Angels of Destruction (9 page)

21

A
ll by itself, the front door opened with a creak after two quick knocks, and a three-note hello came ringing from the threshold. Norah and Mrs. Quinn rose from the table, their dinner going cold the moment they departed, rushing to greet their prodigal guest. The girl footed it more quickly, skittering to a stop just in front of the woman and her suitcases. Straightening from the waist, her Auntie Diane rose like a colossus, nearly six feet tall, her silver hair swept straight back in a thick mane, her face hard and divided into planes and sharp angles broken by a magnificent nose and fierce hazel eyes; shoulders thrown back, her spine a pole perpendicular to the surface of the world, her short boots planted as wide as her hips. Her coat, pink as a rose and with mother-of-pearl buttons, quilted her to the ankles, and fur-trimmed gloves gave her hands the appearance of brushed nickel. Norah had just enough time to take her all in before Margaret caught up to her. The sisters gasped, a small sigh of joy in recognition, and as they stepped toward each other, Norah pirouetted from their path, stood by silent and watchful as they embraced. Diane unclenched first, grasped her sister's biceps, and pulled away to consider her more carefully. The women smiled identical smiles, embraced again, holding four beats, long enough for Norah to begin bouncing on her toes. A draft sucked in the front door, which closed with a bang that startled them all.

“It's cold as the bishop's bum. I had forgotten what a godforsaken frozen tundra you live in, Maggie. You look good—what's all this talk about being tired?” She pivoted her head and stared at the child. “And who is this darling child? The sudden granddaughter you mentioned over the phone. The mysterious fugitive from way out west. Norah, is it? Norah Rinnick, I presume?”

“Quinn, actually. Norah Quinn. And you must be Great-Aunt Diane.” She stuck out her right hand.

“My heavens, Norah Quinn.” She turned to her sister. “She's every bit as you described on the phone. You're quite the shock, Norah.”

“A miracle,” Margaret said. “An answered prayer.”

Diane pivoted around to the girl. “Well, since we're family, I must ask you for a hug. What do you say to your Auntie Di?”

The girl took a half step forward and found herself enveloped in a swatch of pink cloth, her face smashed against a great bosom concealed beneath a brassiere that felt like a birdcage. “Like Princess Di?” she asked, her voice muffled and small.

Diane's laugh erupted from deep inside her chest, and Norah was pitched backward by the percussion. “Just like Princess Di. The two great beauties of the modern age.” She peeled off her gloves, handing them to Norah, and then with practiced formality, she disrobed coat and hat and burdened the girl. Norah staggered to the closet while the sisters linked arms and headed for the kitchen. “Be a dear,” Diane said to the girl, “and take my bag to the room reserved for princesses.” As she hauled the suitcase around, Norah eavesdropped on a bit of their conversation. “Oh, she is a dead ringer for him …” Him. Rinnick

They warmed the plates in the oven and ate an overdone dinner a half hour later. Talk revolved around fatigue from the long drive north, snow at Somerset, but once through the tunnel smooth sailing; the terrible coldness of the winter, neither woman ever remembering temperatures so low for so many weeks in a row; the wretched state of the economy, Ronald Reagan, the collapse of the steel industry. To her astonishment, Norah was not the center of discussion. For the moment, she had ceased to exist. The sisters lingered at coffee, not yet willing to address the matter of the recent addition to the family.

After dessert, she went upstairs to bathe, and over the rush of running water, Norah could not spy so easily, though she tried listening through a glass pressed against the floor. All she could hear was the ocean. Washed, and dressed for sleep, she swept downstairs to say goodnight, finding the two women relocated to the living room, sitting at right angles to each other under a single lamp which cast a pale halo fading to black in the far corners. Like conspirators hatching a plot, they dipped close to each other, their faces moving in and out of the light and shadows, their voices near whispers and dripping secrets.

“Why, we were just talking about you, Norah,” Mrs. Quinn said. “Are you clean as a whistle and ready—”

“Ready to blow?” her sister asked.

Norah wolf-whistled, and the women laughed. Mrs. Quinn held out her arms, and Norah hugged her, kissed her cheek, and then hesitated before Diane, uncertain of the protocol.

“I'm not going to bite you, child. At least not hard. Come here.” She smothered her with a bear hug and a wet kiss on the ear. “I could eat you up.” She held the child with one hand on her back and stroked her hair with the other. “We were talking about your mother, actually. Do you know neither one of us has seen her in nearly ten years? Just before you were born—”

“She ran away from home.”

“That's right, muppet. Do you know why she never came back?”

“No, ma'am.”

Dissatisfied by the answer, Diane held the moment, chewing her thoughts. “Well… her mother and her auntie miss her.”

“I miss her too.”

22

H
UGE, read the first note. The postscript made him laugh and earned them both a twenty-minute detention. AND SCARY. When Sean unfolded the paper tossed his way, he knew that Norah was describing her great-aunt Diane. Caught sniggering by Mrs. Patterson, he was invited to share what he found so amusing with the rest of the class. He demurred, blushed, stammered into trouble. The teacher unfolded the message and misinterpreted the words as directed toward her.

After the dismissal bells trilled, Sean and Norah remained behind, fixed at their desks, waiting out their punishment, while at the front of the room, Mrs. Patterson graded papers, glancing up every so often, a bemused stare tempering the gravity of the situation. The red second hand on the clock face—
MADE IN THE USA, ALLEGHENY COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT
—slowed, wavered, threatened to stop entirely. Norah could count almost to ten between the ticks, and bored into mischief, she tried to attract his attention by clearing her throat, tapping her fingers along the pencil well on the desktop, sighing. He dared look back once, panic in his eyes, and for the last five minutes simply bowed his head and tucked it into the cradle of his folded arms. Excuses for their tardiness in getting home played out in the recesses of his mind. Never before had he been punished by a teacher, never asked to stay one minute after school.

Sentences served, they were dismissed with the admonishment to go and sin no more. Dragging their coats and bags behind them, the pair left the classroom to empty corridors stretching out to the front door. The school seemed alien and foreboding, and he pushed ahead, anxious to disassociate himself from the troublemaker. He pretended to be interested in the displays along the walls: the first graders’ crudely fashioned poems to winter; lopsided snowmen built from cottonballs, spit, and glue; the second graders’ paeans to Groundhog Day, now forlorn after the actual date had passed. The third graders’ papier-mâché masks of African animals, his own clumsy antelope and Norahs toothy leopard. She called for him to let her catch up, but that only served to spur him onward. When he heard her flying toward him, he started to sprint, but before he had broken the traces, she was upon him, spinning him around so quickly that his bag flew from his hand and his coat whipped to the wall and dropped to the floor.

“I told you to wait up,” she said.

“Get offa me.”

“Are you mad because I got you detention?”

He met her stare with malice in his eyes. His face bloomed red and he spat out the words: “Go away. You're nothing but trouble since you got here.”

“Sean, you're making a big deal—”

“Everything was fine till you showed up.” Angry lines crossed his forehead as he flushed a deeper red, and he pinched his hands into fists. She struck quick as a snake, sinking her teeth into his shoulder, biting hard enough to break the skin beneath his shirt. Even as he jerked away, she clamped on and would not let go until he screamed out in pain and surprise.

“There!” she yelled at him. “There, now you have a real reason to be mad at me.”

Fingers clamped on his shoulder, he stammered his reply. “What did you do that for? That hurts. You had no right—”

“I just wanted to talk with you and you ran away. I'm sorry, but you're not going to let Mrs. P ruin us being friends, are you?”

“You really bite hard.”

“Sorry—”

“I'm still mad at you. I have to come by your house every morning and take you to school, and then you're all weird, and you know all these tricks and you won't share and you cheat and you keep secrets.”

“I'm trying to apologize.”

“Sorry isn't enough.”

“You don't understand right now but you will. If you just help me.”

“Why should I help you? You bit me. Why would you bite me?”

“ ‘Cause you made me mad on account of a tiny problem, a bump in the road.”

“But I never get in trouble. My parents would kill—” He caught the words as they tumbled from his mouth, choking on the memory of his father.

“Don't tell on me, okay? You can win next time we play chess.”

With a grudging reluctance, he eased into his coat and shouldered his bookbag. A silent truce formed between them, and taking care to match strides, they walked to the front door. Outside a light snow fell dry and small. Norah pulled up her hood and tugged on her mittens.

Before they opened the door, he stopped to ask in earnest. “I won't tell anyone, but you have to tell me who is following you. You said that night that someone might want to take you away. Where to?”

“I don't know what he wants,” she said. “But I am afraid. I don't want to leave.”

They stepped into the empty yard. All of the buses and children were long gone, and just a handful of cars remained in the lot, their windshields dusted with powdered sugar. The snow ticked against hard surfaces and, in the hush of afternoon, sounded like waves of static. Heavy clouds diffused the light, softened every angle, and flattened perspective. Sean felt as if he were moving through a picture, the flakes white hatches on a gray background. Even Norah, next to him, looked like a paper doll.

“She's very tall,” said Norah. “Aunt Diane. And intimidating somehow. Maybe it's the way she talks. You can almost hear the gears spinning in her head. She's thinking, boy. And I'm going to have to think faster and harder to keep up. And I'm going to need your help with her questions. You know what she called me? A fugitive.”

“Like from the FBI?”

“Maybe I'm a Most Wanted Girl?”

They slowed to let a car pass before crossing the road to the trail through the woods. When they reached the other side, Sean grabbed her by the wrist. “Hey, maybe it's your mother who's the fugitive—”

“My mother would be nothing of the kind. Still, I'll need your help with Auntie Di. Come over tomorrow after school. We're still partners in crime, eh, amigo?”

“Just so long as there's no more biting.”

She could not resist a smile. Taking her knapsack from her shoulder, she crouched on the sidewalk, unzipped a compartment, and rooted around the explosion of tissues, pencil stubs, and broken crayons. With a gentle hand, she scooped a small object and held it carefully in her palm, presenting to him a blue cup, delicate as porcelain, salvaged from a children's tea set. A pair of birds in flight, sharing a banner in their beaks, had been painted in expert hand on its surface, and but for a chip that marred its banded lip, it was a perfect miniature.

“This is for you,” she said. “I've carried it with me for years, the only memory of my former life, but I'd like you to have it to say that we are friends. When I am troubled, I whisper a prayer into the cup and fill it with my wishes. You need it more than I do.”

He hid the present from his mother, grateful for once that she came home hours later. In the silence of his room, Sean considered Norah's token, held the tapered bowl to his lips, and thought of all his wishes. He could not bear to whisper
father
into the cup, struck silent by the absurdity of her claims, by the failure of any prayer to bring about the desired answer. Why whisper when his heart shouted to no result? Still, he was glad for the gift, touched by the selfless gesture, and the teacup found a place of honor beside the circus cookie boxes filled with his collections of found objects. Later that night in the bathroom, he gingerly removed his shirt and stared at the red wound in his reflection. Sore to the touch, the ring seethed purple, and when he turned to get a better look Sean recognized the pattern her teeth had made. In the mirror, the bite mark looked just like a pair of wings.

23

T
he sisters circled around the subject of Erica, as they always had since her disappearance. From the very beginning Diane had suspected the truth, but she had remained circumspect those first few weeks in 1975 when nobody could be quite sure if Erica had run away or had been abducted or worse. The Quinns refused to believe theories proffered by the local police or later by the FBI, even after the confirmed sighting by the liquor store owner in Tennessee, the bedside description in Oklahoma, and the alleged confrontation with a waitress in a Texas café. Only when the evidence proved overwhelming could Margaret acknowledge to her sister that something terrible had happened to her daughter, and even then she maintained Erica's innocence throughout. After Paul passed away, the topic was rarely broached at all.

The summer following Paul's death, Margaret and Diane stole away together for a week at the shore, revisiting the beach house their parents had rented for a song when the girls were ten and eight. A weather-beaten clapboard, it seemed much smaller than they remembered, and the Atlantic too, less wild, less blue, everything diminished in scope and dwarfed by the decades of development along the coast. For four days they idled in the sun, doing nothing more arduous than soaking to the collarbone at low tide, watching the pipers dance to and fro, walking on the sand at sunset. On the fifth night, when the end of the respite began to touch their ease, Diane rustled a quarter bushel of steamed blue crabs, and they sat on the deck with their mallets and picks, a roll of butcher's paper to capture the shells, a six-pack of cold beer to wash down the tang of Old Bay.

“We haven't talked about him,” she said, hammering through a big claw. “Not all week. It's okay, if you don't want to….”

“Paul?” Margaret pried at a reluctant apron.

Diane reached out and touched her sister's forearm. “I know you blame him for Erica—”

“I miss him, I suppose, but I'm getting used to his not being there. He was going from me for so long that it seems like he left long ago. He didn't make her run away with that boy. If anyone's to blame, it's me. I should have stepped in between them, kept the peace. Talked to her like the woman she was becoming.”

Diane sipped at her beer, the slick of condensation cool against her skin. “Keeping busy, then?”

Margaret tore off a lump of crabmeat and savored the salty taste. “The Delarosas have me keep their books, and I go downtown twice a week to volunteer at the Carnegie. I'll tell you a secret, I go by Mullins there, not Quinn, and nobody seems to know who I am. I like it that way.”

With a strong twist of the wrist, Diane broke open another shell. “Well, I'm glad that you're moving on.”

Leaning back in her chair, Margaret stared out at the ocean. A young family, a small boy held in his mother's arms, pointed out a dolphin breaking the surface and rolling beneath the waves. “Moving on? How can we move on? How can I ever forget for the rest of my life what my child has done? I pray every day for some salvation.” She looked back at her sister and warned in a loud voice, “Don't touch your eyes. They'll burn all night from the spice on your fingers.”

Using the crook of her arm, Diane wiped away her tears. Though she wished she could comfort her big sister, she realized she had no idea what swam in the depths of the body, what hopes and fears were fixed on her soul.

W
HILE THE CHILDREN
were in school on Tuesday, Margaret and Diane drove to town, past the shuttered mill, the workers drifting by the bars and the union hall. They stopped for lunch at the diner and wiggled into a booth. Diane curled her lip when she touched the waxy tabletop and the pads of her fingers stuck to the surface. Joyce Waverly noticed them and hurried over to say hello. “Mrs. Quinn, so nice to see you again.”

“This is my sister, Diane Cicogna, come up from Washington, D.C., for a visit. Diane, this is Joyce Waverly Green.”

“Green Waverly, Mrs. Q. Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Cicogna, though I think we may have met once or twice before when I was in high school. At a party over the house. How's that grandbaby of yours, Mrs. Quinn? She like that new coat?”

“Norah?” She held her eyes on Diane a beat too long. “Poor thing caught a cold over the weekend, fell through the ice down on Miller's Pond, but she's better now, thank God, though I was worried sick there for a while. How are your children, Joyce? How's the bun in the oven?”

“Keeping toasty Tell the truth, my feet are already swelling up like pumpkins with toes. I don't know how I'm going to make the last trimester.” Joyce shifted her weight from one hip to the other. “There's been something I've been meaning to ask you ever since you last came in.”

Diane cleared her throat. “Are you one of the girls Erica ran with?”

“Don't know that I'd say it quite like that, but yes, we were friends, ma'am. Best friends, back in the day.”

“Call me Diane. I wouldn't have recognized you, all grown up and a mother too. From the shape of you, you'll have a girl this time, carrying way up high like that. Of course if you had a spoon, some string, and a Gypsy, we could be sure.”

Joyce smiled at the joke, took their order for club sandwiches, and left them in peace. A handful of other people dotted the chairs and booths, mostly solos staring at their meatloaf and mashed potatoes, former mill hunks working through the crossword or the salesclerk from Murphy's tackling the latest Stephen King. A pair of young nurses, immaculate in white, finished up nearby, talking about amnio and C-sections while dipping French fries into the last slick of ketchup on their shared platter. The prettier one hit the bottom of her glass to free the ice but sucked air, and they both laughed, split the check, and left. Diane gave them the skunk eye as they passed the table, but the nurses took no notice.

“The things some people will discuss over lunch in a public place. Delivering babies while decent people are trying to enjoy their minestrone.” Diane laid both palms flat on the placemat, her engagement ring as ostentatious as ever. “What I'd like to talk about is that little girl of yours.”

Tapping her nails like a metronome, Margaret shot a sideways glance down the row of tables to see if Joyce was coming. “Erica?”

“Tangentially Erica, but more to the point, this child Norah. Tell me again how she's come to stay with you? Out of the blue, you hear from your estranged daughter and then this illegitimate—I won't use the vulgar word—is forced upon you?”

“Not at all, not like that at all.” She sipped from her water glass. “Just after the New Year, I got a telephone call in the middle of the night. She must have forgotten about the time difference, I'm always forgetting about time—”

The sandwiches arrived, stacked high and speared with colored toothpicks. Joyce Waverly set them down carefully before the two women. “Just let me know, ladies, if I can bring you anything else. Hey, I've heard news about your granddaughter. My cousin has a boy in third grade, and he says that the new girl is a real artist. Oh, what did he say? Better than Spider-Man, he says, better drawing than in the comics, and him loving Spider-Man more than Jesus, so it's quite a compliment. Since you last came in, I was wondering how's come Erica never mentioned a daughter when I talked to her a couple years back? Maybe I'm just not remembering right. Holler if you need anything, ladies.”

They waited until she was out of earshot. “Better'n Jesus. Still the country out here, you ask me.” Diane plucked the toothpicks from her toasted bread, held them like a picador ready to make the kill, and then tossed them to the rim of her plate. “So about Erica. What does she have to say for herself after all these years?”

Her sister finished chewing the corner of the sandwich, then wiped her mouth with the napkin, a dot of mayonnaise lingering on her upper lip. “At first, I didn't believe it was her and not someone else playing a prank. But she told me it really was her and she was in trouble, a different kind of trouble, and didn't know who to call.”

“Didn't she give you some explanation?”

“What, that she's a wanted woman, that she's underground, hiding, that she feared she would be traced? Of course, she's sorry. But when your only child asks for help, you help. No questions. She said she needed someone to look after Norah for her while she got her life back together.”

“Surely the statute of limitations has run out by now. Did you suggest that she might turn herself in and throw herself on the mercy of the court?”

“It wasn't a long discussion, Diane, and I didn't think about limitations, in fact, until you just mentioned it.”

“But you at least told her about Paul, right?”

The waitress arrived to ask if everything was to their satisfaction, and when they nodded, she scratched her belly with the edge of her order pad. “I remembered what I wanted to tell you. There was a man in here the other day, a funny way about him, asking about you and Norah. Said he knew you from way back when. Very handsome and old-fashioned. Dashing, they used to say. Said he was a friend of the family.”

Diane asked, “Did he call himself Jackson?” Margaret swatted the air in front of her.

“Never gave his name,” she said. “Never saw him before or since. Just funny all of a sudden you come in and then someone asking after you. You had some unexpected company lately?”

“Very mysterious,” Diane said. “We're fine, dear, really. Thanks.”

The interruption gave Margaret a chance to think, and she bought more time by taking another bite of her club sandwich, bacon crumbling to the plate, and chewing slowly. Scrunching up her face, she unpeeled the top piece of toast and removed the tomato slices. “Hothouse.”

Between bites, Diane asked again. “So, how did she react when you told her that her father was dead?”

“As you might expect. They never taste right, hothouse tomatoes. I don't think she broke down and cried, if that's what you meant.”

“After all that man put her through, no.”

“He was only trying to protect her. You don't know that it wouldn't have been worse.”

“Couldn't be much worse than her running off with a criminal.”

“It can always be worse. There could have been a real confrontation. Threats were made.”

“By Paul? Harmless old Paul?”

Margaret snipped off another piece of her sandwich. “By the boy. And besides, if it had gone any other way, we might not have Norah, right? This funny-looking creature, stick skinny, and an entire mystery. She needs me, at least for a while.”

“Maybe you can threaten to keep her daughter.” Diane laughed. “That might bring Erica home.”