The Search Angel (13 page)

T
he rap on the front door is unmistakable. Eleanor lifts her head off the pillow in the dark and looks at the clock: 2:47. Angus’s nails chatter against the floor as he dances and yips his pleasure.

He knows the person on the other side.

She stands up, her silky nightgown falling like water down her legs. After the blow of both search angels turning her down, after not hearing from Jonathan, after the story of the thwarted adoption in the park, after Isabelle ignoring her note, she took a full sleeping pill to quiet her mind. It hit her hard.

When she steps forward, she has to steady herself with the nightstand.

Another knock. “Eleanor.”

It’s him. Her fingers trailing the wall, she pads into the bathroom to rub toothpaste on her tongue, fluff her hair. Then she quiets Angus. Pulls him back from the door. Opens it.

In sweats, his hair in his eyes, his shoes untied. A shy grin on his face. Jonathan.

She opens the door wider and Angus charges his beloved. There is whispering. Affectionate petting. A tail thwacking
the wall with joy. When the dog calms, Jonathan looks up at her, his eyes asking if he can come inside. She steps back and allows him.

He kicks off his shoes, drops his keys on the hall table—a sound she didn’t know she missed but that now makes it impossible to breathe. In the light from the living room window, she’s aware of the sheerness of her nightie.

“God, I miss you.” He steps closer.

He walked out. He stiffed you at the agency. One nice gesture, then he ignored your phone call
.

Still. He’s here. He’s home. “I miss you too.”

Angus pants, happy, his body weight against Jonathan’s thighs as if to keep him here. In the apartment. Where he belongs.

Eleanor reaches for Jonathan’s hand and leads him into the bedroom. Knocks Pillow Jonathan to the floor and pulls her husband onto the bed. He nuzzles her hair and she groans. She stares up at him, hair strewn across her face in a way she hopes is sexy.

“You’re beautiful.” He throws one leg over her and kisses her. He tastes like scotch.

Nothing has ever been so exquisite. She can’t even think, can only feel the wet softness of his tongue, his lips. His body against hers, heavy, solid. Safe. She wonders if she’s dreaming.

“I’ve been thinking …” he whispers.

She covers his mouth with hers and kisses him harder, not daring to hear what he might say. She sucks on his tongue, teasing him until he moans.

Her hand slides down his shirt and under his waistband. Her fingers find their way to the front of his thigh. She
touches his hardness, and for a moment he holds his breath. “I want you,” he says.

She pulls him on top of her and parts her legs, guiding him inside her.

A
n hour before opening, Eleanor allows Angus to relieve himself on a street lamp out front, then she heads into the store to make a cup of coffee. The dog shoves his way in as she’s partway through the door. She locks up behind her. She’s not up to dealing with early morning customers.

With the help of the pill, with the arrival of Jonathan, she slept deeper than she has in weeks. When she finally woke, he was gone. She sat up, blinking. It could have been a dream, if not for Pillow Jonathan tossed on the floor. Then again, it’s Saturday. He works the day shift Saturdays. Almost certainly, he went to work. She searched every surface in the apartment for a note.

There was nothing.

She curses herself for not allowing her husband to talk. But his presence, his body, it felt too good. She couldn’t risk it.

Still, it means something, his coming. It might even mean everything.

In the shop, Angus steps onto the window display to squeeze himself between baby dresser and glass and lie down.
It’s the perfect spot for observation. Offers him countless reasons to woof and growl the entire morning long.

Eleanor removes her outer layer and boots up the computer:
Search Angels
, she types into Google. Thousands of Search Angel sites come up, the second being on Facebook. As she scrolls down the Facebook page, message after message comes up.

“From Ernie Ruiz: looking for my brother Ricky. Born June 1971.”

“From Alex Heingarten: birth son given up Dec 11, 2009. Markham-Stouffville Hospital, Ontario, Canada. Birth mother Michele Boisvert, orig from St. Laurent, Quebec.”

She scrolls through page after page of pleas for help. All from people looking for a search angel. Of course. Hundreds of thousands of people must be looking for birth relatives. There cannot possibly be enough search angels to help them all.

She checks her phone. Nothing from Jonathan.

Still. He came home. He came home.

Ginny thumps through the door, already deep into her maternity wardrobe of Ted’s old police shirt, stretched-out leggings, and UGG boots. She could be six months pregnant. She sees Eleanor and puts down her bag, spins in a circle. “I don’t look pregnant, do I?”

“God, no. You look like you’ve never even met a baby, let alone borne any.”

Ginny smiles. “That’s what I thought. I’m carrying more compact this time.”

As Eleanor turns back to the computer, Angus jumps up in an explosion of barking and window bumping.

Out on the sidewalk, a teenage boy rolls back and forth on a skateboard, squatting down low to leap over sidewalk cracks. The impact when he lands could topple the entire city. In spite of Angus’s barking, a few tattoo-soaked girls lean against the Pretty Baby storefront and suck on cigarettes. A little blue-headed girl cheers. They’re the same kids as before, Eleanor thinks. The ones who peered through the window, full of hope that Noel would actually open for business. Perfectly reasonable. Why would an adult lease a store, spray the walls in graffiti, drag in a ten-foot Sasquatch, and play the same song over and over if he
didn’t
plan to open the doors one day?

A pregnant woman approaches Pretty Baby and steps over a boy sprawled across Eleanor’s doormat.

“Sorry,” Eleanor says to her customer, who looks unimpressed as she heads for the plush toys.

Before these teenagers get into the habit of depositing themselves in front of her store, Eleanor decides to take action. She marches to the back and returns with an antique bench she painted periwinkle blue—the color of her logo and front door. It’s a valuable piece, but not nearly as valuable as the confidence of her customers. These kids need seating. Near
Noel’s
door.

With the girls looking on, she bumps the bench through the door and sets it in front of Death by Vinyl, right beneath the window.

Fully aware that the girls are giggling at her, she returns to the shop to find Ginny watching, an amused smile on her face. “You are so naive it almost hurts.”

“What? I think it’s a brilliant idea. Now they know where to hang out.”

One of the smoker girls snuffs out her cigarette and wanders
over to the bench. The skateboarder stops his concrete-shattering tricks to follow them over to Noel’s. They stand around and observe this foreign object. So quaint. So pretty. The bench might as well have been dropped by aliens, the way they gawk. A tall boy, elbows threatening to pierce his sweatshirt, nudges the bench with the toe of his sneaker. They wait for it to move or fight back.

The bench, of course, does nothing.

“See?” says Eleanor. “They’re admiring it.”

One of the boys, this one weighty enough that Eleanor feels concern for his skateboard, picks up the bench and drags it out onto the sidewalk in front of Pretty Baby. He kicks it onto its side.

“What’s he doing?” Eleanor asks.

Ginny laughs, shakes her head. “I don’t think you want to know.”

They watch as the boys race up the sidewalk and, one after another, turn, leap onto their boards and shoot back, grinding their wheels across her beautiful bench. Paint chips and splinters scatter and right away the top begins to separate from its base. In seconds, the bench is a splintered pile of periwinkle kindling.

Eleanor bursts out of the store, Ginny in her wake. “Excuse me! I didn’t put my bench out here for you to—”

“Out of the way, dude!” The girl with blue hair takes a running jump onto her board and tries to sail over the remains of the bench. Her first attempt results in the board spinning backward and her stumbling toward the mailbox, looking embarrassed. She takes another leap, clearing the bench with the board seemingly taped to her soles, but lands hard on the board’s right side—sending her to the ground, and the
board shooting like a missile straight into the passenger door of Noel’s car.

Curled up on her side, she cradles her wrist, a twisted look of pain on her face.

Though everyone, including Eleanor and Ginny, rushes to the girl, Noel, who has appeared from nowhere, reaches her first. But he runs straight past and drops to his knees at his car door.

“Are you okay?” Eleanor bends over the girl and examines her wrist for swelling, signs of a broken bone. Her friends gather around, all making appropriate sounds of concern.

“I’m fine,” she says, twirling her hand, the heel of which is skinned. “It’s just surface.”

“Still. You need to clean it out. Disinfect,” says Eleanor. “I have a first aid kit in my store.”

“Chill.” The girl laughs and climbs to her feet. “It happens, like, every week.”

The kids thunder off down the sidewalk, shoving each other and laughing. Not halfway up the block, one of them tries to leap over a small bike chained to a tree.

“Hi, Noel,” Ginny says, grinning and hiding her wedding ring finger behind her back. When he doesn’t react, she calls out louder, “HI, NOEL.”

He nods his greeting without looking.

“Your speakers sound … YOUR SPEAKERS SOUND TERRIFIC.”

Something about the way his head is slumped so low, the way he sits almost crumpled into himself, makes Eleanor shoo Ginny back to work. She drops to the curb beside him. Shifts closer. Puts an arm on his back.

“At least you’re going to have lots of customers. Once your speakers are all ready to go.”

“Speakers are good.” He looks up and runs his finger along the dented car door. As Angus barks from the Pretty Baby window display, Noel’s eyes redden. “But now I have to deal with this.”

She stares at him. Finally, she gets it. This delay isn’t about perfect sound systems or keeping a car pristine. Not at all.

I
t’s called the Puppy Love NoBark 3000 and costs $79.95 at Woofers and Tweeters, over on Commonwealth. The collar is meant to administer a harmless but effective electric shock to the offending animal: vibration-sensor collars being preferable to sound-sensor collars because they reduce false alarms caused by external noise. The nylon collar—which has a black box attached to it—has three correction modes, low, medium, and high, and is meant to amp up the correction if the barking doesn’t abate at the previous level.

She has no choice. Customers are too scared to come into the store. And now, if she leaves Angus upstairs like she did before Jonathan walked out and the dog became unglued, the neighbor above has said he’ll call Animal Control.

Eleanor steps over Angus, lying beneath the cash register, his hind legs threaded through his front legs to form a large, knobby X. She can’t test the shock on the dog—what if the signal actually hurts him? Singes his neck?

She adjusts the collar in the way the instructions suggest, holds the black box so the metal prods touch her own neck
and clips it on herself. She’ll try it out. Say something loud enough to create a vibration and see if she can tolerate it.

No one’s around.

Though, a dog does have the advantage of at least a thin layer of fur between shock and skin. It would be far safer to test it out while wearing a turtleneck. Or at least having slipped a Kleenex beneath the metal.

“Don’t wear that during your home visit.” Ginny lowers her sunglasses as she comes in. “Bondage slave collars don’t give off that maternal vibe adoption agencies hope for.”

“It’s not—”

The jolt hits Eleanor’s skin like a bad carpet shock on a dry winter day. Tears prick her eyes and she exclaims aloud, only to be zapped harder. Angus sets front legs atop the counter and starts baying deafeningly toward the ceiling, as Ginny watches, confused.

Eleanor scrambles to unclick the collar and whips it to the ground. Leaning over, she blinks back tears. “Oh my God. That hurt
so
much.”

Ginny picks it up and examines it. “Wait a sec. Do they make these for kids?”

“I can’t do it to him.”

They both turn to watch Angus as he backs up, taking with him the display of diaper creams set up as point-of-purchase temptations by the cash. In a bid to disguise his lack of elegance, he proceeds to sit atop the fallen items and howl.

Then the bell above the door chimes and in walks Isabelle.

She pauses a moment to take in the dog, the mess, and the collar on the ground, then sets her Chanel bag on the counter with an expensive clink. “I didn’t think it was legal in
this country to keep horses as pets.” She braces herself, eyes clamped shut, as Angus charges her, heaving his weight into her legs. “Dear God, please tell me I’m not dead.”

“He’s friendly, Isabelle. He wants you to pet him.”

“I’ll indulge in no such thing.” She sidles away from Angus and glares at Eleanor. “You’re in terrible shape, Eleanor Sweet.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve never even been approached by someone with the name Smith who was actually named Smith. It is, as you can imagine, the single most common name used by women looking to give birth and vanish. And Kansas City. It’s as close to being an impossible case as I’ve ever seen.”

“So, you’re saying it’s not worth trying?”

“I’m saying you’re going to have a terrible time finding a search angel to help you. We are human—we do consider the odds of success in taking on any new cases. Some people are simply unfindable. Surely you can see that.”

Eleanor is terrified to speak lest she frighten the woman away. She hadn’t considered this. That her case is undesirable. “I guess. I hadn’t thought—”

“You can’t just go to anybody.”

“Right. Okay …”

Isabelle pulls a plane ticket from her purse and slaps it on the counter. “I am going to Missouri in the morning. I have many reservations about it. Lately, I do not like planes or travel or other people for that matter. Every nerve in my soon-to-be corpse is shouting at me, but there you have it. I’m going to find this mother of yours if it kills me. And it may very well do so.” She takes her purse and heads to the door, turning back to add, “And next time you compose a
note intended to tempt another to travel hither and yon on your behalf, take the time to make sure you haven’t done so on the flap of a tampon box.” With that, Isabelle is gone.

“Seriously?” asks Ginny, staring at her boss. “A tampon box?”

Eleanor leans over to pick up the shock collar. “What? It got her here, didn’t it?”