Resurrection Man (20 page)

The sight raced over her like frost, making her skin tingle, then go numb. Still and cold she stood, like a little girl turned to glass; that empty and breakable.

With sudden clarity she saw that a kind of fairy tale was growing up around her. Dante and the other angels were only seeing the beginning. It was a new world now, the world of her grandmother's Hungarian fairy tales: a world of witches, of talking beasts and crying statues, of omens and wolves and wicked stepmothers. Like a little girl lost, she stood in the kitchen, enchanted into glass. The magic Dante dreaded so much was hissing down around her like the rain, blurring her view of her parents' fine rational world, tickering against her glass arms and legs, creeping down her glass cheeks; and the night rose up and up, running like a river in her heart.

0 God, her little girl.

She forced herself to move.

It shattered her inside. Her little girl.

Splinters of grief exploded in her chest. She couldn't bear it. How could she bear it? She couldn't, not without help. She had always prided herself on her toughness, but since Dante found the body in his bedroom something had made her weak, had shown her how fragile her life really was, and then come to blow it all apart.

She looked wildly for Aunt Sophie. On the main floor, in the basement; she ran upstairs and banged on Sophie's door without getting an answer. Ran back into the parlor. Something—a faint creak from the back porch, a sound like a small body leaning against the screen—drew her to the kitchen door. She peered down to the boathouse and saw Aunt Sophie standing on the dock.

It was cold dusk outside. She ran down through the garden and out to the end of the dock, her feet suddenly loud on the planking. there she found Aunt Sophie, swaddled in her big wool coat, looking into the river.

Sarah was breathing hard, sending clouds of gray vapor into the chilly air. "I've got to talk to you."

Aunt Sophie did not even turn.

"I've got to talk," Sarah repeated. She was crying. "I have to talk to someone and you're the only one who can understand."

Up behind the house the tallest maples raised their bare branches against a pale skyline, but down in the valley it was already dark. The river slid downstream, wide and silent before them, whispering to the wooden dock supports and the patient bank. In the middle of the channel, Three Hawk island lay like a giant sleeping on his back. A crow flapped heavily across the narrow band of blue sky guttering overhead. Like smoke, he vanished into the tangled darkness of the southern shore.

Aunt Sophie stirred at last; planks squeaked beneath her sneakers. She had a scarf wound around her head, old baba style, to keep out the cold. A cigarette butt shook between her fingers. She tossed it in the river. "Damn birds," she muttered.

"I know about Pendleton," Sarah said. "And Jet."

"You do, do you?" Aunt Sophie watched the river. "That's more than I can say."

"Aren't your hands cold?" Sarah asked. "Put them in your pockets, why don't you?"

Aunt Sophie did not put her hands in her pockets.

"You're crying," Aunt Sophie said. Reaching inside her coat, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes, pausing to accommodate a wrenching smoker's cough. She rummaged in the pack and drew one out. Her old, fat, liver-spotted hands were shaking. She put the cigarette in her mouth and struck a match. It hissed and spat sparks. "All right," Aunt Sophie said. "Talk."

It was the cigarette Sarah remembered: the bitter smell of it; Aunt Sophie coughing; the red tip wavering in the gloom, brighter and brighter as darkness fell around them. She couldn't remember Aunt Sophie's face at all; her coughs and grunts and terse, bitter swearing came out of the shadows of her scarf, and the cigarette tip danced, glowing, dipping, fainting and fading like a firefly winking above the impenetrable river.

"I was nineteen," Sarah said. "I must have been a slow developer, because it took me that long to be a stupid adolescent. Having left it so late, I really had to work to cram it in."

"I remember." Aunt Sophie coughed—wryly, if such a thing were possible. "Lawrence, wasn't it?"

"It was," Sarah said. "God knows why I went out with it. Its attractions elude me now." (The cigarette tip jiggled, accompanied by a phlegmy chuckle.) "Mostly it was the only thing that showed any interest in going to bed with an overweight social disaster just smart enough to be feared. So I and it went to bed."

"This was before or after your father told him never to see you again?"

"Oh, after. Definitely after."

"Hunh! I told Anton that was a stupid thing to do."

Sarah paused, surprised. So they had talked about her, had they? Well of course they had. Where did this curious blindness come from in children, that assumes parents don't exist except when they're in front of you? Of course they would have argued about her: Mom and Aunt Sophie while cooking dinner, Mom and Dad in bed. Dad and Aunt Sophie at any mutually convenient time; they had bickered continually back in those days.

Still night fell around Sarah like the rain. "So we went to bed," Sarah said. All the muscles in her stomach knotted up. "I got pregnant."

"Assholes have strong sperm," Aunt Sophie remarked. "You can be safe with a decent guy for years, but a real bastard'll knock you up in no time."

"Of course the first thing I did was break up with him."

"It. Lawrence. Whether I kept the baby or not, I sure as hell wasn't going to . . . Anyway, Lawrence was out. I didn't know if I would keep the baby. It was paralyzing. For two weeks I walked around like a zombie. I actually got as far as Mom's door once, but I couldn't face going in.

"Ever tell her?"

"Later," Sarah whispered. She closed her eyes. "I walked around in a daze all day. At night I prayed for the baby to die." In her heart, castles were burning.

"—I prayed for it to die. And it did."

For a long second the cigarette tip held perfectly still, red as Mars, a single point of light against the great sliding darkness of the river and the shadowed valley.

Aunt Sophie sighed.

The wooden dock creaked as Sarah rocked back and forth. "I was six weeks pregnant when I miscarried. Six weeks and two days. The pain was incredible. I took a fistful of Tylenol Threes from Dad's bag but I couldn't stop crying. Mom found me-in the bathtub in the middle of the night," she whispered. "Sitting crying in the bathtub with blood all over my skirt."

"Sweet Jesus." Aunt Sophie turned, and took one of the girl's hands in her own. "Shhh, Sarah. You didn't do anything, sweetheart."

"I killed my daughter." Sarah crushed her eyes closed, as if that would somehow stop her from crying. "I wanted her to die and she died."

The river ran, and the old dock creaked sadly in the falling dark. Sarah looked out into the darkness, watching it fill the river valley and spill over its sides, watching the blue sky turn the color of a crow's wing.

"She would have been eight years old," she said.

And Sophie coughed and cursed. "It's not your fault," she said, shaking Sarah angrily. "It happens all the time. It's not your damn fault, okay?"

"Isn't it my fault? How do you know? The mind and the body are hooked up pretty tightly. That's what Dad says."

Aunt Sophie grunted and spat. "Good God, Sarah. Don't listen to your father, of all people."

Sarah opened her eyes to glare fiercely at the darkness. "If it isn't my fault,
why is she back
?" She spun to face Aunt Sophie squarely. "Don't give me the usual line of crap, okay? I came to you because you know what it means to lose a child. Because you lost Jet. Don't tell me it wasn't my fault; that's no damn good to me. Just tell me how to keep from going crazy, will you? Just tell me how to survive. Because I can't stand it, I can't stand it. I can't stand it even one more time God knows; I'm gonna throw myself in the fucking river if I see her again."

The cigarette tip blazed-as Aunt Sophie took a long drag. Sarah could hear the crackle as it burned. Then a long sigh; curls of smoke and vapor in the cold air.

Aunt Sophie took her cigarette between two shaking fingers and tossed it into the river. "I don't know what to tell you," she said.

"Do you ever think of Pendleton? I mean, really think of him, anymore?"

"Yeah. I do sometimes." Very slowly Aunt Sophie spoke, and from a deep place, hidden to Sarah. "Yes I do. Sometimes."

"Don't you ever look at Jet?" Sarah demanded. "Don't you ever look-at Jet and say, My God, what have I done? What did I make? How did I ever fuck this up so badly?"

Aunt Sophie didn't answer.

"Well how do you stand it?" Sarah was crying too hard to keep the bitter strength in her voice. It broke and went ragged. "Please tell me how to keep going, Aunt Sophie. Because I've seen my daughter three times in the last three days and I really need to know, god damn it. I really need your help."

For a long time, Aunt Sophie did not answer. "I don't know," she said at last. "I don't know how we stand anything. Just too stupid to know better, I guess."

And Sarah was too weak, too weak and hurt and empty, to keep from getting folded into Aunt Sophie's big arms and held, shuddering and sobbing in the cold night. Too weak to stop Aunt Sophie from turning her around and guiding her up the dock and the garden path, big fat limbs sure and comforting as white bread baking, as the sound of sewing machines in the next room; leading her up to the house whose windows gleamed yellow against the darkness. Too tired to run back under the river. Too tired to do anything but climb the back steps at last, and step into the house.

*   *   *

Portrait

Here are pictures of the angel Jewel; I dug them up in the newspaper archives. Jewel at twenty-six on someone's arm in the Society column; Jewel at thirty-one, giving her plea-bargained evidence at the securities fraud trial of Liam Stratton, the Persuasive Trader; Jewel at thirty-five, acknowledged queen of the city Angels' Guild, in a color photo
Time
would use as part of their cover story on the astonishing angel Tristan Chu, 1975's Man of the Year.

You can see a vision of Jewel in Gainsborough's "Perdita": a delicate, oval face with a small, set mouth, eyebrows surprisingly coarse, and dark eyes that freeze your marrow. Looking into them is like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun: the threat is that naked.

Even her earliest pictures carry this brooding quality. It's most alarming when she smiles. You can see why Pendleton would have fallen for her; to a moth like him, greedy for power, she must have been a wick of pure fire.

Poor Pendleton. Poor, stupid, god damned coward traitor Pendleton.

I got what he deserved.

*   *   *

The Angels' Guild maintained their offices in a spacious Victorian house that had once belonged to a celebrated poisoner. Back in the seventies a journalist had nicknamed it Hell, because it was the one place you could always find a synod of brooding angels. The name had stuck.

Jet And Laura followed Dante as he climbed the porch steps and then hesitated, standing before the heavy oak door. All his life, Dante had tried hard to ignore the angel in himself, but here, on Hell's doorstep, he found himself wondering if the time for that was past.

Maybe—the thought came with a sudden surge of unexpected longing—maybe he could be proud of what he carried inside himself. Maybe there was a place where he could celebrate his magic, rather than carrying it like one of Jet's unclean secrets.

He shook his head, surprised at himself, and pushed Hell's door open, walking into a long, dim hallway.

From somewhere within the darkness inside, a small bell tinkled, announcing their entry.

Dante hissed sharply between his teeth.

"Looks like a junk shop," Laura said.

Laura liked a certain harmony in her surroundings, but there was nothing harmonious about this place. A collection of coats and scarves and jackets hung from pegs on the wall. Above these ran two long shelves, one on each side, each seemingly cluttered with miscellaneous objects. Aging dolls with cracked porcelain faces, little girls' ice-skates, sleeveless records and derelict turntables, radios with broken vacuum tubes, a twelve-year-old's pretend velvet cocktail dress, and a Mason jar holding an ancient marble collection: the sad remnants of a hundred lives. "Are you sure this is the right address?" she said.