He wanted her to slow down, so he rested the butt of the rifle on the ground and spoke in a calm tone. “Who's sick, Una? Your gramma?”
“No.” She rose to her full height. “Miss Nancy. She's been sick all day and fearing your return, just burning up.”
Slinging the rifle to his shoulder, he followed, and as they neared the cabin, the aroma from the kitchen stove filled the air with carrots and herbs, rendered chicken fat, egg noodles on the boil. The soup flowed like a stream through the pines and deepened his hunger, for he had been all day in the woods, chasing after the phantom car, without a scrap of nourishment. In a dark corner of the porch he braced the guns, and took three bounds to reach the kitchen, wrenched the heel from a loaf of fresh bread, and dipped it into the soup, stuffing half the mess into his mouth. Wiley was still chewing when he heard Erica clear her throat, and turning, saw her swaddled in the rocking chair, hair lank against her scalp, her eyes vanishing into sockets dark as bruises. After dunking the other half crust into the broth, he went to her, mouth full, and knelt at her side, laying the back of his hand against her hot skin. “You look awful. What happened to you?”
She licked her dry lips and waited till he choked down his swallow of bread. “You're back. I was beginning to think you had abandoned me.”
“I wouldn't leave you.” Like a young boy, he threw his arms around her and buried his head against her breast.
With grave difficulty, she raised her free hand and stroked his long hair. “Why were you gone so long?”
“I lost the car. I went back to the place where we left it, but someone took it, or it rolled off on its own into the lake. I looked all day but couldn't find a trace.”
Clamping her fingers on his skull, she lifted his head to look into his eyes. “Someone stole our car?”
Mrs. Gavin, who had been eavesdropping by the bookcase, emerged from behind them. “We'll have to call the police—”
“No,” they said in unison. Wiley offered up an explanation. “It wasn't our car, but a friend's. I don't have any papers, don't even know the license plate number.”
“But your friend, he will be angry if—”
“We traded cars,” Wiley said. “His Duster for my Pinto, because we were going so far. So you can't call the police.”
“I'd get in trouble,” Erica said. “I'm only seventeen. But we're off to be married. We're headed west to elope, but I'm underage back home. Please don't call the police.”
From the other side of the room, Una spun the globe with a slap of her hand. “Married?” She skipped over to them and smiled at Erica. “Mee-Maw, did you hear? That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard. Like Romeo and Juliet. Are you two madly in love?”
The question went unanswered, but the notion satisfied Mrs. Gavin, for the matter of notifying the police never arose again. Erica joined them at table for the blessing of the soup, though she could manage only a few spoonfuls of broth.
Rather than subject Erica to the climb to the loft, the Gavins rearranged their sleeping habits, Una bunking in with her grandmother, and the invalid moving to the child's small bed in the far corner of the house. Though he objected to being alone, Wiley reconsidered and withdrew to the loft, collapsing on the bed. The buzz of his snoring overhead made them all giggle with disbelief. Una fixed another dose of the sleeping potion and brought in the warm mug, tucked the covers round her charge, and sat at the foot of the bed. Together, they stared at the stars streaming in the black sky painted across the window. Away from the city lights, their luminosity increased. As a lifelong habitant of the room, Una knew the names of the fleeting constellations and enjoyed pointing out the more definitive ones for her, then waited for Erica to finish her spiced milk before turning out the nightlight and bidding her sweet dreams.
The darkness encouraged Erica to whisper. “I was just wondering what you might think, lying here every night, the whole of creation right outside your windows.”
“The heavens above, the earth below.”
“Do you miss your parents? When are they coming back?” Erica asked.
The girl rose and stood in the doorway. “I never did say.”
“I miss everything,” Erica said, and then rolled over by a quarter turn into the balm of sleep.
20
Erica did not recover the next day, or the one that followed, nor the entire time they were sequestered at the cabin in the Natchez Trace. Her symptoms followed a pattern established early on: an unrelenting fatigue that no amount of sleep could conquer and a low-grade fever unassailable by chicken soup or drugstore remedies, with a rising temperature in the afternoon, dipping at sunset, causing her to complain of the chills and request extra blankets abed or in the parlor chair where the daily dose of hot spiced milk would be delivered by the cherub of the house. This cycle induced a gradual ennui or emptying of passion, although that, too, drew scant complaint. Though her appetite had deserted her, the thought of food sometimes made her sick. She occupied her few waking hours with the books in the glass cabinet, games of chance and imagination with Una, and, when her energy waxed, short strolls around the grounds.
At first, Wiley was solicitous, worried over her health and well-being, preaching caution. He spent the first few days of her infirmity carefully disassembling the rifle and shotgun, cleaning and oiling the guts and letting them dry in the sun, and then, with some difficulty, refitting the pieces. The Gavins, used to men with rifles out in the country, paid him no heed. October played fair and mild, and he enjoyed being outdoors with a task that required his solitary attention and concentrated effort. But as evening passed to a lonesome night above in the loft, and the next days followed with no signs of progress, he grew agitated and restless. Mrs. Gavin sometimes left them alone with her granddaughter, driving off in an old white Rambler, mysteriously produced from a hiding place, and returning several hours later loaded down with groceries or, once, a quarter cord of firewood stacked in the back. Grateful to have some useful purpose, Wiley helped her unload supplies, eying the car and coveting the keys. For the most part, however, he went off on his own. He took to hiking the trails around the lake, pleased to be among the birds and small animals amid the fallen leaves. Some days he ventured back to the spot where the stolen car had been parked, prowled through the brush and along the shore for some clues to the Duster's disappearance.
To test his marksmanship, he took the rifle with him into the woods to wait for something to move, shooting at the birds that chanced his way, killing one with a single bullet through the breast. After huffing through the underbrush, he found the body, cupped it in his hand, and brought the winged thing to eye level. The cowbird was limp but stiffening with rigor mortis, its feet curling around a missing branch, its wings poised for departure. Wiley waited the rest of the afternoon for something bigger to kill, but the forest creatures grew wary of his presence and nothing flew or crawled or crept nearby. Back at the cabin, he asked Mrs. Gavin whether Erica needed a doctor but was rebuffed by her assurance that the girl simply needed some rest, let the body do what the body does best.
Day by day the sickness whittled away the sense of momentum they had built for the journey, and as the date passed for the planned rendezvous with Crow and the rest of the Angels, Wiley's mood darkened in captivity. As long as she could not travel, he felt bound to stay, but he needed to make some outward sign of his commitment to the cause, a radical break to counteract the domestic and quotidian turn his life had taken. He was a warrior in a just cause, different from his contemporaries who had given up the fight. Buried each day in the Little Red Book, he began to meditate on what distinguished the bold rebel from the apathetic masses, and he concluded that he needed to demonstrate his dedication to a higher calling. The ascetic warrior moves against the times. Wiley decided he would shave his head as a rite of passage and cast off the trappings of the common crowd. He approached Mrs. Gavin with a request to borrow her car, explaining his need to drive into town and find a barbershop.
“I'll cut it,” she volunteered. “You want a shaved head? I do my granddaughter's hair.”
A quick look at the girl's ragged mop did nothing for his confidence, but he capitulated under the circumstances. Mee-Maw made him wash his mess of curls but instructed him to leave it wet, and draping a bath towel across his shoulders, she brushed it out like a horse's tail. Snipping the scissors in the air above his head, she asked again, “How much should I take off? The whole head, Una?”
Wiley cricked his neck to spy her from one eye. “As much as you want,” he said. “Pretend that I'm on the run and don't want anyone to recognize me. Pretend I'm a desperado in need of a new identity.”
Drawing the hair together in a thick rope, Mee-Maw sawed through the hank, and after separating the final strands from his scalp, she raised the coil into the air like a warrior claiming her coup. Una gasped at her grandmother's audacity and the realization of the time it had taken the boy to grow such a pelt. With a final flourish, Mee-Maw tossed the hair on the newspapered floor and, steel slicing through air, set to shaping the uneven ends, all the while humming a lullaby. The frenzied blades slowed to a more calibrated pace, and when she heard her grandmother turn on the razor, Una ran off to herald the news to Erica but could not find her in the bedroom or the bath, so through the front door burst the breathless child.
Una shielded her eyes against the sun with the flag of her hand. “Miss Nancy, Miss Nancy, come see.” But her friend was not sitting on the porch as usual. The girl called again twice and, receiving no reply, launched an elliptical orbit around the cabin. Under a willow, leaves silvered and clinging to weeping branches, Erica perched on the beam of an ancient sandbox. As soon as she saw her there, Una stopped short, anxious that her next step might be off the edge of the earth. She had not thought of the sandbox in ages. Her father, or so she had always heard, built it for her before she was born, hauled the white sand and lumber braces, now weatherworn to gray. As a toddler, Una spent many hot summer days under the willow, watching the feathery leaves and graceful limbs dance in the breeze. By six years, she had forsaken the spot altogether and its sway on her emotions. Rain and wind had flattened the sand into a bowl-shaped depression, and lichen and woodworms had claimed the timber. The tips of the branches overhanging the sandbox had burrowed into the surface, as though desperate for water beneath a desert. Some old toys lay in the sand—a red plastic bucket bleached on one side to salmon, a doll stretched out and staring blindly into the sun, a rusty watering can with a sunflower nozzle. As she approached, Una noticed that her friend was using the shard of a broken china dish to carve lines in the sand.
“I loved that tea set,” she said, her voice tinged with longing.
“I had the same pattern,” Erica said, then bent her face back to the sky and closed her eyes. “Wonder what's become of my old toys.” She had taken off her sweater and knotted it around her waist, exposing her bare arms and shoulders to the sun. Una sat down beside her, skin against skin, and aped her pose, lifting her face to gather in warmth. The willow branches broke the sky into a mosaic as blue as the shattered dishes. “I'll bet you were out here every day in the summertime. I used to set up my tea service with all my dolls and stuffed animals in these teeny, tiny chairs, then I'd make my daddy come to tea, and you should have seen him try to sit there—his knees would be sticking up over the tabletop—and the little bone cup in his big hand.”
She glanced over at the child, who seemed on the verge of tears. “Miss Nancy. I've something to ask you, if I dare.”
“We have no secrets, you and me. You've been taking good care of me these past weeks.”
“Lest I do you further wrong, I should ask.” Her voice quavered. “Are you an angel? An angel sent to us?”
The willow shivered in the breeze. Erica averted her gaze to the fractured sky. “What makes you ask such a thing?”
“Your wings.” She fingered the tattoo on Erica's bare shoulder. “And Mee-Maw says.”
“This? This is just a symbol me and Mr. Wiley had done. A sign of our love for each other. But what has Mee-Maw been saying?”
The girl did not want to answer. She picked up a china cup and flicked at the sand clinging to its edge. “She said maybe you was sent from heaven to deliver us a message about my mama and daddy. That's why we have to keep you here till you give us word and not let you go lest you leave without us knowing.” Una frowned and drew a spiral in the sand. “But I don't believe her, though I do as I am told.”
“Knowing what, Una?”
“Knowing where they are. My mama and daddy.”
“You said they would be coming back soon. What happened to them?”
Una shook her head. “That's what Mee-Maw told you, but I know better. They run off when I was a baby, run off to Canada because of the Vietnam War, and left me with my grandmother to watch over till they come back.”
“I didn't know.” Waves of empathy and confusion rolled over her. “The war's over, though. They'll be back soon.”
“No, they're dead, ain't they? They'd have sent for me if they were alive. Or called or wrote. That's why you've come to us. You are an angel of truth—”
“I'm not sure there are really such things as angels.”
“I prayed for you to come. And to tell me why. And to stay with me.”
Erica could not think of any other way to silence the girl than to hold her close and rock her, soothe her hair. “We came here by accident, Una. What makes you think they are dead?”
Wrestling with her conscience, Una finally spat out her confession. “I had a prayer to God every night to bring them back, and if not, if they are never coming back, to send a message with his angels.”
“But I'm no angel.”
The sunshine beat in waves, and they huddled beneath the willow, hoping they could be saved, and listened to the birds. Una knew every song by heart and distinguished for her among the mockingbirds and waxwings, the wrens and the jays. Far off near the lake, over the long marsh grasses blowing in the wind, a redwing blackbird flew to land on a solitary tree, called out, and waited in the stillness for a reply that never seemed to come. Una held a china cup, blue and small as an egg, next to her chest.
“The sun's making me feel much better, how about you?” Erica spoke at last. “Let's go in and see the others.”
“I forgot! Mr. Ricky got a haircut. I came out to tell you—” She stood and swiped the sand from the seat of her jeans. “He got scalped.”
When she entered the cabin, Erica saw for herself and did not know whether to laugh or cry. Shorn of his long hair, he looked younger, like the children from her elementary school days, but also somehow more menacing, the angles of his skull outlining the set of his jaw, the slightly Neanderthal slope to his forehead, his eyes all but disappearing into the wide expanse of skin. He looked as handsome as a killer.
“That's him,” Mrs. Gavin said. “My boy, Cole. Your father, Una. He looks just like the boy that got away.”
21
The sleek black telephone in the living room rested on the table by the sofa, and the beige telephone in the kitchen hung on the wall like a barnacle. Both waited silently taunting her each time Margaret passed by. Ring, dammit, ring. On the other end, she imagined, a hand reached for the receiver, and then the caller reconsidered and withdrew. She waited for word from the police, for Jackson to fulfill the promise he had made two weeks before, for Paul to ring up from the clinic to check in—nobody ever called—and she was a virtual prisoner in her own home, forced to lock herself away from the gossip, the stares, and the whispers. She waited for Erica to pick up that phone to let her know she was coming home or at least that she was still alive. There was no one to call her Mother.
Diane offered some distraction, some company, someone to keep the daily household running. Swooping in from Washington, she took care of all that had been neglected—leftovers molding in the fridge, the darning pile, the bills unopened and unpaid, and the doctor brushed and dusted and sent off to tend
the ill. Diane did the shopping, answered the dry cleaner's persistent phone calls, scrubbed a line of silt from the bathtub, and polished the neglect. When she had restored order and there was nothing left to do, she began to pick away at the ice around her sister's fears.
One melancholy afternoon, she asked, “What's your worst nightmare?”
“Do you ever think that she is dead? She could be lying in a ditch somewhere, or in a shallow grave, behind a Dumpster, or at the bottom of the ocean.”
“I prefer to think of her alive and will do so until proven otherwise.”
“I don't mean to be morbid. Just preparing for the worst.” Margaret blinked, bringing into focus the far wall, blinked again, and blankness.
Her sister reached out. “Of course, that's one of many possibilities, you're right. She may well have gone willingly, and they've eloped. One expects a honeymoon period when the bride incommunicado forgets that her poor mother is worried sick.”
“I wish you wouldn't talk like that. If you're going to talk like that, I wish you wouldn't talk at all.”
“Then let's talk about your husband and what this is doing to him.”
“I tried to make peace between those two. Tried to get him to understand—”
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