I was sobbing now, uncontrollably. I hadn’t cried since I was a child yet now the tears came, a flood of them, pouring from my eyes and over my face and running down my neck. My throat was thick, sour. I could hardly breathe.
“Oh, ma’am,” he said, suddenly realizing. He stood, went to his sink, ran some water into a glass. He set it on the table beside me. “Ma’am, don’t do that. Don’t cry. Ain’t no reason to cry ’bout nothin’.”
But I didn’t stop. Not for a long time. I drank the lukewarm, bitter water. He stood near me nervously, obviously a stranger to him, a stranger who’d accused him of horrible things and who’d undergone an emotional collapse in front of him for reasons he didn’t understand, for reasons he couldn’t even imagine.
“I appreciate,” he said quietly, “your takin’ me to the store. I surely do.”
I nodded finally, wiping my eyes, standing shakily.
“It was—nothing,” I said.
I made my way outside again, into the blinding sun. McCoy stood there in the doorway, hunched over, all but dead.
Stepping into my car, I started the engine. I sat there shivering, tears trickling down my face, staring through the windshield at the nothingness before me.
“’Bye, ma’am,” he wheezed. “Good luck to you.”
“Goodbye,” I whispered, after a moment. But far too quietly for him, or anyone, to hear.
I drove away.
When I got back to Tucson I called my editor in New York, got him to agree to a three-month delay on the newest Flat-Head Fred story, and checked myself into a hospital. There isn’t much to be said about it except that when I checked out again forty-five days later, I no longer drank.
The world looked different when I left the hospital. The colors weren’t as bright, the sounds not as vivid. And yet everything was clearer than it had been in a very long time.
I wondered what I would do with myself now, especially in the evenings, alone in the house. Naturally the first thing I did on returning home was to pour all the remaining alcohol into the kitchen sink. Then I opened every window, sat down, and let the dry Arizona breeze fill my lungs.
Okay, Lucy, I’ll come with you, I imagined myself saying. Let me put on my shoes.
Loss. So many once here, now gone.
I was in a foster home when I learned what had happened to Lucy, but by then it was later, the flashing lights had come in the night and the police had taken away my parents while Alba held me in my bedroom and said Don’t look, don’t look. I was in another town, not far from Fresno but an intergalactic distance from it for a child. They were a couple, they had other kids; their faces, their names are blurred now. I was with them for a few months, then I was with others: a succession of others, an army of others. It came on the news one night when I was sitting in the corner of someone’s living room, drawing. I’d turned thirteen. No one had told me anything. Neither my aunt nor my uncle had ever called or written. If there were any legal repercussions to my having assisted in the theft of a VW Bus and its subsequent damage, I never heard about it; a steel curtain had slammed down on my life in Quiet, California, and now, eight or nine months later, I hardly remembered it. I hardly remembered my parents. I hardly remembered anything at all. And so when a familiar name from what seemed my distant past, Mike McCoy, was spoken, I looked up. There he was, being led into a courtroom in a prison outfit. I heard the names Maria Sanchez, Trista Blake, Lucy Sparrow. But there were no photos, and the story was over practically before it had begun. I understood that he had murdered those people, but the name Lucy Sparrow seemed to have almost no connection with me. She was someone I’d once known long ago, briefly been childhood friends with. The memories were gone, seared away to oblivion.
Where are we going, Lucy?
My life after that a long smear of pain. I never saw my parents again; they were in prison for years, then died in an auto crash shortly after they were released. People flitted in and out of my life: caregivers, teachers, friends. I learned to smile a lot, show my dimples. When I smiled people stopped asking what was wrong, stopped saying, Cheer up, things can’t be that bad! I was an automaton, saying the right things, smiling on cue. I did very well in school, all schools, and there were many: three or four different high schools, in fact. Sometimes I noticed looks of pity being directed at me, usually by female teachers. I despised them. But I smiled.
Let’s go to Mike’s, I heard her say in my imagination. I wanna learn how to play pool, Franny-Fran.
And I drew. Drew and wrote stories. Eventually I was in college, where I also did well. Flat-Head Fred and Mary the Motor Scooter date from those years: they were two among dozens of characters I created then, in rough prototype form. To escape my childhood memories I ended up creating works that would generate memories for other children. Perhaps there’s some good in it.
No, Lucy, I don’t want to go there. Let’s just stay under the pepper tree together. In the dark. And in the morning they’ll wonder where we are and we’ll just be here, right here, safe and sound.
The faces, the voices: thirty years gone. Have I remembered it correctly? Was this really the way it was?
Okay, let’s do it. We’ll just stay here. I won’t go to Mike’s at all.
Lucy, have I written it right?
Let me brush your hair, Lucy. I’ll brush it all night.
…Or am I still a spaz?
We’ll just stay here ’til the sun comes up. Then we’ll see what’ll happen tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow.
Lucy, I tried to save you. When you came to my window, we could have stayed together; we could have done anything we wanted to do. We still had that night, that one final night. There wasn’t any tomorrow. None at all. Lucy. Lucy.
I knocked softly on my daughter’s bedroom door.
For a moment there was no response.
She knew I was coming; I’d talked to Donald about it, about the possibility of my stopping by their house, seeing her for just a few minutes. Alone.
I don’t have any right to ask, Donald. But…
I’ll see, Frances. I’ll ask Jess what she thinks about it.
“Come in.”
I opened the door. She was on her bed, facing away from me, head propped up on her elbow. She was thumbing through a book. She wore her usual T-shirt and jeans; her feet were covered with pink socks with little fuzzy balls on their ends. For once her baseball cap wasn’t on her head; her hair was down, loose over her shoulders. I could see her face only in profile as she stared down at the book.
I stepped in, closed the door softly behind me.
“Jess,” I said quietly, “is it okay with you that I’m here?”
She shrugged.
I looked around her room. It was the room of an athletic twelve-year-old girl. Her softball uniform was sprawled on the floor; there was a soccer ball in the corner. Posters of sports stars competed with posters of young TV hunks for wall space.
“How are you, Jess?”
She shrugged again.
I looked at her. Though she was a sturdy, athletic girl, she suddenly seemed hopelessly fragile to me, as if she might shatter completely in the first gust of wind that came her way. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, protect her forever, save her. And yet I was the person from whom she’d needed to be saved.
I sat down gingerly behind her on the corner of the bed.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
She held it up over her shoulder: it was Mary’s Amazing Morning, one of the early Mary the Motor Scooter books.
“Oh my gosh, Jess. That one goes back to when you were little.”
“I know,” she said. “I remember you drawing it.”
“Do you really?” I was surprised; she must have been very young.
“Sure. I used to watch you. I was, like, in awe of you. That you could draw like that. And write those stories.”
I leaned over, looking at the page she had open. It was an illustration of a happy-looking Mary making a milkshak
e. As I stared at the drawing it occurred to me for the first time that Mary not only looked like Jess—that had been deliberate—but also a bit like Lucy Sparrow. The same eyes, the wild dirty-blonde hair. I’d never noticed before.
“I like this one,” she said. “It’s my favorite.”
“I didn’t know you had favorites,” I said. “Of those books, I mean.”
“Sure I do. I still read them sometimes.”
“Not the newer ones, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, I do.” She pointed to her bookcase across the room where, indeed, there was a long line of Mary and Fred books. I always gave her a copy of each one, of course. But I didn’t imagine she read them. I thought perhaps she threw them away. “I like the earlier ones better. The later ones are…I don’t know. Kind of sad, sometimes.”
“I guess they are.”
There was a long silence. She turned the pages.
“Dad says that you’ve been working really hard.”
“Working…?”
“At that place. That clinic.”
“Well—yes.”
“But you’re done with it now.”
“Done? Well, honey, I—I hope so. I hope I’m done. I’m going to try to be done. I’m going to try as hard as I can.”
“That’s cool,” she said, looking at Mary the Motor Scooter. “Lots of cool people go to rehab. Like, famous people.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was about to stand up and go—I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. But, without consciously intending it, I found myself lying down behind her on the bed. I touched her waist gently.
“Is it okay?” I asked. “Just for a minute?”
Another shrug. “You’re my mom.”
But after a while she closed the book and her head dropped to her pillow. I felt her body relax, ease slowly into mine.
We didn’t say anything.
I breathed the scent of her hair. I knew that I was on my last chance with my daughter, my absolutely final chance—that if I failed this time I’d be cast out from her life forever. Therefore I couldn’t fail. The ouroboros had to unwind at last, open the endless circle that had been closed for so long.
After a time, unable to stop myself, I whispered, “Jess, I love you.”
And later—very, very much later, so much later that I thought I might never hear her voice again in this life—I heard her whisper to me in return, nearly inaudibly, but audibly: “I love you too.”
In my dream Lucy Sparrow stands facing me in the night surf, fists on her hips, waves bursting softly about her thighs, looking much as I remember her at twelve when the two of us were best friends forever: blood sisters. She wears no bathing suit, but isn’t exactly naked; instead her body appears featureless, like a doll’s, lacking nipples or navel, freckles or scars—incomplete, unfinished. Yet her face is as it was in life. The big raincloud-colored eyes, the shapeless nose, the tangled dirty-blonde hair splayed to her shoulders.
Little happens in the dream. She just stares at me, her expression flat, unreadable—neither friendly nor hostile—while from the shore I whisper over and over, a hot ache pulsing in my throat: Lucy. Lucy. There’s a sudden shriek overhead (a bird? a bat?) but this time I know not to look away. After a moment Lucy begins to walk toward me, stops when she reaches the surf’s edge. She beckons to me.
I step to her, noticing that I’m not the little girl that I was then. I’ve grown up. I know that I’m middle-aged, a writer of children’s books, a mother, an alcoholic. But my appearance seems not to affect her. She drops to her knees and begins digging in the wet sand. I kneel to help her.
After a while we bring up a sand-encrusted Mason jar. Lucy runs it through the surf once to clean it off. We look at it together, smiling. Our time capsule. Never finished, in life. Finished here.
She strips away the tape we used thirty years before to seal it and unscrews the lid. It comes away easily. She reaches inside and together we look at what we put there so long ago. School photos of each of us, perfectly preserved. A map of the town as it was then, so different from now. Newspaper headlines with names like Ford and Kissinger and Rockefeller. Clippings from magazines—one picture of Donny Osmond, half a dozen of John Travolta.
Finally she pulls out our drawings. There’s mine, the illustration of the two of us floating together with angels’ wings, but it’s completed now, luminously colored-in. Behind us in the picture float dozens, even hundreds of angels departing the earth, as if this were the jumping-off point for every angel in the world, a matrix of angels stepping off into an endless sky. My neat, precise inscription is at the bottom: For Lucy, With All My Love, Franny-Fran.
Finally Lucy brings forth the last item in the jar. It’s her own drawing. She moves to hand it to me, but the wind catches it; the paper swoops and dives and lands finally in the surf. I leap to grab it before the picture on the sheet is obliterated forever, but it’s too late. Holding it up in the moonlight, I can make out only a single part of the image she’s drawn: a pair of big silver hearts entwined. But the wet ink loosens, slides down the paper; the hearts look for a moment strangely like angels’ wings before they drop away, melt irretrievably into the sea. Lucy’s heart. Mine.
By the time I look toward her again, I’m alone in the darkness.
Author’s Note
Truman Capote once wrote a friend about a work in progress, “I have a novel, something on a large and serious scale, that pursues me like a crazy wind.” The phrase encapsulates my experience with A Matrix of Angels—I felt that “crazy wind” whipping at me for nearly two years, in a way unlike anything else I’ve ever written, pushing me to discover the final form of the story of Fran and Lucy.
The novel began life as a long short story, also titled “A Matrix of Angels,” which, in a moment of misdirected altruism, I gave to a publisher who was soliciting stories for a charity anthology. Alas, like many such efforts, the book—unreviewed, mostly unread—sank like a stone immediately upon its publication, taking my piece with it. Naturally I was frustrated. But even before this debacle, I’d noticed something odd about this story, this theme, these characters. In every previous instance of my writing life, when a story was finished, I was done with it. However much the plot and people had preoccupied me before and during the writing, they would vanish from my mind like a forgotten dream after it, never to be revisited—so much so that by the time a work was published I would sometimes be startled by its content, which seemed nearly as fresh to me as if the piece had been written by someone else entirely.
Not so with “A Matrix of Angels.” In the year or so after I completed the story, I found my imagination swirling back again and again to Fran and Lucy—they seemed to pursue me like that crazy wind. New scenes and dialogue came to my mind, ideas that I initially resisted—the story was done, after all—but which I eventually began noting down. Yet the voices of these two girls still didn’t stop, and finally I realized I needed to start all over again—not to expand the original story, but to take an entirely fresh approach.
I ultimately completed the novel version of A Matrix of Angels over several summer months, never consulting the short story—this was to be an entirely new work, not an adaptation of something already written. When it was finished the voices of Fran and Lucy grew silent at last, and I knew that the tale had finally, truly, reached its end.
While I consider the novel to be the definitive version of this material, it’s a pleasure to unearth the original story and present it here. Whatever its flaws, Fran and Lucy first saw the light of day in this much briefer work—a work I’d believed complete in itself, until the crazy wind blew my way.
C.C.
A Matrix of Angels
The Original Short Story
1
THIRTY-SIX DAYS BEFORE Lucy Sparrow was abducted and murdered by the Riverbed Killer (who turned out to be a local dropout we both knew named Mike McCoy, then working at the nearby Red Ball gas station; we both knew him), she and I met for the first time at t
he school bus stop. This was thirty years ago. More than ten thousand mornings away.
Lucy came rushing out her front door at the last possible moment, just as the big yellow bus—the “cheese bus,” the other students called it—was rounding the curve from Thumbelina Avenue and rumbling up Kendale Road. I checked my watch: eight-fourteen, on the nose. I was waiting a full ten minutes beforehand, but Lucy only appeared just as the bus itself was pulling up. Since she had to cross the street, she would have to run in front of the vehicle to reach the door, before it had come to a complete stop. This earned a blaring honk from the driver, Mr. Cox, who cried indignantly, “No running in front of the bus!” as she mounted the steps breathlessly.
All this I would recognize as routine only later. On that first day as the new girl at Soames Middle School in Quiet, California, a few miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, I knew only that I had been told to meet the bus at the corner at exactly eight-fourteen a.m., that if I weren’t there Mr. Cox would not wait, that if I failed to appear the bus would leave without me and I would be left to explain why I had been unable to perform such a simple task. And to expect punishment commensurate with such a venal and intolerable crime.
The people with whom I was living, not my parents, were a phlegmatic distant cousin of my father’s named Frank and his wife Louise. By issuing such dire warnings they proved that they did not know their girl. Having been with them only a few weeks, they could have no idea that order, routine, punctuality, control, were the hallmarks of my existence. Never for me the unfinished chore, the neglected homework assignment, the missed bus, all of which seemed to me mere invitations to chaos and disaster. Never for me the hair out of place, the stained T-shirt, the dirty or ragged fingernail. Thus—needless to say—in every school I ever attended I was quickly branded as “stuck up,” yet it was not a belief in my superiority that made me act this way; it was my absolute conviction that I was hopelessly inferior to everyone else, so much so that all I could do was try to be as close to perfect as I possibly could, in the desperate hope that others might at least learn to tolerate me. To be accepted was only a forlorn dream.
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