The Third Angel

by Alice Hoffman

  Teddy went back downstairs to the bar and drank even more. Every night afterward he went upstairs at the very same time, and every time he found himself there, the man he used to be, the person he no longer knew, someone who'd believed in things.

  “She's not here, man,” the bartender said one night when Teddy could barely stand by the end of the evening, when he dragged himself off his stool in order to go upstairs at the appointed hour. “It's not her ghost up there, so you might as well stop looking.”

  “Have you ever felt that you lost something and you can't get it back? As though it's been stolen right out from under you?”

  “Sure,” the barman said. “It's called life.”

  There was only one person who could ever understand. The girl, Lucy Green, who had seen everything. That night Teddy had spied her in the doorway after Bryn and the other man had run out. He had seen the expression on her face. It was as if an angel had been trapped in a cage of blood and bones, torn apart from the inside out. She looked stunned; she shouldn't have been there. They stared at each other and in that instant Teddy felt something he had never in his life felt before: a total connection of thought and emotion. They were there in the same exact moment, having the same exact thought.

  Then the girl turned and ran. That was the difference. Teddy stayed in the room that smelled like lilacs while Lucy fled. She had seen everything, all that ugliness. As for Teddy, he hadn't wanted to see anymore. He sat down on the bed where Bryn had been with that man, and he didn't even cry.

  As a penance, Teddy joined a group that did clean-up work in parks throughout the city. He enjoyed working outside and was amazed by how much wildlife there was in London. He saw foxes in the middle of the city one morning, startled by his presence as he used a long net to collect trash from a fens. He was struck by the way the foxes ran off together, looking behind them to make sure he wasn't following them. Teddy sat down on the grass. He was wearing high rubber boots, a mac, and old paint-splattered trousers that he used for such chores. Sometimes Teddy thought about Lucy Green and what she had seen and he just couldn't bear it. The oddest thing would put him in mind of the look on her face, just as the foxes had.

  The following Sunday, he went back to his church; he had missed it. He talked to his minister about the existence of a soul; he tried his best to understand. The goodness within a human being was what he'd thought it must be, the innocent spirit, but his minister had said no, it was the essence of a person. Pure and simple. The deepest, most complete part, the part that was called to God.

  And without that a person goes to hell? Teddy had asked.

  Without that you live in hell, the minister said.

  TEDDY REALIZED THAT his life had been altered by a letter. The only letters he'd ever written were thank-yous to his aunts and cousins on the occasion of his birthdays when he'd been sent presents; the only ones he'd received were from relatives he'd never met in Australia, sympathy notes after his parents had died. But one letter written by Bryn had changed his life, and then in October came another. It arrived at the Lion Park with his name on it. It was actually several days before he received it. The hotel clerk was marrying the cook and everyone was in a tizzy. The wedding was to be held in the Lion Park restaurant and everyone who worked there was invited. One night when Teddy arrived the barman said, “Sorry Teddy, but we're closed for the evening. Private party.” He handed Teddy the letter. “Dorey's been so caught up in her arrangements, she forgot to give you this. Lord knows why it was sent here.”

  The wedding party was going on inside the restaurant. White and violet satin ribbons had been hung around the bar; there were bottles of champagne set out and silver platters of sandwiches and fruit. The ceremony was over and the festivities were in full swing. The clerk was dancing in her white dress. There was the cook, her groom, toasting all his friends and telling them they had better drink up since the expense of the bar bill was being paid for by the hotel management.

  By that time Teddy had a fear of letters. He sat in the lobby for a while, but the sound of the music and the partygoers was turning raucous, so he went down the street. He intended to go to the hotel where he'd stayed right after the accident, and sit in the lobby there, a dim lonely place, but instead he went home. He walked through the dark. He chose to go through the park to avoid seeing anyone. He was alone, after all; he might as well feel that he was. The park smelled like leaves. This used to be his favorite time of year. When the leaves looked yellow and the weather was still fine. Now he didn't care. He was half a person, really, and the half that he was didn't give a damn about things like leaves and weather. He went to the flat his brother had rented for him and got a bottle of whisky.

  The letter had been written on hotel stationery from a small inn in Scotland. Teddy didn't recognize the handwriting. He opened the envelope with a knife and took the letter out and let it sit on his table for a while. It was probably another great trick of life. He was most likely being informed he had a disease, or he owed the tax man money. He had another drink before he started to read. It began: Dear Mr. Healy, I am the girl from the hotel. My name is Lucy Green and I'm writing to you because I think you are the only person in the world who understands me.

  At first he thought it was a practical joke, but then he recalled the moment before she ran out of the room and he thought it might be real.

  I was wondering if you could tell me if you've discovered if there's any reason to go on living. I have thought about this a great deal. Unlike Anne Frank, I do not still have faith in people. I think you may not either, but I'm not sure. I am traveling with my father. We are going to Loch Ness to look for the Loch Ness Monster, but really we are just driving until we figure out when we should go home and what we should do with the rest of our lives. We will be back in Edinburgh on the twenty-second of the month at the Hotel Andrews owned by Mrs. Amanda Jones. You can write to me there if you have an answer. If not, I am very sorry to have bothered you. Everything was my fault. She gave me the letter to give to her husband. You didn't do anything wrong, it was me.

  Teddy couldn't sleep that night thinking about that letter. It would do no good for him to answer her; she was right, he had no faith in people. But he didn't want her to feel that way. If he stumbled upon some part of her that had been lost in the hallway of the Lion Park Hotel he would not be able to live with himself. She was a twelve-year-old girl, and she'd had nothing to do with it, really. There was no reason for her to be haunted. So Teddy did something out of character. He made a phone call up to the hotel where the girl would be staying again in Edinburgh. The Andrews. He spoke with the landlady, who was made to understand what Lucy had been through. He spoke only of the illness of course, not all the rest. Not the deaths and the road and the blood and looking into his eyes to see that he had lost himself completely. That was knowledge only for those who would truly understand. Someone such as himself.

  LUCY AND HER father stayed at a bed-and-breakfast near Loch Ness for more than a week. They walked along the paths near the loch, through brambles. The ferns were turning brown and the air was cold. It was beautiful, wild country. Ben bought them woolen scarves and gloves in a little yarn store where the sheep were kept right beside the shop. He bought Lucy another skein of wool, tinted indigo, for she had become a fanatical knitter during her time in Scotland and had already used up everything Mrs. Jones had given her. They hiked for miles around the loch and they never once saw a monster. They went motoring on a boat with an old man who swore he would take them to the place where the monster had been sighted, but there were only some logs rolling around in the water. The water was deep and murky and Lucy felt drawn to it. She thought of Michael Macklin, the way he seemed to jump off a bridge into water when he walked into the traffic. Lucy leaned over the boat and trailed her fingers in the icy loch and dared the monster to come bite off her thumb.

  One morning Lucy's father came down to breakfast and he said, “Well, now we really don't have to hurry back. They gave me t
he ax.” He didn't seem particularly upset about being fired; in fact, he was cheerful and famished. He ordered both oatmeal and sausage with eggs. “I'll walk it off,” he said.

  Lucy looked at him. She immediately thought it was her fault that he had no job, and that she'd have to beg down by Penn Station in New York; they'd have to live in the subway in a cardboard box.

  “Lucy,” her father said when she started to cry right there at the table. “There is such a thing as fate.”

  But Lucy didn't believe in anything, least of all fate. She thought they would probably wander forever. When they left Loch Ness, they drove back to Edinburgh; it was a long trip. They stopped at a bed-and-breakfast along the way for the night. From the parlor where there was a fire going, Lucy heard her father say to the innkeeper, “My daughter has been ill,” and she realized that she had been. She sat down on a chair and warmed her hands. She had been too ill to go back to her life in Westchester.

  She still dreamed about rabbits, but not all the time. Sometimes her sleep was filled with purple hills, blank spaces. When they were settling back into the Andrews Hotel, Mrs. Jones's nephew, Sam, mentioned that Mrs. Jones's children had died in a flu epidemic during the war. Lucy went to her parlor with one of the heather-colored scarves she'd made.

  “You did a lovely job,” Mrs. Jones said.

  “I made one for you and one for me,” Lucy said.

  Mrs. Jones was an expert knitter, but she was kind enough not to mention any of the dropped stitches. She put the scarf around her neck. “Perfectly beautiful.”

  Lucy felt sick when she thought about leaving Edinburgh. She felt that if she took too many steps she would fall off the earth. Westchester didn't even seem real to her anymore; maybe everything had disappeared in her absence. Maybe nothing had survived.

  And then on the day before the Greens were to take the train to London, Mrs. Jones said there was one more thing they had to see in Scotland. She asked her nephew to drive them out to a farm. Sam was more than happy to do so. It was beautiful country they drove through, the prettiest Lucy had seen. She was wearing one of the scarves she'd knitted herself, with a seed stitch and a lacy border. Mrs. Jones was wearing the other.

  “Don't take a wrong turn,” Mrs. Jones told her nephew. “You get us lost every time.”

  Mrs. Jones had brought along a blanket and a picnic lunch with a thermos of very strong tea for Lucy if she started wheezing. They soon arrived at a huge farm that belonged to friends of the Joneses, where there was a sheepdog trial. There was a line of trucks and cars and vans and a field that had been cut up into pastures and pens. There were dozens of baaing sheep.

  “This is different,” Ben Green said. “Where we come from dogs just sit in the yard and bark or they lie on the couch and beg for biscuits.”

  “Not here,” Sam Jones said. “Dogs earn their keep here.”

  They went to watch with the crowd as the dogs and their owners worked together herding. The farmer would whistle or shout and the dog would respond as if the two were communing in a language all their own. Just the man and his dog and no one else in the world.

  “You notice every whistle is different?” Sam Jones said to Lucy. “The dogs understand the meaning of every one. Go left, go right, fast or slow. Some dogs are said to know a hundred whistles. They're smarter than we are.”

  They had a wonderful time watching the sheep being herded. One of the farmers came over to say hello. He was a cousin of Mrs. Jones's named Hiram.

  “He's got the best dogs,” Sam said. “He's sure to win.”

  “Come around to my van afterward,” Hiram said to the Greens. “I'll show you something I bet you'd like to see.”

  Hiram's dogs were smart. They raced around the sheep and got them into the pen in amazing time, but in the end another herder won top honors that day. Lucy and her father cheered for every dog; they all worked so hard and with such passion it was hard to pick a favorite. The afternoon had turned cold and the sun was about to go down; Lucy couldn't remember when she'd been so happy and tired. She felt she could stay in this place forever, but everyone was packing up and gathering their dogs into their cars. Sam led them to the sheep pens, where Hiram was having a drink with some of the other men. They all seemed to know each other.

  “Oh, here she is,” one of the shepherds called out. “The girl from New York.”

  Lucy blushed as she and her father were introduced. They all seemed to know about her, they even knew that she was a knitter. The sky was purple around the edges. It looked like spilled ink spreading out on a page when darkness fell here. The end of the day seemed so natural and beautiful.

  “Come on,” Hiram said. “Follow me.”

  He had a van and his three sheepdogs were sitting in the front seat, jumping up when they saw him. They went around the back and Hiram opened the door and there was a young collie bitch curled up on a blanket.

  “Oh!” Lucy said. “Can I pet her?”

  Hiram nodded and Lucy scrambled over to sit on the bumper. “She's a bit shy and she may have to warm to you.”

  This collie was smaller than the others. She sniffed Lucy's hand.

  “Hello,” Lucy said.

  “She was the runt of Rosie's litter last year. She's deaf in one ear, so she'll never be a herder. That's why she's going home with you.”

  Lucy felt something inside. It was like a shovel smacking against her chest.

  “Well, that would be great, but we live across the ocean,” Ben Green said. “So I don't see how that's possible.”

  “You'll take her with you,” Hiram said. “That's no problem. She's well-behaved. She'll be the toast of the ship. She's been bought and paid for, so you can't say no.”

  Mrs. Jones sat down on the bumper of the truck with Lucy. “You can tell she's smart by the shape of her head.”

  Lucy looked at her father. She put her hand on the little border collie, who was shivering; she had never wanted anything more in her life. She didn't even have to beg; Ben Green went aside with Hiram and when he came back he had the dog's leash in hand. Maybe this was a sign of their lives changing from what they had been to what they would become. You never could tell. They drove back to Edinburgh with the little collie in the backseat settled between Lucy and Mrs. Jones. The collie had curled up on a blanket that smelled like sheep and had quickly fallen asleep. Its front paws twitched and Lucy wondered if it dreamed of rabbits.

  “What will her name be?” Mrs. Jones asked.

  Lucy thought about the photos of Mrs. Jones's children on the mantel in oak fames. The boy and the girl. She didn't know why they had to die young, she just knew they were gone and that Mrs. Jones was here beside her.

  The sky was all ink now; the whole bottle spilled out.

  “Sky,” Lucy said. “Skyler.”

  Mrs. Jones leaned in close. She smelled of wool and peppermint. “There's a man somewhere who wanted you to believe in something,” she said. “He's the one who bought the dog.”

  No one else could hear above the motor of Sam's car, an old Vauxhall that rumbled and strained on the steep pitch of the little roads, but Lucy had heard perfectly well. That man Teddy Healy was answering her letter; he was letting her know he still believed in something. Lucy and Mrs. Jones smiled at each other. This was their secret. The collie made puffing sounds in its sleep. There were stone walls on either side of the road and hedges that looked black in the falling night. Lucy gazed out the window. She wanted to remember this when she went home.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to my extraordinary editor,

  John Glusman.

  Many thanks to Shaye Areheart for

  championing this book and to Jenny Frost for her support.

  Thank you always to Elaine Markson.

  Thanks also to Gary Johnson and to Julia

  Kenny. And many thanks to Camille McDuffie.

  Thank you to Alison Samuel and everyone at

  Chatto & Windus and Vintage UK.

  To my
dear friend, Maggie Stern Terris,

  always on my side.

  To Tom Martin, for everything.

  The Story Within the Story

  by Alice Hoffman

  Is love complicated or is it simple?

  In The Third Angel, set in three sections in the ’90s, the ’60s, and the ’50s, all in the same London hotel, it can be both at the same time.

  I didn’t realize until after I was through writing that the novel could be read backward or forward and that a reader’s understanding and knowledge of the story and the characters would be hugely different depending on what he or she knew or didn’t know about the past.

  In the first section of the novel, a writer named Allie Heller writes a book for children that can be read forward or backward. Every family has a family mythology—Allie’s story is one that her mother told her and her sister when they were children. In it a heron has two wives—one on earth, the other in the sky. He doesn’t mean to betray either, but in the end, he will.

  How does he choose between them? Who does he love? It all depends on how you read the story.

  The Heron's Wife

  Out of Nowhere

  She was standing in the marsh and everything was blue. Water, clouds, reeds. He was a heron in the sky, then he fell to earth and was human. They believed love could be simpler than it seemed.

  Out of the Darkest Night

  When he was in her house, everything outside was hazy. Snow, fences, trees. His broken wing had become a broken arm. His life in the sky had become tea, biscuits, a bed with blue sheets. There was a past, but it was far away. They believed love could be too strong to fight.

  Out of the Blue