Read Angels of Destruction Online
Authors: Keith Donohue
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Psychological, #Literary, #Supernatural, #Psychological Fiction, #Fiction - General, #Visionary & Metaphysical, #Girls, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Widows
Angels of Destruction (37 page)
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
T
hank 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
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
