Angels of Destruction (4 page)

9

W
hile the foundling was off in school, Mrs. Quinn wandered among the carousels of clothing in the girls’ department at G. C. Murphy's. Winter coats had already been marked down after the holidays, even though the brunt of the season remained in prospect, and she chose a gray parka with faux rabbit fur trim for Norah. After selecting the coat, she was at a loss for what else to buy her, and wistfully fingered the corduroy jumpers and flannel nightgowns, remembering. Two decades had passed since she had brought Erica to Murphy's; 1965, simpler then, clothes, girls, everything. Her daughter's shade trailed her along the aisles—how she had loved shopping in those days. Taking her mother's hand, Erica had danced from display to display, coveting every bright color and wild design.

Lost in the past, Margaret did not notice the man in the camel hair coat who followed her around the store, stopping a few racks away when she paused to guess at sizes. He switched his fedora from hand to hand, anxious to be under the brim again. Whenever she looked in his direction, he stiffened like a mannequin and remained motionless until some other bright thing caught her eye. Conspicuous by his mere presence, he became inconspicuous by dint of will. He merged into the general background and disappeared in the thickets of hanging clothes.

The few other shoppers were women like herself. Widows, perhaps, but grandmothers surely, out hunting for birthday gifts or bargains to store away for next winter. They shuffled in a daze from bin to bin, and Margaret read in every face some suffering or disappointment, their hopes and dreams marked down, 40 percent off. She wondered if others saw the shame written in her eyes and scratched across her brow. The others, if they noticed her at all, must have recognized her as that woman whose daughter had run away from home, gotten into trouble, and never returned. Photographs of Erica had been in the papers and on television when the story broke, and even Margaret and Paul had once been on the front page of the local newspaper. If the women didn't remember the exact circumstances, they knew instinctively that she shared their heartbreak over irredeemable losses. But the little girl was her secret, and she clung to it with all the ferocity of untrammeled happiness. Margaret gathered in the parka, quickly chose a watch cap, scarf, and mittens in complementary red, and paid her way out of the store. She thought of crossing over to the Rosa Rossa Flower Shop to see her neighbor, but decided she did not feel like talking to anyone after all.

To get to her car on Robinson Street, she had to pass the diner where she and Erica had often stopped for an ice cream or to split a slice of chocolate cake. The air bit at her cheeks, and she felt hopelessly tired again. No harm, she thought, to step inside for a cup of coffee and warm up before heading home. At eleven o'clock, the place was nearly empty, so she picked a booth out of the draft. The decor had not changed from the 1970s, the same cracked vinyl flooring, burgundy booths, chrome fading to the sheen of silvered mirror, and the laminated menus offered the same choices—only the prices differed from her last visit. A waitress arrived as Margaret read from the selections, trying to decide if a piece of pie would upset her stomach. She could sense the young woman's presence, a dark mustard-colored uniform, glass of water set down with a thunk, silverware wrapped in a paper napkin dropped unceremoniously on the placemat. Margaret looked up just far enough to see the name tag: Joyce.

“What can I getcha, hon?”

Bring me my daughter at nine years old.

“Just coffee,” Margaret said. “And—oh, I don't know—what pie is good today?”

“We have apple, blueberry, cherry, sour cherry, peach, pumpkin, lemon meringue, banana cream, coconut cream, though that's been here over two days. Nobody gets the coconut. None of the fruit is fresh this time of year, but the apples in the apple pie are real.”

Echoing across the years, the girl's voice finally registered in her memory. Margaret had known her once upon a time, and instantly she averted her eyes, studied her fingernails. “Sour cherry, thank you. A small slice.”

She watched the waitress walk toward the kitchen, just as she stared at all young women, trying to discern some sign of her own daughter in their faces and figures, a clue as to what Erica might look like now, how she might act, what she might feel or think. Trying to draw the particulars of Erica's life from the surface of others’, she could not help but study them, their feathery haircuts, the fading fad for polyester disco clothing, the way they made older folks invisible. Young women had changed since the time she had been one of their tribe. More comfortable in their sexuality, hiding almost nothing, no garters, no wires or girdles, just open and brazen. The girl returned with a smile and set down the mug, milk and sugar, a forlorn slice of pie, the syrupy filling bright as blood.

“Excuse me,” the girl said, “but don't I know you? Aren't you Erica's mother?”

Mrs. Quinn assented by her silence. The high school girl had aged a decade, but of course she remembered her well. All of her friends had disappeared too, when Erica ran away. They stopped coming around the house, so their faces were locked in time as teenagers, but she could still see the giggly teen in the careworn features.

“I thought it was you. I'm Joyce. Joyce Waverly but you might remember me as a Green, my maiden name.” She held out a chapped red hand to show off the wedding band and matching engagement ring. “I went to high school with Erica.”

“Joyce Green.” She remembered.

“So good to see you. Mind if I take a load off?” She pushed aside the department store bags and scooted into the booth across from Margaret.

“I'm married now,” she said. “Seven years. One boy, and one on the way. His name is Jason, my son that is. I don't know what we'll call this one, maybe Mack Truck, ‘cause I never even saw him coming till he knocked me flat. How are you, Mrs. Quinn? How's Erica? Haven't heard from her in ages. She still out west? Arizona or New Mexico, was it? I can't imagine living in a foreign country like that.”

“She's still there,” Margaret lied. She had no idea where her daughter was at that moment. “Doing well.”

Her daughter's friend leaned across the table and whispered. “Did she ever get out of trouble? Is she married? Any kids?”

Mrs. Quinn sipped at her coffee. “Just the one. A girl. In fact, she's come to stay with me for a while.” She nodded at the shopping bags. “I was just after going to the store to buy the poor thing some decent winter clothes—”

“I love little girls’ things way better than boys’.” Joyce Waverly had already begun pulling out the items. She held up the gray parka and brushed the fake rabbit fur against her cheek. “They don't have much call for coats and mittens down in the desert, you know.”

“They're for my granddaughter,” Margaret said proudly. “Norah. Norah Quinn.”

T
HE STRANGER AT
the booth nearest the door sat patiently until the waitress spotted him and wended her way. “Do you mind if I ask who was that woman? The one who just left? The one you sat next to and chatted with?”

“Mrs. Quinn?” Joyce lowered her pencil and pad. The man at the table looked kind and respectable, a bit like her grandfather.

“I thought so,” he said. “It's been years since I've seen her.”

“I was surprised to see her myself. We go way back, her and me. I was friends with her daughter Erica, and ever since that whole incident, she's been something of a hermit.”

He fingered the brim of his hat resting near the sugar dispenser. “Ever since the incident.”

“You remember,” she said. “They thought that boy Wiley kidnapped her, but I say they ran off together. Everyone at school knew they were an item.”

“Right, the incident.”

The icy blueness of his eyes transfixed her, and she imagined how handsome he must have been as a young man. He kept his gaze fixed on her, and in her womb, the fetus kicked and fluttered. The man lifted his hand and held his palm over the hump of her abdomen. “May I?” he asked, and when she nodded, he laid his hand on the spot where the baby stirred, and Joyce shuddered with pleasure as the warmth radiated across her skin, a penetrating heat that spread into her body. The unborn child stilled as if he had soothed it to sleep. Withdrawing his hand, he leaned back into the booth. “So my old friend, Mrs. Quinn, was on a shopping spree?”

Flustered, Joyce kept on talking. “For her granddaughter, come to live with her for a while.”

“Granddaughter? There can be no child.”

“Oh, sure there is,” Joyce said. “She showed me a new hat and coat. For Norah.”

He chuckled to himself. “What a pretty name.”

The baby kicked again at the sound of his voice, and wicked desire filled Joyce with a guilty pleasure. She twisted her wedding ring and looked hopelessly at the front door, wondering if anyone would come in.

10

D
uring long division, as Mrs. Patterson worked on remainders at the chalkboard, Sean kept spinning around in his desk chair to make sure Norah stayed awake. Even when he was called to the front to demonstrate how to divide 400 by 6, he checked on the progress of her fatigue. Stultifying wet heat off the radiators made her drowsy, and she struggled to hold up her head in the cup of one hand. Her eyelids quivered, then closed in slow motion. Her head slipped from her palm, and then she recovered once before she could not fight off sleep any longer. With every inspiration, her nose whistled, and she began a purring snore, oblivious to the mathematics unfolding all around her. By tacit arrangement, everyone let her rest until art class began. Sean woke her with a whisper and a pad and colored pencils in hand, and she begged him to sit beside her at a table beneath the panoramic window.

She drew with a quick and certain hand, sketching out in a few deft strokes a tensed leopard, flash of tawny spotted coat, and teeth and claws as angry slashes. Cowering in the corner of the page, the gazelle caught in the split second of fear, legs bent, neck torqued as its head made a quarter turn too late toward the predator. Sean watched as she drew, tightened his body like the muscles in the gazelle's flanks. He smelled blood and fear. Lost in her drawing, Norah moved the colored pencils with grave concentration. Work complete, she set the paper aside, took another sheet, ripped it in half, and began folding precise creases.

Mrs. Patterson, making the rounds among the schoolchildren, paused to offer encouragement or advice to each child. When she reached the window and saw what Norah was doing, she broke from the regimen and strode to her, stopping close enough to cast a shadow over the table's pen-pocked surface, transfixed by the drawing of the attacking leopard and the delicate manipulations at hand. When she finished folding, Norah laid an origami crane beside her picture and immediately began work on another. Without a word, Mrs. Patterson slid the drawing into her hands, held it up in disbelief, and walked back to her chair at the front of the room. She considered the craftsmanship of the piece, still staring at its realism, and asked in a loud voice, “Where did you learn to draw like this?”

Norah did not look up from her origami. “I could always draw,” she said, bending over another wing.

The whole class now focused on her paper folding as she built a third bird. When finished, she lined them up across the front edge of her desk, stood, and bent so that her face was inches away from them. She drew a deep breath and blew. The paper birds seemed to float in midair, falling up before fluttering to the ground. Each one landed perfectly on its base before toppling under the weight of wings. Sharon clapped first, then Dori and Gail from the other side of the room, and all at once, the entire class was on its feet, cheering and stomping with sheer delight. Norah stared straight ahead at Mrs. Patterson, challenging her to believe, waiting for the teacher to smile before she returned a broken beam of her own.

Norah watched Sean as he had watched her, and every time he noticed her looking his way, he flinched and reddened. The lonesome, like the mad, know one another on sight. She recognized his broken heart before she knew its cause, and he knew that she knew. Later that afternoon, she sidled up to him to walk her home. As they waited outside the door after the dismissal bell had chimed, Sean asked, “How did you do that trick with the paper birds?”

“Origami. And not a trick,” she said. “What are we waiting for? It's freezing out here.”

“I just like to let the big kids go first.”

“Stick with me. They won't bother you.” She grabbed his hand and pulled, running and laughing as they parted clots of children, and once they were through the crowd, the ice-cold air took their breath away.

Someone slammed hard against the chain-link fence, sending a tremor along its breadth, but no person could be found. They passed through cliques of students walking home along the quiet sidewalks and into the emptiness of three o'clock. A dog barked, invisible behind a tall wooden gate, and Norah shushed it with one curt hush. The distance between houses widened as the school grounds receded, and to get home, they took a shortcut through the woods, a bike path that ran alongside a drainage ditch, not more than a hundred yards long. Hidden by the bare forest of January, travelers were invisible from the streets and prying eyes. Usually Sean lollygagged at spots along the trail, peering over the edge into the frozen creek, dropping stones to shatter the ice along the banks, listening to the trees complain in the shifting wind. When they were alone, Norah stopped suddenly, looked up and down the path, and then produced a single cigarette from her pocket, holding it before him like a sacred artifact. She peeled off her mitten and took out a book of ancient matches.

“You're not going to smoke that!” Sean's eyes widened. “Smoking stunts your growth, that's what my mum says. You don't want to get stunted, do you?”

The flame flared blue from the sulfur, and the cigarette already hung from her lower lip. “I used to smoke a pack a day,” she muttered, lighting up. Norah snapped out the match and threw it on the path. “Just kidding. I only want to show you this—” Forming an O with her lips, Norah exhaled a ring of smoke that widened like a ripple in a pond, and she blew another ring which passed through the first hoop, and then quickly, she exhaled a long trail of smoke that shot through both rings like an arrow piercing a heart.

Glee in his high voice, he asked, “Where did you learn to do that?”

With the toe of one shoe, she stubbed out the cigarette and then looked past him to the high thin clouds stretched across the winter sky. “I know lots of things,” she said, and catching the interest in his eyes, she shrieked and tore off through the woods, her shoes skating across the snow and bare earth, and he did not catch up to her until they reached the back fence of Mrs. Quinn's yard. At a blind corner, they nearly crashed, and as he caught himself short by grabbing her shoulders, Norah screamed at the touch and laughed and screamed again, and he could see stars glistening at the back of her throat.