Angels Unaware

by Lisa Deangelis

  “It’s all right,” he said soothingly. “I just come for your mama and I’ll be on my way. You go back to sleep.”

  He pulled the coverlet up to her neck and then his eyes came up to meet mine. “Where’s your bedroom?” I didn’t answer. “You’re shaking.” He seemed surprised. “Are you afraid of me, Darcy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You never were before.”

  I flinched as he raised his hand to brush a strand of hair from my face. “I didn’t have Luca and my girl then.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “Takes all your courage away to have something to lose. Just the opposite with me.” He began pushing me out of Rennie’s room and down the hall. “I guess I’m ’bout as courageous as a man can be. This it?”

  I didn’t answer but some sick intuition must have told him so because he pushed me through the door, to stand square in front of me, feet apart, eyes squinting appraisingly. “You grew up to be a fine-looking woman,” he said, “which is amazing seeing as how plain you were.”

  Without forethought, I said, “It’s because I’m loved.” It was something Luca had told me long ago, that to him I would always be beautiful, even someday when all that others might see was a very old woman. I’d almost forgotten.

  “What?” He looked at me sharply.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t cry,” he ordered. “I won’t hurt you unless you make me.”

  Until that moment, I hadn’t even realized I was crying.

  He went and lit the lamp. It made shadows dance on the walls. He put his hands on my shoulders and smiled close to my face. “You’re like a Christmas package waiting to be unwrapped…”

  Christmas. I thought of last Christmas. Luca had given me a pearl drop necklace that had belonged to his mother. Then he’d gotten mad at me for telling Rennie there wasn’t any Santa Claus. Finally, we’d agreed that there really wasn’t any magic left in the world, though we could never agree just when the magic had gone out of it. Christmas.

  His hands were on me now, and I gasped as he ripped the front of my dress open. I heard the buttons rolling across the floor as he pushed me onto the bed and got on top of me.

  I lay perfectly still as he moved against me. Somehow, I must get through this. Just please God, don’t let Luca wake up. Not yet. Then suddenly there was another sound that drowned out Aaron’s groaning. It came muffled at first, strange, not human. Then closer, deep and throaty, not so unfamiliar now. Still, I couldn’t place it. Aaron shifted his weight off me so he could see where the sounds came from. My eyes followed his and what I saw amazed me. Sam hovered by the doorway. He was a hundred years old now, but it seemed he had not forgotten the chivalry of his youth. The fur on his back stood straight as porcupine needles, and his ears lay flat against his head. What teeth he had left were bared, and showed dirty yellow beneath his gums. With amazing speed for an animal his age, he crossed the room and the shout that escaped Aaron told me that he was being bitten.

  I did not need to think now, for in fact thought was useless. Instinct drove me down the hall. Instinct told me what I must do. The shotgun was still where we had left it since our last hunting trip, hidden in one of the guest room closets. The bullets weren’t there and vaguely I remembered I had hidden them separately. I was conscious of the sound of Aaron being mauled in the other room, of the dog’s growling frenzy, of Aaron cursing, and finally of a sharp whimper that preceded the silence.

  Where were the bullets? Clothes, hats, shoes rained down on me as I tore the closet apart. Damn Luca. He wouldn’t let me keep it loaded because of Rennie, and now…

  I remembered suddenly. The drawers to Jewel’s old dresser were so heavy that they were hard to open. Eight drawers. They were not in the first. Aaron coming down the hall now. He had a heavy step for a man his size. I could hear him opening and closing doors. The bullets were not in the second drawer. Maybe Luca had moved them to another room entirely. Please, God, please. The dubious benefits of prayer. But please, God, anyhow.

  “Darcy.” A singsong voice. “Wh-e-r-e a-r-e y-o-u?” A hide and seek voice, the voice of childhood.

  Son of a bitch. My hand closed over the heavy metal box. Here it was. With trembling fingers, I loaded the gun. The moon gave the only light in the room, but nothing in me hesitated. Loading this gun in the dark, shaking with a fear as old as I was, was something I had done a hundred times before in my mind, anticipating.

  When it was loaded, I got up and turned on the electric light so there would be no chance of missing him. All at once, he was illuminated in the doorway, the light momentarily blinding him. I backed up until I felt the support of the wall against my back.

  “I’ve got a gun, Aaron. I’m going to kill you.”

  He looked at me surprised. “Kill me?” he said, his voice filled with disbelief. “But we’re childhood sweethearts. Friends forever.”

  “No,” I said, surprised at my own calm. “We were never friends. I had no father, no brothers, and you thought you could do whatever you wanted to me.” The disbelief in his eyes was giving way to fear. He was afraid, and his fear stirred something deep within me that made my fingers tingle with pleasure. “But I don’t need a father or brothers.” Stroking the barrel of the gun, I watched him back away. “I have this.” Confused, his eyes cast about for a way to leave, and in a gesture of abject surrender, he raised his palms to me, exposing them, and turned to walk away.

  Time did strange things then. It stopped and it seemed like I had all the time in the world to make up my mind. If I was an animal and I wasn’t planning to eat him, I’d have let him go. Surrender would have been enough for an animal. It wasn’t enough for me. An animal cannot think about the future. He cannot fear it. If he is safe for the moment, it is enough. It wasn’t enough for me. I didn’t want Aaron Hamilton hurt. I didn’t want him imprisoned. I wanted him dead, so dead that he could never again touch my child’s hair, or make my husband feel less than a man. If he were to live, I would never stop being afraid. I would not show it, would deny it, but I would be afraid. And I could not stand myself afraid. No.

  I had so many reasons, real justifiable reasons to kill him, reasons that you would accept and say to yourself that I was within my rights to kill him. Jewel used to say that every dog was God and that was why ‘dog’ was ‘God’ spelled backwards. It was just one more of the idiotic theories she had developed growing up among hillbillies, first in Texas and then in Galen. Still.

  In the end, I didn’t kill him for any of the reasons that might make it right and square me with heaven. I didn’t do it for my husband or my child or because Aaron had raped me. I killed him because he killed my dog and the fact is you cannot kill a person’s dog and expect that person to let you live.

  I walked, unhurried and sure, out of Jewel’s room and down the hall and stood and braced myself against the rail of the second-floor landing.

  Aaron was going, had just reached the door and was passing through, when I took deliberate aim, bracing myself for recoil. I raised the barrel and fired. I shot him in the back, for no other reason than that was the side facing me in the moment. He fell forward onto his face and I knew that he wouldn’t get up again. And yet it wasn’t enough. So I cracked open the shot gun and slid the second bullet I held in my palm into the chamber and shot his dead body again. Only it still wasn’t enough. So I took the last bullet I held and loaded it and shot his dead body a third time. That was enough. It had to be. I had no more bullets. Then I laid the gun beside me and sat down on the step. Aaron was dead and the fear was gone, and with it all emotion.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw a ball of brown fur, and summoning what strength I had left, I got up and went to kneel beside Old Sam. Blood had matted on his head where Aaron had crushed his skull. My poor boy. He had not the human concern for himself to know better than to give his life for mine. Poor simple-minded creature had gone after Aaron with n
o other thought in his dog’s brain but to save his mistress who had never wanted him in the first place. And sitting with his bloody head in my lap, I did what I had not been able to do for Jewel. I cried. I had a right to mourn him. After all, it was me had taken care of him long after the novelty of a dog in the house had worn off for everybody else. I wondered if he’d known how I felt about him, even though I’d taken his presence for granted and hadn’t paid any more attention to him than I had a piece of the furniture.

  There was the creak of stairs being climbed and then a heavy hand on my shoulder. Luca was standing there.

  “He killed him,” I said dully.

  Luca looked at me uneasily, as if he didn’t know me.

  “Why’d he do it? The dog bit him, yes, but he was so old. Hardly had any teeth to speak of. So why’d he—?”

  “Stop it, Darcy.” Luca knelt beside me. “Let the dog down. You’ve got blood all over your dress.”

  “Blood,” I repeated, trying to attach the word to the substance. Then a memory and I said, “Do you remember the first day you came here? I had blood on me then, too, chicken’s blood. Or was it pig’s? We ate it for dinner. Do you remember?” It seemed very important to me that he remember.

  He was about to speak when Rennie’s door opened, and she came flying out of her room and into his arms. She must have heard the gunshots because she was crying and talking incoherently. Luca carried her back to bed and when he came back, I had not moved. So he lifted the dog off me and made me stand.

  “Aaron’s dead.” He stated the obvious.

  “I know. I shot him. Thrice.” Already it seemed like something that had happened a long time ago.

  “Did he…hurt you?”

  I knew what he was asking, and I clutched the front of my dress together and I said, “No.” And then to be more convincing, I added, “He didn’t have time.” I lied to him. Yes, and not just a lie of omission like with Jesse. I lied to him. But I lied for him, too. He could not have stood the truth. He would hate me for it. He would hate himself for hating me, but he was still such a boy that he would not be able to keep himself from hating me, from hating us. The truth would be unlivable. Then, like all liars, I changed the subject to something innocuous and moot: “But I had a terrible time finding the bullets. Promise me we’ll keep it loaded from now on. Promise me.”

  “Darcy,” he said gently. “Tell me how it happened. You shot him in the back.”

  “I had to. He’d have come back. He always came back.”

  “I’m going for the sheriff.”

  “No. We can hide him. We can bury him. It can be done. I know. They rot very quickly in the heat.”

  He looked at me incredulously. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” His voice was losing patience. “Don’t worry,” he said more gently. “He attacked us. We’ll find justice.”

  “There is no justice.” I looked at him hard. “There’s just us.”

  “Don’t talk like that. It would be murder.”

  “It’s already murder, Luca.”

  “It’s not. You killed him to protect yourself and Rennie…and me. Didn’t you?”

  I felt very tired now and everything he said seemed to come from a great distance and to take a long time to reach my ears, like something heard under water. Even the prospect of prison didn’t seem so bad so long as they let me sleep. I still had fond memories of reform school. Maybe prison would be like that. Maybe there’d be a prison library with encyclopedias. “All right,” I said at last. “We’ll tell the sheriff everything. I’ll tell him I shot Aaron and—”

  “No,” he said, and I looked up to stare at his determined face. “You will say nothing. I will do all the talking. They’ll never know it was you who shot him. No one will ever know that. Everyone will think I did it— Don’t interrupt me. For once, listen and do as I say. I couldn’t help you when it really mattered, but I can protect you now. That, at least, I can do.”

  “But I’m not asking you to,” I said. “I killed him, and I’ll pay for it. I won’t let you go to prison—or worse—for something I did.”

  “It isn’t something you did,” he said quietly. “It’s something I failed to do. And if you think I’d let my son be born in prison, you don’t know me at all.”

  “It might not be a son.”

  He tried to smile, but it died quickly on his face. “I won’t have my daughter born there either.”

  Then he went out into the night, never to be the same man again.

  Maybe if we’d had the money to get Luca a good lawyer, things would have happened differently. After he was arrested, I called up Caroline and asked if her husband could come down and help Luca. But old pocket-watch three-piece-suit told me he was a corporate lawyer and not a criminal lawyer, and when I asked him were there no criminals in corporations, he assured me there were not.

  So the court appointed a lawyer for Luca. He was a nice boy, fresh faced and new to his profession. I think he really wanted to help us, but he didn’t have much experience and Luca wasn’t very cooperative. Knowing himself a poor liar, Luca was afraid to reveal too much and implicate me by accident. The lawyer was afraid to have a trial by a jury of Luca’s peers. Luca had no peers really because he was a foreigner, and foreigners made unsympathetic defendants in a part of the country where most of the people looked on anyone who wasn’t born and raised there as already suspect. So we gave up the right to jury trial, and everything was left up to the judge.

  Until the very end, we kept hoping that Luca would be given a suspended sentence, and maybe he would have been, if not for the one question the judge kept coming back to time and time again: Why, if Luca had acted only to protect his family, had Aaron Hamilton been shot in the back trying to leave the house, and not once, but three times?

  I could have told the judge some things. That Aaron had tried to rape me once before. That he had watched and waited and stalked me ever since. But why, Luca would want to know, hadn’t I told him any of this? In the moment I had told the big lie, I only saw that one lie. But it’s never just one lie and soon after, the whole spider web of lies I would have to tell presented itself. And even if I’d been willing to tell the truth belatedly, how could I explain why I’d done it? How could I explain that I had never wanted Luca to know those kinds of things really happened in the world, that I had wanted to keep him as one precious and apart from all the ugliness in Galen that only the initiated could see?

  In the end, Luca was sentenced to ten years in prison, eligible for parole in five. But I knew as I listened to the judge read his sentence that a part of him, the part I had always loved best, would be imprisoned forever and would never come back to me even when the rest of him did.

  They led us to a small outer room so that we could say goodbye before he was taken away. A guard stood by the door, trying very hard not to watch us but curious in spite of himself.

  “I’m glad my father isn’t alive to see me now,” Luca said, the trouble darkening his blue eyes to navy. He looked so old to me, older even than that day he’d returned after the mine accident. “My father had such great plans for me in America. What great things I would accomplish here!” He laughed bitterly and motioned to the guard by the door. “And this is what I’ve become.”

  I saw the pain in him and wished I could have taken it from him. I knew what to do with it. You held it at arm’s length and never let it touch you. But Luca didn’t know that, and he had taken it right into the core of himself where he would brood on it each day in prison, until there would be nothing left but the pain. “You haven’t become anything,” I said. “You’re still the man you always were. And five years isn’t such a long time.”

  “It might as well be forever,” he said, and I knew there was no comforting him. He was still too young in his heart to take the long view about anything. “Something has changed, Darcy, something we’ll never be able to cha
nge back.”

  “Don’t say that. Please. It’s like a knife in my heart to hear you talk like that. We’ll get through this. You’ll see. I’ll come to visit you as often as I can.”

  He took my hands and held them against his chest. “One thing,” he said fervently. “Promise me you’ll never bring Rennie, that you’ll never tell her where I am.”

  “But you can’t mean you don’t want to see her for five years.”

  With his head in his hands, his words came out strangled. “Can’t you understand? She’s my child. Not an hour will go by that I won’t think of her.” He raised his head pridefully. “But she must never see me in prison, never like that. Promise me.”

  “All right.”

  “Thank you.” He stiffened and straightened his spine. “Now please go.”

  We came together awkwardly, both of us feeling the eyes of the guard. Five years would pass before I could hold him again, lie beneath him, feel his body warm from sleep against my own. I wanted to hold him so close that the warmth of him would last that long. Instead, he kissed me lightly on the mouth and pushed me gently and firmly away. I turned around so as not to watch the guard lead him out of the room.

  As I left the courthouse, my head bent over and unmindful of where I was going, I ran into a man on the steps. Opening my mouth to excuse myself, the familiarity of the face stopped me. It was a long ago face that the years had changed. Yet something had not changed. The eyes. Wild eyes, with the metallic glint of birds. Eyes like Aaron’s. But Aaron was dead. It was Seth Hamilton, Aaron’s brother. I froze. It was like finding out Satan had a sibling. He didn’t say a word, just stared in a way that went through me, and in his gaze, I saw that he wasn’t fooled. Seth knew me. Like Aaron, he had known me all my life. He would know who had really shot his brother. Not once like Luca would have done. But three times. He would know and he would not forget.

  The first thing I did when I returned to the inn was to move Rennie’s bed into the room Luca and I had shared. After that was done, I screwed two deadlock bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom, into my bedroom door. I could not stop him from coming, but Seth Hamilton would not catch me unawares. I would be as prepared for him as I had been unprepared for his brother. This time, it would be different.