Angel Among Us (2 page)

It was June and the sun bounced off the store windows in bursts of glory. A pregnant woman caught my eye. She was standing in front of a Korean greengrocer whose business thrived thanks to an endless selection of vegetables and fruits wildly unfamiliar to me. Each night he took his displays down as carefully as if they were jewels, and then put them back up again early the next day, never seeming to weary of building his colorful pyramids. I envied him his contentment at this daily task.

I drifted closer to the pregnant woman, drawn by a feeling that I knew her. She was well along, although I am no expert in such things, having left every aspect of childbearing to my wife. I did not recognize her at first and so I saw her through the eyes of a stranger. Her cheekbones were high and angular, sloping down to a chin exquisitely carved below a wide mouth the color of strawberries. Her hair gleamed like chocolate in the sun and swayed as she picked her way through a crate of oblong fruit with an orange tint and intoxicating smell. She examined each fruit carefully, holding it to her nose and inhaling its fragrance before putting it back down again in search of something better. She was slender and her belly protruded out in front of her as if it, too, was a fruit ripening in the sun. She wore a yellow sundress that contrasted with the creamy tan of her skin and made me think of lemons.

As I stood, drinking in her beauty beneath the June day, I realized that I did know her – it was the preschool teacher from the nearby elementary school, the woman the children had called Seely. Pregnancy had filled out her frame and crowded out her nascent sorrow.

She still had, I thought, the face of an angel. Wide sleepy eyes and a drowsy smile that lingered at the corners of her mouth. There was still sadness there, after all, I decided, though further underneath than before, perhaps hidden by daydreams of her life to come.

When she finally selected her fruit and made her way down the block, I followed – when you are dead, there is not much else to do. She loaded her purchases into the back seat of a battered green Volvo and I decided to hitch a ride. I sat next to her, unseen, as she drove out of my town and into the gently rolling hills of Delaware growing thick with corn, soybeans and wheat. She did not use air-conditioning but rolled all four windows down. I enjoyed the wild rush of air as much as she did and perhaps even more, for I could watch the silken strands of her hair whipping wildly in the wind as she drove.

Ten minutes outside of town, she turned and we bumped merrily down a rutted road gouged by tractor tires that wound through fields of new growth. She pulled up in front of a white farmhouse and unloaded her groceries from the car with the same placid calm she had shown in choosing them. She had not bothered to lock her back door and pushed her way inside with a bump of her hips. Clearly, this house was home.

Leaving her bags on the counter, she wandered languidly down the hall. I could feel the sleep starting to overcome her. As she entered a cheery yellow bedroom decorated with bright quilts and flowers, she pulled her sundress over her head and fell on to bed. She was asleep almost instantly, her body as still as the cool afternoon air that held the room in abeyance. That was when I saw them – dozens of scars criss-crossed against the creamy brown skin of her back that wound their way over her swollen abdomen and breasts, some long and an angry pink, others dark welts or mounds of puckered tissue from old burn marks.

I was paralyzed by what I saw. Above, she had the face of an angel. Below, a devil had surely been at work.

H
er name was Arcelia. I learned that when – just as the sun had lost its bite and the afternoon had turned into an early summer evening – a tall man with brown hair in need of a haircut entered the farmhouse covered in dust from the fields. The door banged shut behind him and I came back out into the kitchen to see who had arrived. He was standing in the center of the room, clearly at home, looking around for his wife. When he found her in the bedroom, fast asleep with her hands cradling her belly, he left without a sound. He returned to the kitchen and began preparing the evening meal. He ate no meat. He pulled vegetables from drawers and washed them reverently. He sautéed them in restaurant-quality pans, adding seasonings and sauces with such ease I knew he had once worked as a chef.

Wonderful smells filled the kitchen and I could feel the hard labor of the day falling from him as he paid homage to the bounty of the earth. I wondered if he had grown the vegetables he was eating. He didn't look like any of the farmers I had ever known. He was in his mid-thirties, with clear blue eyes, an angular nose and a close-cropped beard that he seemed, somehow, to hide behind.

When the dinner was done, he prepared a plate and carried it in to his still sleeping wife. He sat on the edge of her bed and gently touched her shoulder. ‘Arcelia,' he whispered.

Her eyes flew open – she was instantly awake. For a moment, I saw the fear in her eyes and knew she was close to panic. Then she saw her husband's face and relaxed again. ‘I fell asleep,' she mumbled.

‘Good,' the man said. He smiled lovingly at her. ‘I made dinner.'

She struggled to sit upright, her belly making it difficult to maneuver. ‘I'm as big as a house,' she admitted as she reached for the plate and ate hungrily. Her husband smiled, amused at her appetite. ‘I'm not sure how much longer I can take it,' she said, but was instantly distracted. ‘Are these the purple potatoes you told me about?'

The man nodded. ‘What do you think? I've got three restaurants in Wilmington that say they'll take all I can grow. It was a little early to pull them, but I wanted you to try them.'

‘They're amazing.' She looked down at her dinner plate ruefully. ‘And they're all gone.'

The man laughed and reached for her plate. ‘I'll bring you more.'

‘And more butter?' She said this hopefully, widening her eyes a little, knowing it would melt him into submission.

He laughed again as he left the room. Her eyes followed him with a love I envied. If anyone had ever felt that way about me, I could no longer remember it.

This time, the man returned with two plates and they sat side by side on their bed together, watching the shadows grow on the lawn outside their windows. They ate in silence, content in each other's company. The room felt filled with safety and love.

I understood then how it was that she could continue, that she could bring a child into this world, when she still bore the scars of what a terrible place it could be.

I fell in love with her a little that evening as I watched how she surrendered to her love for her husband. He returned that love and I was reminded, for the millionth time since my death, of how poorly I had measured up in that department when I was alive, of what a wretched father and husband I had once been.

Being reminded of my failures is sometimes more than I can take. I left before dark, but in the end, I could not stay away.

I returned in the morning in time to see Arcelia stepping from the kitchen door, a piece of toast still in hand as she struggled with a pocketbook, a tote bag of fresh vegetables and a comically large ring of keys. When she drove away in her old Volvo, I rode shotgun and enjoyed the cool morning breeze alongside of her. She headed back toward town to the elementary school where she worked, parked in the lot set aside for teachers and trundled slowly toward the entrance, her pregnancy slowing her down. The janitor hurried out the door and took her packages from her, ignoring her protests as he gallantly led her inside. Children and their parents began arriving soon after. As they were delivered to Arcelia, their cries of delight told me that the children still adored their Seely.

Arcelia ruled her classroom the way she did the playground: with gentle admonitions, warning glances and frequent smiles. The children gravitated toward her as if she were a beacon and absently wrapped their arms around her legs for comfort.

I had not been so clueless as a father that I did not remember school typically ended in mid-June. The school year was winding down. I knew there were only a few days left to watch her at work and so I decided to return the next day and spend another pleasant morning watching the children barrel about in their sturdy bodies, testing the boundaries of their world. But when the next morning dawned, I was distracted by a family of rabbits exploring the clover in a nearby park. After that, I followed a pack of feral dogs to see where they went during the day (deep into the park bushes to sleep). By the time I reached the elementary school that day, it was already mid morning. Arcelia had not yet arrived. Parents stood in annoyed clusters, looking at their watches, anxious about being late to work. The children were less concerned. Any extra time to swing or slide was fine with them. The principal was the only one who looked anxious. He was a tubby man with close-cropped gray hair and kept offering his opinion that Arcelia must have gone into labor early; there was no other explanation for her tardiness. She had never been so much as a minute late before.

A substitute teacher finally arrived and the remaining parents fled, leaving the principal to deal with where his teacher was and why. He handed over the care of the children to the substitute and returned to his office. I followed and watched as he searched through his emergency contact files until he found the one for Arcelia. Improbably, her last name was Gallagher and her husband's name was Daniel. He did not answer his phone. The principal's agitation was growing and I wondered at his anxiousness. She was only three hours late at that point, but I saw fear in the way he dialed number after number looking for her.

He spoke briefly to someone on the other end of his last phone call without success, then hung up and stared at the wall across the room. A woman poked her head in the doorway and asked, ‘Any word?'

The principal shook his head. ‘A neighbor said he would try to find her husband. He thinks he may be in the fields.'

‘I called the hospital,' the woman said. ‘She's not there.'

The principal and his secretary exchanged a glance I could not understand. A silence filled the room. ‘Perhaps she had car trouble?' the man suggested.

His secretary nodded, acknowledging the possibility. She did not look convinced.

‘If we don't hear from her soon, I'm calling the police,' the principal decided, sounding like he was trying to find the courage to do so. ‘You never know.'

The woman's hand flew to her mouth, as if she were trying to suppress her opinion. She did not want to agree with whatever it was the principal was thinking, but they knew more than I did. That much was obvious. They were both deeply afraid.

T
he principal was a plump little man with soft round hands that looked like a woman's. He sat at his desk, unable to move, unable to act. Occasionally, his secretary would look in on him, then close the door, leaving him to his indecision. If he dithered this much about every matter, the school was in trouble. Once or twice, he started to reach for the phone but held back.

I could not understand what had him so worried. As lunchtime came and went, he still did not move. He went back to work on other papers of inconsequential nature. It was not until early afternoon that he phoned the police.

Two cops I did not know arrived quickly. The school was served by a new substation I had never visited. One cop was young, skinny and white. His partner was an older Hispanic man putting on weight in his middle age. Both seemed bored with their assignment, especially since the principal did not help his case. Whatever was bothering him, he was having trouble spitting it out to the cops.

His secretary, who had been listening in at the door, finally took matters into her own hands. She entered the room and interrupted her boss's utterly baffling attempts at explaining what he feared.

‘Sir,' she said to the principal, ‘I apologize for interrupting, but the other teachers and I have discussed the situation and I feel perhaps I could add some information here.'

The two cops looked as if she had about thirty seconds before they shut their notebooks and left. So far, they had learned nothing from the principal to make them the least bit concerned about the teacher who had failed to show that morning.

‘We have long noticed that Arcelia was afraid of something,' the secretary explained. She patted her hair anxiously. ‘There were times when it seemed as if she was in physical pain, as if it was difficult for her to move. We thought she was suffering from some illness, but then one of the teachers suggested that maybe she was being, well, abused.' She exchanged a glance with the principal, who had flushed red at the idea. ‘She hasn't been married long. I think maybe two years or so. She's been working here for a year now and, to be fair, she's never said a word about her husband being abusive in any way. But once we started watching her more closely, it did become obvious. Arcelia was afraid of someone and she was often in physical pain.'

‘Now, now, Mrs Trafton, everything you say is simply hearsay,' the principal said. ‘There is no proof that her husband is doing anything to her.' He looked up anxiously at the police. ‘I have been through this before,' he sputtered. ‘I lost the best teacher I ever had due to unfounded accusations. It was awful. I simply cannot let that happen to another person.'

Mrs Trafton wasn't buying it. ‘The police need to know,' she said firmly. She faced the two beat cops and took a deep breath. ‘Arcelia is married to the mayor's son.'

The youngest cop dropped his notebook and his partner looked at him in disgust.

‘Are you telling me that the missing teacher is married to Mayor Gallagher's son?' the older cop asked. He turned to the principal in exasperation. ‘Couldn't you have told us that right away? Don't you think that was important?'

The principal looked stricken, but no one was paying attention to him any more. The news that the missing teacher was married to an important man's son took precedence.