Earth Angel (16 page)

“Your grandfather and I were convinced you were going to become a nurse. You had such empathy at such a young age.”

“Where
is
Gramps?” Abby asked.

“He’s puttering in the basement like he always is. He removes his hearing aid so he has an excuse to ignore me when I call down the stairs, but the smell of cookies in the oven will lure him up here eventually. Cookies and anything in a skirt—that’s all he notices.”

Abby glanced at Gwynne, but she appeared to be listening with amused interest, not thrown by Grams at all. Maybe she had lots of experience meeting girlfriends’ parents.

What a depressing thought.

When the cookies were baked and they’d all eaten a few and Gramps had made a brief appearance before retreating to the basement, the three of them trooped upstairs to the trapdoor to the attic. Abby pulled down the squeaky wooden ladder and unfolded it, then tested her weight on the rungs as Gwynne and her grandmother looked on, both of them ready to grab her by the waist and steady her.

“No one’s been up there in years,” said Grams. “I sure hope you don’t see any rodents.”

“Me too.” Wasn’t that the truth. Not that she’d scream or anything—rats and cockroaches had never bothered her—she’d just rather not have anything interfere with her search, especially not a critter known to chew paper. She crawled through the opening and made her way to the middle of the attic where the sloped roof was high enough for her to stand. Her hands were covered in dust.

“Is that the smell of rodent pee?” Gwynne asked, emerging from the trapdoor behind her.

“God, I hope not.”

“What type of rodent was she talking about, anyway?”

“Squirrels,” Abby said firmly. She didn’t know if Gwynne was squeamish about rats, but if she was, ignorance would be bliss, and she would try to prolong her bliss as long as possible.

Gwynne winked. “If you say so.”

“Holler if you need anything,” her grandmother called from below.

“Sure thing,” Abby called back, positive she wouldn’t. The last thing she wanted was for her elderly grandmother to get it into her head that she should be climbing rickety ladders, although why she bothered to worry about a ladder when Grams was out there with a chain saw, she didn’t know.

* * *

The way Abby was bouncing on the balls of her feet, Gwynne expected her to attack the boxes immediately. Instead, she spun around to look at them all.

“I can’t decide where to start,” Abby said.

Gwynne helped her out by picking a large cardboard box at random and dragging it to an open spot. “How about here.”

Abby humored her and opened the flaps, which were tucked corner over corner. “I hope it was okay that I told Grams you used to be a massage therapist. I don’t know how to explain what you really do.”

“I did used to be a massage therapist. It’s close enough.”

“But that’s not really what you do. Like with my ear—it doesn’t hurt anymore. And all those people who come to you for help. What do you do, exactly?”

“I don’t do anything.”

“Obviously you do something.”

“I used to think so.” Gwynne opened her own box and discovered it was full of toys. She closed it and put it back.

“What changed?”

Gwynne opened another box and pulled out a kindergarten scribble on orange construction paper. “Hey, look at this.” She held it out so Abby could see. “I think this one’s supposed to be an angel.”

Abby took the sheet from her and reached over her to lift the next one out of the box. “This one too.”

One after another, she pulled them out—pipe-cleaner angels glued to paper, fuzzy felt angels sprinkled with glitter, angels drawn on construction paper in pencil, in colored markers, in every single color that came in a sixty-four-crayon box.

“I had no idea I did all this. No idea.” Abby spread the artwork out on the floor. “And I can’t believe Grams saved all this stuff. I can’t tell you how uncomfortable she was when I asked her if there was anything unusual about my childhood, like, oh, let’s say, a connection to the Angelic Realm.”

“You couldn’t finesse the question any better than that?”

“I finessed my way to this box, didn’t I?” Abby unfolded a chain of paper dolls that were joined wing to wing instead of hand to hand and laid it carefully on top of the drawings. “This is amazing.”

“Did she say anything else?”

Abby grimaced. “She said she hoped I’d forgotten my childish fantasies.”

Abby seemed annoyed. But she was lucky. She was lucky someone had tried to talk her out of the angel stuff.

If only Gwynne had done the same for her sister.

Like the time she was eight or nine years old and climbed onto Heather’s bed, which was the one under the window. She balanced on her tiptoes, clutching the window ledge to peek out, and was riveted by the zillions of bright yellow lights blinking in the darkness. She stared as hard as she could, fixing on a light and watching it blink out, waiting for it to reappear in the same spot. It was so beautiful she hardly breathed.

Heather jumped up and down, trying to reach the window. “Let me see!”

The bouncing mattress made it hard to balance. Gwynne picked up her little sister, hauled her against her body, and lifted her as high as she could. Her back arched from the effort.

“Up,” Heather demanded.

“You
are
up,” Gwynne said, but then she realized Heather had her nose to the wall and the window ledge remained above her head. She tried to boost her higher, but she stumbled on the wobbly mattress under her sister’s weight and they both fell.

She tried another couple times, then thought of another approach. She gathered their pillows and books and all of Heather’s stuffed animals from around the room, piled them under the window, and shoved Heather to the top. Heather clung to the window ledge for dear life.

“Fireflies,” Heather said.

“And fairies,” Gwynne pointed out. “And angels. The big lights are angels.”

“Big lights.”

“See them?”

“I want to see big lights.”

“They’re right there, see? Dancing in a circle with the fireflies.”

“I want to see big lights!”

“Can’t you see them?”
She
could see them. They were right there.

Heather looked at her reproachfully with those big eyes and promptly toppled off her tower of stuffed animals and onto the bed.

And never gave up trying to see what her big sister could see.

Gwynne wished with all her heart she had never mentioned those damn angels.

Abby was a different story. She had psychic perception, same as Gwynne. They saw the world in the same way, and she had to admit there was something very attractive about that.

Attractive? Try enchanting. Seductive. Tempting.

That didn’t mean she should pursue her, though.

Abby was the good-girl type. She had class. She didn’t survive by flirting with anything in a skirt, as Abby’s grandmother put it, or, as Gwynne preferred to think of it, anything in a bra. Or out of one. Abby was approachable without flashing her sexuality. She wandered the halls of a hospital with her harp or disappeared into the corner at weddings instead of being onstage being a star, begging people to notice her.

She was pure. And Gwynne wasn’t.

Gwynne was a fraud. Women were always purring around her and she didn’t deserve any of it, but she’d been oozing charm for so long, she didn’t know how to turn it off. Not that turning it off would make any difference—even when she was grumpy, women were still drawn to her, and for all the wrong reasons.

If only things had been like that in high school. Back then, she couldn’t wait to grow up and find a magical land where girls didn’t giggle and primp around the gawky, boastful enemy. Back then, she would have worshipped any girl who noticed her.

And that was the problem. Once they did start to notice her, she’d been so afraid no one else would ever go out with her that she threw herself into relationships with girls she wasn’t particularly in love with, girl after girl, ever hopeful, stupidly picking the ones she was the least compatible with and trying as hard as she could to prove she was worth keeping. Not surprisingly, the relationships never lasted long.

Offering to drive Abby—that fit her pattern. The difference was, she really did have some solid reasons for liking her that had nothing to do with their physical attraction. That was unfortunate, really, because she liked her too much to subject her to the Gwynne-capades.

Which didn’t stop her from watching for a glimpse of cleavage as Abby dragged out another box labeled with her name.

“Resting?” Abby asked, setting the box in front of her.

“Distracted.”

Abby gave her a quizzical look, but didn’t ask. She rocked the box onto its side and pulled out the contents—all paper. “Come on, Gwynnosaurus. Let’s get cracking.” She divided the stack and dropped half of it in Gwynne’s lap.

It was an effective distraction from her don’t-go-there thoughts. With Abby sitting on the rough wooden floor across from her, Gwynne flipped through and discovered report cards and letters home from school and medical records providing proof of vaccination and all sorts of other things in torn envelopes. One of the report cards had several sheets attached.

Abby received an incomplete for the first quarter because she was not in class for a significant portion of the marking period and has not caught up on the work she missed while receiving inpatient psychiatric care.

“What is this?” Gwynne thrust the packet at Abby.

Abby glanced at it without touching it, then looked at her hands in her lap. “Nothing.”

“Nothing. Right.” Gwynne tossed the report card onto the floor. “You were in a psych ward?”

“Not for long.”

God, she was only in elementary school. She remembered Abby mentioning something like this, but this was so much worse than she realized. Had Abby even been old enough to understand what was happening to her?

“When you told me you went through psychiatric testing, I imagined a doctor asking you a few questions and sending you home. I didn’t think it was
this
.”

Abby clasped her hands together and cracked her knuckles like she needed something to keep her hands busy. “Yeah, I don’t like to talk about it. I
don’t
talk about it, actually. Only with you, I guess.”

“Was there anything wrong with you at all besides the angel sightings?”

“They never said. All I knew was I couldn’t go home until my friends left. They meant the friends in my head.”

Gwynne mentally thanked her own mother for being sane and not panicking about invisible winged playmates. Not that every parent could enjoy playing pretend as much as her mother did, but no defenseless child should be hospitalized for speaking her truth.

“I learned to give the doctors the answers they wanted to hear so they wouldn’t put me on antipsychotics.”

Gwynne’s heart burned with a possessive need to travel back in time and take Abby home with her so her mother could adopt her. Her mother would have taken her in and loved her and told her she wasn’t crazy. “I can’t believe they would do that to a kid.”

“They were worried about me. The doctors thought I might be early-onset schizophrenic and need to be put on medication, and my grandparents were afraid the doctors were right—that I inherited the voices in my head from my mother. At some point my mother had told them the reason she started drinking and doing drugs was to drown out the voices. They reminded me of that constantly, trying to scare me out of following in her footsteps, arguing with each other over whose fault it was that she destroyed herself.” Abby lowered her voice, probably so her grandmother below wouldn’t overhear. “Gramps accused Grams of bad parenting, and Grams insisted there had to be something wrong with his genes, because there was nothing wrong with
her
side of the family, and it was his bad seed that put her through all those miscarriages and gave them a daughter who wasn’t right in the head and maybe a granddaughter who wasn’t, either.”

“Fun childhood.”

Abby twisted her hands. “Maybe my mother would have taken the doctors’ drugs to quiet her voices, if she’d had the chance.”

“Maybe
her
voices weren’t real.”

Abby closed her eyes and sighed. “What my grandparents really were worried about was brain damage. Grams says my mother told her she was clean during the pregnancy, but I don’t blame them for not believing her.”

“Brain damage does not cause hallucinations.” Gwynne didn’t know if that was actually true, but it didn’t matter, because Abby was not hallucinating.

“They were worried about me. They were trying to do the right thing.”

“Hospitalization doesn’t seem like overkill to you?”

“Grams lost her daughter. She wasn’t going to lose her granddaughter.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It wasn’t that bad. The nurses were nice to me. They played games with me and stuff. It was okay. And they didn’t threaten to put me in foster care if I didn’t behave, the way my grandparents did.”

Abby didn’t even seem angry. She accepted what happened to her like it was all perfectly okay that the adults in her life had treated her like there was something terribly wrong with her when she was surely just a normal, sweet little kid. It was a miracle she’d survived with her innate goodness intact.

“You’re amazing, you know that?”

“Not that amazing.”

“You are.”

Abby shrugged dismissively. She turned to her pile of papers and continued working her way to the bottom, muttering as she leafed through. “SAT scores. Birth certificate. Adoption. Adoption. More adoption.” She paused. “Police report. There was a police report?” Her voice rose in surprise.

Gwynne held her breath, wondering what the next bomb was going to be.

“Listen to this.” Abby peered at the yellowed report in the poor lighting, bringing it close to her face and then standing to hold it under the bare lightbulb overhead. “Toddler found wandering on the sidewalk unattended,” she read aloud. “Mother found dead from suspected drug overdose.” She lowered her arm. “I can’t believe Grams never told me the police found me on the street. She told me about my mother’s screw-ups often enough. Why didn’t she tell me this?” She bent down to hand the thin sheet of paper to Gwynne, as if she needed her to confirm what it said.