A Quiet Belief in Angels (19 page)

“You know how it is, right?” I said.

She shook her head slowly. She reached up and fingertipped a stray lock of hair away from her cheek and over her ear.

Things happened in parts of my body that I had not experienced before. There was an ache in the base of my groin, a sensation like something pulling from within. My mouth was dry, a taste like copper and dirt.

“How it is?” she asked. “No, I’m not sure that I do know how it is, Joseph, tell me.”

I smiled, shrugged my shoulders. “The last couple of years have been tough, Miss Webber—”

“Alexan—”

“Alexandra,” I interjected. “I’m sorry, I can’t help but think of you as my schoolma’am.”

Alexandra laughed. “I was your schoolma’am,” she said. “But I was your friend as well, wasn’t I?” She hesitated for a moment, her eyes questioning.

“You were,” I said.

“You used to come and speak to me about all manner of troubles, and then, when this thing happened with your mother . . .” She looked away toward the window. “I imagined you might come and speak to me again, and ask for my help with her . . . but you didn’t. I wondered whether I’d done something to upset you.”

I laughed, suddenly, abruptly, more nerves than humor. It was a reaction, nothing more than that. “Upset me?” I shook my head. “Even if you tried you couldn’t upset me.”

She’d brought a
Writer’s Digest
. There were details of a short-story competition inside. I laughed, remembering “Monkeyshines” and the letter from Atlanta.

“You still have it?”

I nodded. “Upstairs.”

“You wanna go fetch it?”

“You want me to?”

“Sure, go get the letter, I can’t remember what it said. I’ll make us something to eat.” She tilted her head to one side. “You okay with eggs? I make the best eggs this side of the Altamaha River.”

I rose from my chair. I took a step toward the doorway. “Yes,” I said, almost as an afterthought. “Eggs are fine.”

I went upstairs, closed my eyes and imagined everything I had ever wanted to imagine about Alexandra Webber.

She read the letter. She smiled, laughed, and asked me questions I later forgot, preoccupied with watching her.

We ate the eggs, Uneeda crackers and watermelon pickles. I didn’t know if it was better than anything else this side of the Altamaha, but it was good enough for me.

I thought briefly about the fencing, about the clear-cuts, about Frank Turow and Leonard Stowell’s brother-in-law. To hell with them, I thought. They were grown men. They’d have understood my situation.

“So how
have
you been?”

I pushed my plate aside. “I’ve been okay.”

“And your ma?”

I shook my head. “She’s gone, Miss Webber, she’s gone south and ain’t comin’ back.”

“It’s a tragedy. Your father, the thing that happened with the Krugers, and now your ma.”

“I figure that life gives as good as it gets, right?”

She reached out and touched my hand. There it was, the snap and hum of electricity; I felt a cool rush of hope fill my chest.

“I missed having you to teach,” she whispered.

“I missed being taught.”

“Always my favorite pupil.”

“Always my favorite teacher.”

She laughed. “That’s not fair, I was your only teacher.”

I smiled. “Blow, blow, thou winter wind . . . Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.”

She frowned, her brow creased in the center like a seam. “Shakespeare?”

I nodded. “
As You Like It.
”

“You’re saying I’m ungrateful, Joseph?”

“Or that you didn’t see a compliment when it came.”

“I saw it well enough.”

“So I’ll say it again . . . always my
favorite
teacher.”

“And you’re reading Shakespeare?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes. More often than not I read
Red Ryder
and
Little Beaver
comics.”

“You do not.”

“Do too.”

“You’re teasing me, Joseph.”

I looked down at my hands. They were folded neatly together on the table like they belonged to someone else, as if someone had left their gloves behind and I had arranged them ready for collection. “Wouldn’t know what you were talking about, Miss Webber.”

“You don’t
have
to call me that, there really aren’t that many years between us.”

“Only the same number there’s always been.”

Silence for a moment. Heart beating, right there in my mouth. Mouth so full of heart I wondered how I’d managed to say so much. My thoughts were broken up small like shards of ceramic, and they all were of Miss Alexandra Webber, and for the most part they were biblical.

“Do you have to go to work today?”

I shook my head. “I don’t
have
to do anything.”

“Do you want to spend the day with me?”

I looked right at her, direct and unflinching, and then I smiled. “Maybe,” I said.

She blushed visibly. “Only a maybe?”

“Maybe is good, Alexandra Webber. Maybe isn’t no.”

“What are you saying, Joseph?”

I took the heart from my mouth and held it in my hands. “I’m saying nothing, Miss Webber. Nothing and everything. I’ve always thought of you as beautiful, and always figured you were smart, and I s’pose I looked up to you like a kid should look up to a teacher, I guess. Then I grew up, and started to think a different way, the kind of way people think about each other when they want to get close and comfortable, and whichever way I looked at it, whenever I had such a thought, you were right there in the middle of it like you belonged—”

She gripped my hand. “Stop,” she said, in her voice a sense of urgency.

“Why? Who’s gonna hear me? Who’s listening aside from you?”

“You don’t know what you’re saying!”

“Don’t I?” I’d walked half way to the end of the road, figured it was just as far back as to journey to the end. “So tell me why you came here.”

She looked away.

“Miss Webber?”

She raised her hand, her voice also. “Okay, that’s it, Joseph! If this is going where I think it might be going then the first thing you can do is call me by my first name.”

I nodded. “So tell me why you came here, Alexandra.”

“Alex,” she said matter-of-factly.

I held my tongue and my gaze.

The awkward recognition of unfamiliar breathing; the realization that scent, skin, the touch of hair between my fingers was not my own.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, and her voice came like the sound of the sea from within a shell. “You’ll know what to do.”

I looked at her, close enough to feel the flicker of her lash against my cheek. “And if I don’t?”

“Then,” she said, her voice almost lost within the sound of her heart. “Then I’ll show you.”

“Why did I come here?” She shook her head and turned away. “I don’t know, Joseph. Perhaps because I believed you were lonely.”

“Lonely?”

She smiled. “Sure. Lonely. You know what lonely means.”

“I do,” I said. “I know all about lonely.”

“Like it was your job, eh?”

“My job?” I smiled, started to laugh. The feeling inside was one of emotional release, like a belt too tight now unbuckled. “Yes, you could say that loneliness was my job. And you?”

She leaned to one side, the flat of her hand against her cheek, her elbow on the table to support her chin. “Me?”

I nodded. “You were lonely too, right?”

Alex kissed my eyes in turn; the dampness of her lips, the ghost of her fingertips, the pressure of her breast against my arm, the heat of her body . . .

The way her waist vanished to her thigh, and then up and back across her stomach. There were buttons in the back of her dress, and she turned slowly and took my hand to show me where they were. She stepped out of the fabric as if from a second skin.

She stepped back.

My breath caught in my throat, a trapped bird, and she laughed.

A lock of her hair fell from behind her ear and caressed her cheek. She raised her hand and tucked it back where it had come from. “Everyone gets lonely, Joseph.”

“And you’re here . . . ’cause you figured we were both lonely and you wanted to do something about it?”

She nodded, half smiled. “Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe?” I asked. “I get to say maybe. You? You were never a maybe person, Alex, always straightforward, black and white.”

“Does it matter why I came?”

I shook my head. “No, Alex, it doesn’t matter why you came.”

She got up from the chair. She stepped backward, and then stepped forward, just a single step, but it felt like she’d closed the gap between imagination and reality. “You want me to go?”

“No, Alex. I never want you to go.”

Later, I could not remember how we’d found our way upstairs. Later, I believed it did not matter.

I raised my hand and touched her arm, her shoulder, the nape of her neck.

Her hands found the buttons of my pants. “Off,” she exhaled.

I fought with my clothing.

The breeze lifted the curtains behind me, raised the hairs on my skin, and made me shudder for a moment.

She stepped back and sat on the edge of the bed.

I stood in front of her, my right hand against the side of her face, her cheek, her hair between my fingers.

She kissed my stomach, encircled my navel with the tip of her tongue, and then she dipped her head and opened her mouth. No more than seconds and she looked up at me. “You know how this goes, right?”

I nodded.

She edged forward, slipped off her underskirt. She lay down on the mattress and reached out her hand.

“Come on, then,” she said, “before I die of anticipation.”

We found a rhythm, awkward at first, but we found it. It took us some place we hadn’t planned to go and didn’t want to come home from.

There were moments I remembered laughing, though later I could not recall why.

Alex lay beside me, her body pressed against mine, her arm angled to support her head, and every once in a while I would turn my face to look at her as she spoke, to interrupt her words by kissing her, and after another while I said, “Again,” and she closed her eyes and lay back down and I folded up against her.

We did not leave my room until it was close to evening.

Weeks went by.

The dreams came back. Dreams that were haunted by the hand they never found.

Augusta Falls had convinced itself to forget the killings. With three years behind it, the collective mind of a town had managed to close itself off to the past. I had not.

Alex visited with ever-increasing frequency, and I spoke with her about the girls, the murders, about who might have done such things; we talked of the Krugers, the death of Elena, all that had transpired.

“Whatever happened,” she said, “it’s over.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with the Krugers,” I said. “I knew Gunther Kruger, and his wife and children.” I paused and looked away toward the kitchen window. It was approaching the end of November. For the better part of three months Alex had been visiting two, three, sometimes four times each week. We made love—sometimes furiously, like there was something inside each of us that had to be discovered, and only with force and passion was there a chance to break it free, to discover it; other times slowly, as if under water, every word, every breath, every single second of physical contact drawn out as far as possible. I had turned eighteen a month before. Alex Webber would be twenty-seven in February of ’46. The better part of nine years didn’t seem a great deal of time. It was close to four years since Reilly Hawkins had driven me and my mother to Waycross Community Hospital, since I’d spoken with the head doctor about carbon dioxide to starve the brain, Librium to aid sleep, Scopolamine to find her true, unspoken feelings, Veronal to sedate. Seemed to me my mother had slipped into some dark and silent place, and the drugs they gave her, the things they did seemed to serve no purpose. The treatment merely prevented her from crying out for help.

Alex had filled a void, a vacuum. Whatever she brought I consumed, and still remained hungry. We read books together, sometimes all night. Steinbeck, Hemingway, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Flaubert, Balzac, Dumas’s
Chicot the Jester
, Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
, Stendhal’s
Scarlet and Black
. Those things I did not understand she explained. Those things she could not explain she showed me. My work fell slack. There were people who would no longer hire me. I stopped shaving, and then decided to grow a beard. My hair went past my shoulders.

“Bohemian,” Alex said, and laughed, and kissed my forehead, and gripped my beard with her fingers and led me to the mattress.

Later I spoke with Alex about New York.

“Superb-faced Manhattan! Comrade Americanos! To us, then at last the Orient comes. To us, my city. Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on opposite sides, to walk in the space between.”

“You what?”

“Walt Whitman,” she said, and laughed at me. “You ignorant Bohemian scribbler!”

“Ignorant? I’ll have you know I started a book.”

“To what?”

“A book. A novel,” I said. “I started writing a novel.”

She sat up straight. The sheet fell from her throat and ruched at her waist. Her perfect breasts, the arc of her shoulder, her throat, the line of her jaw. I reached out my hand. She slapped my wrist, grabbed it, held it down.

“Tell me!” she snapped. “Tell me what it is, Joseph.”

“It’s nothing . . . hell, Alex, it’s just an idea I had. I started it last night—” I paused, frowned. “No, two nights ago . . . the night you said you were gonna come and then didn’t.”

“So tell me,” she urged. “Tell me what it’s about.”

I tugged a pillow from beneath me and positioned it behind my head. Alex seemed genuinely excited.

“It’s just a rough thing,” I said.

“Like you,” she joked.

“I’ll give you rough,” I said, and playfully grabbed a handful of her hair.