Paper Angels

by Billy Coffey

  And then he was gone.

  If there was any comfort in that moment, any notion of rightness, it was that I would follow him soon. We’d meet Jesus together. Shadows formed in front of my eyes as the room grew dark around me. Tiny pinpricks of black filled the air. I remember wishing I were outside again, out there in the sweet April air and staring up at my wishing star, saying my final prayer to please let me go. Let me leave. Let me find Eric in that distant land so I can tell him all the things I never had. That he was good and that he was my friend and that I loved him as my own.

  I looked past Eric to the Old Man’s empty booth.

  And waited for death.

  30

  The Plan

  Alpenglow gathered at the tops of the Blue Ridge beyond the windows of the hospital room and readied to spill onto the valley. Robins and jays sang for their breakfast. In the distance diesel engines roared and then idled. Stillness gave way to awakening in a manner I supposed was designed to give me hope, but was instead twisted into a harsh reminder that the world did not pause when it crushed you—it simply moved on with no regard for your catching up.

  Yet aside from the beeping monitors and Elizabeth cutting her paper, the room was silent, as if it had paused to listen. We were each too busy thinking or not thinking about the story of that night, the horrid tale of the last object in my box. She offered no sympathy and I offered no tears. Both were understood if not present, and neither would have done much good at the time.

  The silence was broken by Kim knocking at the door.

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” she said.

  Elizabeth looked up at her and smiled.

  “Morning, Kim,” I said.

  “Don’t want to bother,” she said. “Just wanted to let you know I’m going to call Jake. I wish I could’ve put it off longer, Andy, but I just couldn’t.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll talk to him whenever he’s ready.”

  “He’ll be on his way soon. I figured I could go ahead and change your bandages before then. It’ll make you feel better, and that might make talking to him more comfortable.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you get your wits about you for a little while, and then I’ll be back. Anything you need in the meantime? Maybe some breakfast?”

  I looked to Elizabeth, who shook her head.

  “Nope, we’re fine. Thanks, Kim. Heard more from Owen?”

  “No,” she said. “I expect he’s waiting on me to tell him whether this is just a bump in the road or a wall we’ve run into.”

  She stood at the door, watching. Waiting, I supposed, for a little bit of my advice. I didn’t know what to say other than “Look in your heart, Kimmie. There’s your answer.”

  “Okay, then.” Kim lingered for a moment at the door just in case. “Sure you’re fine?” she asked. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m as fine as I can be. Promise.”

  She nodded and said, “Okay, then. I’ll see y’all in a little while.”

  Kim left Elizabeth to me and closed the door. My left hand began to feel as though a knife had been shoved into the palm. I looked down and realized it was Eric’s key chain. I’d held it tighter and tighter through the entire story until it nearly pierced the skin. When I loosened the grip, my palm held the outline of an angel.

  I decided I’d come far enough with my story to warrant finishing it.

  “They stumbled into Timmy Griffith’s Texaco station a little while later,” I said. “Bruised and bleeding and wanting their beer. Timmy wasn’t going to sell them anything either, not in their condition. Charlie had found his courage again by that time, and he got in Timmy’s face and said they’d do to him what they did ‘down at the Armish man’s place.’ Once Timmy realized they were serious, he beat them both with the axe handle he kept behind the counter. One of them, the scary one—Taylor—he got away somehow. Timmy locked Charlie in the cooler and called over to Peter Boyd’s place just down the road.

  “Pete had guys over every Saturday night to grill up some steaks and play poker. One of those guys was Timmy’s brother-​in-​law Jake, the town sheriff who I guess I can’t avoid anymore. Joey and Frankie were usually there, too. Those are the guys who brought me here in the ambulance. Joey and Frankie took off to check on me, and Jake took off for the Texaco before Timmy could kill those two boys. That’s the way it is in Mattingly. We’re good people, and we’re all a family. Hurt someone in that family, and you’re apt to find our own justice. I’m not saying that’s right, I’m just saying that’s the way it is.”

  Elizabeth put her folded sheet of paper in her lap and slipped the pair of scissors into her pocket. “So Jake is still looking for Taylor?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Guess that’s part of the reason why Jake needs to talk to me so bad.”

  “I’m so sorry, Andy,” Elizabeth said. “I can’t imagine how that feels.”

  “Jake’ll get him,” I said. “Jake’s a good guy. He sort of fell into that job. Family thing, in a way. You say you can’t imagine how I feel? I can’t imagine how he feels. Mattingly’s never seen anything like this.”

  “Did Charlie confess to Jake?”

  “He didn’t have to. Kimmie said Jake got all he needed from the video camera I have at the store. Got the whole, horrible thing.” I smiled to myself as a thought occurred. “I expect he got a lot of what looked an awful lot like me talking to myself, too. But ol’ Jake is a good guy. He won’t think any less of me.”

  “Well, maybe you really won’t have to be that involved at this point since they have the tape.”

  “Hope so,” I said, though I didn’t really think that was the case. “I’m glad he got that tape. It’ll make things easier for everyone involved except for Taylor and Charlie. But I swear, Elizabeth, that’s one movie I never want to see. If they sit me up there in that courtroom and make me watch that, it might be the end of me. It’ll be bad enough having to play it over and over in my head for the rest of my days, the way those boys who come home from war keep seeing all that hell they had to go through. But I never want to see it with my eyes.”

  Elizabeth smiled and said, “You’re stronger than you know, Andy Sommerville.”

  “Strong?” I asked. The words came out in a chuckle. “I’m not strong, Elizabeth. Maybe there was a time when I thought that might be true, but not anymore. I don’t have anything left now. It’s all been taken.”

  “The things that matter in life, Andy, the things that make you who you are, cannot be taken from you. You can only surrender them.”

  “Then I surrendered them,” I said. “I surrendered them on the way here.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Can’t say much, I guess. I remember being in the ambulance and not knowing what was going on. I saw Joey and Frankie, but I didn’t know who they were. I couldn’t talk and could barely breathe. And then I saw the Old Man stare down over me. He said he was there with me and that everything would be okay. Okay. Can you believe that? Eric was lying somewhere with a sheet over his head and I was on the way to the hospital with my face on fire, but it was going to be okay. I lost it. Just lost it right there.”

  “I can imagine you did,” she said. “I think anyone would in that situation. That was a traumatic experience, Andy. No one would be in their right mind.”

  “Oh, I was in my right mind. I was in as right a mind as I’ve ever been. I had nothing left. And more than that, I realized I didn’t have much to lose in the first place. I’d spent my whole life drifting, not really giving myself to anyone or anything. Never had a family, never made any real friends other than Eric and Jabber, just…there. Taking up space. I never had anything to give to anyone.”

  “That’s not true.”

  I ignored her. “Some things that happen in life stick to the soul like a burr and scratch it raw. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because something like that makes a person question
everything they’ve always believed in, that’s why. All that happening and then the Old Man telling me it was going to be all right was my burr. In that moment I saw the world for what it really was, Elizabeth. Saw it clear and true.”

  Elizabeth crossed her legs and folded her arms.

  “You don’t believe me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me what the world really is, Andy? Then I’ll tell you if you saw it clear and true or if you saw it muddy and twisted.”

  I glanced out the windows again toward the yellow slivers of light peeking over the tops of the mountains. It was going to be a beautiful day, I thought. Spring in Virginia was the closest thing to perfection you could find in this world. It sparkled in greens and yellows and newness. Yet I felt a strange separation from that beauty then. The clear air and the tall mountains seemed images rather than the things themselves.

  I had read stories of people who had cheated death, of how their closeness to the boundary between this world and the next had inspired them to live more fully and well. I would not be counted among them. I remembered then another story, a legend that said Lazarus never smiled again after Jesus raised him from the dead. I would be counted with him. He would understand.

  “The world is a place where the weeds will always choke the flowers,” I told her. “It’s lost. Gone to hell. It’s a place where children die, where people twist what should be beautiful into something sick. They choose selfishness over kindness. It’s a world where faith is laughed at.

  “People spend their lives trying to put a wall between themselves and the way things are. They think it’s a barrier nothing can get through. But it’s a lie. All of it. They can build that wall all they want, build it with money or family or prayer or whatever, and it won’t matter. The Old Man was right, you can’t keep the world away. It’s too hungry to let you go. It will swallow you.”

  “Is that what you think happened to you?” Elizabeth asked. “Did the world swallow you because your faith was found wanting?”

  “I trusted God,” I said. “I lived a good life. I did everything the Old Man said. What did it get me?”

  I paused so Elizabeth could answer. She didn’t.

  “What did it get me, Elizabeth?”

  “You tell me, Andy.”

  “It got me this,” I said, pointing to my bandages, “and it got my friend killed. That was my reward.”

  “Your reward? Is that what you were after?”

  “No,” I said, then, “Yes,” and finally, “I don’t know. No. I don’t want a reward, Elizabeth. I just want to believe that in the end good people can make a difference in this world, and I don’t think I can do that anymore.”

  “Is that what you really think, Andy?”

  “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.”

  “People say a lot of things they don’t mean,” she said. “They say it from their anger and their hurt. Speech is all about emotion, but you have to use your everything to say something. So are you saying that with your everything, or are you saying that from the part of you that feels angry and hurt?”

  “I’m saying it from the part of me that doesn’t understand why this happened.”

  “You’re not going to understand everything, Andy. That’s why you need a faith that doesn’t ignore or deny those questions, but accepts that sometimes the answer isn’t the point.”

  “Not the point?” I said, and a little too loudly. Kim’s eyes met mine from across the hall. She looked worried. “Of course it’s the point.”

  “So if you knew the reasons why God allowed this to happen, your pain would be lessened?”

  I considered her question and almost answered a very firm and very loud yes. It would have been lessened. The sting of much of the world’s suffering came not from the hurt it brought, physical or otherwise. It came instead from the unanswered questions it birthed, those gaping holes that were tilled and turned upward into the light by life’s circumstances.

  “God left me three nights ago,” I said. “He left me, the Old Man left me, and Eric left me. I should have died that night. If that drunk idiot would’ve been a little more sober, maybe he would have hit me better with that fire. Maybe Taylor would have stabbed me, too. Then it would be over. Finally over.”

  Elizabeth uncrossed her legs and shot toward me. “Don’t you ever say that, Andy Sommerville,” she said. “Do you hear me? Don’t you ever say those words.”

  It was the closest thing to anger she’d shown me. It would have been enough to take me aback too, but it didn’t. Because suddenly I was angrier.

  “I’ll say them because I mean them,” I shouted. “I’ll say them because it’s the truth. I’ve done nothing in my life, Elizabeth. I have nothing. Nothing but this stupid stuff in this stupid box that means nothing. And yet here I sit while the one person I knew who was worth something, who could have made a difference in this God-forsaken dump of a world, is getting buried.”

  There is within every human heart an empty reservoir that is ours alone to fill with either the beauty or the ugliness of life. Until that moment I had always believed mine to be filled with the beauty, or at least what I could summon of it. But I was wrong. It was anger that was spilling into that secret hole in my heart, a rage against a God who was supposed to be love but was apathy instead. One who would allow my father to kill my mother, answer the prayer of a little boy with an angel that would only abandon him, and allow evil and darkness free reign over the world to murder a boy so pure and so good that his last breath of life was spent asking me if I was okay.

  But if I was fool enough to believe I held peace rather than anger, it was more foolish to believe I could keep it penned. It spilled out then, all of it, and I was powerless to stop the surge.

  My left hand shot out and pushed Elizabeth backward into the chair. She hit with a thud and glared at me, stunned at what I’d suddenly become. I sat trembling, staring at her as she stared at me, both angry and ashamed at what that anger had done.

  Sprawled out on the bed before me was the story of my life, trinkets and mementoes of days spent with neither purpose nor any definable meaning. Pieces of a puzzle, Elizabeth had said. She was the one who had suggested we should piece them together. I was the one to see that once hinged together, what they formed was both pictureless and wanting. Eric’s death had only defined how much he could never give and how much the world had lost. My survival only defined the opposite.

  I flung the pieces and the box that held them, crashing them against the floor and the far wall. I wept my agony, crying out to Elizabeth, to God, to anyone left who could listen.

  “Help me,” I said.

  I reached out, certain Elizabeth would shrink away. Instead I found her hand already reaching for mine.

  “I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” I cried. “I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. I just don’t understand. Help me understand.”

  Elizabeth rose to collect my box and everything that went in it, gathering them with the care and attention of someone charged with guarding treasure. She sat the box where it had been in my lap and then placed my hand over it.

  “Never doubt the course of your life, Andy,” she said. “Never doubt that God has a plan. There is always a plan. Always. And for everyone. That means you, and that meant Eric.”

  I sniffed and shuddered again at the mention of Eric’s name. “God took him too soon,” I said.

  “No,” she soothed. “No, God did not take him too soon. God took him just at the right time.”

  “You can’t say that,” I said, my voice rising again.

  “I can,” Elizabeth answered. “I can because I know it must be that way. We all have a purpose in this life, Andy. A purpose only we can fulfill. I know that to you, Eric was taken too soon. But you have to believe he had done everything God wanted him to do. The Old Man was right, Andy—the world is a bad place. But you’re wrong to assume there isn’t anything that can be done about it.”

  “It won’
t let you do anything about it,” I managed.

  “You need to think of this world as a house with many rooms. Some are big and wide and hold many people. Others are small and cramped and hold just a few. But all of those rooms are dark inside.

  “When people are born, God gives them a light and places them in one of those rooms. Some are put into the big rooms with many other people. They’re the ones who live long and touch the lives of many. Others are like you and Eric. They’re given the smaller rooms. They may not live long and they may not touch many, but the lives they change would have been otherwise lost.

  “You have to see that, Andy. You have to understand. The size of the room God puts you in doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you shine your light. Eric shined his. And this,” she said, placing her hand onto the box, “this is your light.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “There’s nothing special in there.”

  “Oh yes there is, Andy. There is evil in this world, and that evil thrives by hiding the light. And do you know how it hides that light?”

  I shook my head. When I did, tears wet the bandages around my eyes.

  “It hides the light by convincing people they are ordinary,” she said.

  Elizabeth sat in her chair and looked at me. The smile that spread across her face was so bright I almost had to shade my eyes.

  “How do you know all of that?” I asked her.

  “That’s easy,” Elizabeth said. She held up the shredded piece of paper in her hand. “Because I’m done, and because you have no idea who you are.”

  31

  Ordinary Things

  Elizabeth and I stared at one another, her with the Cheshire Cat grin and me with the confused look of a man too worn for riddles. I had never been so utterly emptied inside. Eric’s death, my injuries, and a sleepless night spent rehashing the circumstances surrounding both had left me questioning many things, but not about who I was. What I was supposed to do and when I was supposed to do it and why it had to happen, yes. But not who I was. My identity was the very last thing I felt I owned, the one thing that still belonged to me and me alone. And though it was an individuality that disappointed me, it was at least something. When you’ve been stripped of nearly everything, that last little something mattered. It mattered much.