Angel Landing

by Alice Hoffman

  As the years went by, Ada Finn did not know that it was no longer her husband’s footsteps she heard in the hall, but her son’s. For years, Michael Finn had been illegally driving the family car. He was fourteen the first time he was dragged along to a bar. He sat at a rear table drinking Cokes until his father became too drunk to drive. Danny Finn threw the car keys over to his son that night. “Drive,” he said. And Michael Finn did just that, although it took some time before he could shift the car into first gear. And from that time on, when Michael Finn awoke in the night to see that the car was not in the driveway, he got dressed, walked downtown to the Modern Times, and drove his father home. It was expected of the boy, it had become a habit, and in part he enjoyed it, because he was able to drive when no other boy he knew could even tell the brake pedal from the clutch. It was on these drives that Michael Finn first heard about the girl in the hospital. Danny Finn, lying in the back as Michael drove, would mutter about the girl, calling out to her, begging for her forgiveness, for her love.

  For quite a long time Michael Finn thought that the girl had existed nowhere other than in his father’s imagination; she seemed to be nameless and faceless, more like a spirit than anything else. But one night the boy discovered just how real that girl in the hospital was, just how much she meant to Danny Finn. When Michael arrived at the Modern Times, he found Danny Finn drunker than he had ever seen him before; several men had to lift Danny into the back seat of the car. It was winter, the roads were slick, and Michael drove slowly, hoping with each block that no policeman would stop him and demand the license he didn’t have. From the back seat came a low moaning sound; Michael hoped that his father would not be sick; if he blacked out he’d be far too heavy for Michael to carry alone. When they turned onto Route 18, down by the harbor, Danny Finn cried out in pain. “There she is,” Danny Finn cried. “I can see her face; she’s like a Goddamn saint. Pull over.”

  Michael Finn kept driving, though he kept a careful eye on the rearview mirror. He was certain his father would fall asleep, but instead Danny Finn managed to sit up in the back seat.

  “I said pull over,” Danny Finn cried. He took hold of Michael Finn’s shoulder and squeezed it so hard that Finn nearly lost control of the car. Finally, Michael pulled over, into the deserted parking lot of the old Fishers Cove Ferry. Danny Finn threw open the back door; he ran from the car as if chased by spirits. Michael Finn followed his father, who crouched close to the earth, a tired old wolf.

  “I know her,” Danny Finn said gravely. Saliva ran down his lips and his eyes were wide with liquor and memory.

  “The girl in the hospital?” Michael Finn asked.

  “I should have seen it before,” Danny Finn cried. He looked up at his son, shivering in only a denim jacket. “I should have known who she was,” Danny Finn went on. “My mother,” he said, amazed and terrified. “It was a visitation, that’s what it was,” he cried. “A ghost.”

  The girl who had sat in the patients’ lounge so long ago had probably died a quiet, bitter death not long after Danny Finn checked out of the hospital; she had surely never given the man in the lounge a second thought. But she had haunted Danny Finn for so long that he could not spend a night without her; she had become the most important person in his life.

  “It was her,” Danny Finn whispered. He held his hands over his face; tears dripped through his fingers. “My God. My God. It was her,” Danny Finn shrieked.

  Michael Finn crouched down next to his father; he bit his lip to keep his teeth from chattering; he wondered what he was supposed to do. Perhaps he was supposed to throw his arms around his father, perhaps he was supposed to carry Danny Finn back to the car and hold him until his father’s outburst subsided. But after a lifetime of beatings and distrust, Michael Finn did none of the things he was supposed to do, none of the things he wished he could have done. Instead, he rocked back and forth on his heels. The harbor they faced was a phosphorescent green. He was so close to his father that he could smell the bourbon, he could feel his father’s hot breath each time Danny Finn cried out loud, each time Danny remembered the man he used to be.

  Michael Finn would have liked to run; he would have liked to kick up his heels and run far away from Danny Finn and his ghosts, but the boy couldn’t take his eyes off his father, he couldn’t see anything but the man he had despised for so long, weeping in an empty parking lot. Before Michael Finn knew it, before he had time to stop himself, he was weeping alongside his father. Michael Finn never knew if his father noticed his tears; he doubted if Danny Finn could have noticed anything but his own pain that night. Michael’s tears were brief, he did not weep for long, still he had shocked himself. When his eyes were dry, Michael breathed deeply as he waited for his father to calm down. After a while, Daniel Finn did stop weeping; he lay down, exhausted and shaking.

  Michael Finn helped his father back to the car. Danny Finn nodded off to sleep, and Michael Finn drove home slowly, all the time trying to forget all that he had seen and heard. When they reached the house, and Michael had pulled the car into the driveway, Danny Finn awoke suddenly; he looked at his son as if the boy was no one he knew.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “We’re home,” Michael said as he turned off the engine and the headlights. “I’m parking the car,” he explained.

  “All right then.” Danny Finn nodded. “That’s okay.”

  When they were inside the house and had closed the door behind them, Michael Finn felt a hand on his shoulder as he began to walk down the hall to his bedroom.

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” Danny Finn told him.

  “Sure,” Michael Finn said evenly, but the night had been too much for him; his voice was hoarse, and he wanted to escape to his room, where he would close the door and forget all that had happened in the deserted parking lot.

  “Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be a father,” Danny Finn went on. “I should have been a Navy man.” Then he looked over at his son, and for a minute it seemed as if he wasn’t drunk at all, as if he’d never been drunk. “Maybe you wish that you had someone else for a father,” he said.

  Michael Finn wasn’t a liar, but he didn’t have the courage to tell the truth. Perhaps he thought a time like this would come again, a time when his father once more asked for forgiveness and love, when the two men would talk in the hallway while Ada Finn tossed and dreamed behind the bedroom door. But such a time would never come again, the two men would grow farther and farther apart, so far that when Danny Finn sent Michael off to the Stockley School, father and son really believed they were strangers. But that night when he might have said something, Michael Finn didn’t answer and he lost the one chance he would ever have to talk to his father.

  “Hell, maybe you would have liked a father who had money,” Danny continued. “Somebody who didn’t scream so much. But shit, the way I scream is nothing compared to my father. And if you think I leave my mark when I smack you, just remember that my father was six-foot-four and when he walloped you you didn’t forget it. “No,” Danny Finn shook his head, “you never forgot it.”

  Something was happening to Michael Finn—his throat was closing up, his lungs were heavy and full, he was afraid that when he breathed he might squeak, he might burst right open.

  “My father,” Danny Finn whispered, “was a real bastard. Forget everything I ever told you about him; he was a bastard and he killed my mother. That’s right, he killed her with too much work and no love. That can kill a person.” Danny Finn nodded.

  “I have to go to school tomorrow,” Michael Finn found himself saying. “I’ve got to get up early in the morning.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t meant to be a father either,” Danny Finn said. “Maybe he did the best he could.”

  “Maybe,” Michael Finn said noncommittally.

  “Maybe I did, too,” Danny Finn said. He looked his son straight in the eye. “Think that could be a possibility?”

  “Could be,” Michael Finn said without convictio
n.

  Danny Finn looked quickly away. “You better go to bed,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing up so late. You’ve got school tomorrow, and don’t you forget it.”

  Michael Finn went to his room and shut the door. He tried to sleep, but each time he closed his eyes he saw Danny Finn’s face, he saw his father’s tears, he heard his father’s choked pleadings. Michael Finn had always felt that he and his father would never know each other, they would never talk or be close; but now he felt a terrible sadness deep inside, one which threatened to explode. When he finally did fall asleep, Michael Finn dreamed that he was not a son, but a father. He and his son walked side by side across the snow; they followed a path on the other side of the harbor where the land was still wild with brambles and roots, and sea gulls nested in huge pines. Michael Finn and his son walked together, and they knew each other better with every step they took, as if their spirits floated above their bodies and conversed freely with words that were open and true. When Finn awoke he felt a terrible loss; he was as sad waking from his dream and having to face the day as he would have been had his dream son slipped through a hole in the frozen harbor, had the child’s hands clutched the ice and finally disappeared before Michael Finn could do a thing to rescue him.

  The next morning Michael went into the kitchen warily; he was afraid that he might no longer be able to tell reality from dreams, he was uncertain about the night, he now doubted that he had ever seen his father weep in the parking lot. And from Danny Finn’s behavior that morning at breakfast, where he gulped a cup of black coffee and complained of a hangover, no one would have guessed that anything had happened between the two just hours before. In fact, the tears cried in the parking lot and the explanation Danny Finn had offered for all the years of pain were never mentioned again. Danny Finn’s plea for forgiveness was wiped away with years of anger and abuse, until Michael Finn himself nearly forgot the confidences in the hallway with his father late one winter’s night.

  Even though Danny Finn had despised his father for forcing him to join the union, he did the same with his son as soon as the boy turned eighteen; perhaps because he did not know what else to do, perhaps because Danny Finn had been so terrified of his own father that he still trembled when he saw men over six-foot-three, that he was afraid to direct his son in a path that might displease his long-dead father. Everything Danny did he did for his father’s approval, and in his father’s image. And so he beat his son as he had been beaten, and when the boy broke the law, Danny Finn saw to it that the boy was sent away to the Stockley School, for the boy’s own good or because he had no idea what else to do, or because he was afraid of his own father’s ghost. Sometimes when he watched his son cringe as he beat him, or when he watched Michael driven away by a probation officer to the Stockley School, Danny Finn was also a little afraid of the man he had become.

  “I will never be like him,” Danny Finn used to say to himself when he was young and his father was reaching for his leather strap. “Never. Never.”

  And now he had become so much like him, he walked so closely in John Finn’s footsteps that Danny Finn could no longer remember saying these words to himself. And though there were times when Danny still wanted his life to be different, times when he wanted to throw a suitcase into the back of his car and take off to California, those times passed. And when there were moments when he wanted to hold his wife close instead of pushing her away, those moments, too, passed. And it was easier than anyone would have thought to look across the dining-room table and not notice how much Michael looked the way Danny had looked as a child. Danny Finn had become so much like his father that he did not even notice the hatred in his own son’s eyes.

  Danny Finn conveniently forgot the night he showed himself to his son, he refused to think about his own terror. And as his father forgot, so, too, did Michael Finn. Forgetting was easy. In time, Michael’s memory of the two men kneeling in the parking lot, side by side but still too far away to touch, had totally faded; just as Danny Finn’s memory of the young girl became hazier and hazier with every bottle of bourbon, until the girl was less than a dream. As far as both men were concerned, that long-ago night had never happened; and after a while, Michael Finn could even drive past that empty parking lot in winter without wanting to weep out loud.

  FIVE

  IF HE HAD MORE FAITH IN himself, Michael Finn would have known that his father or grandfather would never have switched the valve at Angel Landing III. He alone had watched his past and the future he was always supposed to have rise up like a storm set loose. On the day of the explosion Finn had been fighting against the history which turned men into ghosts; he had been fighting it all his life.

  “Listen to me,” I said, “you won’t turn out the way they did.”

  “I know what’s waiting for me,” Finn said. “I know my life will be the same.”

  I was now afraid that I might take the place of the girl who had drifted from the patients’ lounge into Danny Finn’s heart.

  “Decisions can be made, lives can be altered,” I said.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” Finn went on. “You’re only involved with my case.”

  “It’s not your case I’m involved with, it’s you,” I blurted out.

  “You’ll get over it,” Finn shrugged.

  “I don’t want to get over it.”

  Finn gripped the arms of the rocking chair. I was hit with the slow embarrassment of a confession which brings no response.

  “Have you had dinner?” I asked when I couldn’t stand the tension between us any longer. “Is there something here I can fix?”

  Finn leaned forward in his chair. “You don’t expect me to take you seriously, do you?” he asked.

  “I could make scrambled eggs or spaghetti,” I said.

  “Do you know what it would mean to be mixed up with someone like me?” Finn asked.

  “We could try.”

  “No.”

  I wondered if Danny Finn had been lucky to forget all that he wanted and never could have, instead of looking right into the center of heartbreak and despair as Michael Finn did now.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m not going to try and talk you into anything.” I put on my coat then, even though I didn’t want to go.

  “I never asked you to care, did I?” Finn said.

  “No,” I agreed. “And if you want me to go, I will.”

  “And don’t care about me,” Finn called as I walked across the room.

  “It’s too late,” I said. “I already do.” But at the door I stopped. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about this?”

  “I just told you,” Finn said. “I never wanted this to happen, and you’d better stop wanting it, too.”

  “Then I’ll leave,” I said, but I didn’t open the door. “I’m going,” I said, though that was the last thing I wanted to do.

  Finn got up; but instead of running to me and holding me tight, he came to me slowly, a disinterested sleepwalker. “Thanks for stopping by,” he said formally, as if I had been a guest invited for drinks.

  “Will you think about what I’ve said?” I asked as Finn opened the door for me.

  “Natalie,” Finn said, “I’ve already told you. No.”

  By the time I ran down the stairs, Finn had probably returned to his rocking chair, and all the way home I could hear the slow, unfeeling creak of that chair. It mattered very little whether Finn asked me to leave because he didn’t care or because caring was simply too dangerous—he had turned me down, and in the next few days I tried as best I could to deny everything I felt for him as well. Because of that I slept dreamlessly, I felt more separated from everyone else than ever before. But I wasn’t angry with Finn for having begun it by asking me to meet him in the deserted high-school field, nor was I furious with the purple smoke which had so suddenly touched my life. In time I managed to feel nothing more than numb; I walked through each day, I met with clients, had dinner with Minnie; even Lark
no longer annoyed me, and one day I found myself agreeing to meet her for lunch at Ruby’s Café.

  After we had ordered hamburgers, I gazed at the tabletop and tried to think of nothing but clean, empty space.

  “What’s wrong with you lately?” Lark asked.

  “Not a thing,” I said quickly.

  “I’ll bet. Well, whatever it is, I’m glad you met me for lunch. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for days.”

  “Talk,” I said.

  Lark waited until the platters of food were brought to us and then she leaned forward and said, “It’s about him. The bomber. Michael Finn.”

  That man who exposed every sorrow, each wound with a shiver, a brief rush of blood; Michael Finn who could look right through you? That bomber, that man? “The bomber?” I said casually as I reached for the salt.

  “I want to know about him,” Lark said.

  “You know I can’t discuss his case.”

  “I’ve already looked through his file,” Lark announced.

  “That was pretty unethical.”

  “I have to know about him,” Lark said.

  I sighed and listed some basic details: where he was born, where he now lived. Finally, Lark threw up her hands.

  “I want to know what the core of his problem is.”

  “The core?” I said. “You’re looking too deeply. He made a mistake, now he may go to jail, that’s all there is to it.”