Angels Unaware

by Lisa Deangelis

  My days carrying the baby were like that dress, deep, soft velvet days, when I felt peaceful and peaceable. Time passed serenely, and I learned not to be frustrated at the growing clumsiness of my body, but instead to let myself slow down to that dreamlike pace.

  We were lazy in those days, Luca and I. Me, because of the baby. And him, because of me. I’d lie in the hammock and he would sit by my feet and fan me when it got very hot in late August. And he’d watch me. So intently. Like the changes in my body were a show staged just for him. He thought the whole business was very mystical, and he seemed determined to let no aspect of the process pass him by. Having grown large and silent with contentment, I felt like the Sphinx, and that was how Luca seemed to see me too. Full of awe, he’d look at me like I was a natural wonder and say things like, “You have life in you. You are holding the secret to life right inside you.”

  In my last months, his reverence got on my nerves so that one day I snapped, “I’m not the Virgin Mary and it’s no different than cats and dogs! Now leave me alone.”

  But it was different than cats and dogs, and I didn’t ever want him to leave me alone.

  Luca was so anxious to meet his child that when he heard the first cry, he rushed in and scooped the baby up in his arms before the midwife had even had a chance to clean her up. She was beautiful to him even all bloody like that.

  I’d figured all along it would be a girl and I thought for sure that Luca would be very disappointed. But he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He was so glad of his daughter that I thought he would burst. The way he doted on her, he did everything but nurse her, and I think he secretly cursed nature that he couldn’t do that. He loved to watch me nurse and I loved to have him watch me.

  When I asked Luca what he wanted to name her, he said he would let me decide, and with unusual largesse, I said I wanted to name her Renata, after his mother, which was quite a sacrifice, since I thought it was an ugly name and not even American. He was so touched at that, he almost cried, and I was glad I offered. Secretly, I made up my mind that she’d be Renata on paper only. I’d call her Rennie, and no one need ever know the origin of the nickname.

  There’s nothing quite so vain or quite so much fun as searching your child for parts of yourself. At six months old, we could see that Rennie was her father’s daughter. It was all there, the dimples, the long dark lashes over warm blue eyes, the thick, dark hair. I was glad of it too, and not just because Luca was prettier than me. Really, it was because he had been orphaned young and besides me and Rennie, he didn’t have anybody. So it was good that he could find proof of himself, that he indeed did exist, in his child. But though she was her father all over again in appearance, she took little else from either of us. It was Jewel who had made her mark on the granddaughter she would never know. The resemblance was not in the face or in the eyes, but rather in what lay behind the eyes. That same sweet wistful way in which she looked out at the world but was never changed by it. She was just a baby yet, but I got the feeling that nothing that came to her in life, no matter how sordid, would ever mar that deep, abiding innocence. And there was something else harder to describe, a sort of fey quality that made me think she knew fairies and possibly they talked to her.

  Before the baby, I’d been afraid that things would change between me and Luca, that maybe he would be like some men and not want me until it was time for the next baby. That would have been like death to me. But I was wrong. Our nights were different only in that somehow, they were more intimate. There was a kind of communion now that had not been there before, for all our closeness. Now there was truly a cord that bound us, a tangible one that would continue to exist long after we were gone. And I loved him so, though I never said it, loved him with a conviction that I would never have thought possible. Luca never told me he loved me either, but I never felt the lack. How could I, when his every touch, his every glance told me so in a way more telling than words. He loved me and more than that, I felt loved, and in my ignorance, I hoped that that would protect us. But I know now that there was something dark moving toward us even then, something older than Luca’s love, and something that was far more familiar to me. How did I know this? Because the light always attracts the dark. That’s the way of it.

  There was no herald. I simply walked into McAllister’s Dry Goods Store one morning and there was Aaron stocking shelves. He grinned at me and said, “Hey, Darcy. Long time, no see.”

  My eyes did not widen in surprise. My face was too disciplined for that, trained from years of forced impassivity. I just walked past him stiffly to the cash register.

  Later, I would marvel that Luca had not been with us that day. He almost always was. Sometimes we went to McAllister’s because we needed something. More often, just for the walk. But always together, except for today. Luca’s bad leg was aching, and he hadn’t felt like walking.

  “Did you come to buy something, Darcy, or just to stare at my hardware?” It was Mr. McAllister. He’d always been gruff with me but never mean.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was just kind of surprised to see Aaron here. He’s been away so long.”

  He looked over my shoulder to make sure nobody was about. We could hear Aaron across the store stacking lumber. “He’s back all right. Got himself dishonorably discharged from the service. Some trouble over a girl. Broke her arm or something.”

  “Why’d you hire him?”

  The old man looked at me like I was the stupidest person on earth. “Isn’t that plain as a turd in a punch bowl? He came in wanting a job and I don’t want to lose my store. Know what I mean?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Come on now, girl. You’ve lived here all your life. You can’t be thinking it’s coincidence that every time somebody has words with Aaron, his house catches fire.”

  “You mean—”

  “It ain’t lightning. Quiet—”

  Aaron walked up to the counter brushing sawdust off his clothes. “And who’s this pretty little thing,” he asked, bending down to Rennie.

  Rennie gave him a big smile and reached her arms up to be lifted. Nearly three years old now, she was a friendly child without discrimination who liked to be held by everybody from Mr. McAllister to the postman.

  Aaron extended his arms too, but before he could touch her, I jerked her little arm and snapped her back to my side. She started to cry. I’d never been rough like that with her before.

  “Don’t cry,” Aaron said, taking her by the shoulders and turning her around to face him. “Come on and smile for your uncle Aaron.”

  I felt a wretching sensation and thought I might vomit, but I kept still. I was afraid of him now. Now, I had so much, so very much to lose. “We’ve got to go,” I finally managed to say, and walked past him and out of the store.

  “So long there, Darcy,” he called after me. “Be seeing you around…I promise.”

  Luca knew as soon as I came home that something was wrong. I told him about Aaron being back from the service. He knew I hated Aaron, but he never knew why. Luca thought I hated him because of the old feud between the reverend and Jewel. I would never tell him the truth. Luca was cursed with the heroic temperament, something I saw as a character flaw that experience had taught me often led to disaster. For his part, he had never forgotten the fight he’d had with Aaron at the Harvest Moon Dance a hundred years before in school.

  “I’m never going to McAllister’s again,” I said, thinking to appease him. But it just made it worse.

  “You certainly will go there!” He turned on me. “And so will I. We’ve been going there for years and I’ll be damned if I’m going to change my life to avoid Aaron Hamilton.”

  Luca was as good as his word. The very next day, he insisted we all go to the store as we always had. I hoped fervently that Aaron wouldn’t start talking to Rennie again, or God forbid, touch her. I knew Luca would kill him then, or try to, and in the tryin
g, be killed or hurt himself.

  I caught sight of Aaron as soon as we entered. He was marking tools and when he saw us, he came up brazenly, but something in Luca’s manner must have given him pause because he stopped abruptly before he got too close. It was strange with Luca. He was more threatening when quiet than others are in a temper. Aaron closed his mouth, and when he opened it again, it was to say only a casual, “Hello, folks. Can I help you?” But even that was more than Luca was willing to take.

  He grabbed Aaron by the throat and backed him into a pile of lumber. “I don’t want you around my wife,” he said. “And I don’t want you around my child. Do you understand that?”

  Aaron didn’t seem to have the good sense to be afraid, despite having his wind cut off like that. “I didn’t know she was your wife,” he said, but not in apology. Instead, he seemed only amused that we had married.

  “Well, now you do. So stay away from me. Stay away from my family and my house. If I catch you anywhere near the inn, I’ll kill you,” Luca told him, without further elaboration. With that, he let go of Aaron and hurried both of us out of the store.

  He wouldn’t speak to me all the way home, and when we got back to the inn and I tried to take his hand, he flung me off. “Rennie’s taking a nap,” I said. “We could go upstairs and—”

  “Not now,” he said, crossing the room in long angry strides, his hands thrust into his pockets. “How can you think of that when we’ve been insulted this way?”

  “Aaron didn’t insult us, Luca. He hardly spoke to us.”

  “It was his manner. He didn’t have to speak. He was taking your clothes off with his eyes.”

  Another girl, a younger girl, a girl who didn’t know things, would have been flattered by her husband’s jealousy. I was just afraid. “Can’t we just forget this day?” I pleaded with him.

  “Forget it?” He turned to me with renewed fury. “You think I’m afraid of him, don’t you? You think I’m afraid of Aaron Hamilton.”

  In that moment, I saw how very young Luca was and how very little he knew about what mattered and what didn’t. “I don’t think any such thing. But—”

  “But what?”

  “But I think you should be afraid. I love my life. I never thought I’d live to say that. But I love my life with you and our child. I won’t risk that for anything, certainly not to prove that you’re not afraid of him. And that’s why we have to stop parading through McAllister’s just to show we can.”

  He looked at me with contempt, but I wouldn’t stop talking. “Don’t you see? Aaron isn’t right in the head. He never has been. Maybe the reverend made him that way. Maybe he was born that way. I don’t know. I don’t care. For whatever reason, the Hamilton boys were always crazy. Everybody knows that. They never cared about their own lives or anybody else’s. Aaron’ll kill you as soon as say good morning. That’s why you just got to stay out of his way until he gets tired of this and hops a train to go torment somebody somewhere else. It’s the only way.”

  “It’s not my way.” His jaw hardened and through his teeth, he said, “I’m not a coward, Darcy, and now I see that you are.”

  I went and put my arms around him and my forehead against his shoulder. “Only about you. I couldn’t keep on without you. I’d sooner die.”

  “Stop it!” He shook me off.

  “Please, I’m not asking you to hide from him. Just don’t seek him out. If you care for me, you’ll do that much. I know Aaron. You can only imagine him.”

  It wasn’t in Luca to refuse me much, and I felt him soften. He kissed my forehead and lifted my chin. “All right, Darcy. We won’t go there anymore. But know this. If ever I see him near the inn, I’ll kill him, even if it means spending the rest of my life in prison. There are some things worse than dying. Do you understand?”

  I nodded and kissed both his dimples, but I knew then, as I had always known, that it would be no challenge of Luca’s that would draw Aaron to the inn. It would be me.

  7.

  The Rest Is Lies

  It was coming, coming, had been coming all along. Just like Jesse, for surely it hadn’t started the day he had set foot on the porch steps. Surely it had begun long before that. When? Maybe the day he’d stolen a motorcycle, thinking to hide. Or the day he’d jumped ship. Or the day he left wherever it was he’d come from. Or the day he was born.

  It had been coming all along. I know that now. Each clock at the inn, and there were many because Jewel loved clocks, ticking off the seconds one by one until the day arrived. Everything waiting, waiting for the proper month in the proper year on the proper day at the proper hour. It had been coming all along. I knew it. And yet I was still surprised.

  Remembered well, too well, for later I would relive it again and again in waking dreams. Everything. The weather, hot and heavy and unnervingly still, threatening thunder. What I wore. What Luca wore. Everything I did that evening.

  We’d had a scrawny chicken for dinner, and after the dishes were put away, I had gone up to put Rennie to bed. I waited while she said her prayers. I’d always thought the benefit of prayer dubious, but Luca, who was comforted by ritual, insisted she recite a prayer each night the nuns had taught him: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here…” Whenever Luca and I were getting along too well, we could always get into a rousing argument over religion. Our Gods were very different deities, and always his was kinder than mine.

  After prayers, I kissed her goodnight and went downstairs to Luca. He was waiting for me on the front porch, smoking a pipe. I think he thought it made him look older and more sophisticated. I liked the smell of pipe tobacco, and every now and then, he’d pass it to me so as I could take a puff.

  “I wish we could put a lock on Rennie’s door,” I said. It was an old request, but every once in a while, I’d bring it up again.

  “I thought we’d been through that before,” he said wearily.

  “We have. But what if a stranger should get into the house? He could just walk right into her room and take her while we slept.”

  “Darcy, you can’t live your whole life expecting thieves and kidnappers. We have nothing anyone wants. Caroline took away everything that was worth anything and kidnappings only happen to rich children. Besides, if we locked her in, how could she get out to tell us if she was sick or had a nightmare or something?”

  “Then why can’t she sleep in our room?” I persisted.

  I watched him refill his pipe. “We’ve been over that too. The child likes her privacy. She doesn’t want to sleep with us. She’d rather—”

  And then it happened, like a clap of thunder or the strike of a copperhead. A hand coming out of the bushes, a hand with a piece of pipe or a crowbar. Too dark to see. A lunge forward. Luca too startled to fend off his attacker, slumping forward, his pipe clattering to the porch floor. Aaron uncoiling himself. Me, starting to rise, pressed back into the chair. Then suddenly everything still again, set in our new positions, like musical chairs.

  Aaron stood before me, his hands on his hips, smiling. “Nice night,” he said. “Lots of lightning bugs.”

  I had to think. Think. But I was too confused. My brain scrambled to grasp what had happened, what was happening—but not what was going to happen. That was too awful to consider, and I resisted the foreknowledge even as I sensed what he’d come for.

  “I’ve missed you, Darcy,” he said, resting his weight on one leg, with the other against the seat of my chair. With his foot, he rocked it. “You don’t come around the store no more. I’ve thought a lot about you these past years. Remember when we were kids?” He stopped to pick up Luca’s pipe, and finding it still smoldered, he relit it. “Remember how we used to play together. They were the best times. I knew you were mine, that you’d always belong to me. We’re alike you and I.” He smiled. “Hell, no one else ever wanted you. You were my secret and I knew no ma
tter how long I was gone, I could count on you waiting for me.” The smile left his face. “You oughtn’t to have married him. He’s a stranger here, and not like us. We’re different. We’re tough and we know it. We make people bend to us, even if we have to bully them to do it. You ought not have married,” he repeated. “Why’d you do it?”

  The power to speak had not returned yet, and I could only stare at him in silent terror.

  “Why?” His face twisted in rage and he reached out to prod me with the length of metal.

  “I—I love him.”

  Sudden laughter. “Well, I think you’re a widow now.” He motioned in Luca’s direction and before he could stop me, I went to the still form. Quickly, Aaron wrenched me to my feet but not before I felt the subtle rise of Luca’s chest. He was still breathing.

  “Get upstairs.” Aaron poked me with the pipe.

  “What do you want with me?” I asked, but of course I knew.

  The grin spread across his face. “What I’ve wanted since we were ten years old,” he said. “Now get up those steps or I’ll go alone…to see that little girl of yours.”

  The mention of Rennie propelled me forward. “Leave her. She’s a baby.”

  Again, soft laughter behind me. “Not such a baby. You weren’t all that much older when you started running this place.”

  We had reached her door now. “Please,” I said in a last effort.

  “Open it.”

  I could hear her breathing as he pushed me towards the bed. Looking down at her sleeping, my own breath caught. Aaron looked down at her, too, and there was a tenderness in his expression that was at odds with all I knew him to be. “Beautiful child,” he said. “Looks just like the Eye-talian. If I’d had a face like that, there’s no telling what I could have been in this life.”

  He bent and touched her dark hair. She stirred and called, “Mama,” rubbing her eyes sleepily.