“Los Angeles?”
“Quiet, don't let your grandma hear.”
Brushing past her aunt, Norah moved to the center of the room. She held her arms perpendicular to her sides and began to slowly pirouette, each sentence spinning to four corners. “There is no cult. Erica Quinn is no Angel. She is sorry for her sins.”
Her aunt stepped toward her, caught hold of her wrists, and stilled her. “But why doesn't she come home?”
“We are all afraid of what's in our hearts. Wives afraid of their husbands. Mothers afraid of their children. Daughters afraid to come home. Maybe she is waiting for someone to find and forgive her.”
Diane spoke in a calm, clear voice. “You are a strange creature, Norah Quinn. Where did you come from?”
The girl began to twitch slightly, holding back the answer. From the kitchen, Margaret called them to dinner, but Diane would not let go, her fingers digging into the girl's skin. “But couldn't you tell her? Couldn't you let her know that nothing matters more to her mother than seeing her child again? That she should come back home?”
“I cannot go where I haven't been called. And I don't want to go, I like it here. And Grandma cannot go. She is not well.” As if her soul had flown away, Norah stared blankly ahead, her vision turned inward and awry.
“Why have you come?” Diane shook her once to claim her attention, instantly regretting her temper.
Margaret shouted for them again. “Dinner's on the table. Where are you? This is no time for hide-and-seek.”
“Coming,” Diane yelled. She lowered her voice to admonish Norah. “Next time you speak to her, tell your mother to come home.”
“You could go,” Norah said. “If you were careful. Safety first. Follow the rules. Never talk to strangers. Do not stare directly into the flash.”
The sudden changes in the girl's manner worried Diane, and she began to fear for the child's mental state. Folding her arms around Norah, she held her tight and rocked her, ran her fingers through the child's hair until the trance broke. Over dinner, they talked about the excellence of the stew, the plans at school for Valentine's Day. All through the meal, Diane watched Norah closely for any sign that she had become unhinged. If she was telling the truth about her mother, Norah was ticking with stress, and Margaret could not be expected to deal with such a tightly wound being. Another heavy snow began to fall outside, and they all remarked at the persistence of an everlasting winter. Something was not right. Halfway through dessert, Diane announced that she had changed her mind—she would be staying with them for another week.
28
In the haze between sleep and wakefulness, he could not distinguish between the real and the imagined, what he conjured in his unrest, willed from his unconscious desire. Under his featherbed, his body retained the radiant heat from a long night's sleep, but Sean became vaguely aware of a chill infiltrating the room. Dampness settled like a fog from the ceiling, kissed his ears and nose and cheeks. Drawing the covers round his hunched shoulders, he buried his face in the pillow, but the cold air did not relent, and it pressed down upon him, reached beneath the blankets with icy fingers, and startled him from slumber. His first thought was that the furnace had shut off again in the middle of the night, but his lips were wet and tingling, and with a shiver he wondered whether a window had been left ajar and let the winter in. The notion that he had been so careless disturbed him, and he worried what his mother might say should she enter the refrigerated room. With reluctance, he opened his eyes and tried to gain some sight in the gloom. The shades had been drawn since bedtime, but he had sensed that more snow had fallen overnight and it was snowing still. A preternatural silence enclosed the space, and when he exhaled, a small moist puff of breath hung in front of his face. He kicked his feet and was shocked by the frigid sheets beyond his bare toes. A breeze, nearly visible in the blackness, passed over the bed, not from the window which he faced, but from behind him at the closed door. When he rolled over to find its cause, a hand covered his mouth and deadened his scream. The pressure took away his breath, and he felt that this must be what it is like to drown or be smothered by an avalanche. The thing in the room made no sound, and Sean came to realize that the hand would remain clamped on his face unless and until he stopped struggling and kept quiet. He shook his head sharply once and then stilled himself, opening wide his eyes to find some aspect beyond the hovering shadow.
“Good boy,” the voice said. Male, not his father. A dark form filled the space between his bed and the door. His mother slept two rooms down and might not hear him or come quickly enough should he call out. “You will be quiet now?”
Each word arrived on a breath of ice which threatened to shatter in the air. A dozen thoughts raced through his mind—a robber, a killer, the devil himself. Someone come to take him away. He imagined terrible things, but he nodded his assent. The hand lifted from the boy's mouth. Sean coughed for air and to calm his spinning fear. Drawing an arm back to his side, the figure loomed larger, like a great bird of prey spreading enormous wings, or a wyvern coiled for the strike. “Just don't hurt me,” the boy whispered.
“Sean Fallon—”
He was frightened by the sound of his name in the stranger's voice.
“—I have come to ask a few questions of you. About the girl.”
“What girl?”
“Your little friend.”
“Norah Quinn?”
“Yes, tell me the truth about Norah. Do you know what happens to little boys who do not tell the truth?”
Although he had lied plenty of times and gotten away with no real consequences, Sean nodded, certain that the stranger would see him more clearly than he himself could see.
“Good boy. Now tell me: who is it she says she is?”
Despite the darkness, Sean searched with his eyes for the blue china cup from Norah and found its place among his treasures, and he willed a short prayer into the bowl, hoping that she was right. He did not know the answer the man sought. A fit of loyalty seized him, and he did not reply. The figure in the dark expanded and his voice shaded deeper with menace when he asked again: “Who does she say she is?”
“Are you the one following her? What do you want with her?”
The man tacked another course. “Who do you think she is?”
“I don't know what to believe. Are you going to take her away?”
The figure shifted again in agitation. “What does she want with a boy like you?”
The question offended him, and Sean scowled in silence.
The stranger hissed and spat out his final question. “Has she told you anything about the Angels of Destruction?”
Images of angels floated in his mind. In flight above the shepherds and their sheep, announcing the Nativity. Michael and Gabriel from the Children's Illustrated Bible, photographs of paintings and statues and stained-glass windows. On the night table, a stack of books and magazines towered, filled with holes and missing pages from which he had torn and cut dozens of pictures for her. To give her wings. The visitor, he thought, might be some retribution for ruining the books. “Nothing,” he said. “I don't know anything about Angels of Destruction.”
“Good boy. You would not want to meet such an angel, and you never know what terrible things might befall a child who pretends to be what she cannot be. Be smart. You don't strike me as the type to believe in things you cannot see and cannot prove.”
Such speculation frightened him more than the man in the room. He could hear his whispered prayer circling in the teacup.
“Everything is divided into two separate equal conditions,” the shadow whispered. “Life that can be observed, the witnessed truth and reality of concrete forms and experiences. And on the other side, unseen rumor and faith. You know your father has gone away and you can feel the coldness in your heart, but what your senses tell you differs from all that cannot be proven. Anything imagined can be true. Angels and witches, love and hope—the list requiring pure faith never ends.”
; Sean wanted him to leave and, closing his eyes, willed him to disappear.
From the bookshelf, the porcelain cup began to vibrate and chime as if his prayer sped around the circle in revolutions fast and faster.
“Go back to sleep. Forget.” The figure moved to the window and drew back the curtains. The snow was heavy now, bright against the darkness, and from that faint light, the stranger appeared nothing more than an ordinary man in a coat and an old-fashioned hat. “There'll be no school tomorrow, so sleep on, my boy.” He moved quickly back across the room, his coat snapping like a flag, and at the door, he vanished to an airy nothing. The cold lifted, and warmth descended on the room once more.
Sean waited for a long time, listening to nothing, overwhelmed by a profound silence. Petrified by his vision, he could not move, could not run to his mother and have her say it was all a bad dream or offer either comfort or scolding. He considered all the possibilities and decided to act upon none. Baffled and tired, he drifted into a deep sleep, angels and devils dancing in his mind. His internal alarm woke him at seven, and though certain that all was not well, he could not be sure what part had actually happened and what was pure nightmare. When his mother arrived with the news that the snow was bad enough to close the schools, he managed to feign some delight, but as she left the room, he rolled over to face the window, wondering what might be beyond the drawn curtains.
29
For the first time, he was late. Sean had always been punctual, early enough most mornings to have a second breakfast while Norah puttered with a toothbrush or sought a missing shoe. When the clock sped past the appointed time, she started pulling at the drapes, searching the dim light for his approach. But he was late. Flurries lingered in the violet sky, falling atop the previous night's snow cover, but no tracks led to the door. She had not missed him. At ten minutes past, Norah pestered Mrs. Quinn to call the Fallons, but there was no answer. At fifteen, she begged to go to school without him. Had she been in the habit of checking the weather, Margaret may have turned on the radio or television to hear about possible closures, but she was out of sorts, distracted by the sense that she had left open a window or door somewhere, sometime. The night before her sister, too, had acted peculiar, eying Norah as if she deduced their deception.
“Do you think you could find your way alone?” When the child rolled her eyes, Mrs. Quinn had her answer. “Go then. Go. He's probably home sick for the day.”
Norah knelt on the sofa to watch through the large picture window, pressing her nose against the glass until her breath completely fogged the view. On the wet panes, she traced wings and daggers with her fingertip until the heavy warmth inside the house made the condensation evaporate, leaving nearly invisible drawings on the surface. No sparrows darted across the sky. No cars minced along the snow-covered asphalt. No children tromped toward school. Their absence from the scene made melancholy the snowfall, emptying the world of life, and Norah reveled in being its only witness. She drew the curtains and found Mrs. Quinn in the kitchen, stirring oatmeal. She stood quietly at her elbow, hoping to attract her attention, hesitant to disturb her daydream. “May I go to school now?”
Without looking up, Mrs. Quinn said, “I thought you were already gone. Dress warm and don't dawdle on the way.”
The girl circled her arms around the woman's waist and felt Margaret lean back slightly into her embrace. The warmth of the child's face lingered in the small of her back long after she had gone.
As she hurried into her boots and parka, Norah peered through the window by the front door. Snow fell more heavily than when she first took notice, and the motion of the storm entranced her. For the first time that morning, she wondered if school had been postponed or even canceled, and that, she thought, would explain Sean's absence. Wrapped in her warmest clothes, she stopped by the hallway mirror and checked her appearance: the gray coat and red cap and scarf set off her pale complexion, and when she removed her glasses, she appeared a different creature altogether. A pink lipstick lay on the sideboard, tempting her. On impulse, Norah drew a wide smile across her lips and covered her mouth with the scarf. She sped by Margaret and nearly knocked over Diane, coming downstairs lost in another morning's drowse, and burst through the front door into the snow, letting it shower upon her upturned face. Each wet fat flake felt like a kiss.
The snowplow, which early in darkness passed over their street, had pushed mountains against parked cars. Old footprints, from the paperboy perhaps or some other wanderer, were disappearing from the sidewalk. A squirrel had hopped from a bare maple to the cover of fir, leaving behind a follow-the-dots. Otherwise the yards were clean again, covered with a seamless white quilt. Like a pioneer, she carved a trail through the virgin snow. When she reached the back fence, she looked back at the pattern her feet had made. In the distance a mother called her son, “Eddie, Eddie, you forgot your hat,” and then the door slammed shut, a pause, then shut again. The woman's voice seemed to come from miles away to pierce the prayerful silence like a cough in a cathedral. Norah moved farther from home and into the woods. Nothing stirred save the falling snow, and nothing sounded save its falling. A bough complained with an arthritic creak, and then the nothing returned, insinuated itself into her soul, and emptied her into itself. Swallowed by stillness, Norah felt the dread of her own existence in creation, and she craved reassurance of separateness from the storm and felt the need to go, to move somewhere, anywhere, to resist the eddy and flow around her. Like an aviator from some silent film, she wiped her spectacles, threw her scarf over her shoulder, and set her course. Beyond the bicycle trail, she turned right on the road to school. Each cross street she passed lay deserted, blank of all signs of life except for a few wisps of chimney smoke, imagined families around imagined fires. She came at last to Friendship Elementary. Encircled by a black iron fence, the enormous yard flowed as a white sea surrounding the island of the building. On a normal day, buses would be idling in the parking lot, coughing smoke and sulfur, and children would be clotting the doorways as teachers waved them in, already thinking of day's end. But devoid of people in motion, the school lost its energy, became just another place, yellow bricks darkening with moisture, windows fogged opaque. Norah curved away from the front door and headed to the playground. Ringed by trees, the broad fields lay empty, and she walked to a fence surrounding a slab of concrete that, when uncovered, had fading lines for hopscotch and foursquare, a wooden seesaw warped and gray, a rusty swingset with half the seats missing. Children dared to sneak in on weekends or on dusky summer evenings, though trespass was forbidden by a chained gate. Norah tested the lock, held her breath, squeezed between the bars, and stepped into the smooth clean yard.
Snow spilled like excelsior when she grabbed the monkeybars. Climbing to the top, like a crow in the nest she scanned in all directions, wishing that Sean were with her, enjoying the soft day, the light wind, and the loneliness of so much nothing. The horizon vanished as the low clouds hemmed in the view. She felt trapped inside a swirling snowglobe, particles in the sky fine as ash settling on everything, the fallout of the ruptured clouds. Treading softly, she investigated the four corners of the enclosure, slipped down the sliding board into a drift piled high as autumn leaves. She plopped on a swing, snorting when its dampness leached through the cloth of her pants. Cold and wet, she stomped angrily across the pavement. Her movements obliterated the false surface, and everywhere she stepped she left proof of her presence. Her feet ached in the boots and her legs stiffened. Tired of the playground, she circled round to the other side of the school, encountering no other soul, and climbed the bottom rail of the iron fence and held onto the bars. A patina of black paint and red rust clung to her woolen mittens. Nothing stirred but the squalls of snow, which now seemed an ordinary part of the everyday air.
Norah closed her eyes, lifted her face to the sky, and let the drops dapple her skin and tighten her lips. She felt a shadow pass nearby like an image from a dream. In the quiet, footsteps approached, and she snap
ped open her eyes to frighten him, only to discover the world white and blank as paper. Muttering at her own folly, she removed her glasses and wiped the moisture with the end of her scarf. Flakes lit upon her lashes. She blinked and beheld the figure on the other side of the fence.
He was elegance. From the leather gloves holding the iron finials to the camel hair coat snug against his frame. At the collar, out peeked a silk scarf, and on his hat, the snow clung to the brim and sharp crease like butter on a knife.
“You startled me,” she said. “Sneaking up on a person with her eyes closed.”
Leaning over the rail, he bent down to face her at eye level and chuckled when he saw the pink slash of her mouth. “You startled me. On such a day and at this early hour. What are you doing out here all by yourself?”
“I came to school, but there's no one here.”
“There is no school today. Didn't you get the good news? Too much snow.” His face softened. Patches of snow rested on his shoulders like epaulets, and his hair was salted where it stuck out from beneath the brown fedora. “You look cold, very cold.”
“I like being cold.”
“But not too cold. Wouldn't you like to get warm?”
She took one step back and considered his smiling eyes. “You aren't going to take me back with you, are you? I don't want to leave her.”
“Margaret? I know all about Mrs. Quinn too.” The man straightened his spine and looked toward the school building, blinking his eyes, either from the blowing snow or some private embarrassment. He seemed larger, as if a radiant energy grew inside his chest.
“Never talk to strangers,” she said. “Don't cross the street in the middle of the block. Just Say No.”
“Since there is no school, maybe you might want to come with me and get warm.”