Angel Song

by Sheila Walsh

  “You must have impressed him during whatever it was. He asked for your cell number. I told him I wasn’t allowed to give out personal information. Margaret almost killed me when she found out I did that, but hey, I’m not going to be the one to give your number to some stalker, right?”

  “Thanks, Jen, I feel much safer knowing you’re on my team.”

  “I know, right? I’ve got your back. Margaret got all freaked and I honestly thought she was going to stroke out right here in the office. Then”—she began to speak so softly Ann could barely hear her—“I noticed she’d been back in her office with the door closed for a while, so I made up an excuse and went in there ‘looking for a file.’ Guess who she was talking to?”

  “Jen, you sneak.”

  “Hey, a girl’s got to do what she’s got to do. I walked in just in time to hear her say that Marston would be very interested in pitching the staging for his newest building. She was glaring at me and motioning with her head for me to get out of there, but I stalled as long as I could. So long, in fact, that as I was walking out the door, I heard her say, ‘Only Ann?’ in that screechy voice she uses when she’s stressed. I’m betting he told her he would only work with you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. And if Margaret’s looks could kill, I’d be a dead woman right now, but she hasn’t said anything about it yet.”

  “Jen! What if she’d come out and fired you on the spot?”

  “Oh, she’s so engrossed in the idea of getting a project from Patrick Stinson that she’s already forgotten about me. Hey . . . just an FYI . . . The rumor I’ve heard is that he can get a little, uh . . . aggressively friendly with the females he works around, and he works around a lot of females. I’m sure you can handle him, but just so you know.”

  “Thanks for the down low. If I end up working with him, I’ll be sure to keep him in line.”

  “No doubt.” Jen laughed. “Anyway, Margaret’s been practically dancing around since he called, in spite of everything else.”

  The thought of Margaret dancing would have made Ann laugh at any other time. Today, it didn’t. “In spite of what else?”

  “Well, you know, the Beka thing.” Jen paused for just a second. “I mean, Beka called you, right? I assumed that she would have called you already.”

  “What Beka thing?”

  “Margaret called Beka into her office first thing this morning, before all this, and told her that as of the end of the month, she was being laid off.”

  “She did what?” Ann jumped to her feet. “Transfer me back to Margaret.” Beka had been Ann’s best friend since their days as classmates at Parsons. Unfortunately, Beka’s relationship with Margaret had always been tense, making her an easy target.

  “Don’t tell her I told you anything, okay?” Jen’s voice dropped even lower. “You know how she gets.”

  “Not a word, I promise.”

  “Right. Hold on just a minute.” There was a long, classicalmusic-filled pause, during which time Ann was sure that Jen was filling Margaret in on what had happened to Sarah. She was equally certain that Margaret wouldn’t mention it. The line clicked.

  “Ann, amazing news. Patrick Stinson called here and he wants Marston Staging to pitch Stinson Towers. I’ve already started preparing for the meeting. I want you to be the lead designer on the project.”

  She wanted Ann to be the lead designer. Right. Did she really think Ann wouldn’t find out that Patrick Stinson had asked for her specifically? Well, two could play this game. “All right. Of course, I’ll want Beka working on the presentation with me.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” She offered a dramatic sigh. “Beka, unfortunately, will be leaving us in a few weeks. She’ll need to be working on her own projects until then, getting them finished. But I’ll work alongside you every step of the way.”

  “Beka’s leaving? Did she find another job or something? She hadn’t told me she was leaving.”

  “Times are hard, and I’ve had to make some hard decisions.”

  “Margaret, if you’ll remember, I took a significant pay cut last month to keep something like this from happening. Beka does amazing work, and you know that she needs this job; she needs the insurance more than anyone else in the company.” Beka’s daughter had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and the treatment costs alone were staggering. Margaret knew this well enough, but as usual, Margaret acted on Margaret’s best interest.

  “Look, I don’t want to cut Beka loose any more than you want me to. Last month I thought I’d found an investor, someone who would act as a silent business partner, but that fell through. Now I’m faced with the hard reality of today’s economy. Unfortunately, Beka is a casualty.”

  “What if we land the Stinson job?”

  “Then we would reevaluate, of course.” She paused a moment, letting that one sink in. “I’m sure you’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we get it. In fact, I’ve already found some photos of their most recent project. I’ll e-mail them over to you so you can take a look. I want you to take what’s been done and do it two steps better.”

  “Two steps better. Definitely.” Ann spit out the words, hardly even knowing what she was agreeing to.

  “I expect no less, even though I understand that you’ve had some, issues, there. I know it’s very difficult, and I know you’re overwhelmed, but this is important.” Margaret paused for a split second, and Ann almost thought she was going to offer condolences. Then she said, “I’ll leave you to get to your work,” and the phone went dead.

  Okay then.

  Ann punched in Beka’s cell number, barely waiting until Beka answered before she said, “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Oh, honey.” Beka was speaking softly, obviously to keep from being overheard in the office, but also just as obviously choked with emotion. “How could I burden you with this right now? It’s been less than twelve hours since you called to tell me about Sarah. I couldn’t dump this on you too.”

  “That’s what friends are for.”

  “You just take care of yourself, okay? I’d give anything if I could be there; you know that, right?”

  “Yeah, I know.” And she did know. She also knew that she needed to do something for Beka, and she would, no matter what it took.

  Tammy stroked her son’s hair and sang softly long after he’d cried himself to sleep. Only now was he starting to understand the truth—that Sarah was gone and was never coming back. The realization had come slowly, then hit hard. He’d sobbed until his strength failed and he could do nothing but whimper as sleep finally claimed him. “Rest well, my sweet darlin’,” she whispered, then leaned forward to kiss the top of his head. Still, she didn’t leave his bedside.

  How could they go on without Sarah? She had been like the third member of their family, her life so much a part of theirs that things would surely implode without her.

  Tammy thought back to a cold winter’s night just last year. Sarah had poured hot chocolate for the three of them from a beautiful hand-painted cloisonné pitcher. Tammy had run her finger along the graceful curve of the handle. “This is beautiful.”

  “Thanks. It was my great-great-grandmother’s. Her father painted china back in the old country. It was the only thing she brought with her when she moved here.”

  Keith took a sip of his hot chocolate. “It makes good hot chocolate too.”

  Sarah smiled at him. “I think so too, Keith. It makes the best hot chocolate.” She used a napkin to wipe a drip from the spout. “It’s not worth anything really, but I love the history behind it.”

  A moment later Keith stood up from the table, stumbled on the leg of his chair, and knocked the pitcher to the floor with a crash that echoed through the kitchen. Fragments of china lay in a pool of cocoa at his feet. Sarah gasped and threw her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide with the horror of it.

  Keith bent over the mess on the floor. “I’m so stupid. So stupid. I ruin everything.”

  Sarah walke
d over to him, the hint of tears glistening in her eyes. She knelt on the floor beside him and enveloped him in her arms. “Thank you, Keith.”

  He looked up at her, the surprise of her words enough to temporarily stop the meltdown. “What for? It was pretty and special and I broke it.”

  “Well, you’re right about the pretty and special part.” She took a deep breath, and Tammy knew she was fighting for control. “And I’ve been thinking for a long time now that something so beautiful shouldn’t be kept up on a shelf where no one ever sees it except on those rare occasions when we drink hot chocolate. I’ve been thinking about breaking it and taking it to an artist friend of mine who makes mosaic tiles. That way I could put it somewhere that I’d see it all the time. It could make me happy every day.”

  “Really?” Keith wiped his eyes. “Do you mean it?”

  “Absolutely.” Sarah gave a firm nod of the head. Tammy suspected she was trying to convince herself. “Now, you go wash the sticky off your hands while I gather the pieces. Just you wait and see—it will be beautiful.”

  Two weeks later Sarah brought over a small mosaic tile and presented it to Keith. She had a similar one on her kitchen counter at home, but Keith’s had the teapot handle, intact, sticking out from it. “Keith, I want you to put this someplace where you can always remember. Even something that appears broken, in the hands of a master artist, can be made into something more beautiful than the original.”

  “Like Jesus does for us,” he’d said in his unique and simple faith, then set the tile on his dresser in the display stand that Sarah had brought him. Even now in the dark, Tammy could see its outline on Keith’s dresser. He rubbed his fingers across that tile on days when things were going wrong. “It reminds me,” he would say.

  “I need that reminder too,” Tammy whispered as she walked from the room. She wasn’t certain how she could face the next few days bearing the weight of her grief. And Keith, well, he was going to be so difficult as he continued to work through all this. Today he had vacillated between asking her, “Why you sad?” and all-out wailing because he missed Sarah. It was likely to be relived over and over in the next few days. Tammy didn’t feel like she had the strength to face it.

  She made her way to the kitchen and began unloading the dishwasher, flashes of Sarah playing through her mind. The image that seemed to hover in her mind the most was of Sarah at her kitchen table, her blonde hair sticking out in all directions from her messy bun, wearing a T-shirt, sweatpants, and glasses that looked like Sarah Palin’s. Large textbooks were spread out all around her on the table, and she had a pencil in her mouth, another in her hand, and a third behind her ear. She always looked so tired during finals or when she had a paper due. How often had Tammy envied her? What would it be like to work yourself to the point of exhaustion and actually move toward a goal in the process?

  With Keith, homeschooling was the best option, which made working from home her only means of income. She enjoyed her sewing business, but she had no hopes of a better education, of a better job, or of ever having money left over at the end of the month.

  She parted the curtains that looked toward Sarah’s house. There was a light on in the kitchen and the dim glow of the television in the living room. Poor Annie. Suddenly Tammy felt selfish for feeling so sorry for herself. She still had Keith. And Ethan. Ann was left alone with no family at all. Tammy couldn’t begin to imagine it.

  She needed to do something to help Ann, but what? She thought of the pillows she’d been making for Sarah and decided she would make them for Ann now, just so she would know that there were still people here for her, people who would help her in any way they could. Tammy knew she wouldn’t sleep tonight until she finished them.

  In her sewing room, she looked at all the alterations she needed to finish by tomorrow afternoon. They would have to wait. For now, she pulled out the fabric she’d chosen just a few weeks ago. At the time, the bright colors had seemed so appropriate. Sarah was graduating; her sister was coming to visit for the first time in years. It held all the colors of new starts and happy beginnings. Now they seemed so wrong. But they would have to move past that, because Sarah would want them to be happy. Maybe, by this one little gesture, Annie would get a measure of cheer.

  It was after one in the morning when Tammy finally stood up and walked through the kitchen to the laundry area. She started a load of darks, then walked over to the stack of Keith’s crayon drawings.

  The first was a drawing of Sarah—Tammy could identify Sarah’s stick figure by the large hoop earrings—throwing a ball to the Keith stick figure in his wire-rimmed glasses. Tammy couldn’t decide if she wanted to laugh or cry at the sight of it. At least she supposed it was a healthy way for Keith to work through his grief.

  The next drawing was the dark-haired Ann hugging Sarah, big blue tears falling from both of their faces, and the yellow glow that could only be an angel looking down on them. The last showed Sarah, a huge smile on her face, in the clouds with angels all around her. The sun had a smiley face in this particular picture, and even the clouds had happy faces. Keith had written, “Brokken made butiful.”

  This time the tears flowed unabated as Tammy closed her eyes. “Thank You, Lord, for giving him to me.”

  “Mama, Mama!” Keith’s panicked voice came from his room. “Mama!”

  Tammy ran down the hallway and into her son’s room. “I’m here, honey, what do you need?”

  “Sarah. Will the angels bring her back?”

  “No, darlin’. No, they won’t.”

  “Please, please. Make them bring her back.” A new wave of tears, a new wave of grief, another day in the life that was Tammy’s.

  She hugged her son close and once again whispered, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you.”

  Ann looked out the side window toward Tammy’s house. She didn’t know how she would have made it through the day without her help, yet something about Tammy made her uneasy. And Keith . . . well, he made her downright uncomfortable.

  His talk about angels and his pictures of angels, they fed into her hallucinations—her paracusias—until the song played over and over and over in her mind, making it all seem so real. Not something she wanted to reinforce.

  She walked over to the computer, typed in her account information, and found an e-mail from Margaret. She opened the photos of the last designs for Stinson, and her skin seemed to tighten around her body, squeezing against her face, her neck, her chest. It cranked tighter and tighter with each successive picture. The first room had two gray leather sofas—one twoarmed, the other one-armed—and a black rug against a black tile floor. A blue handblown glass vase added a touch of color and contrasted perfectly against the room’s structured geometry. Serene and sophisticated. These designs were amazing. How was she supposed to go two steps better than this?

  Ann enjoyed creating new ways to show off spaces, to spotlight the positive features of an area, but she never seemed to reach perfection. She remembered the James’s living room. How many times had she adjusted the side tables, rearranged the art, moved the chairs just an inch or two? She knew that, even now, if she walked back into that room, she’d find something to move. She looked at the photo on her screen and guessed that the designer who’d done this room never had to move anything a second time.

  Well, Ann needed to get busy, be prepared to do her very best work. She pulled out her sketch pad, prepared to rework the room. Her pencil remained poised, ready . . . and unmoving. The problem was, for Ann, creativity required heart. At this moment, she couldn’t even feel hers.

  At just after midnight, with her cursor hovering over the power button, the thought that had been nagging at the back of her mind turned into an insistent demand. Maybe it was because she was tired, or more likely the grief just caused her to slip from reality for a moment. Whatever the reason, she pulled up the Google screen and typed in “angels.”

  The first two links had to do with the baseball team in California. Ann laughed aloud. Only then did
she realize how tense she’d been while waiting for the answer, as if she expected “People who lose their minds and hear angels singing” to be first and foremost on the list. Time to get a grip.

  She looked farther down and clicked on another link. The site offered a “personalized angel print.” After you filled out a form to indicate the physical traits you’d like your angel to have, an artist would paint it for you and send it to you, “all for the low price of $29.99.”

  Changing tactics, she googled “angels’ songs,” which netted a link to a YouTube video of a group of five-year-olds wearing gold tinsel halos and singing “Joy to the World.” Ann smiled. This search was obviously a ridiculous waste of time.

  In a last effort to close this chapter for good, she typed in “angel water sound.” This search provided a list of sites selling angel snow globes or angel statues for outdoor gardens, but one link intrigued her enough that she clicked on it. It opened with a picture of an angel and these words:

  When the creatures moved, I heard the sound of their wings, like the roar of rushing waters, like the voice of the Almighty, like the tumult of an army. When they stood still, they lowered their wings. Ezekiel 1:24

  Ann knew it was a Bible verse, but it had nothing to do with music at all—and was it really about angels? It simply referred to them as “creatures.” Yet somehow, it was connected.

  Long after she went to bed that night, the music continued to ebb and flow through her mind. She’d fallen asleep remembering the words from the verse . . . “the sound of their wings” . . . “like the roar of rushing waters” . . . while the memory of the song flowed through her mind, the notes playing in her brain like water crashing onto the beach.

  The music had lost none of its power, showed no sign of letting up. Ann hoped she could keep her sanity through the long days ahead.

  Chapter 6

  The smell of damp soil and freshly cut grass lingered, perhaps anchored in place by the humidity that saturated the early afternoon air. Everything about this day felt . . . heavy. Even the clouds seemed less like fluff and more like mush. With May’s heat beating off hundreds of headstones, Ann watched the last of the well-wishers return to their cars—back to their families and their lives. Now, for one last time, she could be alone with her sister.