Angel Interrupted (2 page)

I have searched the hidden corners of her life and seen the photos of younger times. I have followed her, unseen, through her tidy house, certain I would spot signs of regret. But though she lives alone—the man in the photographs has obviously passed over, and I see no evidence of children to comfort her in advancing age—I do not feel sadness in her, not even at those times when she slows to examine the images of her past life. Happiness flows from her like silver ribbons and entwines her memories. She pauses, she feels, she moves on. I envy her certainty.

This morning, she was sitting on a small metal bench in a corner of her garden. Her tranquility was so great that rabbits hopped along the garden path without fear and chewed clover at her feet. Birds bathed in their concrete bath inches from where she sat. A sparrow lit on the arm of the bench, inches from her, rustling itself back into order. The old lady saw it all with bright eyes, soaking in the life surrounding her.

I could not tear myself away from her. I had followed her for days now, absorbed in learning the secrets of her serenity. To be near her was to live life in infinitesimal glory. She was the opposite of what I had been.

A breeze blew past, ruffling her hair. She closed her eyes to enjoy the sensation. I was so lost in watching her that I failed to notice I was not her only observer.

“Excuse me,” a timid voice said.

The old woman opened her eyes.

A man stood on the edge of her garden, waiting permission to speak. He was a weighed-down man in both body and spirit. His flesh sagged with years of bad food, though he could not have been older than his early forties. He reeked of cigarettes. His face, though perhaps once almost delicate, had become doughy and lackluster. His spirit, too, was heavy. I could feel it clearly. All the things he had not said in his life—love left unspoken, anger swallowed, regrets not voiced, apologies that stuck in his throat—they all encumbered him. His body slumped under the weight of these unvoiced emotions and I knew he would grow old before his time.

“Please, come into my garden,” my white-haired muse said calmly, unsurprised to see him at her gate. “I believe we are neighbors, are we not?”

“We are,” the man said, shuffling into her tiny paradise with an awkward politeness. He stood near the birdbath and did not seem to notice the flash of wings or the frantic thumping as creatures fled from his presence.

He smelled of stale beer and fried food, an odor I had lived with perpetually while alive but had since come to think of as the stench of self-neglect and disappointment.

“I live six doors down,” he explained. “With my mother. Or, I did live with my mother. She died last fall.”

“I see.” The woman’s voice was kind. She recognized the loneliness in him and, though she did not feel it herself, she understood how it could cripple others. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I had not seen her for a long time. I wondered where she had gone.”

“She was bedridden for several years before she passed,” the man explained.

“And you?” the woman asked. “What are you doing with your life now that she’s gone? Here, please—sit.” She waved her hand at a metal chair by a flower bed blooming in a riot of blues and purples around a miniature pond. But the man chose only to stand behind it, his hands gripping the curve of its back.

“I work,” he explained. “I’m a chef at the Italian restaurant on Sturgis Street. And I volunteer. Actually, that’s why I’m here.”

“I hope you aren’t here about me.” The old woman laughed. “I am quite fine. I have no need for meals, on wheels or otherwise.”

He smiled with an effort that told me it was an expression he seldom wore. “No, not that.” His fingers twitched as mine used to when I needed a cigarette. “I keep watch, you see, in the park. I watch over the children.”

The lady waited, her face betraying nothing.

“I’m part of an organization,” he added quickly, as if her silence meant she thought him peculiar or, worse, suspected him of being the evil he purported to prevent. “It’s not a big deal. I just keep tabs on the people who come and go. Jot down license plate numbers sometimes. Keep an eye on the children. I mostly work nights, preparing food for the next day, so I like to walk in the mornings when they play.”

“I see,” the old lady said. “You are Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye
.”

A spark lit inside him. This time, the smile came easily. “That’s my favorite book,” he admitted. “How did you know?”

“Many years of teaching school, my young friend.”

He nodded and wiped his hands across the tops of his pants, leaving streaks of flour on the denim. “I have a favor to ask. But you’ll think it’s strange.”

“I’m too old to think anything’s strange,” she assured him.

“There’s a man in the park. Sitting on a bench.”

“Perhaps he is enjoying the weather?” She lifted her face to the sun. “It is the finest of spring days. I have been sitting here for an hour myself.”

“I don’t think so,” the man said reluctantly, as if hating to spoil her pleasure. “I’ve seen him now for several days in a row, sitting on the same bench for hours, watching the children play. Sometimes he sleeps or pretends to read the newspaper, but he is secretly watching the children. I’m sure of it. Once you suspect, it’s easy to tell.”

A cloud of sadness passed over the old lady’s face. She knew too much about the world to question the possibilities of what he implied.

“I wonder if you might go with me?” the man asked. “To the park? To take a look at him to see.”

“To see what?” she asked.

“To see if you think he is a danger or if, maybe, well . . .” His voice trailed off.

She looked at him and waited, unhurried, willing to let him take his time.

He glanced about him as he searched for the right words. “I need you to tell me if you think he is a danger to the children or if he’s just someone like me who lives alone and likes the company of the park. His life could be ruined if I made an accusation. But a child’s life might be ruined if I don’t.”

“Well, then,” the old lady said, rising to her feet as she made up her mind to trust him. “Let’s just have a look, shall we?”

I was a surly bastard when I was alive, rejecting small talk and daring others to encroach on my silence at their peril. I would park myself at a bar, ignoring everyone and everything around me. I feared the kindness of others, knowing that glimpsing anything less than abject misery would remind me of how I had given up on life and other people had not.

But in the months I’ve spent wandering my town since my death, I have come to understand that people need meaningless chatter. They use small talk to fill the spaces between themselves and others, as the old lady’s neighbor was doing now. He prattled on in a nervous monologue about his job; his mother; his desire to do the right thing; and, most of all, his fear that he might accuse an innocent man, thus triggering an avalanche of injustice.

My god, but he never stopped talking. It was as annoying as a thousand sand flies buzzing inside my head. The chattering of monkeys would have been more soothing.

I do not trust people who talk too much.

As a detective, I pegged suspects as guilty the instant they offered unasked-for information. And I had been right, most of the time, at least before I descended into ineptitude. Guilt made people talk, as if they could regurgitate their shame in words.

None of the man’s inane chattering seemed to ripple the surface of the old lady’s calm. She was kinder than me. She understood the man’s need for contact and, perhaps, his need to exorcise the thoughts he had about the man in the park.

The trouble was, I suspected there was no man in the park.
He
was the man with the thoughts that should be feared. And how would I protect her if I turned out to be right?

“It’s an organized effort, actually,” he was telling the old woman, who was busy admiring her neighbors’ gardens as they walked past each. “It was started by a retired colonel. I was his first volunteer, actually. He’s in a wheelchair because of a war injury, so he relies on other people, like me.”

The old lady smiled at him. “It seems more worthy than watching television.”

They turned a corner toward the park. I hurried to keep up, an unseen interloper on their privacy. “I’ve never had a problem until now,” he told the old lady. “And I’ve been keeping an eye out for months. They make those sorts of fellows register. You can look up their names and addresses on the Internet and know right away if one lives near you. It’s public information. We keep track of them all.”

“Oh, dear,” the old lady said, her calm finally ruffled. But I could not tell if she rejected the idea of such men living near her or the idea that they were tagged for life like animals in the wild.

“What’s your name, dear?” she interrupted firmly when her new friend had gone on too long about his idea for basil ice cream, a suggestion I am certain revolted the old lady as much as it did me. “I remember what your mother looked like quite clearly, but I cannot remember her name. I am a bit forgetful these days.”

“It’s Robert,” he said. “For my father. He died when I was young. My mother named me Robert Michael Martin. She said three first names were better than one.”

“And her name was Eleanor,” the old lady remembered. “I recall it now.”

“That’s right,” the man said. “I already know your name.”

Oh, really?
Then why had he said nothing until now?

“At least,” he continued, “I know part of your name. You’re Mrs. Bates.”

“But you must call me Noni,” she insisted.

Noni, Noni, Noni—
no, no, no.
Did your mother never tell you not to talk to strangers, not to invite them into your life?

“Isn’t the park the other way?” Noni asked when he led her down a side street.

“Yes. But if we go this way, we’ll be able to approach the bench from behind and you can study him without him even knowing, maybe get a better read that way.”

And if you do that, you’ll also be marching straight into a deserted bramble with a strange man, far from anyone who could hear you, with me as a powerless witness unable to sound the alarm. No!
I wanted to shout.
For God’s sake, have you been living in a bubble? You don’t even know this man and you surely don’t know what he is capable of, no one can know just by looking. Oh, the things I have seen, the moments that have turned people’s lives from triumph to terror, the decisions that have brought on suffering—how small they can be, how the smallest of choices can end a life.

“We shall go your way,” my friend Noni declared. “There are some hydrangeas on this block I have been wanting to see up close.”

A hundred thoughts ran through my head, accompanied by a hundred paralyzing images. I had seen so much violence in my life, before violence cut my life short. I had long ago learned that people had no shame when it came to inflicting pain on others. They’d murder a sweet little old lady as surely as they’d kill a soldier in his prime, all to fill some terrible void that yawned inside them. There are wounded people walking this earth, people whose souls have been poisoned and whose minds have been warped and whose selfishness has risen to such heights that they can take a human life as casually as stomping on an ant.

But what could I do about it but follow them? I had no power over the physical world, just a slight ability to influence wind and water and, sometimes, fire. Even then, my influence was meager. I could inspire a breeze, ripple the surface of a pond, maybe even create a spark or two, but none of that could stop a man. If he wanted to hurt my morning’s muse, there would be nothing I could do except witness her suffering—and I was not at all sure this was something I could endure. Having wallowed in human misery while I was alive, I was not anxious to have it follow me in death.

They were approaching the undeveloped edge of the park, hidden from the playground and picnic area by acres of untamed overgrowth. Early in my career, I used to bust men in the shadows of the ramble ahead, hauling them in for lewd conduct and indecent exposure. This was code for some poor bastard groping another poor bastard in the dark, both seeking something raw and real to counteract the charade of their lives. Back then, I’d enjoyed arresting those men with the same enthusiasm my father had reserved for hunting deer. But I was ashamed of my actions now—and I’d have given anything to encounter another human tramping among the shadows. Anyone at all. I feared for my new friend, Noni. Could she not see what this man was up to? He was a loner who had lived with his mother his entire life. Did she need a Hitchcock movie playing right in front of her to realize the truth? You’d think someone named “Mrs. Bates” would know better.

“Look,” Noni said suddenly. “Did you see that? Follow me.”
And she’s leading him even deeper into the brush. It is hard to be a guardian angel given what humans bring upon themselves
. She placed a finger over her lips, and the chubby man dutifully followed, tiptoeing closer as she bent forward and parted the branches of a bramble bush. “See?”