Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  When we were kids, Grandma was always telling us she was “about to have a come apart.” It was one of the few regional expressions from her own childhood in Georgia she retained after marrying my grandfather, a Pennsylvania boy who was stationed at Fort Benning before and after World War II.

  Neely and I used to dig each other with our elbows and snicker as we imagined Grandma literally coming apart, limbs dropping all over the kitchen, hair falling out, eyeballs hitting the linoleum and rolling under the refrigerator.

  I’ve always known what those words were supposed to mean, but today I believe they truly describe me. I’ve dealt with a lot of stress and high-pressure situations throughout my life but too much has happened in too short a period of time, and I have too much to fix and solve and protect today. I don’t feel like I can cope. I want to crawl back into bed with my MOF, and a cream-filled Zuchelli doughnut, and watch bad TV.

  But I can’t. For starters, I have an abandoned little boy downstairs eating non-fake Cinnamon Toast Crunch who happens to be a nephew I never knew I had.

  I also have dozens of missed calls on my cell, including one from the mayor and another from the president of the town council reminding me that I’m obligated to give a full account of any shootings at the next meeting. They only require this so they can hear the gory details firsthand and then dole it out one gossipy spoonful at a time to their friends and families.

  Before I go back to the station and begin the endless paperwork and media song and dance resulting from last night’s shooting, I’m going to swing by and see Grandma. She has this ability to help me conquer my problems without ever providing any useful answers to them. I also want to tell her about Champ and Mason. And I also want to pump her for information about the Trulys.

  It occurred to me when Miranda was slandering my mother and me and mentioned her friendship with my grandmother who had refused to claim me that my grandmother who not only claimed me but practically raised me was a player in all this, too. She’s lived in Buchanan since arriving here at the age of twenty already pregnant with the baby who would be too pretty for sandboxes and strained spinach. Miranda Truly is probably ten years younger, but they would know each other or certainly know of each other. Between Grandma and her circle of friends at the home, I can find out more about the Truly family in the time it takes to drink a pot of coffee than Nolan and his databases could ever uncover.

  I put on one of my most serious summer suits, since I’ll be giving interviews: a pale gray skirt and jacket with a tiny pink pinstripe. I usually wear an old broken-in pair of gray faux-leather pumps with a reasonable heel but as I stand in front of my shoe shelves today feeling overwhelmed and insecure, my hand seems to have a mind of its own and reaches for my new four-inch stiletto, blush suede, peep-toes. I’ll be taller than just about every man I come in contact with today, and if that doesn’t intimidate them, my fabulousness will.

  I make Mason take a shower and change his clothes while I return phone calls. I begin by calling the hospital. Zane’s still in ICU. There’s been no change in his condition.

  Champ remembered to leave Mason’s clothes and belongings behind when he took off in his car this morning. The boy has a suitcase and a duffel bag. He won’t let me look in either of them. I agreed as long as he promised me he had no animals or weapons.

  “You look nice, Aunt Dove,” he tells me as we meet near my front door.

  He’s changed into a pair of bright blue soccer shorts with a silver stripe down the sides, a yellow Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, and another pair of orange socks he promises are clean.

  “Do you know who Guns N’ Roses are?” I ask him.

  “Dad likes them,” he replies.

  He scrunches up his face, grabs an imaginary mike, and launches into an Axl Rose falsetto.

  “ ‘Welcome to the jungle. We got fun and games . . . ,” he shrieks.

  “Okay. You’ve convinced me.”

  “I like their name,” he says. “I like it when things go together that shouldn’t go together.”

  “Like your socks and everything else in your wardrobe?”

  He gives me an almost pitying look.

  “Orange goes with everything.”

  I have no choice but to take him to Neely’s. He says he can stay by himself, but I’m not comfortable with an unsupervised nine-year-old hanging out in my house. I don’t tell her we’re coming. She had a rough night, too. I decide it’s better to tell her what Champ has done in person and then dump his offspring on her. If I called her first, she’d say no, and if I showed up anyway, she’d send Smoke out with a note attached to his collar.

  It’s another beautiful day. Low eighties. Dry. Not a cloud in the sky. Our Junes are usually a mishmash of rainy, frustratingly cold days interspersed with bouts of freakish heat and humidity so high the air is almost drinkable. Boots with a parka over cutoffs and a tube top is common attire for a summer cookout around here. The weather’s been almost too nice. People are being lulled into a false sense of Santa Monica perfection that’s going to end badly for them when the temperature suddenly drops into the fifties and it pours for a week straight.

  Neely’s dogs come trotting out of the woods to greet us, tongues lolling, tails waving. They don’t make a sound, but the trees all around us are filled with chirping birds and chattering squirrels jumping from branch to branch.

  “Have they ever killed anybody?” Mason asks before getting out of the car.

  “Of course not. Didn’t you play with them yesterday?”

  He nods.

  “Then you know they’re very friendly, very well-trained dogs.”

  “Yeah, but they look like they kill people all the time.”

  “Well, they don’t.”

  “But they could.”

  “But they don’t. Are you afraid of them?”

  “No. But I might need someone killed someday.”

  This conversation is starting to concern me. I’m reminded again how little I know about him and his life with his father.

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He turns away from me.

  “A bad guy,” he says, and opens the door.

  Kriss, Kross, and Owen descend on him. They love kids and don’t get to be around many. Maybe stays back. I wonder if he can sense telepathically that something terrible has happened to his buddy Tug and he’s not feeling social. I’m sure he knew when Tug was here yesterday that he was a wreck.

  Smoke waits for Neely, who comes strolling down the gravel drive with her hands in her jeans pockets.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” she says to me.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Zane?”

  “Too early to tell. Still unconscious. You want to tell me who’s paying for Sandra?”

  “I have some money stashed away.”

  “On top of what we pay for Grandma’s home, you can afford Sandra? You realize there’s no way Tug isn’t going to jail for this unless Sandra is given the opportunity to razzle-dazzle a courtroom with a bunch of extreme emotional disturbance rigamarole, and those billable hours are going to add up to the cost of a house.”

  “Rigamarole?” she repeats with an amused cock of her head.

  “I’m serious, Neely.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

  “Hi, Aunt Neely,” Mason calls out, waving from among a forest of swaying tails.

  “Hi, Mason.”

  She waves back and says to me, “What’s he doing here?”

  “I need you to watch him.”

  “Where’s Champ? Oh no. Don’t tell me he thinks he’s going to use us for babysitters all the time if he moves back here. I mean, Mason’s a cute kid—”

  I hold up my hand to cut her off.

  “Sit down. I have something to tell you.”

  “Sit where?”

  She gestures all around her at the trees, the gravel parking lot, the kennels behind her office.

/>   I take a deep breath and blurt out, “Champ left.”

  “What do you mean he left?”

  “He’s gone. His stuff. His car.”

  I take the envelope of cash out of my purse.

  She stares hard at it. I try to figure out what she’s thinking and can’t. I’m surprised when she finally looks back up at me and is obviously angry.

  “He’s become his dad. He’s the Envelope now.”

  “That’s not fair,” I instinctively rush to my brother’s defense. “Champ didn’t abandon his son. He’s been with him for nine years.”

  “And that makes it okay? What is the age where walking away from your kid is acceptable? Disowning him from birth is bad, but nine is okay?”

  “We don’t know he’s abandoned him.”

  “What about his mother?”

  “Dead,” I tell her.

  This gets no reaction from her. I know she won’t ask for more information. She finds details annoying. She brushes them away on her quest for the big picture like raindrops from a windshield.

  She plunges her hands back into her pockets and peers up at the blue sky through the treetops, shaking her head.

  “I knew something was wrong. It was too weird for him to show up all of a sudden after all these years. He came here on purpose to dump his kid on us.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  The heat in her voice is unusual for her. Smoke cocks his head. His black eyes set in his white wolfish face have been fixated on her during our entire conversation.

  “Listen to yourself,” she chastises me. “You’d never defend this kind of behavior in anyone else. Stop making excuses for him. Something bad happened to him a long time ago. Something incredibly bad. But it doesn’t give him a free pass to be selfish for the rest of his life.”

  “How has he been selfish?” I cry.

  Smoke whines softly. She reaches down and pats his head.

  “You, me, and Grandma,” she explains. “People think being selfish means hogging the blankets or not sharing your french fries but the ultimate selfish act is hurting the people who love you. He cut us out of his life because it was easier for him. He never gave a thought about what it would do to any of us.”

  She’s right, but I can’t blame Champ for hurting us. I’ve never been able to blame him for anything. After what he’s been through I do believe he’s earned a free pass, but she’s also right that I wouldn’t feel this way if he were the brother of some random woman who walked into the station telling me he left his son with her. I’d be sympathetic to his past but I’d be adamant that he needed to put the welfare of his child ahead of his old wounds.

  “Rules of behavior apply to people as well as dogs,” Neely falls into her instructor voice. “A well-trained dog can be part of every aspect of your life while a dog that misbehaves ends up in the pound. No matter how much you explain this to people, there’s still those idiots out there who equate training methods with torture and think making a dog listen to you is being hard on him.”

  “What are you saying? We failed to train Champ properly?”

  “I’m saying he needed someone to help him and that should’ve been us, but he bolted the minute he was off his leash.”

  “And what would you do with that dog once you got him back?”

  “First step, kennel him.”

  “Oh, great. We should’ve locked up our brother?”

  “Figuratively.”

  “And how were we supposed to do that?”

  Smoke raises his left paw, his sign he’s distressed. He only shakes with his right paw.

  She stoops down and wraps her arms around him.

  “Make him explain himself to us instead of making him dinner,” she replies, her tone softening. “You were right last night. I had him for a whole day and didn’t ask him a single personal question other than ‘Are you still a Steelers fan?’ and ‘What made you buy a Kia?’ ”

  “The hamster commercial?” I ask her.

  She nods.

  “Now you’re being selfish,” I tell her. “Don’t hog all the guilt. I want my share.”

  “Can’t you find him?”

  “I’m going to try, but I tried for years to find him before. What makes you think I’d have better luck now?”

  “Sneaky little bastard,” she comments, getting back to her feet. “Remember when he disappeared for a day and it turned out he was hiding in different places all over the house, we just couldn’t find him?”

  “I wanted to kill him.”

  I can’t prevent the words from coming out, and the fact that I wanted to stop them makes me realize how often I censor my thoughts about my brother. The trauma he suffered elevated him to some kind of saintly martyrdom in my eyes. It’s a relief to feel something negative about him again no matter how small or fleeting. It restores his humanness.

  Neely shoos Smoke in the direction of Mason and the other dogs. We both watch him trot away.

  “I can’t keep Mason,” I say as much to myself as to my sister. “I don’t know anything about kids.”

  “I don’t know anything about kids either.”

  “I have a job.”

  “I have a job, too.”

  “But yours is more flexible.”

  “No, it isn’t. I have four K-9s coming at the end of the month. That’s a full-time commitment on top of my private lessons and classes. And my volunteer work at PAWS and the ASPCA. I’m busier than you. And besides, my job is more important.”

  “How can you say that? What’s more important than maintaining law and order?”

  “You think the dogs I train don’t help maintain law and order? And they save lives.”

  After what happened last night, this last remark stings.

  She’s right. The dogs she’s trained have pulled people from burning buildings and from under rubble after explosions and earthquakes. They’ve tracked down hikers lost in the woods, rescued drowning children, helped capture criminals, and sniffed out illegal contraband. She keeps scrapbooks documenting all of their careers, every commendation, every mention in the media. Every birthday is noted with an updated photo; they all look alike to me.

  When the dogs retire from service, she sends each one a leather collar with gold studs and ten pounds of frozen marrow bones.

  “You have a job with health insurance,” she tells me.

  “So?”

  “He’s going to need health insurance. Kids get sick a lot. They break bones. They stick things up their noses.”

  “You have health insurance, too.”

  “But I have to pay for mine.”

  “God, we sound like old ladies.”

  “Speak for yourself. I’m not old and I’m no lady.”

  She starts walking away.

  “Go to work,” she says without looking back at me. “The citizens need you. But so does this little guy.”

  She needs me, too, and I need her. Most days this is enough to see me through.

  SANCTUARY RETIREMENT and Convalescent Home has been around long enough that it’s still called a retirement and convalescent home, not an alternative living environment for mature individuals. Neely and I looked at a few of those, too, and Neely informed me if there ever comes a time when she has to be permanently kenneled, she wants me to have her put down. I promised I’d do the best I can.

  Sanctuary is on the outskirts of town, handy for both of us. The main building is an impressive three-story redbrick farmhouse with dozens of windows trimmed in white that belonged to a prosperous family who woke up one day a hundred years after their farm was established to find the quaint country road the house faced was now a highway with a Walmart going up in full view of their front porch along with the inevitable strip mall that always accompanies the megaretailer like arms stretched out in a yawn of consumerism. They sold the house and land to a developer who hasn’t done much with it except to tear down the old barn, attach a generic hospital-looking addition to t
he stately old house, and build a driving range next door. The back of the home has a spacious patio that looks out on a serene expanse of forested, rolling hills, but the residents prefer by far to sit on the front porch where they can watch the traffic on Jenner’s Pike and the happenings in the Walmart parking lot. In summer, some of them drag chairs off the porch onto the lawn to watch the line of golfers whack away at buckets of balls.

  Grandma isn’t ill. She’s old and brittle. She has severe arthritis in her knees and needs a walker to get around. During the course of two years she broke a wrist and a hip and cracked a rib. She recovered amazingly well for someone her age, but she agreed with Neely and me that it probably wasn’t safe for her to live on her own anymore. She was approaching ninety at the time, but it was still hard for her to give up her independence. She mopily moved into the home and within a week, she was organizing Downton Abbey parties and leading walker aerobics. As often happens in small towns whenever people all of a certain age are thrown together, it turns out she knew practically everyone here, and of course, they all knew who she was, the mother of poor, beautiful, murdered Cissy Carnahan.

  Time has been good to my mother’s memory. More than three decades have passed. The town is full of people who weren’t even born when she died, and if they are aware of her story, it’s only the sensational headlines relating to her demise and not the details of her life. Her peers are in their seventies and Grandma’s are in their nineties. Age has mellowed many of them, and society’s views have softened. Unwed mothers are everywhere now, and my mother’s wanton behavior and style of dress is tame compared to everything they see on TV and in the pages of the People and Us Weekly magazines littering the common area of the home. My mother may have been promiscuous and a lousy housekeeper, but she was well-mannered and respectful in public. Nothing like those Bad Girls or Real Housewives. Here, in Grandma’s world at least, she’s no longer thought of as an aggressive immoral temptress but as a victim of male lust, her dalliances merely surrendering to their constant hounding, and her three bastard children upgraded from untouchable trash to forgivable mistakes.