The Third Angel

by Alice Hoffman

  They packed lightly, only one suitcase for the two of them, and they took the train at King's Cross Station. Lucy was relieved that her father didn't expect her to talk anymore. Once, he took her hand and she felt like crying, but she stopped herself. She wanted to make certain she didn't start crying again; once she started doing that there'd be no hope for her whatsoever.

  There were smokestacks and the train windows became sooty, but once they were beyond the city the landscape was beautiful. Lucy looked outside and felt as though she could drown in all the gold and green and purple. She hadn't expected such a wild landscape. She fell in love with the colors, the yellow fields, the green alfalfa. She liked the rhythm of the wheels on the track reverberating inside her head. They blocked out what she was thinking, terrible thoughts she didn't guess anyone in the world had, except for Teddy Healy. He might want to block things out as well.

  There weren't many people on the train, but in the last row there was a boy who was writing like mad. He hadn't looked out the window once. He had a large book on his knees.

  “Looks like a reader,” Ben Green said. “Just your type.”

  But Lucy's father had no idea what or who her type might be. Lucy gazed out the window. In time, she closed her eyes and fell asleep. In her dream she was on the train with a very large rabbit that was seated across from her. She expected the rabbit to say something, but it was silent. She thought there might be tears in its eyes.

  The train shifted and Lucy woke up. Her father had gone to the dining car to have a drink. Lucy raised her eyes and saw that the boy in the rear of the car was looking at her. He waved, so Lucy waved back. It was only to be polite. Then the boy signaled her over. When she tried to ignore him, he waved again so Lucy got up and walked down the aisle, holding on to the backs of the seats. She was curious, after all. She still felt dreamy. She might as well have been a million miles from home.

  “Looks like we're the only two interesting people on the train. I saw you reading the Alice books. My favorites.”

  Lucy sat across from the boy. He was working on something called “Anthology,” which had a coat of arms on the cover—it was a notebook filled with pen and watercolor and colored pencil.

  “It's a project for school. I'm illustrating my favorite poems. Stuff like Robin Hood. Alice being the most favorite.” He looked up. “You don't talk? Do you speak English? Are you deaf and dumb?”

  “No,” Lucy said. She felt tricked; he'd gotten her to talk. She hadn't done so for days. “Not deaf at any rate.”

  The boy laughed. “Ah. You're an American. So I was right. You don't speak English. You speak American.” He was working on the coat of arms.

  “Are you royalty?” Lucy asked.

  “No. Not one bit. I'm a writer. And an artist. And a musician. I'm everything. And you?”

  “A reader.”

  No one would ever have to know she'd spoken a few sentences to him. She could stop talking again any time she wanted.

  “I'm John,” the boy said.

  “Lucy.”

  “I'm from Liverpool. I was just in London for a visit. I usually go to Scotland in the summer to visit my aunt, but I'm going up for a couple of days now. My mother's left.”

  “Mine's dead. And I saw two people die in London.”

  John didn't seem the least surprised. “Blood and guts?”

  Lucy nodded. “It was over love.”

  “It's always over love,” John said.

  They both thought about that.

  Ben Green came back from the dining car and waved.

  “My father,” Lucy said.

  John waved hello. “Reader?” he asked.

  “Major reader.” Lucy bowed her head so her father wouldn't see that she was talking. “I wish I believed in something,” she said.

  “How about reincarnation? You'd come back again and again. You'd be a moth and a dog and a soldier.”

  “What if I came back as a pig or an ant or a walrus?”

  They both laughed now.

  John showed her his drawing illustrating Alice. It was the walrus and the carpenter. “The walrus always has the carpenter,” he said. “The pig's got his sty. The ant's got ten thousand other ants that think exactly the same thoughts he does.”

  They looked out at the fields.

  “A dog wouldn't be bad,” John ventured.

  “I'd better go,” Lucy said. Talking so much probably wasn't a good idea. Her chest felt weird.

  “Good-bye, Lucy from America. Keep reading.”

  “Good-bye, John. Keep doing everything.”

  Lucy went back to her seat. Her father had brought her a sandwich and an apple.

  “Did you have a nice talk?” Ben asked.

  With her hair cut short, Lucy looked so much like the woman she would grow up to be it was startling. Now that she was out of bed and stronger, she didn't seem like a little girl. Ben had the feeling they were starting from scratch, as though everything were new, even the words they used.

  “Maybe I shouldn't be questioning you,” he said. “You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to, Lucy.”

  After talking with John, it had gotten a bit easier for Lucy to speak. “Thank you for taking this trip with me,” she said to her father. “It's beautiful here.”

  “It is beautiful here,” Ben said, relieved to be granted a single sentence, let alone two. For the first time in years and years he wasn't in a rush. He wasn't thinking about Nixon or the New York Times or Charlotte's phone calls that he hadn't returned. He was actually thinking of the day Lucy was born. The truth was, he hadn't wanted children. He'd been irritated with Leah for talking him into it. He wanted their life together to go on and on as it had been, and then there she was, pregnant, and he was annoyed. All through the pregnancy he'd worried he'd be a terrible father. Leah had insisted that once he saw the baby everything would be different. But when he saw her she just seemed like a wrinkled little alien who took up Leah's attention. He didn't feel anything at all until the day they took Lucy home. A car had cut them off as they were pulling out of the hospital parking lot and Leah had been propelled forward, the baby in her arms. For a moment Ben had been utterly panicked. What if I lost them? he had thought. How could I ever survive?

  When they got to Edinburgh it was dinnertime. Lucy saw the boy from the train meeting his aunt; they waved at each other. She thought that some people were like stories rather than whole books—at least the ones you never saw again. With people like that, you never knew what the real ending was.

  Lucy and her father took a cab to Hotel Andrews, where they had adjoining rooms. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Jones who looked like she must be someone's perfect grandmother. There were two photographs, one of a boy, the other of a girl about Lucy's age, hung above the mantel near the registration desk, but the photos looked old, from another place and time. Lucy thanked Mrs. Jones when the landlady gave her a peppermint candy, but she didn't ask about the children.

  Lucy and her father went out to dinner; they wanted to get the lay of the land. They walked past the castle, which was so amazing that Lucy had to stop and stare. She wondered if she was crazy or if anyone else had ever seen something like the apparition she had seen at the hotel. Maybe because the castle was so old people were trapped inside forevermore; maybe they'd turned into the sort of thing Lucy had come across in the hall. Lucy hadn't told the whole truth to that boy on the train. She did believe in one thing, something so vast and deep she couldn't bring herself to tell John, even though it was probably safe to confide in someone she would never see again.

  She believed that people could lose themselves.

  The sky in Scotland was inky and beautiful and the air smelled different. Maybe this is what that doctor who took the rabbit home was talking about, the blank space of the universe, so endless that people and their petty concerns didn't matter. They stopped in a pub so Lucy's father could have a drink. Lucy had a ginger ale and her father had a glass of port. They ordered cheese
and pickles and a plate of haddock and potatoes.

  “I think this thing with Charlotte isn't going to work out,” Ben Green said while they were having their dinner. “I'm sorry I put you through that.”

  Lucy hadn't told her father that she was the reason two people had died. She never intended to tell him. He had no idea that Charlotte had called Teddy Healy because Lucy dropped the letter. He would never know that Lucy heard Michael Macklin's cry all the time, in the back of everything. She couldn't get rid of it for a second.

  “If I'm being asked my opinion, I prefer Rebecca,” Lucy told her father.

  Ben laughed. “Me, too.”

  They remained in Edinburgh for four days before heading off to the countryside.

  “We'll be back,” Lucy told Mrs. Jones, who'd been teaching Lucy to knit. In the afternoons, after they'd been sightseeing, when Ben went to take a nap, Lucy had sat in Mrs. Jones's kitchen, where she learned how to do simple stitches: knit and purl, yarn over, knit two together. Mrs. Jones had given Lucy a skein of yarn that smelled like heather and salt, a purplish gray shade the color of dusk. Their landlady never talked about the children in the photograph, and there were no signs of children in the house, so Lucy never did ask. Mrs. Jones made jam tarts and Ovaltine so Lucy would gain back the weight she had lost. Once Lucy said, “My mother would have taught me how to knit if she was still alive.” She didn't know what made her say that; it just slipped out. Mrs. Jones didn't even glance up, but she insisted that Lucy and her father stay for supper, and for dessert she gave them slices of sour cream and green pear cake, which sounded bad but tasted delicious.

  Now that it was time to go, Lucy didn't want to leave the hotel.

  “You'll be back at the end of your trip,” Mrs. Jones said, and she offered Lucy some more yarn and a pair of wooden needles of her own so she could keep up with her knitting. This ball of yarn was even softer, the color of old leaves.

  Ben rented a car and tried his best driving on the wrong side of the road. He made Lucy nervous. Once he nearly went into a stone wall.

  “You're not going to kill us, are you?” Lucy said.

  “Not if I can help it.”

  They drove around the city until he got the knack of it. Lucy was nervous, and then she wasn't. Her father was a good driver. He was practical and adaptable, and he was a patient man. In little more than an hour it seemed as though he'd always been driving on the wrong side of the road.

  “North, south, east, or west?” he asked Lucy before they really headed out.

  They were living that way now, day-to-day. Everything was up in the air. Lucy thought it over.

  “Definitely north,” she said.

  TEDDY HEALY HAD not gone back to work or returned to his flat. His brother, Matthew, said there were things that happened in this world that people couldn't understand and certainly couldn't control; he suggested they go together to the church and talk to the minister, but Teddy had refused. Teddy had checked into a nearby hotel, one that had a view of the road where Bryn had died. It was morbid, but he didn't feel he was there for morbid reasons. He stayed there so that when he woke in the morning he could go to the window and remember. He was not going to pretend it hadn't happened. It had. There was no way to deny it. After a while, Teddy went to speak to the minister himself; the minister embraced him and told him it was not his place to question but to accept. Teddy shook the minister's hand, and he didn't go back to church.

  The moment he most often replayed was not the one when Bryn's sister phoned, or when Charlotte met him on a bench near the Serpentine to hand him the letter his beloved had written to Michael Macklin; it wasn't even when he read it and discovered that Bryn loved someone else. It was when he'd first seen her, in Paris, sitting in the Tuileries, just across from the Musée d'Orsay. He had a meeting with a real estate firm in Paris, and if he hadn't, if Barry Arnold had gone from the London office in his place and Teddy hadn't taken off the afternoon and walked through the garden, he wouldn't have looked up to see a beautiful young woman with long, pale hair sitting in the sun. As it was, he'd watched her doze off, already falling in love with her. When she opened her eyes that was it.

  Now Teddy felt like a science experiment gone wrong. What had attracted him to her? Her scent? The shade of her eyes when she looked up at him? The fact that the lilacs looked pink in the afternoon air? The sound of pigeons and of doves? His own metabolism? His own history? Paris?

  He had asked her to lunch, where she told him that she was in love with someone. She tried to be honest with him, but he didn't want to listen. They ate sandwiches and olives and drank white wine. She was on a trip till the end of the year; she had gone to Amsterdam before coming to Paris, but she'd never been to London. She leaned over at one point, after she'd had too much to drink, and she'd said, I want someone to save me. That was the instant that had stayed with him more than any other. Another man might have run, but not Teddy. He and Matthew had lost their parents very early, in a train accident, and had been raised by an aunt. There was not a day when Teddy didn't think the situation might have been different if he'd been on that train rather than playing football at school. He might have heard the squeal of the brakes, he might have thrown open the window, helped his parents climb out of the wreckage. He might have done something.

  He and Bryn spent the night together. She had cried at first and she'd said there was someone else, but she was lonely and in the end she was the one who asked him to stay. She came to London because of that loneliness, because Teddy was the only one she knew in Europe and she didn't want to stay on in Paris alone, because he was kind, because he was so in love with her.

  When her parents heard about him after her older sister Hillary visited London, they wrote Teddy a letter to say how happy they were that Bryn had found love; they insisted they would pay for the wedding. They hadn't discussed marriage, but after that letter from her parents Teddy had thought, Of course, we should get married, and he'd gone out to look for the ring. Bryn slept late and went to bed early, so he left the ring on the table before going to work and when he came home that evening the diamond was on her finger. It was much more than he could afford, but Teddy wanted his love to be obvious; he wanted her to know how he felt. He didn't notice when she took off the ring; they were no longer engaged and he'd never even known it.

  Matt came to visit him at the hotel where he was living. It was called the Eastcliff and it had neither a bar nor a restaurant. Teddy brought his own liquor up to his room; he'd been drinking hard and he hadn't showered. He was twenty-eight years old. Matt was older by eighteen months, but Teddy now seemed like an old man.

  “You can't let this kill you,” Matt said. “It was terrible, all right, but unexpected things happen in life. No one knows that better than you and I.”

  Matt was an organizer; he worked at the same bank as Teddy. Now he went into high gear. Matt rented his brother a new flat, got rid of the old furniture, especially the things that would remind Teddy of Bryn, the bed for instance, and his wedding suit, and all those gifts that had arrived. He got Teddy a week's leave, and at the end of that week Teddy had been moved into the new flat near Lancaster Gate and was ready to go back to work, more or less. People approached him tentatively, as though he'd been through a grave illness and was still quite weak. He did his work, true enough, but on the way home he had begun to stop at the Lion Park bar. It turned out that he was weak. He began to drink in earnest.

  When Teddy opened the door on the night he saw them together in bed, everything he thought he knew and believed in had shifted. In a way, he'd made it happen. He couldn't just walk away; it was exactly as it had been when he'd met her and he'd refused to listen. He had stopped at the desk when he arrived at the Lion Park and demanded the key from the night clerk, who seemed too confused by his request to deny him. Then he'd run up the stairs. He knew it was bad, knew it was over. Why had he needed to see for himself? Because he needed proof? Because he didn't really believe it? They were utterly tan
gled together, in the midst of making love; he barely recognized Bryn, it was her back he saw at first, long and white and beautiful. She hadn't even heard the door open.

  He started shouting and he couldn't stop. Not when she turned to him, not when she stayed where she was, stunned, while the man she was with moved quickly to cover her with a sheet. He said she had betrayed him. That she was committed to him and had to marry him. He didn't recognize his own voice. Who would want a woman who didn't love him? Who would never really belong to him?

  He grabbed her while she was hurrying to pull on her slip. She tried to explain it wasn't about him; she was already married when they'd met; she'd been wrong to make any promises. He pulled her close and said something horrible. That was the instant he could never forget. That was what drove him to the bar at the Lion Park each night. You don't deserve to live is what he'd said. He'd turned on the man then, and hit him straight on, and that's how Bryn managed to get away. The other man, the one Bryn loved, had finally punched him back in order to go after her.

  Teddy Healy drank his whisky neat, and sometimes the bartender would put a sandwich or a bowl of stew in front of him. Sometimes he ate and sometimes he kept to his drinking. One night, when he was good and drunk, Teddy Healy went upstairs. He had never done so before this night. It was raining and his bones hurt as though he were an old man. It was late September by then and chilly and the hotel was not as full as it had been over the summer. On the seventh floor there were strips of wallpaper torn from the lower wall from the time when the pet rabbit had wandered off. The hallway was downright cold.

  Teddy went to what had been Michael Macklin's room and knocked. There were no guests, so he opened the door. He smelled something. Lilacs. He backed away, but before he could leave he heard a man's voice. He leaned his head against the wall and the oddest thing happened: He saw himself in the doorway, shouting, in a rage. It was impossible and yet it was true. There he was.