Angels Burning (3 page)

I always wished Grandma would get mad at Mom and tell her she needed to be a better mother and a better housekeeper, but she thought her daughter's refusal to attend to such mundane domestic tasks was perfectly acceptable because she was beautiful.

“Your mother shouldn't have to worry about things like this. It would be a crime for a girl that pretty to do dirty work,” she'd say as she attacked our sticky kitchen linoleum, her hair covered with a knotted bandana, wearing a colorless housedress and clunky rubber-soled shoes.

Anyone seeing Grandma would've never known she had produced an offspring too lovely for mopping.

The ever-practical Neely finally piped up one day and asked, “If being pretty is such a big deal, why doesn't Mom use it to make money? She could be a movie star, or Miss America.”

Grandma looked like she was about to scold Neely, then her face softened like she was going to say something kind. She ended up not saying anything.

What we didn't realize was that Mom
was
using her looks to make money. Various boyfriends bought her clothes, paid our rent, gave her spending money. When times got desperate, she'd work for a little while as a waitress or secretary in town, but each job would quickly lead to finding a new sugar daddy.

I step into the shower and turn on the water, making it as hot as I can stand. I watch it turn black as it hits my muddy skin and streams off
my body before swirling down the floor drain. No matter how much I scrub and dig, I can't get the grit out from under my fingernails.

I wonder if the dead girl was pretty. Probably. Most teenage girls are some kind of pretty simply by virtue of their youth, even though almost all of them think they're ugly.

I make the water hotter until I can't stand it anymore, knowing it's still not anywhere near as hot as the flames that had begun to consume the girl's face.

I've managed to keep the details of her at bay, but standing here naked and exposed on a concrete floor, I lose my resolve. The image washes over me along with the steaming water: patches of burned skin the amber brown of pipe tobacco crisped tautly over her face and bare arms; her skull, caved in on one side, scattered with straggly shocks of singed hair; her hands clutching at nothing, the fingers like strips of jerky. It suddenly strikes me that her hands were burned worse than any other part of her body. I file this away in my head as possibly important.

I know this is the moment when I should finally cry for her, for the life she didn't get to live and the horror of her final moments, for her family and the anguish they will never be able to escape for the rest of their days, but the tears don't come until I abandon my thoughts of the murdered girl and begin to concentrate on the monster who could do something like this. It's familiar territory for me, and the rage and righteousness I find there warms and comforts me. They're not tears of grief but of relief.

Back in my office, still in bare feet, with my unruly dark hair pinned to the top of my head, wearing gray YMCA sweatpants and a pink sweatshirt from a breast cancer fund-raising fun run, I sit at my desk and reach for my reading glasses with a sigh.

I started wearing them last year. At first I kind of liked them. I convinced myself I was rocking the sexy librarian look. That delusion ended fairly quickly.

I just turned fifty a couple of weeks ago. The number on its own doesn't bother me. I didn't even get upset when Singer unthinkingly proclaimed with sincere admiration, “Wow, fifty! That's half a century.”

I'm in good health. Aside from a little bit of gray in my hair that I cover, a few lines on my face, and the beginning sag of certain body parts, I still look good.
I'm okay with my age, but nobody else is. Especially men.

I bristle at the thought of Nolan hurling me over that fallen barbed wire back at Campbell's Run this morning like I was a sack of road salt. He would've never done that when I was younger, because the same act would have had the sensual connotations of a romance novel lover swinging his sweetheart over a babbling brook.

He also would have never asked me about my weight with the dispassionate scrutiny of a farmer passing by a penned hog at the county fair.

Maybe this is my comeuppance for spending so much energy during my life trying to make men in my profession ignore my face and figure and take me seriously as an equal. I didn't want them to treat me like a girl; now I do, and all they see is a sexless blob.

Singer knocks on my door even though it's open. He pauses and sniffs the air.

“I smell Axe bodywash,” he says.

“Never mind.”

“There's a guy out here who insists on seeing you.”

“Something to do with our girl?”

“No. He won't give his name, but he says he killed your mother.”

He let's the weight of this statement sink in. I'm sure he expects a reaction from me, but I have none to give.

“Are you okay, Chief ? Do you think this joker is serious? Should we check on your mom?”

“My mom was murdered when I was fifteen.”

He drops his eyes to the floor.

“I'm sorry. I didn't know.”

“It's okay. Show him in.”

I'm perfectly calm. I don't have to force it. I really feel nothing, and I wonder fleetingly if that means there's something wrong with me.

I assumed I'd never see him again, but I never ruled out the possibility.
He's an old man now but still vain about his looks. He hasn't lost his hair. It's completely gray but thick. He's put an oily gel in it and slicked it back from his forehead. He's wearing a faded but clean short-sleeved checked shirt with fake pearl buttons and an enameled American flag belt buckle as big as his fist. His bare arms are covered with tattoos in heavy black ink. He didn't have any when he went in, so they must be the work of a prison artist who seems to have randomly scribbled on and slashed at him. I can't make out a single image or word.

“Hi there, Dove.”

He smiles at me. His teeth haven't fared as well as his hair. They're stained, and he's missing a few.

“You're all grown up. Well, you're past grown up. You're way on the other side of grown up.”

“I get it. You've made your point,” I say.

“Though you weren't exactly a little kid when I went away. You already had a good-size rack on you. Nice ass.”

“Still the charmer, I see.”

I fold my hands on my desk.

“What do you want, Lucky? Or did your nickname change to something more accurate in prison? Is it Pathetic Loser now?”

“No need to make personal attacks,” he replies, taking an unoffered seat. “It's still Lucky. Compared to a lot of guys where I just come from, I am lucky. And I got a few years shaved off my sentence for good behavior. What could be luckier than that?”

“I was notified you were being released.”

He sizes me up in the covetous way he used to look at Mom and me and Neely but also cases of beer, our neighbor's Trans Am, and our TV before he turned it on and sat down to watch a ball game. He had two expressions: a sullen bored pout for things he didn't care about or didn't understand, and a greedy groping gaze for everything else.

“How's that little sister of yours? I hear she's a lesbian.”

“She's not a lesbian.”

“That's not what I heard. I heard she's a real man-hater.”

“Lots of heterosexual women hate men. Thanks to men like you.”

“Too-shay,” he exclaims, flashing me another hay-colored smile. “I hear she's a dog trainer now. Some kind of dog whisperer or, in her case, more like a dog shouter.”

He laughs, highly amused by the sputtering spark of his own dim wit.

“You've heard a lot for a guy who's spent the past thirty-five years behind bars,” I say.

I'm as amazed as I was in my youth that my mother had anything to do with him, but this was common musing for me back then. As far as I could tell, my mother's only standard for men was that they could afford her. Young, old, handsome, homely, muscly, portly, blue-collar, white-collar, married, single, educated, and dumb as dirt: we watched all kinds come and go.

Very few appealed to Neely and me, and those who did initially always proved to be jerks in the long run. Lucky had been a jerk from the start, although we both agreed he was good-looking. He worked in a factory that made parts for mining equipment and drove a black Harley with a dazzling electric blue stripe. He drank too much, but so did our mom, and he treated my siblings and me like we were the hired help or naughty pets depending on his mood, but so did our mom.

“Maybe I'll go see her.”

“Stay away from Neely.”

“Hit a sore spot,” he cries, grinning. “Come on. You aren't still mad over that pop I gave her that one time for talking back to your mom? If you'd had a dad, he would've done the same thing.”

“What do you want?” I repeat.

“I think you know.”

“I have no idea.”

“How about your little brother? What was his name? Spot? Fido? Bandit?”

“Champ.”

“Yeah, right, Champ.”

“He left the state when he graduated from high school.”

“Running away from his sisters, huh?”

He was running away from something. Definitely not his sisters. At least Neely and I have always prayed this wasn't the case.

I'm not about to allow this conversation to turn to Champ.

I look at Lucky over the tops of my glasses.

“I've got a lot to do today. I need you to leave.”

“So you're not going to be nice about any of this? Even after all these years?”

“Good-bye, Lucky.”

“Not good-bye. I'll be seeing you around. Your sister, too.”

He stands up and stares down at me. I know he's trying to rattle me, but he has no idea what he's up against.

I'm suddenly struck by the vivid image of my mother as I saw her before I left for school the day she died. She was standing in front of Gil's big bay window in her shorty emerald green bathrobe sipping a cup of coffee and playing with her mane of Farrah hair. She was studying the neighbors' trash as the garbage men tilted their cans into the masher at the back of the truck. She said you could tell a lot about people by what they threw away.

Since she had married Gil and finally attained the respectability of a shared last name and a big house in an upscale part of town, she had begun spying on the neighbors, a pastime she had never indulged in when we were poor. Then, she had been content to be the object of everyone else's prying eyes. Grandma called her new habit being a nosey parker until Gil taught her the word “voyeurism.” She preferred it, saying it sounded classy.

Those acquainted with my mom's past would go on to say that Cissy Carnahan dying on trash day was perfect timing.

Lucky turns to leave and I begin to let my guard down, but he stops in the doorway.

“All I want to know is why you and Neely lied and sent me to prison for something I didn't do.”

I don't flinch. I stare him down, saying nothing, until he finally gives up and leaves.

I will never tell him that I've often wondered the same thing.

MY MOM'S MURDER
is something I keep hidden most of the time; when I have to bring it out, I wear it like a crown or a noose, depending on my mood. After talking to Lucky, I've slipped it over me like a Kevlar vest.

Her violent end happened thirty-five years ago, and even though it was the most heinous crime this town has ever seen up until today, it has been largely forgotten except by her children, her mother, and, of course, the man who unfairly paid for it.

I like to think the man she was married to at the time remembers, too, as he continues to float around Europe on a cloud of family money serving out his self-imposed exile. At the time I wanted Gil as far away from my siblings and me as possible, but now I think I could finally deal with him properly. I wouldn't mind if he came home again.

However, I realize I'm not ready to deal with Lucky. I may have seemed tough and detached when I talked to him, but my conscience was wringing its hands inside me. My actions against him seemed inarguably necessary at the time; now I'm not so sure.
One of the worst aspects of growing older is the lengthening of hindsight. As it stretches, it becomes thinner and more transparent and we see things more clearly.

I drive home around noon to change my clothes. I'm still shoeless, and the feel of the gas pedal beneath my bare foot conjures up memories of Lucky giving me driving lessons. It was summer. He'd come roaring
up on his motorcycle on a Saturday morning relishing the disapproving scowls on the faces of Gil's neighbors peering out from behind their fancy drapes the same way Mom watched their garbage. I'd grab Gil's car keys and run out to meet Lucky, usually forgetting to slip on my Dr. Scholl's.

Lucky's relationship with Mom had ended five years earlier. After they broke up, a parade of men came and went before she finally took the plunge with Gilbert Rankin. I had begun to think that Mom was not only too beautiful for housework but also for marriage. I could imagine Grandma's reasoning: “It would be a crime for a girl that pretty to only be able to manipulate one man for the rest of her life.”

Mom had entered her thirties not seeming the least bit interested in a commitment, but I think Gil's money and availability had been too much to pass up.

Gil came from one of Buchanan's wealthiest families. All small towns have a few who no one knows exactly where their money originally came from, but in Pennsylvania it can almost always be traced back to something dark or invisible that's been dug, blasted, or piped out of the ground. His father had given him a department store and two restaurants to keep him busy. He also appeared to have an active love life, but despite constant rumors about possible potential spouses, he had never married or had any children.