“When we went out into the woods, it seemed like she just cast off the years and the troubles and was a child again. A day when we could be our perfect selves, just kind of vanish into the landscape.” She paused as if reliving the event and then set down the frame. “You know, I missed her for ten years, and we only had ten months together after she came out here. This was taken a couple months before we found out about the cancer. Still, I treasured the days. A blessing.”
“She passed away?”
“That next February, around Valentine's, 1986. But we had the chance to make up for lost time, and I think she forgave me in the end.”
“Of course she forgave you. You were all she thought about.”
The boy yelped in the other room, and she excused herself to investigate. Alone, Sean looked at the photo of Mrs. Quinn and her daughter, his heart filled with regret. Mary came back, shaking her head. “Kids will keep you young. Do you have any yourself?”
With a shrug of his shoulders, he indicated there were none.
“Don't wait too long. You know, I never fully understood what my mother went through until I became a mother myself. Like I was saying before, we had a second chance. Don't get many of those in this life.”
“You're right, and I was hoping against hope that Mrs. Quinn would still be here. Last thing I ever said to her was ‘I hate you.’”
“I'm sure she forgave you, too, whatever you might have said.”
“I was so angry. On account of Norah. After you left, all kinds of stories went around town about her. Some people said you took her back to an orphanage, and others said she jumped off the bridge—”
“People are crazy, make up all kinds of things.”
Jo squalled into the room, her brother behind in close chase and a blur of noise.
“I don't really know what happened to Norah. We were supposed to take her—”
From the opposite direction, the chase resumed, the little girl screaming with joy, her brother growling, and the two dogs, anxious to join the game, racing one after the other through the parlor.
“Those kids. Norah vanished in the middle of the night, left a note saying she was going back home. Of course, my mother was in a state. For a few days, she could not bear the thought of leaving without her, not knowing where she was. Coming out of nowhere and going back the same way. She never—” A curdled scream rang out from the other room. “She wanted us to look for her, but there wasn't time. And besides, what could we tell the authorities? ‘We're looking for a girl whose true name we do not know, and we don't know where she came from or where she might be going, and by the way, I'm Erica Quinn. I'm on your fugitives list.’” Calls for Mommy bounced off the walls. “Give me a minute.”
While peace talks were under way in the imaginary city, Sean drained his glass and set it on the table. Like a magic potion, the drink loosened his tongue, and when she returned, Josie in tow, he spilled out the story, a tale of miracles and visions, recounted the signs she had shown, the angel's ability to be outside of time, the night he found her transported and praying on the cold ground. In his telling, he searched for a logical response to each act, but could not account for the mystery of Norah. Mary took in every word, interrupting only to have him clarify his account. Absent Margaret Quinn, her daughter was the only person he could trust with his confession. “I always wondered if she might have somehow been telling the truth,” he said. “If that's possible. I don't believe in fairy tales, and the only angels around these days are on calendars and greeting cards. But I always wondered what she was and why she came into our lives.”
“Perdido en los sueños.” Stiff from sitting, Mary stretched like a cat, and her daughter slid down her legs. “Lost in our dreams.” She spoke to her child. “Go get Cole, Jo-Jo, and come out to the studio with Mama. Follow me.”
The wolfhounds got their legs underneath them and, shaking off the dust, led the way. Sean trailed, caught in the sail of her white skirt, the weight of his secrets lifted and blown to the four winds. As she threw open the shutters, columns of light penetrated the darkness section by section until the whole room burst into being. Thrilled by each aspect, he questioned her about the studio, the tools and brushes, the rolled canvas and stretchers. Mary gave him the grand tour while her children played in a corner brightly colored. A current of assurance and contentment changed the tone of her voice as she described the steps in her processes, and he felt the joy her work had brought to her.
“And these are my old angels,” she said before the wall of dusty retablos. “My first try. I don't know how much of my story my mother may have told you.”
“I only know the story Norah invented for school, how she lived with you out here in New Mexico and was only at her Gramma's because you and your husband were fighting.”
She stared at the bandoliered santo in the corner. “Wiley.”
“Norah had me expecting coyotes and roadrunners overrunning the place.”
Beginning with the long-ago night that she and the boy snuck out of the house, she told him about the Angels of Destruction and their plans to save the world by destroying it and starting all over. She told him of their encounters with the strangers on the road, ending with her abandonment and the baby who never arrived. “They were warning me,” she said, sweeping her hand to the figures on the wall. “Warning me away from perdition and back to grace. They were trying to get me home while still possible, but I didn't listen.”
She sat at a stool and picked up a brush. “All kinds of angels, something missing in our souls, we re-create when we are awake and in need. Like your Norah.”
Hanging on the wall behind her shoulders was a series of abstractions, life-size canvases each dominated by a single color in different hues and shadings. Each piece featured a dark figure reminiscent of the human form—a splayed hand, the pear of a derriere, flattened circles with bull's-eye nipples, a face, a nose, lips. The bodies in the paintings struggled to escape from the blues and reds and greens, or perhaps to meld into the canvas, or transcend this world for another. Desire, coming into being.
“And these?” he asked.
“I call them the Nagasaki angels, a long story.”
Sean walked over to the paintings and considered them one by one. “Norah told me about your father, what he did for those poor people after the atom bomb.”
The figures in the paintings strained to the surface, between imagination and reality, waiting to be borne into another world. He could see their pain at letting go of this life, caught between here and there, nowhere.
Mary chewed on the end of the brush. “If Norah knew, then my mother must have told her. My mother must have known all along and never said a word to my father.”
“Maybe that was her way of letting it go, her way of forgiveness.”
“Maybe my father was their angel, caught up in the chaos between mercy and pain.”
One of the dogs padded into the room and settled in front of her. Mary reached down and scratched the coarse hair between his eyes. “They were Maya's dogs. The last pups in a long line of wolfhounds my friend Maya used to keep. She passed away too, and told me to watch over them, but they really kind of watch over me. And the kids.”
“Maya.” He smiled. “From the Upanishads. The veil thrown over the world.”
Mary laughed, and then drew her hand to her mouth. “I'm sorry, Sean. Who knows? Maya could have been right. Norah could have been right. Who's to say what's real and what's an illusion? Why do we believe in things we cannot see?” From the corner her little girl laughed and called to her mother to come look at what she had made.
BEFORE DAWN, SEAN woke and dressed and tiptoed past the rooms where Mary and her husband, Dan, slept and past the two children nestled in their beds. He could not bear to wake them. At the kitchen table, he scribbled a note thanking them for the hospitality. For her boy Cole, he left the slouch hat, “for the dusty trail.” From his bag, he took a small parcel swaddled in layers of tissue paper. He unwrapped
the gift and left it atop his postscript: “This is all Norah left behind. For your little girl.” The wolfhounds lifted their shaggy heads and thumped their tails against the floor, goodbye. As the sky faded to plum, he found his way back to the car, pointed north, and drove away.
Blue as a robin's egg and suited for a child's hand, a child's imagination, the teacup seemed too small to hold more than a whisper. When she woke an hour later to find the cup on the table, Mary drew in a deep breath, recognizing the lost token, and then she bent to listen to the echo of a thousand prayers.
Past Santa Fe at first light, he found the road toward Taos, the mountains filling the windshield, the air blowing cool and clean. He followed the signs to Carson National Forest and arrived late in the morning. From the vacant parking lot, he climbed into the quiet hills, alert to the sound of the land, and the silence of nothing when he stopped. Murmuring softly to himself, Sean made his goodbyes to Mrs. Quinn, whom he had hoped to find in this lonesome place. In her own way, she was more mysterious to him than Norah Quinn, and he had wanted to ask her why in the first place she had opened her door to the girl, why she had lied so carefully and created the fiction of a long-lost granddaughter. Perhaps she, too, realized the necessity of the angel, a creature born from desire. He hiked to a break in the treeline, and from the high overlook, the piñons and junipers appeared to stretch endlessly to the horizon, and he had never been more alone. In the ancient sunlight, a blackbird sang a tune without words. Perched on an outcropping of granite, Sean listened awhile to the sound of the wind and watched the ever-changing skies, fearing what might come, hoping for its return.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Peter Steinberg, extraordinary agent. Thank you to John Glusman, my editor, and everyone at Shaye Areheart Books. I am grateful as well to Lauren Schott Pearson, Markus Hoffman, Ellen Bryson, and Amy Stolls for their suggestions, and a special thank-you to Melanie for her close reading and patience. You make a better book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEITH DONOHUE is the author of the acclaimed novel The Stolen Child. For several years, he was a speechwriter at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and he now works at another federal agency. He lives with his family in Wheaton, Maryland.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Keith Donohue
All rights reserved.
www.crownpublishing.com
Shaye Areheart Books with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. for permission to reprint “The Pelican” by Dixon Lanier Merritt (Nashville Banner, April 22, 1910). Reprinted by permission of Brownlee O. Currey, Jr.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Donohue, Keith.
Angels of destruction : a novel / by Keith Donohue—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Girls—Fiction. 3. Supernatural—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.O5654A83 2009
813.6—dc22 2008021277
eISBN: 978-0-307-45027-2
v3.0
Keith Donohue, Angels of Destruction
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