Angels Unaware

by Lisa Deangelis

  In the next months, Rennie would ask me more times than I could count why her father had gone away, where he was, and when was he coming back, until I thought I would lose my mind. And even when she wasn’t asking about him, just her physical presence was a constant reminder that there had been a stranger once, who had loved me, given me a child, and was no longer with us now. When Rennie looked up at me to pose one of her endless queries, it was with her father’s face, his eyes, his smile, and she must have wondered why so often I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

  If the days were hard without him, the nights were worse. I ached for him in a way that was without sentiment, in a way that had nothing to do with my loftier memories of him, and my pregnancy, now in the fifth month, did nothing to lessen that longing. I remembered too well how he had felt beside me, how when I woke up it was always to feel his arm around me, his leg thrown over mine, as if he could not stand for us to be separated even in sleep. And the things he did to show he loved me, the way he would get out of bed in the middle of the coldest night to get me a drink of water, the way he brought my breakfast to me in bed every Sunday morning, even though I wasn’t sick, how comforting he could be after a nightmare, and how funny when I needed cheering, how many stories he had about Italy. Now there seemed nothing left but a drafty old house and a little girl who asked questions for which I had no answers. And always, there was the sense of time passing, time lost, the certainty that things could never again be as they once had been.

  Now began the dark hours, when every shadow in every corner of the secretive old house would gather around me like a black cloak of despair. For the first time, I was truly alone, the way I’d always wanted to be. Like all lonely children, Rennie had grown so adept at amusing herself that it was easy for me to forget she was even there.

  The days were only tolerable because with Luca gone, there was always something demanding to be done and only me to do it. On Thursdays, I’d go with Rennie to do the marketing. We’d become notorious since Aaron’s death, and always there were whispers and stares. Everyone in Galen was satisfied that Jewel Willicker’s eldest girl and that dirty little foreign boy had come to no good. Wasn’t that just as they’d always predicted? Yet their hate was strangely comforting to me. At least it was familiar, and there was some solace in knowing that some things never changed, that something could be counted on to endure, if only the hate of a small town.

  The nights were the hardest. It was just me at night, without even the enmity of the townspeople to pit myself against, to make me forget myself in proving just how indifferent I was to them. The night had a power that the day never did, the power to shatter the picture I’d always had of myself, one as much a fable as anything in a fairy story. Someone so strong, she needed no one, for her strength was not drawn from others, but generated from some place within. Such piffle. Why it was Jewel who had made me strong. Yes, soft-spoken, affable, and unbendable Jewel. And my sisters. And later Luca. And because they had loved me, they had let me live my whole life through believing I didn’t need them. But I did. I couldn’t be strong alone. I needed someone to be strong for. Now there was no one to be strong for but Rennie, and Rennie had her own peculiar kind of strength, that same strange capacity that Jewel had had to be born new each day.

  The day is lost to activity, but the night is still, and in the stillness, truth comes upon you quietly. And in the night, that yawning chasm of time between the early approaching darkness of winter and the first hint of morning light, I discovered theinn was haunted. Not with dead people. Jesse’s body was surely dust in the orchard by now. And not by Aaron. Rumor had it his mother had had him cremated. No, the inn was haunted with convictions long held and false, hopes long cherished and crushed, and plans, made with great enthusiasm that would never come to pass.

  It had started with Jewel’s misconception of innkeeping, the idea that you could take vagrants into your home, feed them if they were hungry, give them a place to sleep when they couldn’t pay, and imagine they would not think you a fool, serviceable only to be taken advantage of. Jewel believed that if you were kind, kindness would come back to you, like a pigeon to roost. She had believed this with a conviction that rejected all evidence to the contrary. And she had died believing in all for which she had no logical reason to believe.

  And Luca. Come to a new country and imagining the great things his father and he would accomplish there. Thinking, in spite of everything, that it would all turn out well, for no better reason than he wanted it to with all his heart.

  And me and Kathmandu.

  So the inn was haunted, as are all dwellings where great slaughters have occurred, the slaughter of people and the slaughter of dreams. And here I was, left with the carnage. And worst of all was not the dead dream but the living nightmare. The dreams about Aaron didn’t start until Luca was gone, as if Aaron had been waiting in the ether for him to leave before he felt free to come to me. In the dream, Aaron was not dead, not shot, not bloody. He looked hale and hearty and cheerful and when he spoke it was teasingly, like a mean older brother. “Did you keep that dress, Darcy?” he’d always ask. “The one I raped you in?” And I’d say, “No, I burned it, just like I’ll burn you if you ever come back.” And he’d laugh, and say, “You can’t burn me, Darcy. I’m already ashes. But I can burn you.” Even that wasn’t the worst of it because with the illogical logic of dreams, I knew he was dead and couldn’t come back. It was what he threatened to tell Luca that frightened me most. “I’m gonna bend over him at night while he’s asleep in prison,” he’d say in the dream, “and whisper in his ear that I put my seed in you. That baby’s mine, not his, and once he knows that, he’ll stop loving you, if he ever really did and you’ll disgust him, and your baby will disgust him too… Once I tell him.” And I’d wake up in a cold sweat, panting like an animal, and covering my mouth with my hand so as not to wake Rennie in the bed beside me. I knew it was Luca’s baby and couldn’t be Aaron’s. Yet I felt as if the life inside me had been defiled by the rape and that it would, against all laws of biology, somehow be Aaron’s baby too I was carrying.

  Time was turning in upon itself again. Night after night, I would sit in front of the fire that never warmed me and think, if only Jewel were here. Jewel, needing me to calm her senseless fears, and in calming her fears, my own would ease. Before there’d been Luca, promising that everything would be all right, and disbelieving, I’d been comforted, nonetheless. Only Rennie now. So young. What could she know of haunting? And soon another child born into this haunted world to live in this haunted house, to a mother struggling to keep her wits and a father in prison. Unhaunted child, I thought, asleep in your silent world, so soon to be disturbed for the first time and for always. They should leave you in peace. Nothing should wake you.

  There is a kind of delirium to despair, I know that now, and as I went to the sideboard and poured some brandy, an idea came to me, and drunk with despair more than with brandy, the idea seemed the only bit of reason in an unreasonable world. Later, I was to remember it with an agony of regret that no passing of years would ever dull. But at the time, it seemed the wisest and the kindest thing that I would ever do. I drank the brandy down and poured another. We needed it, my unborn child and me because we were so cold. Even our fingers were numb, had lost all feeling hours ago.

  If we were never born… The word if had never had any place in my vocabulary before, and none in my thoughts. Things were or they were not. Things happened, and you were either destroyed by them or you managed to salvage something. But whatever happened, speculation was a waste of time.

  And yet… if we were never born… The question presented itself again, and this time, I answered. We’d never know about haunting. It was too late for me. Too late for Luca. Too late even for Rennie. But the baby was still asleep. There was still time. One thing was clear or seemed so then. This child must never feel what its mother was feeling now, never this wretched. I would prot
ect him as I had always done for Rennie. But I remembered that I hadn’t been able to protect her, not really, not when it was most important.

  She had seen me that night, had seen Aaron. Had heard the gunshot. Had stood, looking through the spokes of the banister, and seen him bloody. Our eyes met so briefly, I’d hoped it was imagination. But I’d never had any imagination. Did she remember that night? Dream about it in between childish concerns? Wonder if her mother was a monster? I couldn’t know, and unwillingly, we shared a secret. Just as Jewel and I had done. A secret that would bind my child to me, even as it would separate her from all other children. The sleeping baby must never know what Rennie and I knew.

  But what about the other times, a part of me fought against the natural conclusion to this line of thought. Would you want the child to miss them? The times of exquisite happiness, like on the first warm day after a long winter, when you feel your heart rise. There were those times too. But so fleeting, and first you had to endure the winter, I answered the fading light of myself. Still there were times…the light said back, its voice getting dimmer and all the harder to hear, when you thought it was enough, enough to make it worthwhile.

  And then I answered aloud, “I don’t think so anymore.”

  There was a woman who lived in the woods, not far from the whorehouse, which, looking back, must have been real convenient. Jewel used to mysteriously recite sometimes, “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn’t know what to do… So she went to see the woman in the woods.” I didn’t know the woman, had never laid eyes on her, because like other Galen outcasts, she was only whispered about. I knew only that Jewel hated her “because of how she makes her living,” and for the longest time, I couldn’t imagine what the woman could possibly be doing in her cottage in the woods to make Jewel, who thought nothing of befriending prostitutes and thieves, hate her so. It was the only time I could remember Jewel seeming to harbor malice, and it gave the woman a deep fascination for me, until in my later years, I found out just what it was she did.

  It was after midnight when I made my way into the woods. Snow had fallen earlier, and when I finally found the cottage, I saw that it was covered in white, as were the trees around it, a scene out of a fairy tale.

  I knocked and waited, hoping she would not be angry with me for coming so late. Probably she was used to women coming at all hours. Desperation probably never observed any schedule.

  When the door was opened cautiously by a white-haired woman, she didn’t ask me why I’d come. There was only one reason anyone would.

  “Have you brought money?” she wanted to know.

  I nodded.

  “Let me see it.”

  I showed her and she told me to get undressed.

  “How many months?”

  “Almost five.”

  “Fine. Lay down and we’ll start.”

  “Is five too far gone?” I asked, starting to undress.

  She shrugged. “Makes no difference to me. I’ve done ’em gone longer.”

  The whole thing didn’t take very long, and would have gone even more quickly if I hadn’t started crying. It wasn’t because she hurt me. I was too numb from the cold and brandy to feel much of anything. But some place in the pit of my brain had resisted the numbness and was already aching.

  After it was done, I wanted to rest a minute, but the woman had someone else coming and she told me I would have to leave. And then she said the cruelest thing anyone had ever said to me in my whole life. She said, “It was a boy.”

  The snow had stopped by the time I left, and the moon shone blue on the clearing. I walked slowly, with great effort. I’d never felt this light before, like the wind might blow me away, and so weary, tired enough to lay down in the snow and go to sleep. I looked down at the new-fallen snow, thinking to find a place to rest, and as I did, I saw the reason for this unrelenting fatigue. I was beginning to bleed to death. I saw it with each step, as a new circle of red formed against the frozen white ground, and opening my coat, I felt my skirt saturated with a warm wetness. I was dying and leaving my daughter alone in a word that I knew from long experience did not care about her, without a father, without anyone, and it was this knowledge that propelled me forward and changed my direction.

  I collapsed on the road leading up to the doctor’s house, the same doctor who’d sewn Aaron up after I’d cut him with the sickle. In the end, I owed my life to his wife’s insomnia and her love of new-fallen snow. She’d been up looking out her window admiring it when she’d spotted me lying in the midst of it as she sipped warm milk in her kitchen.

  Morning came unwelcome and found me alive, though I took no pleasure in the fact, and with it came sobriety, not from drink, but from the drunkenness of despair that had a hold of me the night before. I was not despairing now. That had abated, and in its place was left a resignation to existence. I could not live without Luca. That, I had found out soon after they’d taken him from me. But I could exist without him. That much I could do. I owed it to Rennie.

  Dr. Lynch came into the bedroom where he’d put me and said, “I should take you to the sheriff and tell him what you did.” I hung my head. I half agreed with him. “And I’d do it too…but for your little daughter. Don’t worry. She’s downstairs in the kitchen. My wife went and fetched her last night.”

  “I’m grateful.”

  “I don’t want your gratitude. You got to pull yourself together, girl. You got your man in prison and things are hard for you. Well, too bad. Things is hard for everybody nowadays. That’s why they’re callin’ it the Depression and not the Jubilation! You gotta do whatever you have to to get by and pray there’s better days ahead. That’s all anybody can do—you hear me?”

  “I hear.”

  “And stay away from that Satan’s piss you been drinkin’. You’d never have done what you done if you hadn’t gotten yourself all liquored up first. Now put these clothes on. They’re the wife’s. Threw yours out.” He got up to leave. “You be grateful for your life, Darcy. Even when it’s a curse, it’s a gift.”

  So Rennie and I went home. The son Luca had so long awaited and with so much hope was dead. Gone to join the other faces that would haunt me and follow me for all my days. But you can live being haunted. Most people do. Each day they beat it back, only to have it rise again each night. But they get along. Somehow.

  It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing mattered. Only Rennie, and one good reason to go on can trump a hundred reasons not to. My daughter, who had her father’s face, was alive, and from now on, when those other faces rose up to haunt me, I would beat them back with that.

  8.

  Turns Ashes

  The prison where Luca was serving his time was a three-hour train ride from Galen. I had only been on the train a few times in my whole life and every time the motion had made me sick. This time was no different. Halfway through the ride, I had to go to the bathroom to throw up in the toilet. It isn’t easy to vomit on target on a moving train, and as it turned out, I threw up on my shoes.

  All morning, I had labored over my appearance. I washed my hair and rinsed it with vinegar, because Caroline had told me once that it made your hair shine. Then I wound the ends around rags to make them curl, but defying all my winding, my hair remained straight as a poker. I tried putting it up, but the hairpins kept falling out. So I decided to concentrate instead on what to wear. My own clothes were all old and looked it. But in Jewel’s closet, I found the velvet dress that had always been my favorite. Except for being too short at the hem, and too tight in the shoulders, it fit fine. But the memory of how Jewel had looked in it was too sharp, and I put it back in the closet and chose instead a plainer one that conjured no memories.

  Having tried so hard to look nice, I got to the prison tired, anxious, and smelling faintly of vomit and vinegar. The stone steps leading up to the prison were cool, and I sat down to ste
ady myself. As I sat there, a man with grey hair who looked like somebody’s grandfather came and spoke to me.

  “I’ll bet you’re Mrs. D’Angeli.” He smiled and his face crinkled into careworn lines.

  I’d never been called that before and I was taken aback, but I nodded.

  “Luca talks about you and that little girl of yours all the time. Are you feeling all right? You look a little peaked.”

  “I threw up on the train.”

  He laughed but not in a mean way. “I’m the same way on trains. But you’ll feel better when you’re inside and you see Luca. He’s been up since dawn getting ready for you, primping like a girl. He’s been looking forward to this since the first day he came in here.”

  “Who are you?” I finally thought to ask.

  “I’m the warden here.”

  “You don’t look like a warden,” I said. It was always disturbing to me when people didn’t look as they should.

  “I suppose not,” he said apologetically. “Are you feeling better? Would you like to see your husband now?”

  He led me to a long corridor. It was divided by a metal grate, with rows of benches on either side.

  Before he left, the warden said, “Take a seat. Luca should be out shortly.” Then he called a guard. “Bring Mrs. D’Angeli a glass of soda water.” He winked at me. “It’ll settle your stomach.”

  But my stomach wouldn’t settle. Unwilling, I kept thinking about Joseph Gibbet. He was one of the people who haunted me. They had an electric chair in this prison. I’d read about it once in the newspaper. What if Luca had been sentenced to death? What if he was behind these walls waiting for his turn? What if Rennie and I never saw him again? Did it hurt to die in the electric chair? How could it not?