A Quiet Belief in Angels (24 page)

“We should go and see my mother,” I said. “Her birthday was the nineteenth. Christmas is the day after tomorrow. I should go, Alex, I really should, and I want you to come with me.”

“So we go.” Like that, so matter-of-fact. “Reilly will let us use the pickup?”

“Sure he will . . . but this time we don’t stop on the way.”

She smiled, reached out toward me. I stepped toward her, took her hand, drew her close and held her. “I think we should cut your hair and shave your beard,” she said. “Make you look less like the crazy mountain man come down to scare up the villagers.”

“Not now. Now we go see my mother.”

Which is what we did, and we arrived without incident, and once we found my mother—in the sun lounge at the back of the building—I told her that Alex was my girlfriend.

“Such a modern word,” she said. “Girlfriend.” She laughed. The sound was of someone else, not the woman who’d raised me. “You can stand in the sunlight,” she went on, raising her hand and indicating the lawns behind the building through the high windows of the sun lounge. “You can stand in the sunlight . . . feel the warmth of the sun. Feels like the fingerprints of God on your soul.” She turned and smiled at Alex, seemed to look right through her, like there was no recognition. I wondered if my mother even remembered her name. “And you can hear the voices of angels.” She looked at me directly. The sensation of something moving across the back of my neck made me shudder. Fleeting, like the shadow of a cloud on a field.

“Angels?” I asked.

My mother nodded, smiled again, but this time there was a heartbeat of connection, like she was looking at me and she saw her son. For real, she saw her son.

“Angels,” she whispered. “Voices of angels . . . like those little girls, Joseph, the ones that went with the Devil, remember?”

I nodded. I felt uncomfortable.

She leaned closer to me. “Come,” she whispered, her tone con spiratorial.

I leaned closer.

“I know who took them,” she said.

I frowned.

“The little girls, Joseph . . . I
know
who took them.”

“Took them?” I asked. I wondered what had really happened to my mother. I wondered about the mind, the way it worked, the manner in which it could malfunction and close down with such finality.

“Took them all to Hell,” she hissed.

I felt suddenly and intensely overwhelmed. I glanced sideways at Alex. She looked as nervous as I felt.

I reached out and took my mother’s hand.

Her eyes were clear blue and fixed, like a light shone in back of them. “They’re all out there,” she said. “Alice and Laverna, Ellen May, Catherine . . . the one you found, Joseph, what was her name?”

I shook my head. “You know her name, Mom.”

“Virginia, right?”

“Right, Mom, Virginia Perlman.”

“I hear them all, and your father too, and sometimes I can hear Elena. She says she’s waiting for me, and she’ll wait as long as it takes, and when I get there I can hold her hand and show her the way.”

“Mom . . . please.”

She paused for a moment, perhaps offended by my interruption, and then she nodded, winked as if we were engaged in some unspoken collusion. “It’s okay, Joseph, not another word. But you must promise me something, Joseph.”

“What, Mom, what do you want me to promise?”

“That you’ll speak with Sheriff Dearing, and tell him what I’ve said. Tell him to come and see me. Tell him that I know the truth. Tell him that
I
know who this child killer is.”

My heart was closed like a fist. “Yes,” I said, and even as the word left my lips I wondered if I would ever really speak with my mother again. Ever speak with the woman who had raised me, the woman who’d loved my father, the woman who’d buried him and carried on living for no other reason than her son. “I’ll tell him,” I whispered, my voice cracking with emotion, my fists clenched, every ounce of will I owned required to hold back my tears. “Soon as I get back I’ll tell him.” I smiled as best I could. I hoped beyond hope that she wouldn’t say such things to the doctors, to the other patients. God knows what they would have done to her had she told them she was talking with dead husbands and murdered little girls, that she knew the identity of a child killer who’d evaded the police of several counties for so many years.

And it was then that she spoke about Oysters Rockefeller and blueberry slump, about the banquet she would prepare for us, for her nurse, for the elite of Georgia. She became the vague and distant woman I had come to expect, and there was no light behind her eyes, and there were no words about the dead.

We stayed a while longer, as long as I could bear to sit with the woman who’d once been my mother, and then we wished our good-byes.

“So sad,” Alex whispered. She took my arm and sort of pulled me close as we walked away. “Such a cultured and intelligent woman, and now . . .” Her voice trailed away into a fragile silence.

We found Nurse Margaret, my mother’s nurse. She was painfully thin; her features seemed almost vague, like a watercolor painting. Her eyes were pale gray and washed-out, as if she’d spent the vast majority of her life in tears. A Southern spinster I guessed, her lips thin and pursed, her manner tied up tight like a corset, the kind of woman that longed for love but would never find it.

“She told you that . . . that I was a nun?” she said. “Lord almighty . . . I can imagine I’d be the last person in the world to be considered for such a thing.” She shook her head. “No, I’m just Margaret, straight and simple, nothing more complicated than that.” She smiled warmly, and then steered Alex and me away from the people who sat waiting in the room beyond the sun lounge.

“She manages somehow,” Margaret said. “Every once in a while you can see something, like there’s a light behind her eyes, and that’s the real Mary that must have existed before the illness.”

“What is wrong with her?” Alex asked. She glanced at me, almost as if she was afraid I’d be offended by her asking.

Margaret smiled sympathetically. “I’m no psychiatrist, dear,” she said. “If you want an opinion then you should speak with her doctor. All I know is what I hear, and what I hear doesn’t make a great deal of sense. I don’t know that anyone really understands what happens when people . . .” Margaret looked at me, then at Alex. “No one really knows what happens when people
turn
.” She sighed and shook her head. “I wish I did know, then at least I’d feel like I could do something to help.”

Alex turned to me. “We should see her doctor.”

I shook my head. “I’ve seen him numerous times. They don’t know what’s wrong with her, never have, probably never will. All they’re trying to do is keep her quiet.”

“It’s the voices she hears,” Margaret said, and she glanced at both of us in turn, something fearful in her gray, washed-out eyes. “The little girls?” she added, and then looked directly at me as if I would elucidate for her.

I said nothing.

“She can speak about the weather, about flowers in the gardens, about other patients.” Margaret was fussing with the edge of her dress pocket. “Seems she’s all there, you know? Can sit and talk for an hour, sometimes more, and you think she’s mending fine, making sense and then suddenly, out of nowhere she’s talking to someone else, someone you can’t see. So I say to her, I say ‘Mary? Who are you talking to dear?’ and she turns and looks at me like I’m the crazy one, and she says, ‘Why, Margaret, I’m talking to’ and then she says some little girl’s name as far as I can gather, and off she goes, telling whoever she sees something about her day, talking to someone called Earl.”

I nodded. “Earl was her husband. He died back in ’39.”

Margaret smiled, like she’d been asked a question and got it right. “Yes, Earl,” she repeated. “Talking about something she did with Earl, and even when you walk away she’s still there talking away, talking like there’ll not be any time to talk tomorrow.” Margaret stopped suddenly. She looked awkward, looked like she’d said too much. “I’m sorry,” she blurted. “It’s not my place to be speaking about such things. I do apologize. It’s just that you’re the only ones who’ve visited with her in such a long time. There’s the other gentleman. He’s been a few times, but he never stays long . . .”

“Haynes Dearing,” I said.

Margaret shook her head. “I don’t know his name. He never told me and I’ve never asked.”

I reached out my hand and touched her arm. “It’s okay,” I said. “You’ve been real helpful, Margaret. It’s been very good speaking with you. Please don’t feel as though you’ve said anything out of turn.”

Margaret smiled. With her washed-out eyes she glanced back and forth as if expecting someone to appear. I wondered how long it would be before Margaret was having conversations with people who weren’t there.

We left without seeing Doctor Gabillard. I didn’t even ask if Gabillard was still attending to my mother. There was no purpose in speaking further.

“You really think there’s nothing else that can be done?” Alex asked me as we drove away from Waycross Community Hospital.

“She’s been there nearly four years, Alex.”

Alex opened her mouth to say something, perhaps to ask another question, but nothing came forth. She looked at me, seated there in the passenger seat as we drove in Reilly Hawkins’ pickup toward the highway. I glanced back at her and there was nothing in her expression, a simple statement of nothing. Her eyes were empty, as if she’d seen all there was to see and little else remained.

I reached out and gripped her hand for a moment. “I’ve been coming out here for an awful long time. After a year, eighteen months, it stopped feeling like I was visiting my mother. Now I just come out of duty, more for the memory of my father than anything else.”

“You remember telling me about the angels?” Alex asked.

I smiled. “Don’t remind me of that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was very young at the time, and you were most definitely my schoolteacher, and that makes what we’re doing now awful strange.”

“You feel that way?”

I shook my head. “Not until you start talking about angels and the Atlanta Short Story Competition, and giving me a book by Steinbeck for my birthday.”

“You should write a book about all of this,” she said.

I frowned. “All of what?”

“Your life. Your father, the little girls that were killed, what happened to the Krugers, what happened to your mother, us . . . all these things. You should write your autobiography.”

I started laughing. “I’m eighteen, Alex, eighteen years old. You make it sound like I haven’t got a great deal more life to live.”

“Do you think she knows?”

“Eh?”

“Your mother? Do you think she knows who did it?”

I shook my head. “Alex, my mother is crazy. She’s in the psychi atric wing of the Waycross Community Hospital. She has conversations with my father, and he’s been dead since July of 1939. I am sure she has absolutely no idea who was responsible—”

“Is responsible, Joseph. The killings are still going on.”

“Okay, okay . . . I am quite certain that she has absolutely no idea who is responsible for these things.”

“But what if she does know? What if knowing this and not being able to do anything about it is what has made her this way—”

“Made her crazy, Alex. What if knowing this thing has made her
crazy
. Let’s say it how it is. We know each other well enough not to walk in circles around this thing. She’s crazy. She’s bughouse, nuts—”

“Stop it!” Alex snapped. “Enough!”

“And enough from you, Alex. Jesus, I don’t wanna hear anymore about this thing, okay? She does not know who killed these girls . . . sorry, who is
killing
these girls. She does not know. She has never known and I am sure she never will. She will go on living at Waycross. She will probably be there for the rest of her life, and I will keep on visiting her until I can’t take it anymore, or until she doesn’t even recognize who I am. Then I will be sorry, but at the same time I will feel a tremendous burden lift from my shoulders, because you have no idea, no idea at all, how it is to go out there and listen to your own mother holding rapt conversations with dead people, especially when one of them happens to be your own father.”

“I’m sorry—” she started.

I looked at her. I reached out my hand and touched the side of her face. “Alex, I love you. I love you more than anything or anyone in the world. I’m not mad at you. I’m not even slightly angry at you. I’m upset about the situation. There’s nothing I can do about it except get upset every once in a while, but it’s not about you. If anything, it’s directed at the people at Waycross, the ones who said they would do something to help her and seem to have made her worse. That’s all there is to it. What happens to my mother, who she is, how she behaves . . . these are not things that you should concern yourself with. They’re certainly not things that I want to have come between us.” I paused to catch my breath. “That’s all there is to it, nothing more, nothing less, and really,
really
, I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”

“Okay,” she said quietly. She reached up and held my hand, kissed my palm. She smiled, and in the vague light of a Georgia evening, with the warm breeze coming through the open window of the pickup, she looked like more than I could ever have wished for.

She closed her eyes, squeezed my hand once more, and then let it go.

I looked back toward the empty road ahead of us.

We did not speak for a long time, and when we did the words we shared were of no lasting consequence.

After the killing in Fleming of the Keppler girl, after visiting my mother and listening to her talk her own special kind of crazy, I wondered if I was destined to carry the weight of these ghosts for all time. If I, somehow, could have done something to stop these killings, and in doing nothing I had consigned myself to carrying a burden of guilt for the rest of my life.

After the Keppler girl the dreams came more frequently.

I dreamed I was murdered. Dreamed I had run like the wind through trees and fields with the awareness of something behind me, something I could not see but could perceive with as strong a sense of certainty as my own name.