A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  I thought briefly about the fencing, about the clear-cuts, about Frank Turow and Leonard Stowell’s brother-in-law. To hell with them, I thought. They were grown men. They’d have understood my situation.

  “So how have you been?”

  I pushed my plate aside. “I’ve been okay.”

  “And your ma?”

  I shook my head. “She’s gone, Miss Webber, she’s gone south and ain’t comin’ back.”

  “It’s a tragedy. Your father, the thing that happened with the Krugers, and now your ma.”

  “I figure that life gives as good as it gets, right?”

  She reached out and touched my hand. There it was, the snap and hum of electricity; I felt a cool rush of hope fill my chest.

  “I missed having you to teach,” she whispered.

  “I missed being taught.”

  “Always my favorite pupil.”

  “Always my favorite teacher.”

  She laughed. “That’s not fair, I was your only teacher.”

  I smiled. “Blow, blow, thou winter wind . . . Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.”

  She frowned, her brow creased in the center like a seam. “Shakespeare?”

  I nodded. “As You Like It.”

  “You’re saying I’m ungrateful, Joseph?”

  “Or that you didn’t see a compliment when it came.”

  “I saw it well enough.”

  “So I’ll say it again . . . always my favorite teacher.”

  “And you’re reading Shakespeare?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes. More often than not I read Red Ryder and Little Beaver comics.”

  “You do not.”

  “Do too.”

  “You’re teasing me, Joseph.”

  I looked down at my hands. They were folded neatly together on the table like they belonged to someone else, as if someone had left their gloves behind and I had arranged them ready for collection. “Wouldn’t know what you were talking about, Miss Webber.”

  “You don’t have to call me that, there really aren’t that many years between us.”

  “Only the same number there’s always been.”

  Silence for a moment. Heart beating, right there in my mouth. Mouth so full of heart I wondered how I’d managed to say so much. My thoughts were broken up small like shards of ceramic, and they all were of Miss Alexandra Webber, and for the most part they were biblical.

  “Do you have to go to work today?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have to do anything.”

  “Do you want to spend the day with me?”

  I looked right at her, direct and unflinching, and then I smiled. “Maybe,” I said.

  She blushed visibly. “Only a maybe?”

  “Maybe is good, Alexandra Webber. Maybe isn’t no.”

  “What are you saying, Joseph?”

  I took the heart from my mouth and held it in my hands. “I’m saying nothing, Miss Webber. Nothing and everything. I’ve always thought of you as beautiful, and always figured you were smart, and I s’pose I looked up to you like a kid should look up to a teacher, I guess. Then I grew up, and started to think a different way, the kind of way people think about each other when they want to get close and comfortable, and whichever way I looked at it, whenever I had such a thought, you were right there in the middle of it like you belonged—”

  She gripped my hand. “Stop,” she said, in her voice a sense of urgency.

  “Why? Who’s gonna hear me? Who’s listening aside from you?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying!”

  “Don’t I?” I’d walked half way to the end of the road, figured it was just as far back as to journey to the end. “So tell me why you came here.”

  She looked away.

  “Miss Webber?”

  She raised her hand, her voice also. “Okay, that’s it, Joseph! If this is going where I think it might be going then the first thing you can do is call me by my first name.”

  I nodded. “So tell me why you came here, Alexandra.”

  “Alex,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I held my tongue and my gaze.

  The awkward recognition of unfamiliar breathing; the realization that scent, skin, the touch of hair between my fingers was not my own.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered, and her voice came like the sound of the sea from within a shell. “You’ll know what to do.”

  I looked at her, close enough to feel the flicker of her lash against my cheek. “And if I don’t?”

  “Then,” she said, her voice almost lost within the sound of her heart. “Then I’ll show you.”

  “Why did I come here?” She shook her head and turned away. “I don’t know, Joseph. Perhaps because I believed you were lonely.”

  “Lonely?”

  She smiled. “Sure. Lonely. You know what lonely means.”

  “I do,” I said. “I know all about lonely.”

  “Like it was your job, eh?”

  “My job?” I smiled, started to laugh. The feeling inside was one of emotional release, like a belt too tight now unbuckled. “Yes, you could say that loneliness was my job. And you?”

  She leaned to one side, the flat of her hand against her cheek, her elbow on the table to support her chin. “Me?”

  I nodded. “You were lonely too, right?”

  Alex kissed my eyes in turn; the dampness of her lips, the ghost of her fingertips, the pressure of her breast against my arm, the heat of her body . . .

  The way her waist vanished to her thigh, and then up and back across her stomach. There were buttons in the back of her dress, and she turned slowly and took my hand to show me where they were. She stepped out of the fabric as if from a second skin.

  She stepped back.

  My breath caught in my throat, a trapped bird, and she laughed.

  A lock of her hair fell from behind her ear and caressed her cheek. She raised her hand and tucked it back where it had come from. “Everyone gets lonely, Joseph.”

  “And you’re here . . . ’cause you figured we were both lonely and you wanted to do something about it?”

  She nodded, half smiled. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Maybe?” I asked. “I get to say maybe. You? You were never a maybe person, Alex, always straightforward, black and white.”

  “Does it matter why I came?”

  I shook my head. “No, Alex, it doesn’t matter why you came.”

  She got up from the chair. She stepped backward, and then stepped forward, just a single step, but it felt like she’d closed the gap between imagination and reality. “You want me to go?”

  “No, Alex. I never want you to go.”

  Later, I could not remember how we’d found our way upstairs. Later, I believed it did not matter.

  I raised my hand and touched her arm, her shoulder, the nape of her neck.

  Her hands found the buttons of my pants. “Off,” she exhaled.

  I fought with my clothing.

  The breeze lifted the curtains behind me, raised the hairs on my skin, and made me shudder for a moment.

  She stepped back and sat on the edge of the bed.

  I stood in front of her, my right hand against the side of her face, her cheek, her hair between my fingers.

  She kissed my stomach, encircled my navel with the tip of her tongue, and then she dipped her head and opened her mouth. No more than seconds and she looked up at me. “You know how this goes, right?”

  I nodded.

  She edged forward, slipped off her underskirt. She lay down on the mattress and reached out her hand.

  “Come on, then,” she said, “before I die of anticipation.”

  We found a rhythm, awkward at first, but we found it. It took us some place we hadn’t planned to go and didn’t want to come home from.

  There were moments I remembered laughing, though later I could not recall why.

  Alex lay beside me, her body pressed against mine, her arm angled to support her head, and e
very once in a while I would turn my face to look at her as she spoke, to interrupt her words by kissing her, and after another while I said, “Again,” and she closed her eyes and lay back down and I folded up against her.

  We did not leave my room until it was close to evening.

  Weeks went by.

  The dreams came back. Dreams that were haunted by the hand they never found.

  Augusta Falls had convinced itself to forget the killings. With three years behind it, the collective mind of a town had managed to close itself off to the past. I had not.

  Alex visited with ever-increasing frequency, and I spoke with her about the girls, the murders, about who might have done such things; we talked of the Krugers, the death of Elena, all that had transpired.

  “Whatever happened,” she said, “it’s over.”

  “It wasn’t anything to do with the Krugers,” I said. “I knew Gunther Kruger, and his wife and children.” I paused and looked away toward the kitchen window. It was approaching the end of November. For the better part of three months Alex had been visiting two, three, sometimes four times each week. We made love—sometimes furiously, like there was something inside each of us that had to be discovered, and only with force and passion was there a chance to break it free, to discover it; other times slowly, as if under water, every word, every breath, every single second of physical contact drawn out as far as possible. I had turned eighteen a month before. Alex Webber would be twenty-seven in February of ’46. The better part of nine years didn’t seem a great deal of time. It was close to four years since Reilly Hawkins had driven me and my mother to Waycross Community Hospital, since I’d spoken with the head doctor about carbon dioxide to starve the brain, Librium to aid sleep, Scopolamine to find her true, unspoken feelings, Veronal to sedate. Seemed to me my mother had slipped into some dark and silent place, and the drugs they gave her, the things they did seemed to serve no purpose. The treatment merely prevented her from crying out for help.

  Alex had filled a void, a vacuum. Whatever she brought I consumed, and still remained hungry. We read books together, sometimes all night. Steinbeck, Hemingway, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Flaubert, Balzac, Dumas’s Chicot the Jester, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black. Those things I did not understand she explained. Those things she could not explain she showed me. My work fell slack. There were people who would no longer hire me. I stopped shaving, and then decided to grow a beard. My hair went past my shoulders.

  “Bohemian,” Alex said, and laughed, and kissed my forehead, and gripped my beard with her fingers and led me to the mattress.

  Later I spoke with Alex about New York.

  “Superb-faced Manhattan! Comrade Americanos! To us, then at last the Orient comes. To us, my city. Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on opposite sides, to walk in the space between.”

  “You what?”

  “Walt Whitman,” she said, and laughed at me. “You ignorant Bohemian scribbler!”

  “Ignorant? I’ll have you know I started a book.”

  “To what?”

  “A book. A novel,” I said. “I started writing a novel.”

  She sat up straight. The sheet fell from her throat and ruched at her waist. Her perfect breasts, the arc of her shoulder, her throat, the line of her jaw. I reached out my hand. She slapped my wrist, grabbed it, held it down.

  “Tell me!” she snapped. “Tell me what it is, Joseph.”

  “It’s nothing . . . hell, Alex, it’s just an idea I had. I started it last night—” I paused, frowned. “No, two nights ago . . . the night you said you were gonna come and then didn’t.”

  “So tell me,” she urged. “Tell me what it’s about.”

  I tugged a pillow from beneath me and positioned it behind my head. Alex seemed genuinely excited.

  “It’s just a rough thing,” I said.

  “Like you,” she joked.

  “I’ll give you rough,” I said, and playfully grabbed a handful of her hair.

  “No,” she said. “Seriously, tell me what you’re writing.”

  “It’s about a man,” I said.

  She smiled, tilted her head to one side. “Good start . . . like ‘Once upon a time there was a man’ kind of thing, yes?”

  “Too smart, Alex Webber, too smart by half.”

  “So tell me,” she said. “Tell me what it’s about.”

  “It’s about a man called Conrad Moody who does something terrible. He kills a child. An accident, but he’s a fatalist, he believes in Providence and the Three Sisters. He knows that somewhere he must have committed a crime and escaped his punishment, and now his punishment has been brought to him. He spends the rest of his life in atonement for killing the child, a child he promised to protect.”

  Alex was quiet for a moment.

  “What?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “You have some you could read me?”

  “Now?”

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said.

  I leaned across the bed and put my hand beneath. I felt along the floor until I touched my notebook. I retrieved it and sat up, Alex beside me, watching me, something cool and distant in her expression.

  “You want me to read this now?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Just a little.”

  I opened the book, found a page. I cleared my throat and started.

  “He thought of something like a white-knuckled solar plexus fist, but that was no real way of describing the tension within. He thought of a dam, like seven hundred thousand pounds per square inch pressure, breaking point, something more than that, but he felt that this did not define it. An understatement; a definite understatement of fact. Tension like whipcord strung taut, a piano wire that creaked and strained and could not have twisted a fraction more without snapping, lashing back. Iron-bound, he was. Imperfect, yes, but iron-bound. And believing those imperfections made him human. This is what he had been told, and he never cared to disbelieve, for belief had always been his firm foundation, and without that the walls within would have fallen. Conrad Moody wrote upon those walls, and they listened. They heard everything he wished to say. Simple enough. Strong enough also. Strong enough to bear it all alone—”

  “Stop,” she said.

  I looked up at her. A single tear had edged its way from her eye and started down her cheek.

  I frowned, tried to smile. “What?” I said. “What is it? Hell, Alex—”

  “It’s about you, isn’t it?”

  “Eh?”

  “You . . . it’s about you and the Kruger girl, isn’t it? You promised to look after her, didn’t you, Joseph? That day you told me about, looking down from the hill and seeing her in the yard. You promised to yourself that you’d make sure nothing bad happened to her.”

  I didn’t reply; there were no words in my mind.

  “But it didn’t work, did it?” Alex said. “You couldn’t keep your promise and she died.”

  I was silent.

  “How long will you torture yourself over that?” she asked.

  “I don’t think—”

  She raised her hand, pressed her finger to my lips. She shook her head, closed her eyes for a second, and then pulled me close toward her. “Shhh,” she sighed. “Don’t say anything. It’s okay . . . gonna be okay, Joseph. We’re going to make a baby. It’s that simple. We’re going to make everything okay. We’re going to bring a child into the world and redress the balance . . . we’re going to break the spell.”

  “Alex—”

  “Shhh, Joseph . . . enough. We’re going to make everything all right again.”

  My heart thundered in my chest, a trapped fist. I was sweating, my skin varnished, but I was cold, shivering almost. Alex pulled up the sheet and encircled us with it. She lay down, and I went with her, down onto the mattress, my notebook tumbling to the floor.

  “Now,” she whispered.

  TWELVE

  I BORROWED REILLY’S PICKUP THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS,
AS we planned to visit my mother at Waycross Community Hospital. Saturday, December twenty-second, 1945, an overcast and oppressive sky, the trees along the highway like hands grasping for something.

  I did not want Alex to see her, not how she was, but Alex insisted.

  “It’s Christmas. She’s your mother. This isn’t the sort of thing you negotiate or postpone.”

  Fifty-some miles, but that was with the crow. We took the circuitous route and watched morning chase shadows as the sun lifted, houses appearing as if from nowhere. Thunderheads jostled for space along the horizon to the west, but every once in a while a spike of brilliance sliced through, like a whittler’s knife cutting back the deadwood to find the true grain within.

  We spoke little, but every once in a while I glanced at her profile, and she seemed content.

  We saw shapes picking cotton in the field; men stacking logs for the corduroy road, others splitting those same logs for railroad sleepers. We drove for more than an hour and were no more than halfway to Waycross. There was no hurry. Road unraveled behind us, and ran out ahead like a black ribbon. We were going to see the woman who bore me because Alex believed she was family, now as much her own as mine. She said she loved me. I’d reciprocated, to which she’d replied: “So when you love someone you take all of them, every attachment, every obligation. You take the history, the past and the present. You take all of it, or none at all. That’s the way it goes, Joseph, that’s just the way it goes.”

  Alex did not argue or contest, she stated viewpoints matter-of-factly. I would set my mind to a challenge and she’d take the wind from my sails before I’d weighed anchor. I consigned myself to let such things go. She was from Syracuse, and such people thought differently.

  Mid-morning broke sultry and humid, with a breeze up close and personal with too much moisture. I pulled Reilly Hawkins’s pickup to the side of the road, a wheel-beaten mud-and-ditches affair that ran the tires left and right simultaneously. Alex opened a flask of coffee she’d brought, and for a while we sat up front, sipping from the same cup one after the other, and talking little of nothing to pass the time.