A Better Angel

by Chris Adrian

  Back in bed, I looked out my window at the storm, which was still gaining strength. It would be almost a blizzard by morning. School would be canceled. I lay watching the snow that I knew was covering our child-sized footprints, covering Santa Travis’s body. I thought of him dying, the coldness of the snow penetrating in stages through his skin and his muscle and his bone, a light veil falling over his sight like somebody was wrapping his head in layer after layer of sweet-smelling toilet paper, like Colm and I used to do when we played “I am the mummy’s bride,” or “the plastic surgeon just gave me a new face.” I imagined Colm, waiting patiently by the door and suffering the snow to blow through to where he was suffering it to collect on him, or in him, waiting and waiting, peering at the slowly approaching figure.

  Sheriff Travis did not die. A concerned citizen, worried because of the storm, had called his house. When he didn’t answer, people went looking for him. They found him where we left him. He had not moved an inch, but he was alive. At the hospital my father took him to surgery to repair his lacerated kidney and fret over his hemisected spinal cord.

  When he woke up he said he remembered everything. Despite the darkness of the night, and the snow, he gave fairly detailed descriptions of his two attackers. Two large black men had done it, he said, one holding him while the other stabbed him and called him “Honky Santa.” Police visited the community just outside the Severna Forest gates, and two men were arrested when Travis identified them in a lineup. I saw them in the paper.

  Molly was furious that Travis hadn’t died. I had never seen her so angry as when she stood in my room, kicking my bed so hard that the wall shook and the “First Mate” sign fell down with a clunk.

  “Why?” she said in a loud voice. “Why couldn’t he have died? I needed him to die.” I thought about her hungry blue stone while she kicked my bed some more, until my father came to the door and said, “Everything okay in here?”

  “Yes sir,” she said. “We were just playing kick the bed.”

  “Well, please don’t.”

  “Yes sir,” she said, blushing. I looked at the sunlight on the carpet and wanted my father to shut up and go away. Don’t make her angry, I was thinking. I didn’t want her to get him.

  When he was gone, she said, “It’s just not fair.”

  I thought it would be many more months before she returned for me at night. I thought we would lie low, but she came back soon, after only two weeks had passed, at the beginning of the second week of January. She had been gone, down to Florida with her grandparents over break, but she came for me the first night she was back. While she was in Florida, bitter cold had descended over the Atlantic coast from New York to Richmond. The river and even parts of the Chesapeake were frozen over.

  When we went down the ravine to Beach Road, I thought for sure we were going to Travis’s house, to finish him off. But when she got to the road she crossed it and stepped over the riverbank, onto the ice. She turned back to me. “Come on,” she said and went sliding over the ice in her rubber boots. She went past the pier and the boat slips, out into the open water. Her voice came drifting back to me. “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” I hurried after the place where I thought her voice was coming from, but I never caught up with her—perhaps she was hiding from me. It was a clear but moonless night, and she was wearing a dark coat and a dark hat. I stopped after a while and wrapped my arms around myself. I was cold because my parents were both home and I did not dare go down for my coat. Instead I had worn two sweaters, but they weren’t enough to keep me warm. I knelt on the ice and looked down at it, trying to catch Colm’s image. I heard her boots sliding over the ice out in the dark, and I thought about a story people told about the ghost of a girl who drowned skating across the river to Westport, to see her boyfriend. On nights like this you were supposed to be able to see her, a gliding white figure. If you saw her face it meant you would die one day by water. I looked downriver, searching either for the ghost or Molly, but seeing only the lights of the bridges down past Annapolis. There was a flash, and for a moment I thought it was the winter equivalent of heat lightning until I heard the Polaroid whirring and realized she had just taken my picture.

  She did it again, and again, from different sides. I suppose she was trying to upset me, or make me afraid. Maybe she thought I would run and slip on the ice. I just knelt there, and then I lay down on my back and looked up at the stars. My father had shown me the constellation of Gemini. It was the only one I ever looked for, but now I didn’t see it. Molly came sliding up to me. She stood behind my head, and I could not see her, though I could see her panting breath.

  I thought she would speak, then. In my mind I had heard her speak this speech—I had played it out many times: “I need you,” she would say. “For my parents. They’re stuck in here and I must let them out. You don’t mind, do you?” Of course I didn’t. I would have told her so, if I could have. I had been expecting her to say this ever since she had stabbed the horse, because I didn’t know what animal she could turn to after that, besides me. That night Colm had said to me, “So very soon now!” But it was not so soon, and I waited.

  She didn’t say anything, though. She only knelt near me and put a hand on my belly. She wasn’t smiling, just breathing hard. The camera hung around her neck and the dagger was in her hand. She raised my sweaters and my pajama top so I could feel the cold against my skin and the goose bumps it raised. She put the tip of the dagger against my belly and when she looked at me I was so tempted to speak a word.

  “Goodbye,” she said, and slipped it in with as much gentleness as I suppose could possibly have been managed. I heard my brother’s voice ring in my head. He, too, spoke one word: “Now!” For just a moment, when I felt it enter me, I wanted it, and I was full of joy, but not for long. A cresting scream rose in me and broke out of my mouth. It was the loudest sound I had ever heard, louder than Travis’s scream, louder than my father’s scream, louder than any of the dogs or cats or rabbits. It flew over the ice in every direction and assaulted people in their homes. I saw windows lighting up in the hills above the river as I scrambled to my feet, still screaming. Molly had fallen back, her face caught in a perfect expression of astonishment. I turned and ran from her, not looking back to see if she was chasing me, though I knew she was. I ran for my life, sliding on the ice, expecting at any moment to feel her bodkin in my back. I cried out again when I climbed over the seawall and ran across the road, because of the pain as I lifted myself. As I clambered up the ravine, I could hear her behind me. At the spruce that led to my bedroom she caught up with me, stabbing my dangling calf, so I fell. I kicked at her when she came again, getting her knee, but she didn’t cry out. I held my hands out before me and she stabbed them. With a bloody fist I caught her in the jaw and knocked her down, and I got up the tree and into my room, too afraid to take the time to close the window. I rushed through my door and down the stairs into my parents’ bedroom, where I slammed the door behind me and woke them with my hysterical screaming. My mother turned on the light. Despite my long silence the words came smoothly, up from my leaking belly, sliding like mercury through my throat and bursting in the bright air of their room.

  “I want to live!” I told them, though my heart broke as I said it, because as my mother turned on her light, Colm’s image appeared in the floor-length mirror that stood on the opposite side of the bed. He was bloody, like me, wounded, I knew, by my cowardice and betrayal. I saw him looking at me while my parents jumped out of bed and rushed to me, with their arms out, their faces white with horror at the sight of their bloody child. I cried great heaving, house-shaking sobs, not because I was bleeding from painful wounds, or because my parents were crying, or because I knew Molly was on her way back to the river, where she would turn her knife on herself and at last sacrifice a human life to her soul-eating dagger, which somehow I knew would happen, as it did. I didn’t cry like that because I felt guilty over the animals and people, now that I knew just how much a knife hurt, though
I did feel guilty. And I wasn’t crying at my impending betrayal of Molly Pitcher, though I knew I would say I had no part in any of it. I cried because I saw Colm shake his head, then turn his back on me and walk away, receding into an image that became more and more my own until it was mine completely. I knew it would speak to me only with my own voice, and look at me with my own eyes, and I knew that I would never see my brother again.

  THE VISION

  OF PETER DAMIEN

  Peter had never been sick a day in his life. When all seven of his brothers lay in bed with the chicken pox (lined up by height and by severity of the rash, Tercin, shortest and most mildly afflicted, on one end and Thomas, tallest and oldest and most ill, on the other), Peter waited on them with their sisters, untouched even though Tercin spit on him every time he came near enough to hit. When Amy brought home the pearly botch and Kathryn and Louise and Anne got the oak gall on their knees, he was unaffected, and even when the whole family got the yellow flux he was the only one of them not jaundiced in his eyes and skin, though he’d snuck a second helping of Mr. Hollin’s tainted bluefish. Lonely in his perfect health, Peter had rubbed his skin with hickory root, but his mother discovered the ruse. She beat him with the stick called Truth and exiled him to the barn for a week, because the only thing worse than telling a lie was to become one.

  So when he woke that Lammas Eve, shivering despite the August heat and yet soaked with sweat, he did not understand what was happening to him. He wondered if Tercin had thrown a bucket of springwater on him, but his only younger brother was sound asleep on the other side of their room, uttering the sobbing sighs he always made when he dreamed, and anyway it would be more like Tercin to soak him with horse piss. He lay quite still for a few minutes, watching the moon rise in his window. The room he shared with his brother had been the last to be glassed, and the window was only fifteen days old. He knew it was a waning gibbous moon, though you couldn’t tell it by its shape—the ripples in the glass twisted it into a shape as soft and irregular as a round of the soft cheese Mrs. Clark made from her goats’ milk. The bubbles in the glass caught the light in such a way that they startled him—it was his own birthday glass and he had cleaned and admired it incessantly for the past two weeks, and yet now it was more beautiful than ever, and he felt all of a sudden a tremendous sympathy with those bubbles. He felt suspended in the thick transparent air, floaty and full of moonlight. So this is a fever, he said to himself, realizing the feeling his brothers and sisters had described, and he noticed a little ache in his bones that faded as quickly as it came. He turned over in his dampening bed and fell back asleep.

  “I was sick last night,” he told his mother at breakfast the next day, careful to keep even the smallest measure of pride from his voice. Though he had grown to almost twice her size she wouldn’t hesitate to use the stick called Humility (and it was the second-largest of the seven that stood in a barrel on the back porch) on him if she thought his better parts would profit by it.

  “A dream of sickness?”

  “No, I had a fever and an aching in my bones. Now it’s gone.”

  “A strange dream,” she said. “Fevers don’t come and go so quick. Lucky for us dreams of sickness never come true in the summer.” Still, she looked over her family at the table, everyone, even picky Tercin, eating heartily of the oatmeal and honey and eggs, and not a runny nose or a dull eye among them, and she made a sign that Peter recognized as a ward against bad fortune. She scraped the edge of her finger down her nose. To anyone who didn’t know her well it would have looked like she was merely scratching.

  He almost believed her—after all, she was always right about everything, whether the coming weather or a mathematics problem or the right name for a tune—but he couldn’t put away the memory of illness like he could put away the memory of a dream. “I have been sick,” he declared to the radishes as he worked that morning in the salad garden. Yet after squatting for an hour along the rows of lettuce there wasn’t a trace of the ache in his bones, and by the time he had to leave for school he had nearly forgotten the whole thing, distracted by his work and by the usual noises of the farm. His father was down at the forge, making nails; he could hear his mother and Elizabeth washing flax; he could hear Tercin quietly cursing where he sat near the house with Caryn and Genevieve, making rick vanes. Even Tercin’s cursing seemed a part of the lovely day. There is nothing wrong, Peter thought to himself, because just the previous week Reverend Wallop had scolded them all for not properly appreciating the absence of affliction.

  But later that morning in school he got the curious, suspended feeling back. Sara Cooper was reciting a poem in front of the class, and Peter had just noticed that Reuben Claflin had appeared at the window to watch. Reuben was Tercin’s usual partner in truancy, but Peter’s brother was nowhere to be seen. He thought Reuben’s habit of daring the window—placing himself just out of Mrs. Clark’s view—was stupid. “If you’re going to skip, skip,” he said. “There’s relaxing to be done.”

  Reuben was ugly—it was something that the whole town agreed on. In fact, his ugliness was the standard by which the ugliness of other boys was measured, just as Tercin’s was the true standard of naughtiness against which the others’ behavior was measured and judged. “Why, that tinker was at least half as ugly as Reuben Claflin!” Peter’s mother had said just the previous Saturday of a man who had come selling in town. And if a child did something egregiously bad, then any parent might tell him, “You are a veritable Tercin Damien today!” And that was how Peter knew the fever was back—he felt cold, not hot, and suddenly Reuben’s face was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The pits and scars and the eyes set as close together as a vole’s added up to something so lovely he thought the pain in his chest was on account of it.

  He had the floating feeling again, but this time it was like something in him as essential as his soul was flying out to cleave to the hideous perfection of the boy in the window. Sara was just starting her recitation:

  The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;

  It rains, and the wind is never weary;

  The vine still clings to the moldering wall,

  But at every gust the dead leaves fall.

  And the day is dark, dark, dark.

  Peter stood up, knocking his desk over. He hadn’t wanted to stand up, or knock over his desk, or throw his arms out in front of him, or speak, but he said a word—it sounded a little like “Reuben!” though he wasn’t trying to say “Reuben.” It was more of a moan, the way a tongueless idiot would pronounce the name. It occurred to him to be acutely embarrassed, and to be afraid—nothing like this had ever happened to his brothers or his sisters when they had a fever. Mrs. Clark was striding toward him, very purposefully but ever so slowly, and every face in the class was turned toward him, every eye curious and many of the lips already turned in hard mocking smiles. He was suddenly very aware of the breeze blowing slowly through the window. Mrs. Clark’s feet were thunderous on the wooden floor of the classroom, but there was no other sound, until with a pop like a coal jumping in the fire a seam appeared across his vision, across the walls of the classroom and across the blackboard and across Sara’s arms and chest and hands. No matter how he turned his head it was there, even transecting Reuben’s still-beautiful face. Another endless moment and the seam burst, and the day unraveled into another day. Peter stood utterly still and calm as the vision beneath rushed over him. Then he was only his sight—he had no hands or feet or any body at all. The wind was gone, and the noise of Mrs. Clark walking and the other students laughing, and the pressure of the breeze. He beheld an empty blue sky, and then a woman falling through it.

  He thought at first that she was a man, because she was dressed in a black jacket and pants, but then he saw the bones in her face and the length and richness of the hair that coiled around her head as she twisted in the air. She fell toward him, then caught him in her descent—though she never touched him, she tangled him up in her fall. He felt the lurch
in his stomach, and the sting of the wind against his skin, and now he was close enough to see how frightened she was, and to understand that she was screaming, though he could not hear her. They spun together in the air—he caught a glimpse of a crowd standing in the middle of a stone causeway. They twisted again and he saw the two silver towers burning against the lovely blue sky.

  Then he was in the classroom again, flat on his back on the floor. Mrs. Clark was kneeling next to him, her hand steadying a ruler stuck in his mouth. Sara was staring down at him, along with the rest of the class.

  “Think of green fields!” Mrs. Clark said to him, speaking loud and slow. “Calm blue seas! Relaxing cloudless skies!” She explained to him—and to all the class, because not a sparrow dropped dead through her window or lightning struck the fields outside but a lesson of natural science was generated—that his brain had become overcome by the intense sincerity of Sara’s delivery, and so he had a fit.

  “No, ma’am,” said Sara, putting her hand on his head. “I think it’s more than just the poetry. He’s burning up.”

  “It might be the orange glanders,” his mother said. “Or the willow fever. Or the early early dropsy.” For each malady she had a separate poultice, and so all afternoon Peter sat restless and bored under strict directions not to disturb the plasters on his back and chest and belly while the rest of the family kept busy with the Lammas preparations. He wanted to be heaping up the ricks or laying the bowers or cooking, anything to distract him from thoughts of the falling woman. He hadn’t told his mother or anybody else about what he had seen. People see things when they get a fever—he knew that from the stories his brothers and sisters told. Caryn had dreamed that she saw their mother come into the room with a dripping bloody mallet, and as she held it over her in a way that was more blessing than threat, the drops became dark insects in the moonlight, and took wing to fly around the house. Horace had seen fiddling rabbits, and George a strange lady made all of fruits and vegetables. Peter wanted to tell them what he’d seen, because his vision was grander and stranger than any of theirs, but when he considered it he felt a drop in his stomach, like he was falling again, and he found himself sweating again, though the fever was long gone. “Nothing scary about a lady,” he told himself, sitting in the kitchen while his mother chopped carrots, “even when she’s falling through the sky.”