Angels Unaware

by Lisa Deangelis

  After dinner, I brewed him some of the smelly kind of tea he liked. “You should go to bed, Rennie,” I said. You’re falling asleep in the chair.”

  “I’m not,” she argued, eyes half-closed. “I forgot to tell you. I met a man today.”

  “What man?” I asked, too quickly, as Mr. Sung watched, sipping his tea.

  “His name is Seth. He said he used to know you when you were my age. He was at the picnic, but he didn’t have any children with him. He asked if I had brothers or sisters. I said no and he said he didn’t have any either. He said his brother had died and his mother had died and now, he didn’t have anybody left at all. He was so sad. I felt sorry—”

  “Go to bed.” I got out of my chair so suddenly that Mr. Sung’s tea spilled all over the table, and for a moment I glared at him. He was staring straight at me with the steady gaze and impassive face I’d grown used to. Rennie got up and obeyed me without further argument.

  “Were you there today when that man talked to her?” I asked after she had gone.

  He nodded. “I don’t want him around her.” He nodded again. “If you ever see him near her—”

  “Don’t worry.” His face wasn’t sympathetic and if he were feeling some emotion, it didn’t show on his features.

  “I do worry. I’m afraid that—”

  “Don’t be afraid. He can’t reach her.”

  I didn’t understand what “reach her” meant and I assumed it was one of his misuses of figures of speech. I would have pursued it, but he immediately said goodnight and went up to his room.

  Days of waiting followed, during which the slightest sound, the slightest stirring, would make me whirl around, ready but never truly prepared, for what was I to do to prepare? Keep the shotgun loaded and by my side at all times? Not sleep? Not let my child play out of my sight for a moment? I decided yes and did all those things as much as possible. I slept like a dog with one eye open and one ear cocked. I didn’t let Rennie out of my sight, and it made her hate me a little. I wouldn’t even let her go to school. I would rather have her ignorant and alive than educated and dead. And, yes, I carried the shotgun loaded and with me from room to room even though I’m sure Mr. Sung thought I was insane. To his credit, he never called me on it. Instead he acted like it was the most normal behavior in the world.

  Then, strangely, things around me began to reflect my fear back at me like a mirror. One night I was reading from Peter and Wendy to Rennie as she lay in our bed. “Was that boy asleep, or did he stand waiting with his dagger in his hand? There was no way of knowing…”

  In those days, I ate, worked in the fields, cared for what little livestock we had, andslept fitfully. But mostly, I waited, for I could smell it in the air, carried on the wind—the sickening smell of revenge long planned and relished. Where would he strike and how? In the house, appearing at a window, or in the orchard, stepping out from behind a tree? With a gun, the way I’d killed his brother, or a knife, hacking away till his rage was spent? And most important, on who would he choose to vent himself? I was the obvious one, but Seth Hamilton, always so much quieter than Aaron, so brooding, would be more devious than that. I had killed someone he loved. Would he take Rennie, thinking to do the same? I could fight him. I would fight him, and if I was killed, it would be with his skin under my fingernails and his flesh in my teeth. But Rennie couldn’t fight him. She wasn’t waiting. She didn’t know enough to be waiting in spite of all my crazy behavior. And in the end, if I was killed, what would happen to her? Would someone in Galen take her in? I doubted it and even if someone did that would be terrible in itself. She was too strange and fey a child to be raised by anyone but Luca or me.

  I decided to write my last will and testament and leave it with Mr. Sung. I read it to him:

  I, Darcy Willickers, leave all my earthly possessions to my husband, Luca D’Angeli. It is my final request that my daughter be delivered safely to my husband who currently resides in prison.

  I gave the address and directions to Mr. Sung so that hopefully he would take her to Luca. And if they wouldn’t let Luca out to take care of his child, maybe that nice warden would take her. But when I tried to communicate all this to Mr. Sung, he got all Chinese about it and refused to understand what I was asking of him. So if I was soon to die, I couldn’t even die in peace. It seems like a little thing to ask, to die in peace, but when you really think about it, it’s an enormous request and I think few probably are ever able to manage it.

  There are so many ways to die, to be killed. Knives to stab, ropes to pull tight, and guns to fire. And so many people to fear and fear for. Who will deliver your end to you? There are the obvious people. The strangers, and knowing their strangeness, we must shun them, lock our doors against them. But what about the others? The familiar ones. The postman, perfectly harmless. Or old man Zook. He’d always liked children. But there was talk once about a little girl… And where and when and how and why? People were so unknowable, even the people you loved. There are so many ways to die, to be killed. I’d never considered them all before. And if I did methodically consider them all, what then? Then madness. Then, my poor child, forced to trust her safety to a madwoman, one of those to be shunned, doors to be locked against. A madwoman for a mother who could no longer trust herself to recognize the enemy.

  In the end, it was time that fooled me. Time passed, a month, then two, then fall turned to winter and into spring, and the spring seemed less dangerous than the winter had been, less dark, less opportunity to hide in the dark. I waited still. But now there were lapses in my waiting, an hour here or there when I let myself sleep or sit down to a meal without thinking of Seth.

  And, of course, that was when he came back.

  The heart of the night, it was, and sleeping the dreamless sleep of exhaustion, I awakened, disoriented, to thoughts of autumn. Someone was burning leaves in the middle of the night. Coughing, I tried to sit up. Rennie was beside me still asleep. I reached for the gun beside me. It was there ready for me but there was nothing to shoot, and the door was still bolted soundly. I could see it clearly in the flickering glow that softly lit the room. Everything was all right—must be, for the door was still locked. No one had gotten in. We were safe. I coughed again. My breath came labored. The strange light still shone through the window. Not daylight, more like gaslight, but not that either. And the roar of crackling, like a thousand candy wrappers being opened in unison. Then all at once, I knew. The inn was on fire.

  Rennie would not wake. I shook her, but the sweet dreamy expression would not leave her face. Trying to get out of bed, I fell to the floor, dizzy, my vision blurring, so that where one door had stood, now there were three and all of them soundly bolted. If I could just get beyond the door to the hallway, get some air into the room. Smoke was everywhere now, thick enough to see, a misty gloaming that brought death. But my legs wouldn’t hold my weight, and I had to crawl. Even the floor was warm, and with every inch I gained, I grew weaker. Reaching the door, I touched it. Cool. The flames had not reached the second floor yet. All that lay between us and the life-giving air was the door. The bolts. Two of them. One at the bottom. Every muscle strained to pull it back. Dizziness came in waves, each deeper than the one before. “No one’ll ever break this,” the hardware clerk had said proudly. The other bolt was near the top. Using the door handle, I pulled myself up and grabbed the knob of the bolt. It would not give. Again, I strained to pull it back and again failed. And the last thing I remember was the defeated sound of my fingernails against the wood of the door as I went down.

  10.

  And Like Wind I Go

  When I was once again aware of life, it seemed as if I’d been gone from it for a long time, suspended in some limbo that was like death, but without its finality. But I couldn’t have been gone long because the sky was still eerily lit by the burning inn. It was still in flames, its rotting timbers screaming goodbye to those who ran about,
trying to bring order to its death throes. Much of the town had turned out to witness the destruction of the dwelling that had so long been the object of their contempt. I think I was the only one who knew that more than the old hotel was burning. A part of our history, my own and that of every soul who had ever wandered or blundered in, was dying too, and with it, the last holdout against ignorant conformity that Galen might ever know. Yet watching it burn, I felt as if a terrible burden had been taken from me.

  Sitting up, I heard Rennie crying beside me, a good sound because it was as much the sound of life as laughter. “She’s all right,” a voice assured me. It was Dr. Lynch, the one who’d found me bleeding in the snow. A good man, that doctor, in snow or flames. “She’s just scared. But there’s no saving the inn, went up like kindling.”

  “Where’s our boarder?”

  “The Chinaman?” He shrugged. “Don’t know yet. You and your girl were lying out here when we arrived. We figure he must have gone back in for something and been trapped. But he’ll turn up. Teeth don’t burn.”

  I looked up at him. For the doctor, the sequence of events was obvious. The Chinaman had given his life for ours and had we been more valued citizens of Galen, what he did might have seemed heroic. Galen would think he perished in the fire. For Galen, there was no mystery in what had happened. For me, there was nothing but mystery, one that would endure into my old age. He’d had no reason to go back into the inn. We three were the only occupants. But his arrival in a town that offered him nothing had been similarly improbable. What had brought him?

  Toward dawn, the inn finally burned itself out, leaving a charred staircase as the only evidence a home had once stood, a house wherein some people, who had never amounted to much, had lived and died, loved and cursed each other. My bedroom door, like most everything else, was burned to cinder, but its locks had not been destroyed. Even melted into a twist of metal, I could see where they had been pulverized, smashed to bits by some powerful force.

  Another discovery awaited in the barn, where the fire had not reached. The body of Seth Hamilton. There was no blood or soot. He’d not been stabbed nor shot nor burned. His neck was simply broken, as neat as a chicken’s meant for Sunday dinner.

  In the days that followed, no one ever thought to pursue Seth’s killer. Reverend’s son or not, he’d long been more trouble than he was worth to Galen and with his mother and father and brother gone before him, there was no one to miss him in their lives or insist his death be avenged. Seth had outlived the few people who might have cared that he no longer walked the earth.

  Nor did anyone think to find out for certain what had become of Chun Sung or Sung Chun; I never did find out which name went where. He was a foreigner, after all, and folks were satisfied that he’d perished with the inn, though no trace of him was ever found, not even the telltale teeth the doctor had predicted. But I knew. I felt certain that someday, in some dark corner of the world, I’d spy him disappearing down a twisting path, or glimpse him through the window of a passing train, his slanted eyes catching mine and holding for a moment, but only for a moment, before disappearing again. People always said Orientals were slippery, and now I had first-hand knowledge.

  Rennie had her own theory about Mr. Sung. She thought the little man had not so much wandered to the inn as been invoked. By whom, I asked—for surely I’d not invited him. But she would only smile her dreamy smile that hinted at some secret communion and was not unlike the expression I had sometimes seen cross the features of our boarder. And I remembered their hushed conversations.

  Not until some weeks later did I begin to understand, but only faintly, because whatever had transpired between them had not been for other eyes to see, and was not now for other minds to grasp. Rennie had summoned him and it was to Rennie alone that he had perhaps unveiled the mystery of himself.

  We had been living in the barn because there was nowhere else to go, and mysteriously each day, a basket of food would appear, or a freshly baked loaf of bread, even once a mattress, as if Galen was afraid of its own timid compassion, a feeling that if allowed to grow might have led to further involvement and the further risk of sharing too closely in another’s misfortune. And no one wanted that, least of all me. Sympathy would have only embarrassed me. So, they dropped food and snuck away as kindly and as stealthily as they had come.

  I wondered if I could sell the blackened land where the inn had stood, and who in their right mind would buy it, and who, even if they were crazy enough to want to buy it, would have any money to buy it with. Conscience might make me confess that it was an unlucky place, cursed with old events, memories, personalities, convictions that do not burn but linger to haunt a house and the land it sat on for always, undimmed by time or the elements. In short, too much had happened there.

  Then one day, not long after, while Rennie was at school, and I was sweeping the floor of the barn where Seth had got his neck broken, I sensed I wasn’t alone, and looking up, I saw the silhouette of a man, illuminated from behind with the light of the morning sun. He seemed to have been standing there watching me for some time. Wordlessly, he came toward me, and with each step, his arms opened wider. And I went into those arms that had known me in hell, only to find me now in purgatory, and for the first time in years, I really looked at the sky, and I saw over his shoulder that there truly was something above the earth, a horizon that could not be sullied by it, that even tears could not obscure. And as I closed my eyes, my thoughts echoed the words he whispered into my hair. “I’ve come home,” he said quietly. We held on to each other for a long time, then held each other far enough away to look at each other, only to clasp each other close again. And we probably would have gone on a long time like that—holding and looking and holding again, our eyes and arms so starved for the sight and feel of each other—had Rennie not come home from school.

  She didn’t seem particularly surprised to see him and when questioned, said she had always known he would come back for us. That that was simply the way it was to be.

  Later when we were alone, Luca said that if Rennie had always known he’d come home, then she’d known more about it than he did, because his plan had been to go back to Italy when released and never to set foot on American shores again. He had been so angry at me for so long, been so convinced that I had wronged and betrayed him, felt so righteous about his indignation that he was sure he could not love me ever again. As for Rennie, he was convinced that she would be better off without a father who felt nothing but bitterness and resentment toward her mother. So his plan was to sail for Naples, find work, and send us money every month. It was hard to hear him talk about how much he had hated me, but I had to know. “What changed your mind?” I asked at last because so far, I had heard nothing that would make him want to come back for us.

  Luca said a man had visited him in prison, the only visitor he had ever had except for my one visit to him. The man seemed to have known Rennie and me, though he never volunteered how he knew us. He spoke little and there was something peculiar about his speech, as if words were a foreign language that he had to translate from another medium. He told Luca that he would be released soon, and Luca didn’t believe him because he still had almost a year to go on his sentence. He told him that he must go back to his wife and child and take them back to Italy with him where others would be waiting. Luca asked him why he must do this, and the man responded without a hint of sarcasm, “Otherwise the world will end.” Luca had laughed out loud at that and had begun to think it was a trick perpetrated by one of the other prisoners, who often tormented him because he was the warden’s favorite. But the following week, he was told that he and a few other prisoners were being released unexpectedly to make room in the overcrowded prison for new offenders. Still Luca doubted on what authority the visitor had spoken with such conviction and he had not abandoned his own plan. He had gone so far as to enquire about the train schedule to New York and how much passage was to Naples. But
very soon he realized that leaving us behind had only been what Rennie would call “for pretend.” In his anger, he had needed to pretend for awhile that it was possible to leave us. It wasn’t. It had never been. We were a family for better or worse, not because he and I had uttered some words to each other fraudulently years ago, but because joy in each other and misery and longing had welded us together as surely as the flame-forged locks of my bedroom door. I realized, too, that in every moment that he had hated me, he had loved me in that very same moment, and that’s the way of things that are joined and which “no man can put asunder.”

  I told Luca all about our boarder, how it must have been him who carried us out of the burning house, how he must have gone to visit Luca because everyone in the whole county knew where Luca was and why. And he said that all made sense, except that his visitor was tall and fair and not short and dark, and he looked more like a Viking than an Oriental. So we decided that it had been one of Galen’s newsy bodies and left it at that. To continue to question it would just have caused an itch in our minds that could never be scratched.

  I asked Luca how close Italy was to Kathmandu. He didn’t know. I hadn’t thought of Kathmandu for a long time. I felt certain that I would never in my life go there, and I didn’t care. We imagine our zenith. But neither a zenith nor a nadir is fulsome enough to be the whole of a life, and ruined life is still life. I gave up Kathmandu for Naples, bartering a life that could never have been for one that was. An excellent trade, and there was no tragedy in it. It was as it should be. Or the world would end.