by Sean Stewart
". . . I asked her why she shot the bird. You know what she said? '—Because it was free.'
Delicately, Dante touched the thread of Laura's guilt. On angel's feet he followed it into her darkness. "In China she'd still be at home, wouldn't she?" he said softly.
"This isn't China," Laura said, twisting her key in the ignition.
Fierce as a hawk.
THE DESCENT TO HADES IS THE SAME FROM EVERY PLACE. —ANAXAGORAS
CHAPTER
TEN
Sunday dinner was quiet without Dante and Jet. When the meal was over and the dishes had been done, Sarah absently closed the fridge door a small hand had pulled open. A moment later she whirled, heart in her mouth, only to find she was once again alone. And yet, there on the floor she clearly saw a set of muddy sneaker prints, about the right size for an eight-year-old child, trailing from the refrigerator to the kitchen door.
The sight raced over her like frost, making her skin tingle, then go numb. Still and cold she stood, like a little girl turned to glass; that empty and breakable.
With sudden clarity she saw that a kind of fairy tale was growing up around her. Dante and the other angels were only seeing the beginning. It was a new world now, the world of her grandmother's Hungarian fairy tales: a world of witches, of talking beasts and crying statues, of omens and wolves and wicked stepmothers. Like a little girl lost, she stood in the kitchen, enchanted into glass. The magic Dante dreaded so much was hissing down around her like the rain, blurring her view of her parents' fine rational world, tickering against her glass arms and legs, creeping down her glass cheeks; and the night rose up and up, running like a river in her heart.
0 God, her little girl.
She forced herself to move.
It shattered her inside. Her little girl.
Splinters of grief exploded in her chest. She couldn't bear it. How could she bear it? She couldn't, not without help. She had always prided herself on her toughness, but since Dante found the body in his bedroom something had made her weak, had shown her how fragile her life really was, and then come to blow it all apart.
She looked wildly for Aunt Sophie. On the main floor, in the basement; she ran upstairs and banged on Sophie's door without getting an answer. Ran back into the parlor. Something—a faint creak from the back porch, a sound like a small body leaning against the screen—drew her to the kitchen door. She peered down to the boathouse and saw Aunt Sophie standing on the dock.
It was cold dusk outside. She ran down through the garden and out to the end of the dock, her feet suddenly loud on the planking. there she found Aunt Sophie, swaddled in her big wool coat, looking into the river.
Sarah was breathing hard, sending clouds of gray vapor into the chilly air. "I've got to talk to you."
Aunt Sophie did not even turn.
"I've got to talk," Sarah repeated. She was crying. "I have to talk to someone and you're the only one who can understand."
Up behind the house the tallest maples raised their bare branches against a pale skyline, but down in the valley it was already dark. The river slid downstream, wide and silent before them, whispering to the wooden dock supports and the patient bank. In the middle of the channel, Three Hawk island lay like a giant sleeping on his back. A crow flapped heavily across the narrow band of blue sky guttering overhead. Like smoke, he vanished into the tangled darkness of the southern shore.
Aunt Sophie stirred at last; planks squeaked beneath her sneakers. She had a scarf wound around her head, old baba style, to keep out the cold. A cigarette butt shook between her fingers. She tossed it in the river. "Damn birds," she muttered.
"I know about Pendleton," Sarah said. "And Jet."
"You do, do you?" Aunt Sophie watched the river. "That's more than I can say."
"Aren't your hands cold?" Sarah asked. "Put them in your pockets, why don't you?"
Aunt Sophie did not put her hands in her pockets.
"You're crying," Aunt Sophie said. Reaching inside her coat, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes, pausing to accommodate a wrenching smoker's cough. She rummaged in the pack and drew one out. Her old, fat, liver-spotted hands were shaking. She put the cigarette in her mouth and struck a match. It hissed and spat sparks. "All right," Aunt Sophie said. "Talk."
It was the cigarette Sarah remembered: the bitter smell of it; Aunt Sophie coughing; the red tip wavering in the gloom, brighter and brighter as darkness fell around them. She couldn't remember Aunt Sophie's face at all; her coughs and grunts and terse, bitter swearing came out of the shadows of her scarf, and the cigarette tip danced, glowing, dipping, fainting and fading like a firefly winking above the impenetrable river.
"I was nineteen," Sarah said. "I must have been a slow developer, because it took me that long to be a stupid adolescent. Having left it so late, I really had to work to cram it in."
"I remember." Aunt Sophie coughed—wryly, if such a thing were possible. "Lawrence, wasn't it?"
"It was," Sarah said. "God knows why I went out with it. Its attractions elude me now." (The cigarette tip jiggled, accompanied by a phlegmy chuckle.) "Mostly it was the only thing that showed any interest in going to bed with an overweight social disaster just smart enough to be feared. So I and it went to bed."
"This was before or after your father told him never to see you again?"
"Oh, after. Definitely after."
"Hunh! I told Anton that was a stupid thing to do."
Sarah paused, surprised. So they had talked about her, had they? Well of course they had. Where did this curious blindness come from in children, that assumes parents don't exist except when they're in front of you? Of course they would have argued about her: Mom and Aunt Sophie while cooking dinner, Mom and Dad in bed. Dad and Aunt Sophie at any mutually convenient time; they had bickered continually back in those days.
Still night fell around Sarah like the rain. "So we went to bed," Sarah said. All the muscles in her stomach knotted up. "I got pregnant."
"Assholes have strong sperm," Aunt Sophie remarked. "You can be safe with a decent guy for years, but a real bastard'll knock you up in no time."
"Of course the first thing I did was break up with him."
"It. Lawrence. Whether I kept the baby or not, I sure as hell wasn't going to . . . Anyway, Lawrence was out. I didn't know if I would keep the baby. It was paralyzing. For two weeks I walked around like a zombie. I actually got as far as Mom's door once, but I couldn't face going in.
"Ever tell her?"
"Later," Sarah whispered. She closed her eyes. "I walked around in a daze all day. At night I prayed for the baby to die." In her heart, castles were burning.
"—I prayed for it to die. And it did."
For a long second the cigarette tip held perfectly still, red as Mars, a single point of light against the great sliding darkness of the river and the shadowed valley.
Aunt Sophie sighed.
The wooden dock creaked as Sarah rocked back and forth. "I was six weeks pregnant when I miscarried. Six weeks and two days. The pain was incredible. I took a fistful of Tylenol Threes from Dad's bag but I couldn't stop crying. Mom found me-in the bathtub in the middle of the night," she whispered. "Sitting crying in the bathtub with blood all over my skirt."
"Sweet Jesus." Aunt Sophie turned, and took one of the girl's hands in her own. "Shhh, Sarah. You didn't do anything, sweetheart."
"I killed my daughter." Sarah crushed her eyes closed, as if that would somehow stop her from crying. "I wanted her to die and she died."
The river ran, and the old dock creaked sadly in the falling dark. Sarah looked out into the darkness, watching it fill the river valley and spill over its sides, watching the blue sky turn the color of a crow's wing.
"She would have been eight years old," she said.
And Sophie coughed and cursed. "It's not your fault," she said, shaking Sarah angrily. "It happens all the time. It's not your damn fault, okay?"
"Isn't it my fault? How do you know? The mind and the body are hoo
ked up pretty tightly. That's what Dad says."
Aunt Sophie grunted and spat. "Good God, Sarah. Don't listen to your father, of all people."
Sarah opened her eyes to glare fiercely at the darkness. "If it isn't my fault, why is she back?" She spun to face Aunt Sophie squarely. "Don't give me the usual line of crap, okay? I came to you because you know what it means to lose a child. Because you lost Jet. Don't tell me it wasn't my fault; that's no damn good to me. Just tell me how to keep from going crazy, will you? Just tell me how to survive. Because I can't stand it, I can't stand it. I can't stand it even one more time God knows; I'm gonna throw myself in the fucking river if I see her again."
The cigarette tip blazed-as Aunt Sophie took a long drag. Sarah could hear the crackle as it burned. Then a long sigh; curls of smoke and vapor in the cold air.
Aunt Sophie took her cigarette between two shaking fingers and tossed it into the river. "I don't know what to tell you," she said.
"Do you ever think of Pendleton? I mean, really think of him, anymore?"
"Yeah. I do sometimes." Very slowly Aunt Sophie spoke, and from a deep place, hidden to Sarah. "Yes I do. Sometimes."
"Don't you ever look at Jet?" Sarah demanded. "Don't you ever look-at Jet and say, My God, what have I done? What did I make? How did I ever fuck this up so badly?"
Aunt Sophie didn't answer.
"Well how do you stand it?" Sarah was crying too hard to keep the bitter strength in her voice. It broke and went ragged. "Please tell me how to keep going, Aunt Sophie. Because I've seen my daughter three times in the last three days and I really need to know, god damn it. I really need your help."
For a long time, Aunt Sophie did not answer. "I don't know," she said at last. "I don't know how we stand anything. Just too stupid to know better, I guess."
And Sarah was too weak, too weak and hurt and empty, to keep from getting folded into Aunt Sophie's big arms and held, shuddering and sobbing in the cold night. Too weak to stop Aunt Sophie from turning her around and guiding her up the dock and the garden path, big fat limbs sure and comforting as white bread baking, as the sound of sewing machines in the next room; leading her up to the house whose windows gleamed yellow against the darkness. Too tired to run back under the river. Too tired to do anything but climb the back steps at last, and step into the house.
* * *
Portrait
Here are pictures of the angel Jewel; I dug them up in the newspaper archives. Jewel at twenty-six on someone's arm in the Society column; Jewel at thirty-one, giving her plea-bargained evidence at the securities fraud trial of Liam Stratton, the Persuasive Trader; Jewel at thirty-five, acknowledged queen of the city Angels' Guild, in a color photo Time would use as part of their cover story on the astonishing angel Tristan Chu, 1975's Man of the Year.
You can see a vision of Jewel in Gainsborough's "Perdita": a delicate, oval face with a small, set mouth, eyebrows surprisingly coarse, and dark eyes that freeze your marrow. Looking into them is like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun: the threat is that naked.
Even her earliest pictures carry this brooding quality. It's most alarming when she smiles. You can see why Pendleton would have fallen for her; to a moth like him, greedy for power, she must have been a wick of pure fire.
Poor Pendleton. Poor, stupid, god damned coward traitor Pendleton.
I got what he deserved.
* * *
The Angels' Guild maintained their offices in a spacious Victorian house that had once belonged to a celebrated poisoner. Back in the seventies a journalist had nicknamed it Hell, because it was the one place you could always find a synod of brooding angels. The name had stuck.
Jet And Laura followed Dante as he climbed the porch steps and then hesitated, standing before the heavy oak door. All his life, Dante had tried hard to ignore the angel in himself, but here, on Hell's doorstep, he found himself wondering if the time for that was past.
Maybe—the thought came with a sudden surge of unexpected longing—maybe he could be proud of what he carried inside himself. Maybe there was a place where he could celebrate his magic, rather than carrying it like one of Jet's unclean secrets.
He shook his head, surprised at himself, and pushed Hell's door open, walking into a long, dim hallway.
From somewhere within the darkness inside, a small bell tinkled, announcing their entry.
Dante hissed sharply between his teeth.
"Looks like a junk shop," Laura said.
Laura liked a certain harmony in her surroundings, but there was nothing harmonious about this place. A collection of coats and scarves and jackets hung from pegs on the wall. Above these ran two long shelves, one on each side, each seemingly cluttered with miscellaneous objects. Aging dolls with cracked porcelain faces, little girls' ice-skates, sleeveless records and derelict turntables, radios with broken vacuum tubes, a twelve-year-old's pretend velvet cocktail dress, and a Mason jar holding an ancient marble collection: the sad remnants of a hundred lives. "Are you sure this is the right address?" she said.
"Oh yes," Dante whispered.
Ghosts swayed and sighed everywhere around him. Each broken toy, each cracked cup leaked its secrets into the dense air. "Can't you feel the memories?" Dante shuddered as the angel in him woke, and began to stir.
"It's . . . it's sort of a joke," he finally said. "To you it just looks like junk. But if you're an angel . . ."
With every breath he took in a dizzying perfume of memories, mixed from lust and ancient spite, tenderness and green rage. He wanted to close his eyes, stop his ears, press his arms to his head and hide. "These are magic things," he said, unable to look at the bric-a-brac lining the walls. "Each one is like a dream. Like a dream you can't help having when you walk by."
Surely the whole house couldn't be like this, he told himself. What angel could bear it?
And what could Jewel be like, the angel who founded it? The one he was stupidly trying to find. Jewel hungered for these ghosts, swallowed them whole. Jewel had set up Hell to smolder with memories and old emotions.
He felt Jet next to him, cold and empty as a mirror, camera bumping on his chest like a demon's amulet full of stolen souls. Jet lifted it to take a picture of the hallway. "A joke?" he murmured. "But I don't hear you laughing, D. Where's your sense of humor?"
"On the boathouse floor," Dante said, grimacing. "With a lot of my better parts."
(And he saw Laura's Chrysler Tower earrings spinning, spinning; her long hand, with her mother's talon buried inside, her long hand reaching, reaching for the bottom of a tarnished bird cage on her right, where a pair of black-handled scissors lay, with a twist of long blond hair curling around the blades. The blades were bright, shiny and attractive. Laura reached for them through the open bird cage door.)
"For God's sake, don't touch that!" Dante hissed, grabbing her hand.
Laura jumped back, spooked and angry, her hand cocked and bunched into a fist. For an instant he thought she was going to crack him on his bruised arm again, but she held back. "Come on," he pleaded, and after a moment's stiff resistance she allowed him to pull her down the hallway.
A door opened, revealing a sharp-featured woman dressed in severe silks. "Welcome to Hell," she said, tense and unsmiling. "I'm the virgil tonight."
Jet snickered. "And this is Dante!" he cried, presenting his brother. "He's been looking for you for some—"
"Dante!" The virgil's eyes widened. "Urn—wait just a second. Don't go away!"
They heard her footsteps pounding up an unseen flight of stairs.
Jet watched her go. "He's been in need of a Virgil for quite some time," he finished. "Well, D., I'd say they've been expecting you."
"Oh shit," Dante said weakly.
"That was the angel the cops brought in to check out your place," Laura said. "I'm sure of it." She looked at Dante thoughtfully. "She was definitely hiding something that night. Angels do that a lot when they think other angels are involved in a crime; at least, that's what the cop
said."
Jet frowned. "You know, if any of the angels in here can regularly predict the future, they may well be expecting us." He shook his head. "Isn't that a curious feeling: that someone else may know what we're going to do, before we know ourselves."
The hallway door opened and the virgil returned, accompanied by a middle-aged Chinese-American man with a narrow, hatched-shaped head. His fingers were dry and light. To Dante everything about him seemed light, as if instead of watery organs and muscles, something altogether more fleeting and electric filled his skin. He reached to shake Dante's hand. At his touch, a humming shock flew up Dante's arm and crackled over his body like sheet lightning.
"Good evening," the stranger said in unaccented English. "My name is Tristan Chu."
In the room behind him, five or six angels sat watching. Dante wondered if any of them knew how this visit would turn out. Not for sure, if Aunt Sophie's coins were any indication of how future-telling usually worked. Not with all the details.
Dante still felt shaky from Chu's touch. In a white sac inside himself he felt something stretch, and blindly move.
He willed it to stillness.
Jet nodded, studying Chu. "You were one of Jewel's pupils. I recognize you from the pictures."
Chu turned to Jet. The pleasant smile he had prepared died in a quick hiss of breath. He reached out, running his fingers lightly over Jet's butterfly birthmark, like a blind man reading Braille. "This is about you," Chu said flatly.
"Don't touch me," Jet said, slapping Chu's hand away from his face. There was a quick hiss of indrawn breath from the angels watching in the sitting room.
Chu shuddered, looking at his fingertips. They were red, as if tracing Jet's butterfly had burned them. "My apologies," he murmured. "Terribly rude of me."
Laura had recovered from her initial astonishment. "Tristan Chu! I've always wanted to tell you how much I love your work! The stadium, of course, but particularly the hospital."
Chu smiled thinly. "It is a quirk of history that the hospital has been overshadowed by that stupid World Series fiasco. But after all, home field advantage existed long before Harmony Stadium." He shrugged. "I just . . . gave it its head, that's all."
