Unlikely Angel

by Ashley Smith

  “No,” I went on, “you’ve got to turn yourself in and pay for this. You’ve got a son now. And it’s gonna take more of a man to turn yourself in than it is not to turn yourself in and kill me or hurt more people or hurt yourself. You’ve got to see that now. You’ve gotta be a man. Don’t you want to make it for your son?”

  He didn’t say anything. And I didn’t like the way this was going. I didn’t like what I was seeing on his face. I didn’t like him watching that TV.

  “Will you turn that off, please?” I said suddenly, standing up and walking over to the kitchen. “I don’t want to hear that.”

  I was seeing pain in his eyes, and I just didn’t want him watching that stuff anymore, watching all those people talk about what he had done and what a terrible person he was. It wasn’t good for him to be hearing those things. He had to keep believing that he had a reason to live, a reason to stop and do the right thing. He was already facing the truth of what he’d done a little bit, and I figured that little bit was enough. He didn’t need to fall apart and go back to the bathroom where those guns were.

  “Would you mind turning off the TV?” I asked again. Now I was standing at the kitchen sink, right behind the bar, and looking at him over the row of picture frames. He was still in that same position, still lying back on the sofa. I could see the news playing in that mirror above his head, and I didn’t know if he could even hear me. Then he stood up slowly and started walking toward the TV.

  20 tools and a badge

  Are you hungry?”

  I asked him now. I was standing in the kitchen on the other side of the bar. We had been going at this for a long time. He was hungry earlier, so I knew he had to be hungry now. And I actually thought I could eat too. I needed something to keep going—I knew that much.

  “Yeah,” he said, turning to face me where he stood in front of the TV. “That sounds good.”

  I walked over to the stove and opened the same cabinet of dry foods I had showed him earlier. I thought I would make pancakes. That would be easy. I figured morning would be here soon enough, so I might as well make breakfast.

  Then he asked, “Do you have a computer?”

  “Yes,” I said, still facing the cabinet. “It’s in my bedroom, but it’s not hooked up yet.”

  He didn’t say anything. I figured he wanted to get on the Internet, and I was just glad that wasn’t an option for him. He needed to quit thinking about all of that stuff right now.

  Behind me, I could hear him walking around—in the hallway and then the living room. Then I heard the front door open and close. A minute later it opened again, and when I turned around to look, I saw him bringing in a twelve-pack of Coors Light with some of the cans missing. He came around the bar to the fridge and stuck the beer in there. He was wearing my brown leather clogs.

  “You want a beer?” he asked, grabbing one.

  “No thanks.” I just wasn’t drinking beer with this guy.

  Then he said, “I’ve gotta make a move.” A move? I don’t like the sound of that.

  He walked out of the kitchen now, and I went back to getting the ingredients out for breakfast. The way the kitchen was set up, if you turned your back to the sink and the living room, the stove was to your left, the microwave was on the counter in front of you, the fridge was to the far right, and in between was counter space. I was basically moving around, trying to think about where I had put things when I unpacked.

  I took the box of pancake mix and some cooking oil down from the cabinet. I got the big pan out from underneath the stove. I took some eggs out of the refrigerator. I went to the utensil drawer for a spatula, whisk, and wooden spoon. If I needed it, the canister of sugar was already out on the counter. Mack and I had gotten a set of three canisters—white with big fruits on them—as a wedding gift, but one canister broke during a move. The two I had left were just to the right of the microwave next to my coffeepot.

  I wasn’t really paying much attention to Brian at this point. I had been on guard for so long, maybe I was just tired—and glad to have something to do. I could hear him moving around and then going in and out of the front door. For whatever reason, it never occurred to me to just go over there and lock him out. I mean, I had the guns inside with me. I could’ve done it. But I just wasn’t thinking like that. I was focused on waiting until 9:30 so that he would let me leave, and nobody would have to get hurt. That’s where my mind was.

  At some point, though, I turned and glanced over the bar, and I saw Brian come into the apartment carrying something. He walked in and set whatever it was down in front of that low, whitewashed bench I had covered. Then he turned around and walked out again. A minute or two later he was back. From where I was standing in the kitchen, I could see his shoulders and head as he walked into the living room. Then I saw his head duck behind the bar again as he set something else down.

  When he turned to go back out, I looked over the picture frames sitting on the bar and saw what he was bringing in—tools. I knew tools. Mack had a whole shed full of tools, and I knew which tools were which. I knew what a circular saw looked like. I knew what a miter saw looked like. I knew what a drill looked like. I could recognize the different boxes they were stored in. Looking at the lineup in front of the bar, I knew those were some pretty expensive tools right there.

  Brian was coming back in now with another load, and as he set it down, I said, “What are you doing with all this?”

  “These are yours now,” he said, gesturing at the floor. He was talking to me across the bar. “I’ve gotta make a move, and you can have these. Maybe you can start your own business or something and do what you’ve always dreamed of.”

  What? He wants to help me fulfill my dreams? I was maybe touched that he’d actually listened to what I said about fixing stuff and decorating and all that, but something was not right here. Not right at all. And I still didn’t know what he meant by “make a move.”

  “Dude, these are some really nice tools. Where’d you get these from?”

  “From this guy, this agent,” he said. Agent? Like CIA agent?

  Now he looked down at the floor as he talked. “I didn’t—I didn’t want to kill him. All I needed was his truck, you know, and like I begged him—begged him—to listen to me and just cooperate and do what I told him. But he wouldn’t. He just kept fighting me back, so I had to kill him.”

  Whoa! Okay. I didn’t know about this. There’s someone else. He’s killed someone else. Someone who wasn’t at the courthouse. Oh, God, help me here. Help me not to panic. Just keep me focused on what we’re doing. I’m making breakfast. We’re doing good. He’s going to let me leave. He’s going to stop and turn himself in. I was trying to get some air and not let him see me shake or anything. I was glad the sink and the bar were between us. God, just help.

  Then I saw that Brian was holding a wallet in his hand. “I got his wallet,” he said lifting the wallet up. “He was an agent. Yeah, here’s his badge.” Now he walked around the bar to the kitchen and stood in front of me, flipping the wallet open. The badge was inside. “This is him right here.”

  I focused on the badge, trying to keep my head together. There were all kinds of credit cards in the wallet that Brian could’ve already started using. Then I looked down at the agent’s driver’s license. I looked at his photograph. He was a young guy. Maybe forty years old. He was probably a husband and a father. I thought about Mack right then. I thought about what Paige had lost. What I had lost. What we had been through. And I could feel my adrenaline kick in. I could feel my heart racing. I could feel rage coming up. Like I wanted to scream.

  “Look at this guy,” I told Brian now, pointing at that wallet. “Look at him. He’s probably forty. Do you know what that means? It means you took away somebody’s husband. And probably somebody’s father. Do you realize that? Do you know what that feels like? Can you imagine it?”

  He just stood there, holding the wallet open. I could see that his thumb was bleeding, probably from carrying t
he tools. I kept going. And I wasn’t holding back.

  “Well, let me explain it to you,” I started. “Let me tell you about Paige and what she lost.”

  I was thinking about what Paige had been telling Aunt Kim lately—how other kids at her school had their daddies and why didn’t she have hers? And why couldn’t she be with her mommy, either? I was just sick over it. Sick.

  “You know,” I said, “Paige will never, ever have her father. He’s gone. He’s not coming back. She will never get to spend time with the man who loved her most—her daddy. Because someone took that away from her. Just ripped him out of her life before she could even really know him. She was just two. Two years old.

  “I mean, Mack wasn’t always around because he worked so much, but he loved Paige to death. He gave her anything she wanted. He provided for us. He was an incredible provider. It didn’t matter if he was worn out from working—he was going to provide for us and give us whatever he thought we needed. That was a huge thing to him. We were going to have the best whether we wanted it or not, because he was going to give it to us.”

  I was remembering Mack on his lunch breaks—how he would sneak back to the house to lie on the sofa with Paige. “Honey,” I said, “I’m not going to keep making your lunch every day if you’re just coming back home.” He would be stretched out on our striped sofa with Paige in his arms. Just holding her.

  “Mack loved Paige,” I said to Brian now, taking a step back from him. “He would lie on the couch with her and let her draw all over him after a long day at work. One time he said to me, ‘You don’t bathe her right.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘I look after this child every day while you’re gone and you can bet I get every crevice in her body.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t bathe her right. I’m gonna show you how to bathe her.’ And he did. I just let him do his thing, and he bathed her right there, showing me how he thought it should be done.” Is this guy hearing me? He’s got to feel this.

  “Mack had a huge heart,” I said. “He had a huge, generous heart, and Paige will never get to know it now. She’ll never feel his love. She’ll never know her daddy’s heart. Never have his arms around her. And I feel so sorry for her. I feel sorry for her because it’s not fair. It’s not fair somebody took her daddy away. Somebody killed him. Do you hear me? He’s gone. Her daddy’s gone. And she didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.”

  For a minute I was back in that parking lot again. With those paramedics. And Mack hooked up to that machine. “Give more air. Breathe. Give more air. Breathe.” His body was so toned and tan from all of the hard work outside. He was stocky and powerful. He always had huge amounts of energy. But he was lying there now. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving. “Give him more air!” I yelled. “Breathe!”

  “Not now, baby,” I was thinking. “Not now. Not when we’re finally getting it right. This isn’t supposed to be happening now.”

  As I looked at Mack lying there lifeless next to that machine, I thought back to the morning when everything changed for us. That morning when something inside of Mack snapped, and he got clear on how he wanted to live. It was New Year’s Day, our last New Year’s together. Mack had stormed into the house yelling at the top of his lungs: “We’re getting a divorce!” I was standing in the living room holding Paige. Mack’s face was all cut up and bruised. The night before he had knocked me unconscious in front of that club and left me there on the sidewalk. Some men had gone after him —he said it was the police—and now he was blaming me. “They beat the crap out of me because of you,” he screamed. “And we’re getting a divorce!”

  Looking at his swollen face, I smiled kind of sarcastically. My head was still pounding from the blow the night before. “Divorce?” I said. “Um, no we’re not, honey. We’re not getting a divorce.” I lifted Paige up. “Look! Do you see her? Remember? We’re staying together for her.”

  Mack was holding a cup in his hand, and in one quick motion he turned and whipped that cup right at me. Whatever was in it splattered all over Paige and me and the wall behind us. I stood there looking at Mack, not knowing what to say or do. And then I saw his expression change. He stopped where he was. “Wait a minute,” he said, whispering. “What am I doing? You’re my wife. She’s my child.” He sat down on the sofa. “I’m sorry,” he said, putting his bruised face in his hands. “I’m so sorry.”

  He never laid a hand on me after that. Our marriage started to get better, and Mack began to really love me—not just because I was his wife, but for who I was. He spent more time at home. It started to feel like we were a family. I could see my prayers being answered. And then he was taken away. Gone, they said. “He’s gone.”

  “Do you know what it did to me losing my husband?” I said to Brian now. He was holding the wallet at his side, looking down at the floor. “I already told you what it did to me. I lost it, man. I went completely down. I was scared to death. I felt completely alone in this world. How was I ever going to take care of Paige and provide for her? I was totally devastated. I didn’t want to feel anything ever again. I just wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening.

  “I was taking all those pain pills and Xanaxes and going out and getting high every time I could. Just leaving Paige whenever I had the chance. I mean, I checked out on her. I didn’t give her any attention. I took those pills in front of her. I drove her around like that. I mean, I could’ve killed her. Could’ve killed us both and other people too. Are you hearing me?

  “I would drive her to the cemetery all messed up on pills and make her sit there at her daddy’s grave playing with these little wind chimes while I cried and talked to Mack for hours. How do you think that made her feel? To have to see her mommy like that? And then I started with the ice and the paranoia. And sending her to live at Aunt Kim’s. And my car accident. And moving away to Atlanta. Do you know how many times Paige has asked me, ‘Mommy, when’s your scar from the accident gonna get better so I can come live with you?’ And here I’ve been still using those drugs and getting messed up, still playing with that stuff, trying to convince myself I can do it and still be a good mom.

  “I mean, Brian—how do you think Paige feels? What do you think she must feel about her mommy now? It’s shameful what I’ve put her through. Don’t you get it?” I was pointing at the wallet in his hand. “Don’t you see? That man’s family is going to have to survive what you’ve just put them through. You ripped that man away just like those people took Mack. You did that. And this family has to survive it.”

  I took another step back now. I was almost afraid to look Brian in the eye after what I had just said. But he had to hear it. It was time for him to suck it up and deal. He had to face it head-on. He had to see what he had really, really done. He had to know he was going to have to pay for this.

  Clearing his throat, Brian closed the wallet and set it down on the end of the bar next to Paige’s picture in that big silver frame. I was looking down at the navy rug I’d put down in this kitchen yesterday. It covered the entire floor. Then I remembered his bleeding thumb.

  “Look, man,” I said, reaching out my hand. “Your finger’s bleeding. Let me —just, come here and let me put something on it.”

  21 a certificate

  I stepped over to the sink and turned on the water. “Here,” I said again, reaching for his hand, “let me put a Band-Aid on it and let’s clean it off.”

  He stretched out his hand, and I took it, looking at the cut. It was a small cut on his thumb right by his nail. “Let’s put it under the water,” I said, pulling him forward so I could stick his thumb under the faucet. “Keep it right there.”

  Then I turned to the cabinet above the microwave and took down my small first-aid basket. I grabbed the bottle of peroxide and went back to the sink.

  “Okay,” I said, opening the bottle, “take your thumb out of the water and hold it right here.” He did what I said, and I poured the peroxide over his cut. “Now wait.” I stepped over to the counter and pulled a paper towel off the roll.
Then I went back and blotted his thumb dry so the Band-Aid would stick.

  “Step over here now.” I reached into my first-aid basket, got out the box of Band-Aids, and opened it. “Stick out your thumb.” I peeled the wrapper off a Band-Aid and wrapped it around his thumb, covering his nail. “Okay,” I told him, “that should do it.”

  He pulled his hand back and looked at the job I’d done. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  To me, Brian looked very calm standing there examining his thumb. I was guessing everything I had just said to him was sinking in now. And I felt calm too. Just a strange peace. It was like the presence of the Lord was here in the apartment —just like when I did my devotions in the mornings. Just a peace filling the whole place. Filling my whole heart. I couldn’t understand it.

  I remembered that dark presence of evil I felt in the parking lot the night Mack died—and even after that night. When I tried to go back to the apartment complex later and leave a candle for Mack, I felt it then too. I couldn’t even drive up to the spot where he died to put the candle down. I just got out of the car, left the candle on a curb, and got out of there. Darkness. Evil. Like nothing that happened there that night was of God. They took Mack away in the ambulance and wouldn’t let me be with him. It was all wrong. Just wrong.

  But standing here in my kitchen right now with Brian Nichols, I felt the complete opposite. Like there was this presence of God all around me. God was with me. I knew that now. I could feel it. God had a purpose here. My husband was gone—he was dead. I was still here for some reason. Paige needed me. God had something for me to do, and I was doing it. I was telling Brian what he needed to hear, trying to help him quit hurting people and turn himself in. Somehow I was able to stay focused and do the next thing. I just knew God was doing his will right here. I really knew it.

  Suddenly, I had an idea. “I’ll be right back,” I told Brian.