Angel Interrupted (40 page)

“Three and a half,” her father called down from the porch.

Maggie turned and glared at him.
“Dad,”
she said firmly.

“I’m going to go freshen my ice,” Colin Gunn declared, then wheeled his chair through the front door with a whole lot of unnecessarily conspicuous effort.

“Sorry about that,” Maggie told Fletcher. He didn’t care. Her father could have raced down his access ramp naked and done wheelies down the sidewalk for all Fletcher cared. All he saw and heard was Maggie.

I understood how he felt.

“You’ll wait?” he asked, still not sure of his good fortune.

“Of course,” she said, stepping closer. She looked up into his eyes, and I felt the thought pass between them again:
This is real.

I knew it was real as well, and I knew something else that they did not know. I knew it because I had squandered moments like this in my life—laughed through them, slurred through them, run from them as fast as I could. Because of that, I had thrown away my chances of feeling what they were experiencing now. But at least I had learned from it. What I knew, that they did not, was this: It was real because they both had the courage to acknowledge it was real. It was real because they both had been through enough loneliness and unhappiness to realize how rare that feeling of two hearts merging is, and how much of a waste it would be to throw that feeling away because you were afraid you might get hurt by it one day. Letting yourself feel like that is like leaping off a cliff into the darkness and letting the momentum take you. Sure, you step out into the abyss, but oh, when you do, what a rush it is.

“It might be a long time,” Maggie told him. She had put her hands on his arms, and he pulled her closer. It was physics, I knew, physics of the heart. For every emotion, there was a corresponding motion.

Oh, to be alive again.

“I don’t care how long it takes,” Fletcher said. He bent down and kissed her, and when I felt what that kiss meant to each of them, how it changed each of them forever, I knew it was time for me to walk away. This was not my world. It was not my turn. It was time to surrender the battle.

And yet, I needed to be a part of their joy, even if only by proximity. I returned to the front porch just as Colin Gunn was wheeling himself back outside, extra glasses of ice balanced precariously on his lap.

He did not give the walkway a glance. He wheeled over to his favorite comer of the porch, where shrubs hid Maggie and Fletcher from his view, and lined up the glasses neatly on the ledge of the stone porch, filling each one with two fingers of whiskey.

I counted the glasses: there were three of them. Was he going to invite Fletcher to join them?

“The third one’s for you, Fahey,” I heard him say.

The shock electrified me to my core.
Colin Gunn was talking to me.

“Relax, Fahey,” he said cheerfully, raising a toast in my general direction. “I can’t see you, but I know you’re there. You always smelled like tomato sauce and stale beer. You still do. Here’s to you, son—
salute
.”

He raised his glass to me, gulped at his whiskey, and smacked his lips in satisfaction. He dropped his voice to a whisper.

“I won’t say anything to Maggie,” he promised me. “But I know you’re here to watch over her. So long as you keep my little girl safe, you and I are going to get along just fine.”

A man lies on an inflatable bed in a dimly lit hospital room. The air is hot and moist, though he can only feel it on his face, where the smallest of areas around his eyes remains uncovered. His body has been wound in bandages that peel off his charred skin when the nurses come in to change them. They reapply the salve that smells like metal and do not know he sees them. They think he is unconscious.

He knows he must stay awake.

The room is filled with soft hums. Respirators and humidifiers pump out the oxygen that keeps him alive. His lungs feel as if they are filled with liquid fire. Each breath sears his body from the inside out. The agony is unendurable, but he must endure it.

He knows he must stay awake.

Few are allowed inside his room. The risk of infection is too great. He sees only the shadows of people walking past in the hallway, voices hushed.

He sees the darker shadows, too.

They cling to the ceiling above him. They creep along the walls. They are gathering, watching his every twitch. When he closes his eyes, they inch forward, probing, tasting, feeding on his pain.

He knows he must stay awake.

It will get worse, the pain. He has heard the nurses whispering outside his room. When the blackened flesh is scraped away and the nerves regenerate, his present pain will seem like a respite. They want to put him under, to keep him deep in twilight where he will have no control. Where he will not even be able to open his eyes.

When the time comes, he will fight them.

He sees the shadows now, slinking closer. They hide in the corners of the room, biding their time. They live under his bed, and their dark power radiates upward with a magnetic pull.

Pain floods his body, but he fights to stay awake. He knows what will happen if he closes his eyes.

He knows they have come to take him.