The Third Angel

by Alice Hoffman

  Lucy took out the engagement ring and slipped it on her finger. If she ran into those young English women again she'd tell them that the ring had belonged to Katharine Hepburn. Clark Gable had wanted to marry her, but she'd turned him down flat and given the ring to Lucy instead.

  When Lucy got back to the Lion Park it was past dinnertime. The entire hotel was in an uproar because Millie, the rabbit, had gotten loose. The maids and the porters were all looking for her. She'd left a trail of her droppings, and worse, wallpaper everywhere had been torn from the walls. She'd chewed on the phone wires so that the entire sixth and seventh floors had no service. Now something had gone wrong with the lift as well; Lord only knew what the rabbit had chewed up. Guests were advised to take the stairs.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” Dorey said gloomily. She'd been called on the carpet and her position was in jeopardy. Usually she wore the gray jumper and white blouse that was her uniform; now she had on a flowery dress and heels and scarlet lipstick. She'd been all set to go on a date when she got the call about the rabbit. The cook who was in love with her had threatened to chop off Millie's head if he found her. He was walking around in his good holiday clothes with a meat cleaver, slicing through the air.

  “Save me the foot,” Dorey called after him. “That's the lucky part.”

  Lucy headed up the stairs. She had decided to count them and was up to eighty-one when she ran into Charlotte.

  “There you are,” Charlotte said. “Have fun at the zoo?”

  “It was brilliant,” Lucy said. That was a word those English women had used all the time. Lucy planned to use it quite often when she returned home. “There were twenty-three camels and one of them was an albino.”

  “You are such a little liar,” Charlotte said. “You may have your father fooled, but I see right through you. Where have you been all this time?”

  Charlotte might have said more, but suddenly she was staring at Lucy's hands. Lucy put them behind her back. She had forgotten to take off the ring.

  “Where'd you get that? Oh my God! On top of everything else, you're a thief!”

  “That just goes to show how much you know,” Lucy spat back. “She gave it to me.”

  “She?”

  Lucy shut up and turned to go up the rest of the stairs. She thought of the rabbit, hiding somewhere. She thought she probably had another hundred steps to go before she escaped. But Charlotte grabbed her. She wrenched Lucy's arm.

  “Are you talking about Bryn? Did you take that ring from her?”

  “Does my father know you don't even believe in love?” Lucy said. She should have felt trapped. Instead, she felt oddly powerful.

  Charlotte yanked Lucy's hand up and forced the ring off her finger. “When your father hears about this you'll be seriously punished for once in your life.”

  What happened next was Lucy's fault. She pushed Charlotte and she never should have done that. Charlotte clutched onto Lucy to keep from falling and that's how the letter dropped to the floor. It was the sort of instant that lasts too long and then all of a sudden time speeds up and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. It's much too late for that.

  Charlotte bent down and picked up the letter. She recognized her sister's handwriting and Michael Macklin's name. She stared at Lucy as though she had never quite seen her before.

  “That's mine, give it back,” Lucy said.

  But it wasn't, and they both knew it.

  Charlotte tore open the letter and read it.

  “It's mine,” Lucy said again, hoping to convince them both.

  “Then what does it say?”

  Lucy couldn't answer.

  “If it's yours you tell me what the hell it says, Lucy Green, you little liar! Go on!”

  “It says I hate you,” Lucy finally answered.

  Lucy ran upstairs and knocked on Michael's door, but he wasn't there. When she turned, Lucy knew she had made a mistake. She shouldn't have gone directly to find Michael. Charlotte had followed her.

  “Is this where he's staying?” Charlotte said. “He's the man at breakfast, isn't he? You've been planning this with him all along. You've been helping a criminal and a thief!”

  Lucy had her key in her hand. She opened her door, then slammed it behind her and turned the lock. There was no peephole, so she couldn't look out to see if Charlotte was out there. But she didn't have to wait long for her answer; her stepmother began to pound on the door.

  “You get out here right now!” Charlotte said. “Don't think you can just walk away from me!”

  Lucy sank down onto the carpet, her back against the wall. She was never opening that door. She could feel her heart pounding, and the thrumming of her pulse echoed in her ears. She saw something across the room, under the desk. She thought it was a shadow, or a lost soul, or a rat, or the devil himself, but it was only Millie, the rabbit from downstairs. Lucy crawled across the floor and moved the chair away, then got under the desk with Millie, who was huddled at the back, next to the wall. It felt safe under there. Very hot and somewhat stinky, but safe.

  Everything seemed surprisingly quiet when Charlotte finally stopped yelling and thumping on the door. It was hardly possible to hear the traffic noise from under the desk. Lucy curled up and closed her eyes. She listened to little puff-puffs of breath, the rabbit breathing, or maybe it was herself as she fell asleep. When she dreamed, Lucy dreamed about that last day with her mother. First they had gone to Saks, their favorite store, where her mother had bought Lucy a camel-hair coat. And then, at the last moment, her mother had pulled her over to a jewelry case and on impulse also bought Lucy a small gold watch with a black leather band.

  It was October, and Lucy should have been in school, but her mother had said to hell with it all; she said some days were too perfect for school and that's when they'd driven into the city. After they went shopping, they had lunch in the Rainbow Room high above Fifth Avenue. The world below looked blue and gold. Lucy kept checking her watch and announcing the time, which made them both laugh.

  “This is my forever day,” Lucy's mother said.

  They ordered shrimp and steak. Lucy had a Shirley Temple cocktail and her mother had a martini, straight up, with five olives. She gave the olives to Lucy, then asked for five more. In real life, they went to Central Park and saw the blue heron and he flew away and Lucy's mother sat on the rocks and wept. In real life, Lucy's mother had cancer, and her face looked ashy, and she was wearing a heavy coat even though the weather was fine and her dress was soaking wet. She'd had beautiful dark hair that she'd worn long, but she was wearing a wig. She was thirty-six years old. She had looked at Lucy and then she'd said, I'm sorry. In real life, Lucy had taken off her new watch and dropped it in the water. She knew she shouldn't do it, and that she'd regret it, but she didn't want time to go forward.

  Everything is either beneath us or above us, Lucy's mother said.

  People started to shout in Lucy's dream. Maybe because her mother was standing close to the edge of a bridge in her dream. Below, there was a stream and a waterfall and huge rocks. People were screaming when Lucy's mother stepped off the bridge. Lucy was in a panic; her heart almost stopped—her dream heart and her real-life heart—but then she saw that her mother was in the air. The heron had been waiting, and she didn't need the earth at all. Everything was either below her or above her, just as she'd said. Lucy had to put one hand over her eyes to look upward; everything was blue and the sun was so bright it hurt her eyes.

  Lucy woke up when the rabbit kicked her. She opened her eyes and heard the screaming in the hall. She looked at her watch. It was ten-fifteen. Everything was dark. The rabbit had hopped away and was shivering under the bed, startled by all the noise. Lucy went to the door. She opened it a crack. A tall man was in the hall. The door to Michael's room was open. The man went inside, still screaming. He'd been betrayed, that's what he said.

  Lucy opened her door wider and slipped into the hall. She felt fuzzy, as though she were a sleepwalker. She fe
lt drawn to the screaming; it was like a magnet. She could hear a woman screaming now. She knew the voice. She started to feel something like chills, the way she felt when she had a fever. Lucy looked inside the room. There was Bryn getting out of bed. Michael was there as well, pulling on his clothes. They looked far away, half-naked. The other man went to Michael and grabbed him and hit him in the face. Again and again. Michael didn't fight back. “Go on, if it makes you feel better,” he said. “I deserve it.” Blood came out of his nose. It was ridiculously red.

  “Stop it,” Lucy cried, but no one was listening to her. She was invisible. She was watching a dream.

  “How am I supposed to forgive you for this?” the tall man said to Bryn.

  “You're not! Don't forgive me, Teddy. I don't want you to. We should have never been together, so just let me go.”

  He didn't listen to what she was saying. The man called Teddy grabbed for Bryn; he was saying he was going to marry her for her own good. He looked like he was about to hit her, but Bryn managed to pull away and get past him. Then Michael hit him. He hit the tall man hard, but as he was doing so, Michael shook his head; he didn't like what he had to do, but it seemed he had no choice.

  As for Bryn, she was like a shadow; she ran right past Lucy. She smelled like heat and lilacs. Inside the room, Michael realized she was gone; he stopped paying attention to the other man and went after Bryn. He was shoeless. Lucy could practically hear his heart thumping. He was drenched in sweat and there was still blood coming out of his nose, but he took off down the hall.

  The other man, the one called Teddy, stayed where he was. He sat on the bed and looked down at the floor. There was blood on his face, too. He seemed stunned, but when he gazed up, he saw Lucy standing at the doorway. Lucy stared at him and then she ran. She ran as fast as she could. Her pulse was so loud she thought she'd gone deaf. She ran down the stairs and through the lobby and out into the street.

  She was still in a dream, wasn't she? It was possible for things to go backward in dream time, to change and reverse themselves. That's what she counted on. She was running so horribly fast she thought her lungs would burst open. Lucy thought about blue herons, rising into the sky. There was so much traffic on Brompton Road, it seemed endless. Lucy wished they had those Walk/Don't Walk signs that had just gone up in Times Square.

  She could see Bryn running through the crowd. In her slip, Bryn was so white in the dark night she looked as if she'd tumbled down from the moon. She looked to the left and then took off running, but she had not looked to the right. She crossed as she might have in New York, without thinking twice, and in an instant she was hit by a van. Even with all that traffic Lucy could hear the thud. Even worse, she could hear Michael Macklin. She would hear him forever. The sound of his cry, below her, above her, everywhere.

  Lucy was sitting on the sidewalk when her father found her. It was Dorey the night clerk who phoned the authorities; then, because she'd seen Lucy race out through the door, Dorey ran upstairs to get Ben Green. There had been a horrible accident and his daughter had been right there in the midst of everything, Dorey told him. The young woman hit by a van, the man who walked into traffic afterward. The blood was already fading into the black road and the black night, but Lucy had seen it all. Those frozen moments right before, when she could have run out and stopped him if only she'd been faster on her feet. Michael had looked at her from the other side of the road. He had focused for one moment as though he was glad they saw each other and recognized each other. Then he stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known he was going to do it the instant their eyes met. She'd known what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

  The Greens checked into another hotel that night. Their luggage and all their belongings would be sent around. Dorey offered to do the packing. Charlotte was going to stay with her sister, Hillary, and see to the details of bringing Bryn home, so it was just Lucy and her father. Their new hotel was smaller, a family-owned place called the Smithfield, very comfortable. Ben Green got a suite, and he let Lucy sneak the rabbit from the Lion Park into their room. Ben wasn't usually one who approved of taking what didn't belong to you, but Lucy simply refused to leave without Millie. She'd gotten hysterical and had crawled under the desk. She kept saying people at the Lion Park were going to chop off the rabbit's head and cook it. Her father had to make a blood oath that he would protect the rabbit no matter what. Ben nicked his hand with a razor and made an X on a piece of stationery before Lucy would come out from under the desk. She took a Lion Park ashtray to use as a feeding dish.

  The new hotel was on the other side of the park, not that far from the church where the wedding had taken place. Lucy remembered it, something Grove, as if there was woodland right in the middle of the city. To leave the Lion Park with the stolen rabbit, Ben wrapped it in his suit jacket, sneaking it out before anyone could see. The taxi driver looked in his rearview mirror when Lucy slipped off the jacket to make certain the rabbit was all right.

  “I didn't see that,” the taxi driver said. “If you've got any living creatures that shouldn't be riding around in a cab, don't tell me.”

  They didn't say a thing. They were all in shock, Lucy and her father and the rabbit. When they got to their new hotel suite, the couch in the parlor area was made up as a bed for Ben, and Lucy was given the bedroom. The hotel was quieter and the streetlights didn't glow through the windows, but Lucy didn't sleep. She picked up Anne Frank's diary, but she couldn't bring herself to read it. She didn't want to read it anymore. Lucy didn't sleep for three nights, and then she got sick.

  She had started to shiver and now she couldn't stop. She was burning up and yet she was cold. Her mouth hurt and she didn't want to drink any water. There was a doctor staying in the hotel, in London for a conference, and the management called upon him to see to Lucy when her father asked for a physician to be sent up right away. Millie was sitting on the bed chewing on a woolen blanket when the doctor came in. The girl's father had already told him that his twelve-year-old daughter was impressionable and sensitive and that she'd witnessed a horrible accident.

  “What do we have here?” the doctor said. “A rabbit in a hotel room? Now that's something I wouldn't have expected.”

  Lucy didn't say anything. She liked the room she was in. She didn't particularly want to leave it. She didn't want to talk. She wasn't going to tell anyone that she couldn't sleep at night because she heard Michael Macklin's voice.

  The doctor had been told that Lucy had stopped talking, and that the same thing had happened when her mother had died.

  “Ever hear of the Third Angel?” he asked.

  Usually that got a response, but Lucy didn't even glance at him.

  “People say there's the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death, but there's another one, too. The one who walks among us.”

  He could tell that she was listening.

  “He's nothing fierce or terrible or filled with light. He's like us, sometimes we can't even tell him apart. Sometimes we're the ones who try to save him. He's there to show us who we are. Human beings aren't gods. We make mistakes.”

  “That's not a very comforting thing for a doctor to say. You're supposed to cure people, not talk about making mistakes.” Lucy hadn't spoken for several days so her throat felt scratchy and dry.

  “I do the best I can,” the doctor said. “I think you do, too.”

  “You don't know anything about me,” Lucy informed him.

  “I've got a daughter who likes books.” The doctor had taken note of the copy of Anne Frank's diary on the night table. “She's a big reader, too.”

  Lucy glanced at the doctor. His voice sounded sad; he had probably seen a lot of sick people. She noticed that he was wearing two wristwatches. That seemed very odd indeed.

  “You're not a quack, are you?” Lucy asked. Her chest hurt her and she was coug
hing at night. She kept her face in the pillow so her father wouldn't hear her. She had worried enough people. She didn't intend to worry anyone anymore.

  “As in duck?” the doctor said, puzzled. “That sort of quack quack?”

  Lucy might have laughed, if she hadn't felt so dreadful. “As in lunatic,” she said.

  “Ah, the watches. One I use to take your pulse.” Which he then did. “The other is to make sure I'm always on time. It's a time-traveling watch.”

  “Really.” Lucy had never had a doctor quite like this one. She sat up straight.

  “Mind if I listen to your lungs?” he asked.

  Lucy shrugged. The doctor had an old black bag that opened when he pushed on a silver clasp. He took out a stethoscope and listened to Lucy's back, then her front. She could hear herself wheezing. When he was done she had one of her coughing fits. She covered her mouth up. She felt her ribs would shatter. The doctor waited politely until she had finished choking and had managed to catch her breath.

  “The rabbit doesn't cough, does he?”

  “She,” Lucy corrected. “No. She's totally silent. Never a peep.”

  The doctor asked Lucy to sit on the edge of the bed and when she did, he tapped on her elbows and knees. She felt like a puppet. When he asked her to cough again, she did so and then couldn't stop. This time the rabbit startled and jumped down, then skittered beneath the bed. “What do you mean a time-traveling watch?” Lucy asked when she got her breath back.