Angel Landing (3 page)

I called good night when Minnie left the room, but there was no answer. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, I imagined her fragile grip on the wooden banister, I worried about the rate of her heartbeat and her pulse. I went to sit by the fire; I turned to Carter. “I'm glad you're here,” I whispered.

“Shit,” Carter said. “So am I. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. I could have gone to California, I could have set up the Soft Skies office in New Hampshire, but I came here. At the right time, the perfect time.”

Although Carter had misunderstood, I went along. “Are we in danger?” I asked.

Carter looked at me fondly. “I've told you a hundred times—the whole planet is in danger.” Carter cleaned his glasses again. “There's going to be a lot of work to do. A lot of organizing.”

When Carter pulled his notebook out of his back pocket and began making a list of antinuclear organizations to contact, I went into the kitchen and brought back the bottle of Seagram's. When I returned, Carter was already on the phone.

“No long distance,” I warned him.

“Just send the bill to my office,” Carter told me as he dialed New Jersey and Maine.

I sat in front of the fire, drinking Seagram's from Carter's glass. I didn't bother to add more wood, I didn't stoke the embers or add more kindling when the fire began to die. On the other side of the harbor, firemen watched Angel Landing III simmer and spark. And here, in Minnie's house, the only sound was Carter's voice and the hissing of bits of white birch turning to ash in the cast-iron stove.

Much later Carter hung up the phone receiver and came to sit next to me on the floor. “I'm feeling pretty good,” Carter announced. “Pretty damn good.”

“I'm not,” I said. I took Carter's hand. “Stay here tonight,” I asked.

“Tonight?” Carter said. “I've got fifty or sixty more phone calls to make. I'll be up half the night.”

“That doesn't matter.”

“No,” Carter said, pouring himself the last of the whiskey and drinking it quickly. “I would never ask you to do that. You've got work tomorrow. So do I.”

“I don't mind,” I said. “I don't feel like sleeping. I'll stay up with you.”

“I'll tell you something.” Carter touched my face with his fingertips. “I think I'm on the brink of something, Natalie. I can feel it. Something is going to happen.”

“Carter,” I said, “just tonight. I don't want to be alone.”

“You're not alone,” Carter said. “Minnie's right upstairs.”

“Just tonight,” I said.

Carter shook his head. “You should understand better than anyone. I've got to go home.”

I thought of trying to hold him there; I would refuse to open the front door, I would beg, throw myself down on my hands and knees, whisper every fear into the polished wooden floor, whisper into Carter's ear. But instead I quietly kissed Carter's cheek, and then walked him to the door.

“I'll call you,” Carter promised. “Wish me luck,” he said as he walked down the porch steps jauntily, not hindered by a coat or a scarf, not hindered by me.

But I did not wish him luck; I stood in the open doorway, wrapping my sweater tightly around myself. Carter got into his old MG and turned on the engine; as I watched him drive away I wished that he was the kind of man who would have stayed till morning. We could have made love all night long, we might have chased away the phantoms who whisper in tongues when the night is too quiet, and not even the sea gulls call. I waited a little longer, wondering if Carter just might be the sort of man who would make a quick U-turn in the middle of the street, a man who might suddenly know as much about my fear of darkness as he did about the politics of kindness. But Carter did not return, and I closed the front door and went up to my room.

I had always remembered Minnie's house in August, now I couldn't imagine summer in these rooms; perhaps that always happens when a house settles, when there aren't enough boarders. I turned down the hand-sewn quilt on my bed, then went to the window. The sky was still not right; a purple cast clung to the clouds, alien particles had been left behind.

I pulled down the window shade; I didn't want to look outside again until morning, when the horizon would once again be a calm blue. But once in bed I found it difficult to sleep; after the hours of noise and confusion, the harbor seemed unnaturally quiet, and the house seemed to breathe, wood and walls exhaled slowly. Waiting for sleep, I thought of Minnie, just down the hallway, and of Beaumont standing over a hotplate in the basement mixing up a snack of molasses and oatmeal.

When sleep finally came I dreamed of white horses locked in a paddock racing close by a wooden fence, in circles, over and over again. They left their footprints in the sand; their hooves were phosphorescent, trailing ribbons of light behind them. I awoke before dawn, hours before the alarm clock sounded, as if I had been awakened by the clamor of hooves and quick heartbeats. Then I dressed hurriedly, to escape the chill, to avoid my bed and those horses which seemed to have left their mark on my pillow, and their restlessness on my sheets.

TWO

R
UMORS DRIFTED THROUGH
town. Angel landing III had been closed for nearly a week, paid construction crews watched as a troop of laborers cleaned up the debris. The explosion was no longer referred to on the front page of the
Fishers Cove Herald
, but purple smoke still seemed to hang in the air. Everyone in town was interested, everyone had caught the same disease: an all-consuming interest in the power plant, a driving need to find out what had happened, a passion for gossip. There was talk that a lunatic was loose: a radical fringe walked the streets at midnight, a cult whose members wore black met secretly at the edge of the harbor.

Even at Outreach, where therapists prided themselves on cool rationality, there was an odd excitement. In the days that followed the explosion Outreach was busier then ever; people in town had gone wild. Life decisions were made in a flash, bad checks were written, cars were stolen, marriages dissolved overnight. But though new clients streamed through the waiting room, I refused to be caught up in the frenzy. I stuck with my old reliables: an anorectic girl, a sad teenager who had been truant from school for most of his life, and one or two others who wandered in and out.

All of my cases had been forced into therapy by the courts, none really cared to break into the evenness of our sessions with private stories of sorrow and betrayal. To my mind, this was just as well. In these months at Outreach I had come to distrust the methods and techniques I had been taught in graduate school; none of the theories seemed to apply. My original passion for social work had not done a bit of good. Each day I was more and more convinced that my clients would never be cured; I had little hope that any of them would speak more than two sentences once they had walked inside my office. And so, I refused to let the power plant explosion affect me, though even I could not help standing at my office window, watching the sky and the harbor.

On the day when one of the networks sent a news crew out from Manhattan to interview local residents, Lark Perry walked into my office without bothering to knock. Lark had been a therapist at Outreach for more than two years; she had her eye on the job held by our supervisor, Claude Wilder, in time perhaps an agency of her own. Lark sat on my desk and ran a hand through her curly brown hair.

“I've been watching you, Natalie,” she said, “and I'm worried. You haven't had an in-take in ages. You have fewer clients than any other therapist.”

“I thought I would leave the new in-takes for you,” I told Lark. “I know you like a heavy caseload.” I smiled then. “I know you're easily bored.”

Lark raised one eyebrow. “I wonder where your anger is coming from.”

“Anger?” I said.

Lark smiled knowingly. “And envy.”

In truth I had met with absolutely no success, and Lark had already begun EMOTE, a therapy group based on original techniques; she had admirers throughout the state, Claude Wilder spent most of his time covering his tracks, making certain that Lark did not walk right into his supervisor's position.

“I really think we should talk,” Lark went on. “With your anger and envy, how can you hope to be a decent therapist? Something has to be done.”

“You think I'm envious?” I asked.

“Do you know what I want you to do?” Lark said. “I want you to come to EMOTE.”

I shook my head. “I'm not interested in cults.”

“Cults!” Lark said. “Well, because of a ‘cult' not one of my junkies is on drugs anymore, not one of my car thieves would even look at a Mercedes now. I'm meeting with enormous success.” Lark twisted the silver ring on her finger, she began to calm down. “But that's not the point,” she went on. “Sooner or later you're going to have to deal with your own failure.”

“It's true,” I agreed. “My work hasn't been going well.”

Lark jumped from the desk and came to give me a hug. “Don't you understand?” Lark said. “You're wonderful, you're the best. But you have to get rid of your self-doubt. See yourself from the EMOTE point of view.”

“I don't know,” I sighed.

“I do know,” Lark insisted. “I can help you.”

“Do I need your help?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” Lark said. “Listen to me, there's room for both of us at EMOTE. I could use a good assistant, I can't possibly keep up with all the cases referred to me. I want you to try it. I want you to promise me you'll come to an EMOTE meeting.”

“I'll think about it,” I said.

That wasn't good enough; Lark shook her head. “Promise,” she said.

“All right,” I finally agreed. “One of these days I promise to come to a meeting.”

“And you'll take on more clients here at Outreach?” Lark smiled.

I buzzed Emily, the secretary in the waiting room, and told her I would be glad to see the next client who walked through the door.

“Satisfied?” I asked Lark.

Lark shook her head as she walked to the door. “I won't be satisfied until I see you at EMOTE. Maybe then you'll learn something about social work. Maybe then you'll learn something about success,” she said as she walked out the door.

Each time I compared my feelings about work with Carter's I grew depressed. He was dedicated to a job nobody paid him for, nobody wanted him to do, yet he was happier than if he had sat on the board of directors of his father's cereal company. But now when I thought about Carter I wondered if I might also have a chance for the same sort of fulfillment. If I became immersed in work, if I followed Lark's lead, I might start to sing in the shower, I could find joy in social work, reasons for dedication. If Carter had not been a man who thought of his work not as a job but as a passion, and if Lark had not needled me and forced a second wind of hope into my sagging professionalism, I might have spent that day like any other. I would have studied the naked blackberry canes in the frozen ground outside my window, I would have thought about writing my letter of resignation to Outreach's board of directors, I might even have imagined a move to California or the Southwest. But it was not like any other day, and so I got Michael Finn.

When Emily buzzed me and announced that a new client had just walked through the door, I thought it would be a small-time thief or a junkie, perhaps the court had sent over a fisherman arrested in a local bar or an abusive mother forced into therapy by the law. I never thought, as I opened the door and reached for the case file Emily handed me, that it would be anyone special. When I went back to my desk Michael Finn stood by the open door, hesitating. His long hair fell over the collar of his leather jacket. He leaned on the door and looked in at me.

“Why don't you sit down?” I said, pointing to the chair on the other side of the desk.

“No thanks,” Finn said, but he did come into the office then; he closed the door behind him.

The only facts Emily had written into the file were his name, his address, and his age—twenty-nine. I looked over the top of the manila folder. “You haven't been referred by the court?” He would be my only client not forced into therapy, not ordered to produce his psyche at a given hour, legally bound to bare his soul twice a week.

“That doesn't mean I want to be here,” Finn told me.

His eyes were the kind that could electrify with just one look.

“Why don't you have a seat?” I suggested. “We'll never be able to talk this way.”

Finn shrugged and sat down. He stretched out his legs and crossed them, obviously waiting for me to make the first move.

“Cigarette?” I offered the pack on my desk. I, kept it there for new clients under stress, though sometimes I, too, needed to smoke.

“No.”

“Why did you decide to come to Outreach? You must have had a reason.”

“I didn't know where else to go,” he said.

“I hope I can help you,” I said reassuringly.

“I doubt that,” Finn said as he took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He lit a match, inhaled. “I don't think anyone can help me.”

“If you really thought that, you wouldn't be here,” I smiled.

“I am here, aren't I?” Finn agreed.

“Let's start,” I suggested, but neither of us spoke. A thin scar ran across Finn's cheek, from his left eye to his ear; his wrists were knotted with long, blue veins. “Why have you decided to come for therapy?”

“I have to talk,” Finn said simply.

“All right,” I nodded. “Good,” I said. “About what?”

Finn looked at me carefully. “I'm the bomber,” he said.

I had been scribbling notes in Finn's file—“anxious,” I had written, “extremely ill at ease.” Now I looked up and met his eyes. “What?” I said. “What was that?”