaped and where many waited, weighing their mortality and their inevitable demise against the far more terrifying prospect of anagogic immortality?

  At last we passed through a final guard point and into the interview area, a maximum-security room rimmed with picture windows—though we were in the very heart of the prison, with only unspeakable views to speak of. Guards were stationed outside the room, along each wall, looking in. Bobby Daniels, once Alissa Hayes’s boyfriend, and later labeled her murderer, waited for Maggie inside the room. His hands were spread wide against the metal tabletop, his body unnaturally immobile. He’d gained a lot of muscle over the last three years. Indeed, he had bulked up massively and his shoulders strained against his prison jump-suit. His face had grown larger, too, somehow, all traces of the boy he had been banished beneath an emotionless veneer. Only his sandy hair, still worn short, and his fussy gold-rimmed glasses seemed to belong to the same man I had sent away.

  The guards had not manacled him hand and foot, though I thought it was protocol. And that told me Bobby Daniels was a model prisoner, that he had given no one grief since entering here over three years before.

  He looked up as Maggie entered the room, but his blank face did not so much as twitch. He had hardened beyond comprehension, his humanity replaced by a granitelike facade that had one purpose and one purpose only: to endure.

  I tried to penetrate his thoughts, as I could do with others, to uncover his essential life moment. But his mind was strong, and while I could sense a light within it, he had surrounded his memories with layers of impenetrable blankness. I concentrated harder until an image of a young woman came to mind. She was dressed in jeans, a waterproof jacket, and hiking boots, her body framed by sunshine that obscured her surroundings. I could hear the sounds of rushing water. I concentrated harder still until a clearer image emerged: the woman was standing on top of a boulder before a waterfall, her head thrown back as she stared up at the torrents that poured forth behind her. Then she turned her head and looked back over her shoulder, her smile joyous and inviting.

  It was Alissa, Alissa gloriously alive, and with Bobby still, if only in the core of his deepest memories.

  She had kept him alive in here.

  I circled the room, unseen and free to wander, running my hands over the walls, making faces at the watching guards through the glass, sniffing the corners like a dog, searching for traces of what had gone before. But Bobby’s presence had banished all evidence of prior human occupation. He carried a curious stillness about him, and while he gave off no light, he also gave off no darkness. It was as if he had been granted a poor man’s state of grace, a form of spiritual suspended animation. He was neither here nor there. But he was, it felt, somehow inured against the darkness that flowed around him, by some sort of neutral, protective strength. Granted by what? His innocence? God? The universe? Was there really a source of goodness out there somewhere, something with the power to protect a man like Bobby Daniels, a lamb sent to slaughter in a den of hungry wolves?

  Maggie showed him her badge. His eyes flickered. “I thought you were my new lawyer,” he said in a voice creaky from disuse. “I filed another appeal.”

  “On grounds of inadequate representation?” Maggie guessed.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking her up and down as she arranged herself across the table from him. He was still human : I felt his interest in her form, his silent acknowledgment that she was a woman and that it had been a long time since he’d been in the presence of one. But it was a detached, almost clinical interest. He was too self-contained to allow such base emotions their freedom.

  “You read my file?” he asked her.

  Maggie nodded. “You have grounds. There were a lot of things your lawyer could have done and didn’t.”

  He ignored her comment, asking instead, “Why are you here?”

  Maggie stared, trying to gauge him. I could feel her failing to penetrate the wall he had raised around him. I felt her explore sympathy, then falter and change course, opting for directness instead.

  “I’m here because there’s been another murder and I’m certain whoever did it also killed Alissa Hayes,” she said. “I’m here because I think you’re innocent and I have enough proof to free you almost immediately. I’m here to tell you that I will do everything I can to see that your new lawyer gets this information this afternoon.”

  He stared at her, mouth agape. It was as if he were a stone wall transmuting into clay and cracking into ten million pieces before my eyes. His resolute exterior crumbled, his shoulders slumped, his muscles trembled—then he covered his face with his hands and he wept.

  He cried without explanation and without apology. He cried from the bottom of his soul, from the core of his heart, with all of his body and all of his might. He cried without stopping for over five minutes, washing away three years of hatred, of fear, of loneliness, of overwhelming despair.

  Maggie waited, holding the guards off with a hand signal. The guards looked on with a mixture of astonishment and awe, each wondering what Maggie could have said so quickly to break a man they believed to be immutable.

  Maggie did not try to stop him from crying. She waited, her compassion a peculiar, practical sort I had never experienced before. She was making a list, I realized, while Bobby Daniels cleansed himself of the past, she was making a list of all the things she needed to do to see that the man before her was freed. Freed before something terrible could happen to him first in that unexplained and all-too-heartless way of fate. She did not want to lose him now to some murderous impulse by a jealous inmate, or let him be blackmailed into committing crimes on the outside by lifers who knew he had family and how to get to them. She was covering every eventuality and cataloging what it would take to get Bobby Daniels back safely to those who loved him.

  By the time Bobby Daniels had used up his reservoir of tears, she was ready. Maggie touched his hands lightly and he withdrew from her touch. Then, almost apologetically, he slid his hands back across the table toward her, as if offering her his trust, as rusty as it was, as hard as it was for him to feel anything again.

  “I’m going to ask them to put you into solitary confinement until you are released,” she said quietly. “Don’t take it as punishment. You understand why? You should avoid all contact with other prisoners from this moment on.”

  He nodded, still shaking from the shock, I thought, until I realized that he was not so much shaking as realigning his entire sense of being. Hard emotions close to the surface receded and others, long buried, rose to take their place: hope, gratitude, relief, and more. He became a new man before my eyes and I realized, with awe, that Maggie had been the instrument of his resurrection.

  “Can you answer a few questions for me?” she asked him softly. “Things that should have been asked of you the first time around?”

  By me, I thought, questions that should have been asked by me. Maggie was cleaning up after my failures.

  “Of course.” Bobby Daniels sat up straighter. “Ask me anything.”

  “How did you meet Alissa?”

  “At her house. Her father was my faculty advisor and I went over one night to drop off an application to grad school I wanted him to look over. She was there. Her father wasn’t. He was still on his way home from teaching a late class, so she and I got to talking while I waited. We really hit it off. She was different. I liked her right away.”

  “Different how?” Maggie asked him.

  “Alissa was very straightforward, yet delicate, too. She was unadorned and honest. Not at all like the other girls I went to college with. And maybe a little shy. I had to ask her three times before she’d go out with me and, even then, we had to keep it secret from her parents.
She said they’d disapprove if they found out, even though she was nineteen and in her second year of college.”

  “She was still living at home?” Maggie asked, eliminating a dorm as a possible link between Alissa and the new victim, Vicky Meeks.

  Daniels nodded. “Her father’s a big-deal professor and they live in this huge house right by campus. I’d have lived at home, too, if I could have slept in an extra hour each day and had someone to cook and clean for me.”

  “Her mother did that for her?”

  “Her stepmother. Her mother died when she was pretty young, like eleven or twelve. Her little sister was even younger, just a baby.”

  “You ever share any classes with Alissa?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did she make jewelry?” Maggie asked.

  “Jewelry?” Daniels sounded surprised. “She didn’t wear jewelry, much less make it.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “Right now, we’re comparing her class schedule with the new victim’s schedule to see if there’s any overlap. You can help.”

  “Overlap?” Bobby hesitated. “Is the . . . was the girl you just found the same age as Alissa when she died?”

  “Just about,” Maggie told him.

  “Then any overlap wouldn’t be with friends or classmates, right? I mean, Alissa was killed four years ago. Any overlap would have to be—”

  “People who worked at the college,” Maggie finished for him. “Or maybe someone who lives or works near the college. Can you help?”

  Bobby was silent, thinking back to what must have seemed like a lifetime ago to him by now.

  “Did Alissa ever monitor any classes not on her official schedule?” Maggie prompted him. “Or hang out on campus somewhere a lot, belong to any clubs we might not know about, maybe had a favorite coffee shop?”

  Daniels shook his head. “She wasn’t a joiner. It was really just . . . me and her. We had this private world when we were together and it was enough for both of us.” He was silent, gathering his strength. “When I lost her, our world was gone. I went to this dark and terrible place instead. And then it felt like I never got out of it once I ended up in here.” His voice had fallen to a whisper and his eyes dropped to his hands. They were shaking.

  Maggie barely touched his arm, afraid to intrude on his so carefully protected space. “You won’t have to be here much longer,” she promised.

  He put his head back down on the table and began to cry again, hiding his face, afraid of the hope that flooded through him.

  “Do you want me to call your parents?” she asked quietly.

  He nodded. “They moved to Kansas City three years ago,” he mumbled. “To get away from the phone calls and stuff. People can be . . . very cruel.”

  “I’ll find them. Is your new lawyer on record yet?”

  “Yes. Her last name is Esposito. I can’t think of her first name right now.”

  “I’ll see she gets the information this afternoon,” Maggie promised.

  He cracked again, overwhelmed by emotions. He put his head down and Maggie patted the top of his head gently.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “You made it through. It’s over now. I promise you, it’s over.”

  He could not answer her, or thank her, though I don’t think Maggie needed that anyway. She patted him on the shoulder and rose to go, gesturing to one of the guards to let her out of the room.

  “What the hell did you say to him?” a guard asked. “Did his folks pass on?”

  Maggie shook her head. “No, but can you keep him here for another hour? I want to talk to the warden. He’ll see me. He’s an old friend of my father’s.”

  The guard stared at her, then his hand touched the brim of his hat. “Sure. We can keep him here awhile. Why?”

  Maggie did not answer him; who knew what might happen, how Bobby Daniels’s good fortune might spread through the prison population, leaving him prey to the spiritual vultures, the blackened souls whose only pleasure left was to rob all others of happiness? “Can you take me to the warden’s office now?” she asked instead. “It’s important.”

  The guard conferred with his coworkers, then led her back down the same hallway we had taken to the interview room. Curiously, as we passed between the cells of imprisoned men, most remained silent this time. They shrank back from Maggie’s passing as if aware that she, somehow, wielded a power they could neither comprehend nor ever hope to triumph over.

  She was just human, I knew that, though she gave off more light than most. But to me, at that moment, she was once again an avenging angel, a seraph of such immense might that at any moment great argent wings might spring forth from her shoulder blades, unfolding in a flash of light so intense that the very walls of the prison would crack asunder, banishing the dark to the darkness and sending the righteous upward on beams of glory.

  An angel. My angel.

  The men who lived in this bleak world also sensed this power in her. They cowered in the corners of their cells, ashamed of themselves with rare self-awareness, afraid of something they did not understand. Those who saw me behind her cast me glances of fear before their eyes slid to gaze upon Maggie, then looked away again.

  I knew then, beyond all certainty, that though there was evil in the world, and far, far too much of it, it did not have the power of the light we held within ourselves. Which meant that I had a chance, that I had a future—and that Maggie had given more than one man hope that day.

  Chapter 13

  I could not shake what I had felt within the prison—to realize that in each of us there incubated both a portal to Hell and a window to Heaven frightened me. For I now suspected that my death had saved me from being claimed by evil, inch by inch, excuse by excuse, one miserable day after another.

  I left Maggie and returned to my family, drawn to them by a need I did not quite understand. Though I had been steadily disengaging myself from them, and though I had seen Connie’s future and not begrudged her new life, I found that I now needed to know, with absolute certainty, that my sons did not harbor some dark spot deep within them that might one day bloom into the malignant core I had sensed deep inside many of the inmates I’d passed.

  I was beginning to fear that we were all were born with that potential darkness but that, thankfully, it withered and died in the light of the love we received from others. I thought, too, that perhaps a speck of that darkness had survived inside me, had been fed by bitterness, alcohol, and self-loathing until it had gained hold in my final decade, feeding itself on my anger and disappointments, growing ever larger until the day, mercifully, that I died.

  Had I loved my boys enough to vanquish that nascent spitefulness forever? No, I had not. But maybe Connie had.

  I waited just inside the kitchen, listening to the sounds of conversation and laughter in the dining room next door, admiring the feeling of safety that Connie’s kitchen exuded. Dinner was almost over and their talk was relaxed and meandering, fueled by the presence of the man I had seen with Connie earlier. He asked my boys simple questions, then gave them room to answer, not interrupting, or giving advice, simply listening and asking more questions when they were done. Under this gentle probing, my boys opened up and I learned more about them than I had ever known when I was alive. Sean did well in math, not so well in vocabulary, and wanted to be a shortstop rather than an outfielder. Michael was going to be in the school play, in a leading role yet, and was not the least bit embarrassed by it.

  I felt a deep gratitude toward this man who had stepped forward to love my sons and a relief that they could turn to him for guidance.

  Dinner over, the boys jostled through the kitchen door together, all elbows and shoving, each trying to be the first to claim dessert. Sean, my youngest, won the battle, his smaller size giving him the advantage as he ducked around a corner while holding his larger brother at bay. He reached the refrigerator first and used the door of it to block Michael from gaining access. The largest bowl of pudding firmly in one hand and a can
of whipped cream in the other, he cast his brother a triumphant smirk—and I was filled with a sudden, overwhelming love for these still unformed young men. They were so innocent in their vendettas. I prayed the world would be kind to them both.

  “So, are you banging that Courtney chick yet?” Sean asked Michael, failing miserably in his attempt to sound older.

  “Shut up,” Michael said immediately, pushing his brother aside as he reached for his share of dessert. “Say something like that about her again and I’ll shove your face in the toilet.”

  Sean froze, surprised by his brother’s fury. Michael looked just as shocked.

  “Sorry, man,” Sean mumbled.

  And then I think it hit us all simultaneously—Michael truly liked the girl Sean was teasing him about. I could tell he was both confused and pleased at this realization, and that Sean was envious, but respectful, of his brother.

  As for me, I felt elation: my oldest son was approaching love, and approaching it willingly. I would not need to worry about him. Nor about my youngest, either. He loved his brother and I saw it plainly then. That I had shared in this moment elated me. I was connected to my sons in a way I had never achieved while alive. And yet, even as I felt the love that bound us, I knew I had to let them go. They were going to be all right. It was time to let them all go.

  “What did I miss? Besides the whipped cream?” Connie’s voice cut through the silence and the boys looked up, faces wreathed in smiles. She saw their delight. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  They were silent.

  “Okay,” she said slowly, “perhaps you can answer this: would either one of you like to go out to a movie? Cal says it’s on him.”

  They stared at one another, unsure of how to handle this sudden turn of events: a movie, on a school night, in the middle of winter?

  “With popcorn and Cokes?” asked Sean suspiciously.

  “And Raisinets?” his brother added. Michael always pushed his luck.

  “Why not?” Connie said. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”