River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  Afterward, there was always punch and cookies, a little bit of sweet wine. So it was late in the afternoon by the time Janey finally headed home on County O, passing Tom Mader’s memorial cross, its crisp plastic necklace of roses. Behind it, the Neumillers’ Holsteins were confined to a single icy pasture, and it seemed to Janey there was wistfulness in the way they stared past the electric fence at the unspoiled whiteness of fields. She remembered making snow angels with her brothers, how they’d visit friends in the country and spend an afternoon making a chain of angels stretching as far as the eye could see. It was a happy memory, and Janey gave thanks for this small gift. She always felt good after Faith meetings. Perhaps, when she got back to her parents’ house, she’d do some more work on her résumé. Tabby Smoot managed a Pizza Hut, and though she had no job openings at present, she’d encouraged Janey to apply in case something came available. There was also a job at the Badger State Mall, which Ruthie had seen in the Ambient Weekly. It had been a year since Janey had moved home from Green Bay, and all the Faith members said she’d feel better once she was earning money again, getting out of her parents’ house.

  The snow had let up, and now the sky cracked and bled, releasing its pale yolk of sun. Farther up the road, the fields were spotted with new ranch houses, crisscrossed by snowmobile tracks as savage as welts left by a whip. Something in the distance caught Janey’s eye—three snowmobiles making lazy buzzard circles not twenty yards from the edge of the highway. As she approached, she saw they were circling someone. The figure floundered in the deep snow as the snowmobiles went round and round. At times, they cut so close that he disappeared in a powdery plume—she could tell it was a boy; they were all boys—but when the snow settled, Janey saw he was still there.

  She slowed reluctantly. All she wanted to do was keep on driving until she reached her parents’ house, go up to her room, turn on the little typewriter that Mary and Tabby had loaned her. Perhaps she could finish the résumé today, have it ready to mail out on Monday—a small step, but more than she’d felt able to accomplish in months. The boy probably lived nearby anyway, in one of those ugly ranches that were going up left and right. Developers like Big Roly bought the old farmsteads for nothing, subdivided them into residential lots, and sold them to people nobody knew. Or maybe the boy’s own snowmobile had broken down somewhere, and the others were going to help him fix it. Or perhaps this was a spat between kids. In that case, what right did Janey have to meddle? All of these thoughts were going through her mind when, beneath her thick wool scarf, she felt the weight of her Faith cross tapping lightly against her collarbone. Once, she would have overlooked the significance of such a thing, but Ruthie had taught her to recognize God’s nudge, His whisper in her ear.

  She pulled up alongside the shoulder, as close as she could without getting stuck. It took a while before the boys noticed her; when they did, they darted a few yards farther into the field and waited, engines idling. The boy they’d been tormenting stared at the ground. She could see his shoulders moving, as if he were breathing hard, or crying. “You want a ride?” she called, stepping off the shoulder. The snow was deeper than she’d realized, and she promptly sank to her knees. One of the boys cut his engine, motioned the others to do the same. “C’mon,” he hollered. “We’ll take you there this time.”

  “Yeah, we promise,” another boy said.

  “Let me give you a ride,” Janey called again, and when the boy turned his face toward the sound of her voice, she saw the blood on his chin. Who knew what might have happened to him had she hardened her heart and driven on by? The boy hesitated briefly, looked back at the others. They all were younger than Janey first thought—twelve, maybe thirteen, tops. Too young to be playing on snowmobiles unsupervised. When the boy began trudging toward her, they started their engines again, hooted and jeered. Janey couldn’t hear what they were saying. It was probably just as well.

  “Where did you want to go?” Janey said, leading him back to her mother’s Buick. “I can take you there.” She wasn’t sure if she should drive him to the hospital or what. Maybe he needed stitches. Or a tetanus shot. As they pulled away, the boys rode off into the fields, shrank to dim specks, vanished like demons.

  “Are you lost?” Janey said. “Where do you live, near the Crossroads?”

  “Do you have anything to eat?” the boy asked.

  “No,” Janey said. It was an odd question, though reassuring. If he was hungry, he couldn’t be badly hurt.

  “Oh,” the boy said. “What about gum?”

  “Gum isn’t good for you. It rots your teeth.”

  “Not sugar-free gum.”

  “That’s bad for your kidneys,” Janey said—she remembered reading that somewhere. Or maybe her father had told her. At any rate, the boy certainly didn’t look like he needed something to eat. In fact, he carried quite a bit of extra weight. But thoughts like that were judgmental, wrong. She tried to think of what Ruthie would do in a situation like this. She tried to see the boy through Ruthie’s eyes, to open her mouth and let God move her tongue, which Ruthie said was just a matter of having faith that all the right words would be there.

  “What’s your name?” she said. “What were you doing in the field?” But the boy simply repeated that he was hungry, using his coat sleeve to wipe at his chin. Janey’s father was a retired GP. Perhaps the best thing was to take him home, let Dad check him out.

  “I guess I could take you to my house,” she said. “You could have a sandwich or something.”

  “What kind of sandwich?” the boy asked.

  “Tell me your name,” Janey said, “and I’ll tell you what kind of sandwich.”

  The boy considered this seriously. He shivered, and Janey turned up the heater, aimed the vents at his face. What kind of parents let a child this age go out without a scarf or a proper pair of mittens? And instead of a hat, all the boy had was the hood of his coat. No wonder he was freezing. It struck Janey, as it often did, how unfair it was that such people could have children and she could not. Three miscarriages, then eight years of ovulation charts, hormone injections, mood swings and bleeding, and, finally, the loss of bleeding altogether. She and Harper looked into adoption, but it was too expensive; besides, the wait would have been years. “I’m sorry,” Harp had finally said. “All I’ve ever wanted was a family of my own.” And though Janey’s friends had all sided with her, in her heart she knew she’d have done the same thing.

  “My name,” the boy said, startling Janey from her thoughts, “is Shawn.”

  “Well, Shawn,” Janey said, “we have bologna, or peanut butter, or cold meat loaf with ketchup.”

  “Meat loaf,” the boy said, “but I don’t want any ketchup on it.”

  “OK,” Janey said, slowing for her turn onto the D road. Her parents’ house was behind the Solomon strip on the Saw Whet Road, in one of the few original neighborhoods that remained in Solomon. Janey had grown up with a best friend who lived next door, and each of them had dated the boy across the street, Danny Hope, all elbows and shins. Tonight was the night of the neighborhood block party Danny’s parents hosted each year. It was always held in the dead of winter, and in recent years it had gotten pretty wild. Men wore their wives’ sundresses, summer gowns, and bikinis; women wore their husbands’ short-sleeve bowling shirts, neckties and boxers and skimpy tees. There were summery foods and tropical drinks; the Hopes turned up the heat and set out fans and buckets of ice. The Ambient Weekly took pictures. At midnight, members of the Polar Bear Club stripped as naked as they dared, rushed out of the house, and rolled in the snow until Chief Pranke arrived to hustle them back inside. Both Mum and Daddy had been trying to get Janey to go to the Hopes’ party, especially now that Danny, a successful chiropractor, had divorced his wife and come back home from Houston to think things over.

  “You don’t even have to dress up,” Daddy had said at lunch. “You can be the chaperone.”

  “And once you see the dress Daddy’s going to wear, you’ll k
now he’s going to need a chaperone,” Mum said, and she waggled a scolding finger at Daddy until he kissed it, kissed it again. They were worse than newlyweds. They took classes in ballroom dancing at the community center. They were planning a Carnival cruise. Nights, they watched TV on the couch, cuddled up under the afghan like teenagers. If Janey came downstairs, they’d sit up quick and make room, Mum patting the space between them. “Come join the old folks,” she’d say. Wheel of Fortune was their favorite show. They’d yell at the contestants, urge them to spin, buy another vowel, while Janey slumped deeper into the cushions, feeling like an intruder. Her brothers had gone into insurance: Lee had an Allstate office in Minneapolis; Matt had one in Saint Paul. They came home with their wives and children twice a year.

  Janey was the only one who hadn’t made good. After ten years of marriage, she was right back where she’d started: single, childless, dependent on her parents. At first, she’d seen doctor friends of Daddy’s, who prescribed hormones to start her monthly bleeding, pills to cure her sorrow. But her sorrow deepened, her bleeding still did not return, and some days she wept for hours on end. Things might have gone on this way if Mum hadn’t thought of the Circle of Faith. Mum had attended meetings herself before Daddy retired and they’d fallen in love again. Janey would never forget the day that Ruthie came to the house like an old-fashioned doctor, her black satchel filled with gifts: a journal for Janey to record positive thoughts, a small china angel that was also a nightlight, three white candles she asked Janey to light whenever she felt the dark thoughts closing in.

  “What’s the matter?” the boy asked. They were parked in the driveway, but Janey didn’t remember pulling up to the house. When the dark thoughts came, she’d lose time that way—not a lot, not like that TV girl with all the personalities. Just a blip. She’d drive to a Faith meeting, and when she arrived, she’d realize she couldn’t remember a thing she’d seen along the way. Or she’d be doing something like folding laundry, and then it would all be folded.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Janey said. “This is where I live.”

  She led him through the garage and brought him through the back door into the sudden warmth of the house. Mum was vacuuming; the cord stretched down the hall and disappeared into the living room. She’d used the same Hoover for twenty-five years, and it sounded as if she was driving a tractor back and forth.

  “Hello?” Janey shouted, and when Daddy called back, “Down here!” she led the boy downstairs into the basement den, where the noise was absorbed into the wall-to-wall carpet. The den was spanking new, one of Daddy’s retirement projects.

  “A visitor!” Daddy said, clearly delighted. He was busy combing Rusty. Rusty woofed once when he saw the boy, but he was even-tempered and never barked at anyone for long.

  “I found him along County O,” Janey said. “His name is Shawn, but that’s all he’ll tell me.”

  “What did you do to your face there, pal?” Daddy said, as if Janey brought stray children home every day. He let go of Rusty, who wagged his tail so hard it made his whole backside swing to and fro.

  The boy shrugged. “Got beat up.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Daddy said. He took the boy’s face in his hands, tipped his chin up to the light. “By who?”

  “Just some kids,” the boy said. When Daddy released his face, he let Rusty lick his hands. “This is a very nice house.”

  “Thank you,” Daddy said, pleased. “Tell you what. Why don’t you tell me your dad’s name, and we’ll just call him up and have him give those kids a talking to.”

  “Can I have something to eat?” the boy replied.

  Daddy looked a little surprised. “Sure, why not?” he said, and he turned to Janey. “Wipe him down with Merthiolate and then bring him up to the kitchen. I’ll see if Mum knows where he belongs.” He headed for the stairs, Rusty dancing happily underfoot. Kitchen was one of the words he knew, like walk and treat and Rusty. Janey often thought it would be wonderful to be a dog like Rusty, with so few words to be responsible for, all of them pleasant and promising.

  She led the boy into the utility bathroom, gave him a washcloth from the linen closet, then opened the medicine chest, where Mum kept first-aid supplies and a collection of tiny wrapped hotel soaps. Janey’s antidepressants and hormone tablets were on the bottom shelf, in full deliberate view, so Mum and Daddy wouldn’t suspect she’d stopped taking them. Every night, she’d flush another batch down the toilet. Only God had the power to heal, and Janey was determined to put her faith in Him. Still, she couldn’t help but wish for a sign, some small thing that would let her know that He was watching. Ruthie said God spoke to people nowadays as often as He had during Bible times—it was just that the modern mind wasn’t trained to understand. Janey wondered if she’d recognize a sign if it came. Upstairs, the sound of the vacuum cleaner stopped, and suddenly all the little sounds around her seemed too loud: the closing of the cabinet, the scuff of her feet on the tile floor, the boy’s thick breathing as he lathered his face and hands.

  “What were you doing with those boys?” Janey said. “Where were they taking you? You can tell me. You don’t have to be afraid.”

  She handed him a towel, and he patted his face dry. His chin was still a little puffy, but with the blood washed away, it didn’t look too bad. There was only one small cut, more of a scratch really, under his mouth.

  “I don’t want any of that stuff on me,” he said, eyeing the Merthiolate.

  “Just on the cut,” she said. “To keep it from getting infected.”

  “It won’t get infected,” he said.

  “It might,” Janey said.

  “No, it won’t,” the boy said. “God will make it heal. God can do anything if you believe He can.”

  His words took Janey by surprise. A strange thing happened: She felt the cross at her throat begin to move, tap-tapping like a heartbeat. She grabbed for it—dropped it! It was hot! Then the bathroom door swung open, clipping her hip. “Knock-knock,” Mum said, which was what she always said whenever she came into a room. She wore one of Daddy’s old baby-blue seersucker suits, and she’d darkened the space between her eyebrows, so it looked as if one long eyebrow stretched across her forehead. Her tie was fat and black, with the word DANGEROUS spelled down the front in red letters. “Daddy’s upstairs doing his nails. Oh, goodness,” she said, noticing the boy’s wide eyes, “you must think I’ve escaped from the loony bin! It’s just that I’m on my way to a party where everyone dresses silly. Do I look silly?”

  The boy nodded hesitantly. Mum laughed, delighted. “There’s an honest answer,” she said. “I’m Kathryn. And you’re Shawn?”

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “Don’t be afraid, love. Where do you live?” She turned to Janey. “Do we know anything about him?”

  “He believes in the power of God,” Janey said, and when Mum gave her a funny look, she wished she hadn’t said anything. At lunch, when Janey had told Mum for the hundredth time that, no, she didn’t want to go to the Hopes’ party, Mum said she was concerned that Janey was getting too religious, that she spent too much time with Faith members and not enough with other people. Back in Mum’s day, they didn’t meet at the Fair Mile Crossroads—they just sat around in Ruthie’s living room, played cards, and talked, and maybe they each had a splash of kümmel in a shot glass. “Of course, we prayed,” Mum said. “And a few times we went on retreat. But there wasn’t all this talk about angels and goodness and—I don’t know—miracles.”

  “You and Daddy are a miracle,” Janey said, “compared to how you used to be.”

  Daddy said agreeably, “So we are. So we are.”

  “And there certainly weren’t any vows of silence,” Mum continued, as if she hadn’t heard. “What’s so secret that you can’t tell your own parents what you pray for?”

  “Nothing,” Janey said, trying not to sound irritable. “It’s just that we pray for personal things sometimes. Like, if somebody has a problem, they bring it to a meeting and we
talk about it and then we pray about it. Like, when it’s time to pray for me”—Janey paused; it was OK to talk about your own requests—“we pray that someday I’ll meet somebody again and have a family.” She had to whisper to keep from crying.

  “But, sweetheart,” Mum said, her eyes filling with sympathetic tears, “how can God answer a prayer like that if you stay hidden away in the house?”

  “Aw, she’ll venture out again when she’s ready.” Daddy was trying to smooth things over; now he changed the subject. “Boy, would I love to be a fly on the wall during one of those meetings!” he said, nudging Janey’s shoulder in a playful way. “Bet I’d learn a thing or two.” Men were always saying things like that; it was just because they weren’t invited. They thought that meant you were talking about sex. Or else that you were talking about them.

  Now Mum took the boy by the hand. “I hear you’ve been asking for a snack,” she said, and Janey followed them up the stairs. Mum had been cleaning since early this morning, and everything smelled of lemons. The curtains were freshly ironed, and the floors were waxed. She’d even raked the old shag rug in the living room. Janey hadn’t offered to do anything, because no matter how carefully she washed or waxed or dusted, Mum would do it all over again. She said she couldn’t help herself. “It’s just that I have my routine,” she said. “Relax, Pumpkin. Think of yourself as our special guest.”

  Daddy was in the kitchen. He’d changed into a peach muumuu splashed with yellow flowers. He had flip-flops on his feet. Rhinestone clip-ons hung from his earlobes. “What do you think?” he said, and he turned in a lavish circle. Rusty circled with him, toenails click-clicking on the linoleum.

  “Darling,” Mum said. “You’ll be the belle of the ball.”

  The boy giggled.

  They kissed, and in that casual gesture Janey saw everything her own life lacked. Harper had already remarried, and now he was the father of a baby girl. Month after month, when her bleeding did not come, she prayed the same prayer: Only say the word, Lord, and I shall be healed. Sometimes she watched Praise the Lord! on TV, listening closely to the testimonies of everyday people who’d witnessed the supernatural. Christ had appeared to one man in the form of a very young boy; another man had been in a plane crash and heard God’s voice saying he would be OK. Even people in Ambient had experienced things that could not be explained. There was a family who saw the ghost of a girl in their living room every New Year’s Eve. At the Faith house one time, as they’d prayed for Shelley Beuchel, a blue light had descended from the ceiling, slid down the walls and across the floor and up her body, where it rested on her forehead like a kiss.