Paper Angels

by Billy Coffey

  Yet I couldn’t bring myself to say such things, because I didn’t believe them. Could not. Regardless of what Elizabeth’s answers were, she was right. I deserved them. Any hell upon this earth can be endured if there is truth and light to be found on the other side of it, and I had to trust there was truth and light to be found on the other side of mine.

  That didn’t mean I didn’t steal a look at the door and harbor a small, secret hope that Kim would come walking in to bandage me back up. At that moment, I would have even settled for Jake.

  She rested her hands on the side of my bed, looked at me, and said, “The Old Man is your angel.”

  I waited for her to say more, but more did not come. I felt as though she were pausing to allow the obvious to sink in.

  “…Yes,” I said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been sitting there all night concentrating so much on your scissors and paper that you missed the particular seven hours or so I spent talking about him.”

  Elizabeth winked at me and smiled. “Yes, I heard that. I heard every word. Now it’s your turn to hear. What I mean is the Old Man is not a figment of your imagination.”

  “That might get you into some trouble with all those God-denying colleagues of yours,” I said.

  She waved me off. “There are counselors and there are Counselors. I am of the latter.”

  I offered Elizabeth a sigh. “Well, I’m glad. I thought for a minute you were going to tell me he was all in my head.”

  “No,” she said. “The Old Man is real, Andy. And he is an angel. But he’s not a real angel.”

  Instinct instructed me to massage the back of my head again in preparation for the pain I was certain would soon return.

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  Elizabeth sat back in her chair beside me. Her smile was gone, and though the tenderness was there, it was now of another sort. One with the purpose of not helping me to understand, but to hear.

  “Almost every religion in the world incorporates something akin to angels in its belief system,” she said. “Not just Christianity and Judaism. Islam, too. Even Buddhists and Hindus. Most of them have differing opinions about what angels are and what they do. But I’m going to stick to the Bible, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s easy to get weighed down by the concept. The Bible mentions archangels and cherubim and seraphim and just your plain old ordinary angels, if there is such a thing. Some folks have taken it further and said there are actually nine different types. That’s not really important to us. What’s important is what the term angel originally meant. The Hebrew word is malach. It means ‘messenger.’ And it’s related to the word melacha, which means ‘task.’”

  “I really don’t see how this—”

  “Wait,” she said. “I’m getting there.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “To the Old Testament Hebrews, angels weren’t restricted to harps and halos. By their thinking, anyone could be an angel. You. Me. The neighbor down the street. Friends and strangers. Even people who aren’t very angel-like. Anyone who helped you accomplish a task or convey some truth about God was an angel. Not a real one, maybe, with the glory or the trumpeting or the fiery swords. But a good image of one that was just as real. And in that respect, the Old Man is an angel.”

  “So you’re saying…what? That he’s a ghost? Some kind of spirit?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “But what he is and where he came from and how he came to you is…well, that might be the part that has to go unanswered for now. But I know this, Andy—God heard your prayer that night. He heard it and He answered it, and He sent you exactly who you needed.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me whether he wore a halo or not,” I said. “Doesn’t matter if he was a real angel or sort of an angel. All that matters to me is that he always knew when stuff would happen, so I’m pretty sure he knew what he was skipping out on when he left me at the gas station that night. He didn’t say a word to me, Elizabeth. He just left me and Eric there. The Old Man left Eric there to die, and he left me there to almost join him.”

  Elizabeth looked at me and pursed her lips. Then very slowly, very clearly said, “But you did join him, Andy.”

  I’ll admit the first thing I thought was that I had misunderstood what Elizabeth had said, which wouldn’t have been too difficult considering what she’d spent the last few minutes telling me. I’ll also admit my second thought had something to do with a movie I once saw about a dead guy trying to help a kid who saw ghosts.

  “You ain’t saying I’m dead, are you?” I asked. “Because you and Kim can see me just fine.”

  “No, Andy. You’re as alive as you can be. But in a way you did die that night. Life isn’t one unbroken line from beginning to end. There isn’t one birth and one death, there are many of both. Things end so other things can begin. The Andy Sommerville who spent his life in the world but apart from it, who was intent on not getting too close to anyone? He died. You’re not supposed to be him anymore. It’s time to be the man God wants you to be, and you don’t need the Old Man to do that. He’s done his job. He’s given you what you need. And as far as him leaving, I’m afraid nothing I could say would make your anger any less. I’m pretty good at what I do, but that’s just something you’ll have to work out for yourself. And you will. It won’t be easy, but nothing worth anything is easy.”

  “And who is this man I’m supposed to be?” I asked her. “Because honestly, I don’t feel like much of a man anymore. I don’t feel like much of anything. All I want to do is go back to the way things were and erase the past three days.”

  “Life is lived forward, Andy. God put your eyes in front of you so you can see where you’re going, not where you’ve been.”

  I stared out at the bright morning and said, almost to myself, “If the stars were out, I’d find mine. I told myself once that I didn’t need to ask God for anything anymore, and that was stupid of me. I’ll always need God, maybe more in my comfort than in my pain. I know you’re trying to help me, Elizabeth. I know you’re saying the things you think I need to hear. But I promise you the next time I look up into the night sky, I’m going to ask God to take it all away. To let me go back. And I’m going to pray just as hard as I did when I was a kid, and I’m going to watch and see if that star winks. You’re telling me I have to be to Jabber what the Old Man was to me. I can’t. Because the old me is the only me I know how to be. I’m not good for anything else. I’m not smart. I’m not wise. I’m just a man.”

  “You have all you need,” she said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  “You keep telling me that,” I said, “but I can’t accept it. A part of me wants to believe that everything you’re telling me is the truth, but another part of me thinks you’re saying this just so I’ll have a reason to keep going. Being there for Jabber would give me a purpose. And I want to do that, I really do. That poor boy has no one now. But you need to know that I can’t be like the Old Man. I don’t have all the answers. I’m stumbling through this life like everyone else.”

  “Listen to me, Andy,” Elizabeth said. “God knows what He’s doing. Knows better than you or me or anyone else. If this is what He wants you to do, and I think it is, then He’s going to make sure you can do it. You didn’t need answers the night when you were eleven and looked up at that star to pray. You didn’t ask for an angel, Andy. You asked for someone who would understand. That’s what Jabber needs now, and God’s picked you for the job. Who better to send to a frightened young boy than someone who will understand?”

  I offered her no answer.

  Elizabeth reached into her pocket and brought out a small, square mirror. “Besides,” she said, “you might not think you’re an angel, but you look just like one.”

  She handed me the mirror for proof. I turned it over and closed my hand around it.

  “No way,” I said. “The last thing I need right now is to look at Charlie’s handiwork.”

  “Part of this,” Eliza
beth said, “part of your healing, is accepting who you are. Trust me, it won’t be easy. But it’s the last step.”

  I looked from Elizabeth to the back of the mirror in my hand. I knew on the other side lay some sort of truth, the kind that comes with the facing of not What Could Be or What Should Be, but What Is. The last step. Elizabeth might have said those words, and yet I felt as though they’d been sung to me. It was a faint welcome just down the path of a long and raw journey. Not the end, perhaps, but at least an end. I considered then all the times over the years I’d told the hurting and the tired that when it comes to a journey, it was the going and not the getting there that made it worthwhile. What rubbish. What utter nonsense. No journey is worth taking unless there’s a place to get to. Maybe Elizabeth was right, I thought. Maybe I was supposed to start over. And the best way to start over is to find out what you have to start with.

  But if I was going to see what I had to start over with, I had to know who I had to start over with, too. If the Old Man had indeed left because his purpose had been completed, if life truly was a series of deaths and births, then I had to believe his leaving was so someone else could come. That someone was sitting beside me, and I had to tell her. Once and for all.

  “Elizabeth,” I said, “I just wanted to say that…”

  I looked up to finish my sentence, looked for those beautiful eyes to drown myself in and those beautiful hands to rescue me from that drowning, but there were none. The chair was empty.

  Elizabeth was gone.

  “Elizabeth?” I said. “Hey. Where’d you go?”

  I looked toward the bathroom. The door was open and the room was empty. Then to the hallway.

  “Elizabeth?”

  No answer. From outside the door, the hallway was now quiet and still.

  Panic built in my chest. My heart thumped, my stomach sank. I let out a small whimper, like a lost child.

  She didn’t tell me good-bye, I thought. She can’t be gone, because she didn’t tell me good-bye.

  “Elizabeth?” I called louder. “Where’d you go, Elizabeth? I’m ready to look now. I promise.”

  To prove my point and coax her back from wherever she had gone, I turned the mirror over. The polished surface cast an image I was not able to comprehend.

  I was no longer me. My beard was gone, singed away by Charlie’s makeshift flamethrower, which had also taken my hair and eyelashes. Left in their place were streaks of cracked red and pink skin that had aged me beyond my years.

  But that was not the worst. Oh no, not the worst by far. That distinction was the sole property of what was staring back at me.

  It was the Old Man’s face.

  In that moment my life shattered in a thousand pieces of glass, exploding out and around and into me, piercing skin and soul.

  “Elizabeth?” I whispered.

  I couldn’t find her, couldn’t see her. I reached out for the chair and took hold of air

  (“ELIZABETH HELP ME!”)

  but nothing was there. Truth blurred until I could not tell what was inside of my mind and what was out, what was real and what was not. Was I really there, in that room? Was Elizabeth? Or had that time and those people existed only in the darkness that Charlie had left me in?

  Kim burst into the room, eyes wide and arms outstretched, ready to catch my fall. “Andy, what’s wrong? What happened?”

  “Elizabeth,” I cried again.

  Kim reached me and took me by the shoulders to keep me in my bed. The mirror Elizabeth had given me disappeared in our struggle. I reached for it but could not find it. “Andy, what’s wrong with you?”

  “He is me,” I told her. The words came out slurred and panicked. Kim’s grip recoiled slightly, then returned even stronger than it was before. “He is me, Kim. Heisme.”

  She tried to ease me back into my bed. I pushed her away. “Someone help me here!” she called out into the hallway.

  More nurses came. Orderlies. A man in a white coat.

  “Heisme,” I said again, and then, “Elizabeth. Where’s Elizabeth?”

  “Andy,” Kim said, “I need you to listen to me, okay? You’re okay. You’ve had a lot of medicine to ease your pain, okay?” And then she muttered, “Maybe too much.”

  “ELIZABETHHEISME!”

  White Coat gave orders. Hallucinations, he called himself. Or me. Or to me. What?

  Hallucinations.

  Head trauma. Maybe too much.

  Nurses and orderlies on me, holding me down.

  I heard Kim tell White Coat: “He was alone all night talking to himself.”

  There was cold in my arm, cold like the ambulance.

  You’re gonna be okay, Andy Sommerville, the Old Man says. Said.

  I murmured “Help me,” though I felt sure I had cried that name into my mind rather than the air. Shadows enveloped me.

  It was not Elizabeth who answered.

  33

  The Anvil

  Walk to me is what I am told, but not by sound. It is instead a knowing that feels surer than words could ever feel, one that pulls me forward in my darkness with no thought of danger or fear. What hellish shadows that grope for me are cast aside by a light that grows from a pinpoint to a star to a sun to something beyond my telling. It moves toward me as I move toward it, and the warmth I feel is the love I always handled but never embraced.

  The man’s back is to me, his face hidden by long strands of black hair. I hear the clanging of the hammer in his hand as it is brought down upon an anvil, black and worn from countless ages of use. The mangled metal upon it glows red. Even from this distance, I feel its heat. He swings the hammer in a CLANG I cannot fathom.

  Is this real? I ask him.

  I know no unreal, he says.

  What are you making?

  All things new.

  I do not face him. I cannot. And yet I know he smiles deeply and always has, even in his mourning.

  What is taken away I will give back a hundredfold, he says, and he brings the hammer up and

  CLANG

  down again.

  He moves. The light from the metal consumes me. I raise my hands to shield my face as he places something upon the anvil. A box. My box.

  You need all you have, says the man. You have all you need.

  From the shadows comes a form that shimmers from spirit to flesh. Strong and young and so, so alive. He carries in his hand a section of rubber hose attached to a Y-shaped piece of wood.

  Grandpa?

  My grandfather smiles and says, The peace you wish for the world begins inside yourself. He hands the slingshot to the man.

  CLANG

  Now a little girl from behind me. The bristles of the paintbrush she carries sweep against my arm. Who we are is not who we should be, Mary says, and skips past me to the man. He stretches out his hand and takes the brush, placing it on the anvil.

  CLANG

  Willa walks across the room in front of me, singing a verse that is not a hymn, but a Psalm—You have taken account of my wanderings; Put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book? She gives the man the card she had given me.

  Alex is beside me, my letter finally in his hand. There is no greater pain than love, he says, and there is no greater joy.

  The man takes the letter.

  Jackie’s mother walks past, a small wooden cross in her hand. Our troubles do not test our faith, our troubles make our faith.

  Ms. Massachusetts hands the man the tip of her fingernail—We are separated only by our prejudices, she says, and then she is gone.

  CLANG, CLANG, CLANG, CLANG

  Pine needles from Rudolph, who says there are worlds I do not see and yet see me. Napkins from David Walker, who says the wheels of history are turned by the hands of the ordinary.

  The woman from the mall gives the man a hat and tells me we all will stumble without one another.

  There is Jordan, sweet Jordan, who hands over a piece of bubble gum and says, We are each other’s angels, all of us, and our q
uestions lift us upward.

  There is Logan, still in his dinosaur costume and with a golf tee in his hand, who says that every day can be a day of birth to who we are and a day of death to who we were.

  And there is one final person. Standing alone near me. He walks to me and smiles, then places his hands on my shoulders.

  You’re good, Andy, Eric says. It is not a question now. Not a dying sort of wondering. It is truth and it is fact and it is good.

  Eric walks to the man and hands him the key chain. The man takes it in one hand. Resting the hammer on the anvil, the man reaches out with his other hand and rests it on Eric’s shoulder. He gives Eric a squeeze and a pat, much as a proud father would give his son for a life well lived and a purpose fulfilled.

  Eric takes his place among the rest as the man lifts the hammer one last time and

  CLANG

  molds it into the metal.

  It is finished, the man says.

  He turns his face, plain but kinglike, and invites me to him. He raises the work of his hands.

  A mirror.

  It gleams by an unseen light and catches the reflection of the Old Man. I touch my face and he touches his, and I know they are both one and the same.

  He points beyond where we stand toward the darkness. Two paths appear before me: one narrow and steep, one wide and flat. The man says, Walk on.

  I don’t know the path, I answer.

  The man smiles as a light now shines upon the wide path. A figure is bathed in white, arms outstretched. She faces me.

  Elizabeth.

  Gone are the glasses and the streak of gray in her brown hair. Gone is the rumpled denim shirt and the untied tennis shoes. She is not Elizabeth as she was, she is Elizabeth as she is.

  The man says, The world is not solid, Andy. Keep to the deep places. See a new way.