Angels of Destruction (22 page)

22

W
aking in darkness, Erica sat up in bed and realized that Una had failed to bring her the nightcap of warm milk. Every evening since the arrival, they had shared the ritual, and just the smell of cardamom triggered an overwhelming desire for sleep, and she always drank the potion to the dregs, a trail of spices climbing the inside wall of the ceramic mug. But Una had passed over the moment that evening, her neglect linked to the fuss over Wiley's shorn head. The sight of him shocked Erica initially, but when she touched the short bristles, she thrilled to the new sensation and could not resist running her palms over and over the coarse nap, the skin and bone. The old woman, likewise, could not stop staring at him, her son's name loose on her mouth as she whispered what she had wrought, if only in appearance. Like Frankenstein's Prometheus:
it's alive.
Or the ghost made flesh again. Una did not know what to think or how to act, for she had betrayed her grandmother under the willow tree, let slip her desire and extracted the truth, their plot unspooling like a skein of yarn batted by a cat.

“You could pass for Cole,” Mee-Maw had said, and then to Erica, “And you are growing more like her each day, pale and thin as a Madonna.”

“But they're not, Mee-Maw. They're not them. We should ought to let them go.”

“Whisht, child.” Her eyes were lit with rage.

They passed an uncomfortable meal talking about the changing weather, the cool winds bringing in the real autumn. Wiley rubbed his scalp between courses, pondering his new haircut with his fingernails, grinning like a tot whenever he strayed into the field of Mrs. Gavin's be-maddened glances. When the dishes had been cleared, Erica registered her old complaint once more, the tiredness coming on despite the hours in the healing sun, perhaps too much sun, and she let herself be led to the child's room, where the rite of story and prayer continued, falling asleep as Una read Aesop's fable of the fox and the stork. When she awakened hours later and remembered there had been no sleeping potion, Erica put a hand to her cool forehead and thought her fever had broken.

Kicking the quilt from her legs, she crawled from Una's tiny bed to hunt for the ladder leading to Wiley, but the room was dark and the hallway darker still. With arms stretched and hands extended, she closed her eyes and gingerly felt her way along the wall, step by step, until she reached the sharp edge of the corner. Her bare feet stuck to the wooden kitchen floor, and she counted the paces to where the parlor was supposed to begin and where she expected scant starlight to offer better illumination, but when she opened her eyes, Erica saw that she had entered a narrow curiosity box. All around her, the room's strange objects swelled and crowded close, pinning her to the center of the space. A huge globe rolled off its pedestal, its axis threatening to impale her. A riderless velocipede cranked its pedals in mad abandon, spiraling in figure eights around the dressmaker's mannequin, which arched its back like a magician stretching arms toward the hearth, where the fireplace sparked, then roared with flames. The creatures on the walls blinked to life: the deer head strained to escape the wall, a raccoon, trilling with ecstasy, scooped a crayfish from the acrylic waters, and a bird spread its cottony wings to fly once around the room before settling atop the bookcase. A pane shattered, and the butterflies escaped the shadow box. The glass doors popped open and the books tumbled in single file from the shelves, fanning their pages in freedom, their contents spilling out word after word, uttered in their authors’ voices, then falling like road signs into jumbled stacks of hot type. She stood in the middle of a pinball game, her gaze bouncing from bumper to bumper, like a toy in a penny arcade. A pair of giant eyes filled the picture window, the wizened head tilted for a closer look, and Mee-Maw screeched like a witch. Projected on the far wall were the larger-than-life faces of the Virginia state trooper pining for her, and Carl and Barry from the diner, talking with one another in hushed tones. Superimposed over their features appeared circular targets, and the shots rang out from behind her, the points piling high with each hit. A fierce wind roared through the trees outside, and the voices of her father and mother blew in, bored into her ears, and drilled into her brain.

Una descended from the loft, her wings unrolled and shimmering like an angel's. Not the celestial kind, but a watcher, more sinister and threatening, as though the heavens had been emptied out and they roamed the earth in misery, unsure of their mission. She walked toward her, arms outstretched, crying
Mother.
The bohemian girl whose car they had stolen soared beneath the eaves, abandoning Wiley in the bed, shorn and spent, his life draining between his legs. Luminous and foreboding, she spread her wings to span from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. In her hands she cupped a radiant fire, shielded its brightness in the knot of her fingers, and then released it all at once until the light and heat filled the room to sweep everything from its path and send Erica tumbling into the fathoms, falling up into the limitless sky. She reached out to be saved, and then cried once and collapsed to the floor, where he found her in the morning, dropped from the sky in a crumpled heap of bones and hair.

“We are getting out of this place,” he said. “Let's go.” Wiley bent over her and slid his hand beneath her shoulders, but she did not recognize his face without the curtain of curls. Sharp against his skin, his skull flashed, and she thought he was dead. She had fallen away from him to the bottom, drowning in an ink blue sea pressing on her body and soul. Parting the blades of water, she emerged gasping and unsure of her whereabouts, cast away and waking in the middle of an endless ocean.

“Let's go, Erica. We should have gone long ago.”

Lifted to a sitting position, she wrapped her arms around Wiley's shoulders and pulled him to her, kissing the stubbled hair behind his ear, his jaw, the arch of his cheekbones, his lips, hungry for him, waking from a century of slumber, and he returned the embrace, filled with relief, and welcomed the tang of her skin, the pressure of her limbs, the course of her hair spilling into his hands.

Together they saw the child watching from the kitchen. She had just awakened, her hair a bird's nest of knots, and trembled with suppressed indignation. “You called her Erica. I heard you.” Wiley helped Erica to her feet, and she leaned against him for strength. The child quaked like a banshee, her eyes darting from face to face, her hands balled into fists. “You've been lying to me all along—”

Wiley said, “We're leaving. Today.”

“Mee-Maw won't let you go. She'll never let you go. She'd kill you first—”

“Una.” Erica stepped toward her, but the girl inched backward. “You're right. We're not who we say we are, but that doesn't change anything, Una. That doesn't change how I feel about you. We had to lie to protect ourselves, to protect you. We had to pretend to be someone else.”

“Mee-Maw says you are them come back.”

“I'm not Cole Gavin,” Wiley said. “I'm not your father. She's not your mother.”

“We are not who you want us to be.”

The girl looked away, up to the ceiling, folded her arms and brought her hands to her collarbone, hugging herself and fighting tears. She crossed her feet, rested the right upon the left, gripped by the power of her own desperate confusion, gnawing at her lip, anxious for rescue from herself. Groping to become one of them. An uncertain angel. Erica held her close and felt the wild thump of her own heart drum against the child's ear.

N
O PROTESTS, NO
negotiations, and no threats from Mrs. Gavin when they told her they were leaving, only a hint of resignation when she asked if they were sure, if it wasn't wiser to wait a day or so to see if they were well and fit for travel. The Gavins’ old Rambler station wagon had been hidden beneath a paint-splattered canvas in a locked shed, but once Wiley insisted that she drive them to town to catch the next bus heading west, it was uncovered and prodded till it started. Mrs. Gavin busied herself with the child while the fugitives packed their gear. She gave them a duffel bag in which to stow the broken-down guns, and cooked a last meal before their departure. She refused any payment for her hospitality, and on the road seemed preoccupied by the driving and occasional car passing the other way. Littering the roadside were strands of brown oak and poplar leaves, and when they pulled into the parking lot of a general store, the tires crushed a swath and ground the leaves to dust.

The bus stop outside Parker's Cross Roads was nothing more than a bench beneath a small sign in the shape of a racing hound labeled “Dixie.” Tickets were purchased at the counter inside amid the dusty goods, the sweating soda cooler, the rows of cigarettes and ammunition, and plastic-carded fishing lures and wicked hooks. Arranged neatly in a rack next to the cash register, an army of stacked pamphlets trumpeted in red capitals: HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED? ARE YOU BORN AGAIN? THE COMING ARMAGEDEON. Wiley took the last of these, spread the folds like a roadmap, and chuckled over the contents as the clerk filled out their receipt for the bus to Memphis. He paid with a singed twenty-dollar bill and with the change bought four Cokes, which they took outside to drink. “How much time to your bus?” Mrs. Gavin asked.

“Three thirty,” Wiley said. “Under an hour, give or take. You don't have to wait.”

“We'll set awhile. I just like to be off the road afore dark. Can't see as good as I used to. You remember when I first laid eyes on you, thought you was my Cole.”

“I'm not him.”

“No.” She shook her head slowly. “No, you ain't. If he comes back to me, he will not leave me like this. The prodigal son returns humbled and is given the fatted calf.”

The chrome gas pumps reflected shards of light. The day's temperature had reached its apogee, and a cool breeze foretold the chill night ahead. Erica tied a sweater around her shoulders, fighting off the lingering aftershock of her fever. Pressed to her side, Una took short sips from her bottle to make her soda pop last and thus forestall their farewells. “Will you write me a letter? I will write you back.” She slipped her a label with a PO box address.

“I'll send you a postcard, okay? Next place we go. And when we're all settled, I'll write you again.”

Hidden in her jacket was the small china cup she had rescued from the sandbox, trimmed in Wedgwood blue, painted with two birds in flight, holding up with their beaks a tiny banner between them. Una pressed it into Erica's palm. “I'd like you to have this to remember me by. You won't forget me?”

She hugged the child one last time and nodded.

“Can you tell me your real names? Romeo and Juliet?”

Erica did not reply, but stared down the road for a long time. When Mrs. Gavin finished her Coke, she stood and signaled to her granddaughter. Goodbyes and thank-yous, an awkward embrace, and then they got into the car and drove away. When the Gavins had disappeared, he checked his wristwatch and announced they had another twenty minutes to wait for the bus.

“Imagine that little girl, all alone with that old woman, and never knowing what happened to her parents. I feel sorry for her.”

“Don't,” Wiley said, and then threw his empty bottle into the trash. “She was trying to get you hooked every night. Love junkie. That's how much she wanted to make her own dream come true. They would have kept you forever if they could.” Worse fates were possible, she decided, and better ones. Waiting for the bus, she resolved to rekindle her feelings for Wiley, to choose to be happy, to will herself to give in to his schemes and wild notions. She resolved to be what he wanted her to be, to change as he had changed. A silent laugh flared in her chest and rippled through her throat and echoed in her brain. The idea of forever seemed an impossibility, like love itself, or finding your way ashore from the middle of an ocean, or returning to earth after being abandoned at the top of the sky, blue as the cup resting in her hands.

23

D
iane nearly bumped into the postman on her way out the door, and after apologies were exchanged, he handed her the mail and tipped his cap goodbye. In her haste to get back home to Washington, she passed the bundle on to Margaret, who laid the mess atop the sideboard by the door. Joe had been calling nightly, missing her, and at her sister's insistence she prepared to make the long drive back. Golden light dressed the morning, and the sisters, glowing white, lingered by the car packed with her suitcases. Reluctant to take her leave, Diane held her in her arms and would not let go. “You call me the minute you hear anything. You call me any time you need to talk, night or day.”

Crushed by her sister's embrace, Margaret could only nod.

“She'll be back,” Diane said. “I'll keep you both in my prayers.”

Though she had her doubts, Margaret thanked her and stood in the street till the car vanished. With a sigh, she walked into the foyer and swept the mail together and laid the lot on the table. Already missing Diane, she fetched a cup of tea and sat to sort the junk from the bills. At the bottom of the stacks lay the postcard. On its face, a photograph of a Victorian funereal statue, a grieving stone angel in the foreground framed by bare branches in the wintry background.
Historic Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis, Tennessee
ran the caption.

What kind of person would send such a morbid picture? She flipped over the card and the sight of her daughter's handwriting struck her in the solar plexus: “Do not be blue, for I am finally happy. Goodbye, and do not try to find us.” Without understanding, Margaret managed to read it twice before the first tear hit the saucer's edge.

•   •   •

A
NOTHER PICTURE POSTCARD
sent from Memphis arrived in the rural post office box but was not retrieved until the week of Thanksgiving, when Mrs. Gavin came into town to buy a small turkey. The photo on the front showed a downtown streetscape at dusk or dawn, a few stragglers talking in doorways, marquees glowing, and a lonesome car parked curbside.
Beale Street
and a progress of musical notes in the upper left corner, and
Home of the Blues
centered in the bottom. Una did not know why such a card had been chosen for her, but she kept it many years.

Dear Una,

Drat, I messed up with this postcard and meant to send this one to my mother and the one with the angel to you, for you are the true angel and I will always remember you. See, I told you I would write and will write again.

“Miss Nancy”