Angels of Destruction

by Keith Donohue

  He unfurled the covers and got out of bed. His E.T. alarm, with a clock in the center of its belly, read 1:30 a.m. A voice compelled him to come out into the cold night, and he crept past his mother's room, down the stairs, and to the front door for his boots and overcoat. A shadow moved between the moon and the earth and raced past him at threatening speed. He hurried down the hill toward the Quinns’ house, yet he almost missed her, bent to the ground, motionless as a dove on a rock, and he feared disturbing her. Curiosity trumped anxiety, and he crouched down close to her, so that he might speak softly yet be assured she would hear.

  “What are you doing, Norah? You'll freeze to death.”

  She did not look up at him, and her words hit the ground beneath her face. “I am praying for guidance.”

  Sean looked to the silent house. All of the windows were dark, but the porch light glowed like a yellow eye. “Guidance for what? It's freezing.”

  She lifted her head and looked into his eyes. “For what can be done for Mrs. Quinn, what can be done for you. And what to do about the one who is following me.”

  He looked out into the darkness but saw nothing. “Someone's following you?”

  “Someone's trying to stop me and take me away from here.”

  “But why would anyone want to take you away?” He raised his voice and sent the question echoing in the night air. All of her illusions—the stars that appeared in her mouth, rings of smoke, the things she moved with her breath—stood stark against the sinister aspect of the late hour. For the first time, he thought she might be something other than a girl. She did not answer, but bowed to the ground to continue at her prayers in a foreign tongue, filled with a savageness he could not comprehend. Beside her he stood for as long as he could bear; then, after insisting she go inside, he left for home in the small hours, vigilant for strangers, and edged under the covers to wait for the light of morning.

  16

  A squall blew in from Canada, bringing moisture from the Great Lakes and over the western hills, the first flurries tumbling around noon, intermittent as scouts, and by one o'clock, snow showers fell in sheets. In the driveway next door, Mr. Delarosa showed up early and unexpectedly, having closed the flower shop due to the threatening weatherman on the radio. A shroud of silence hemmed in the town, and on his way home, he saw the ice-encrusted figure near the bridge, mistaking it for a statue, until the snowman shrugged to clear his shoulders, and surprised by the sudden movement, Delarosa nearly drove the delivery van into the river. Just as she started to worry over the roads, Margaret was surprised by the sudden appearance of Norah and Sean at the front door, stomping their boots and shaking off their caps, dusting the snow from their coats.

  “They let us out early,” Norah announced. “And we want to go back out and play in it.”

  “Let me fix you something warm first, and you'll have to bundle up. Sean, do you want to call your mother and let her know?”

  The children were gone for hours. At the window, Margaret kept watch through the crepuscular light, but saw only the blankets of snow rippling, falling so thickly and rapidly that the children's footprints had filled to shallow dents in the swale. She knew that something bad had happened as soon as she saw the two figures crest the horizon in the gloom, one limping stiff-legged, the other slowing to keep pace. As they neared, they looked like two snowmen indistinguishable from the white mantle, and Margaret felt the seeping wet cold, a panic quickening her breath, a sense that they would never make it home, too far to go. She threw on her overcoat and slipped into her boots to step outside, the porchlight halo swarming with snowflakes. The children drew closer and the details emerged; the struggling one was Norah.

  “What on earth happened?” Margaret called out from the porch.

  “She fell in the pond, Mrs. Quinn,” Sean shouted from the yard. “Right through the ice up to her legs and she's near frozen.”

  In two bounds, she reached the child, bent to see her chapped blue grimace. “Get in, get in, and get out of those wet clothes. Are you hurt, girl? We'll get you warm inside. Norah, how could you be so careless?”

  Her legs looked afire when they finally worked off her boots and pants, caked with silt and rock-stiff She sat splayed on the edge of the commode, wincing with discomfort, as the steam from the bath made a cloud of the room. On command, she could wiggle her toes, but she balked at Mrs. Quinn's orders to take off her underthings. Her insistence on privacy went unspoken and was acknowledged with a sigh. As she left the bathroom, Margaret admonished Norah to stay put in the bathtub until she felt normal again. The girl sneezed and laughed to herself, waved goodbye with a red hand.

  Downstairs, Sean melted and dripped on the mat in the foyer. He had removed his hat and mittens but otherwise remained a sentinel at his post, waving sheepishly at Mrs. Quinn. “Oh for heaven's sake, Sean, take off your coat and get warm—”

  “Will she be all right?”

  “You're sopping wet, and it's a blizzard out there. I think I have something of my husband's you could wear at least while I throw those wet jeans in the dryer.”

  Sean followed her upstairs, past the sound of Norah singing to herself in the bathtub, and changed into a worn blue flannel shirt that hung to his knees. As he rolled up his sleeves, he replayed the staging of her walk into the icy water and concentrated on the plot they had designed together. Wiggling his toes in the dead man's woolen socks, he could forget his discomfort only by focusing on the questions she had made him rehearse before she jumped through the ice. He left the bedroom and bumped into Norah as she exited the bathroom wrapped in a thick yellow towel. They exchanged a conspiratorial smile.

  “Watch this.” She pinched shut her eyes and twisted her lips into a grimace. A thin strand of mucus ran from her nose, and when she opened her eyelids, her irises glowed as red as cardinals. “Too much?” Afraid, he blanched and nearly cried out. She blew a raspberry and shut her eyelids again and then revealed a bloodshot pink. Holding up her left hand for his patience, she counted down a measure and then sneezed violently and loud. Giving him the thumbs-up, Norah sent him on his way.

  “Do it like I told you,” she said. “Like we practiced.”

  He grinned and slid down the stairs, skated across the linoleum in the foyer, excited to find her grandmother in the kitchen. The sight of him in her husband's clothes brought a flush to her cheeks.

  “Was that Norah sneezing?” Mrs. Quinn asked from the stove. “I hope she doesn't catch her death of cold.”

  “Or double-p pneumonia,” Sean said. “That's what my dad used to call it.”

  The boy rarely mentioned his absent father, and Margaret let the matter linger for a beat. “I phoned your mother, Sean. You'll stay here for the night, and if it isn't still snowing in the morning, she'll come take you home.”

  “We were just testing the ice to see if it could hold our weight, cause she said her mum was a great ice-skater and promised to teach us when she comes.”

  “She did, did she?”

  “And I could hear it, crick, like stepping on a twig, and then crack, like a thunder. Before you know it, she was up to her knees, and I thought I was going to fall in too.” He sat beside her at the counter, crossing his legs to make sure the shirt didn't ride up.

  “With how freezing it's been, that ice should have been three inches thick. I walked that way for the past five years, and this time of year, it should be safe. But you did a good deed, Sean, thank you.” She handed him a mug of hot cocoa, and watching carefully the level at the brim, he sipped at the steam.

  “Is it true, Mrs. Quinn? About your daughter?”

  “Erica?” Images from her history sped giddily across her mind. She did not understand the boy's question at first, thought he dug deeper than she allowed, then realized his meaning. “She could skate like the wind. As soon as it was cold, say, come December, Erica would be out on the ice every chance she could. And even on that bumpy pond, she could pirouette and, whaddyacallit when you fly on one leg with the other
bowed behind your back? Grace itself.”

  He licked the chocolate mustache from his lip.

  “And then one day, she just quit. Never laced a pair again. I don't know, maybe she just outgrew skating. A lot of things changed once she was a teenager.”

  “Boys, I bet.”

  Startled, she tried to focus on him, but his features were hidden behind the mug. “Boys, indeed. And don't you be getting any ideas when you're older, Mr. Fallon. A girl is vulnerable at that age, not knowing her own mind and body, willing to give her heart away to the first one of you hoodlums that pays the least attention, but oh you boys, you know your tricks, and it's not right, I tell you.”

  “Is that what happened with Erica, Mrs. Quinn?”

  No, she thought, not just the boys, but Paul. His dark past. His desire to freeze time and keep her young and his own. They fought bitterly about the boys, not just Wiley Rinnick, but all of them. The first, just thirteen, hung around the house at dusk each night that summer, a cavalier on a bicycle. A handsome brown-eyed boy with a lock curling across his forehead that he swept away whenever he bent to talk with Erica. On an August evening, just before the start of high school, Paul strode like a bear to the curb where the boy was chatting with their daughter. Margaret could see them from the window—the boy slouching behind the high handlebars, Erica leaning against the mailbox, and Paul, the apex of the triangle. Words were exchanged, the boy pinning his curl to his scalp with one hand, his lithe body contracting under the sound of her husband's scolding, Erica straining toward him, tense with sympathy. Off the boy pedaled, never to return, and Paul just watched, helpless, as if on shore bidding a ship goodbye, till the moon brightened the evening sky.

  She curled her fingers around the mug, felt the warmth escaping through the ceramic. From upstairs another fluttery wet sneeze roared through the floorboards. “That girl, I hope she's not caught her death. If you want to see Norah's mother, there's a photo album in the living room. Poor dear, I've got to take care of her now. You'll be all right by yourself, Sean?”

  He nodded. Through the ceiling, their muffled conversation rolled from Margaret to Norah in the rhythm of a love song. He listened, anxious at the strange sound, before remembering his duty and padding off to study the pictures from long ago.

  17

  Here is Erica, bald and fat and toothless, naked in the grass. Here is Paul Quinn, making her fly, the baby a blur in the air, his fingers spread like branches for the catch. Here are Margaret's hands, one cupping the baby's head, the other rinsing soap from her daughter's potbelly. The baby's face startled by the suddenness of water. The toddler toddles. A circle of three-year-olds around a birthday cake, the candle flames white streaks on the gray tones of the snapshot, its edges scalloped and marked with runiform: Apr 13 61. Sean turned the page and the images sprang into muted color, washed out by the sun.

  Here is Erica perched on a tricycle, ready to race past the edge of the frame. Topless at some summer spot, a beach house perhaps, sucking on a nearly empty Pepsi bottle. Holding up her first hooked fish, no bigger than her hand. The colors deepen, become more saturated. She is a ballerina, a Halloween black cat, a girl with one tooth missing. Close up she resembles Norah in some ways: the eyes one size too small, the pert nose, the planes of her jawline. Years go missing, unobserved.

  Here is Margaret Quinn, twenty years younger, and next to her, arm around her shoulder, stands a woman close enough to be her sister, he thinks. Diane and Margaret pert in matching shirtwaist dresses, a burning cigarette in Diane's hand, a cocktail glass in Margaret's. Their lips brightly painted, their eyes shining with the glamour of summer. In one corner of the photograph, out of the depth of focus, the blur of a girl. He imagines her chasing the first fireflies of the evening or leaping through the sprinkler or being spooked by an unseen phantom. Then Erica, her back to the camera, looks over her shoulder at the lens. Spread across her outstretched arms is the Andean shawl with the sun aloft.

  Here is Christmas morning, paper on the floor, the tree twinkling and forlorn. The barest smiles. The new white skates appear too heavy in her hands. Her father ungainly in a tight leisure suit, her mother done up in a beehive, two steps behind the times.

  Here is Erica and her best friend Joyce times four—a photo strip from the new booth at Murphy's. From top to bottom: both girls caught in the middle of the giggles, Joyce's hand covering her mouth; Erica, three-quarters profile, fingers to her lips, and Joyce with her mouth wide open; now Joyce is smiling perfectly, Erica's eyes are shut; then flawless, cheek to cheek, happy to be fifteen.

  Here is Paul Quinn, the final time, standing to the knees in a hole; above the ground, a cherry tree, its roots encased in a burlap ball. The camera has captured his little girl half out of the picture. She grips the trunk with such fierce determination that Sean reads first anger, then jubilation in her expression. Her hair hangs down past her shoulders in two curtains. Her body now looks like a woman's, not a girl's, the swell of small breasts against a tie-dyed shirt, her hips wider at the tops of her jeans, but more ineffably, her carriage—the way she squared her shoulders and lifted her head, in full cognizance of her strength and beauty.

  Here he is, the boy at the class trip to the amusement park, barely noticeable, only in retrospect. The teenagers took over the merry-go-round, laughing, long hair flying, riding mad snorting ponies, an ostrich, lion, leaping deer. Just beyond Erica, who is centered in the frame, the dark-haired boy stares so ardently that his eyes nearly burn through the paper. There he is again, at the margins of a clowning group before the Tilt-A-Whirl, all eyes forward, devil's horns over the unsuspecting, but only this boy, cascades of brown curls, wearing a shirt with the peace sign, only he is gazing aslant at the object of his desire. And a final time, he stands behind Erica, arms clasped in front of her waist, both grinning out of focus as though photographed through a scrim of ice.

  On the last page of the album, here is Erica's junior-year portrait, the one the police and FBI used, the one in all the newspapers and on television, the last known photograph. A formal coda to her childhood. A girl, becoming woman.

  18

  “She's finally asleep,” Mrs. Quinn told him in hushed tones. “Poor thing. Her temperature is 102 degrees, and she's shaking and chattering like a bag of bones.”

  At the stove, Sean stirred the soup. While he was waiting for her to tend to Norah, he had raided her refrigerator, and a pair of grilled cheese sandwiches browned in a cast-iron skillet.

  “You added a can of water?” Mrs. Quinn hovered over his shoulder, peering into the pot. “It's condensed, you know.”

  “I make my own dinner lots.”

  She patted him on the shoulder. “Of course you do.” He looked so small in her husband's shirt and socks, a stickboy elbows, hips, and shoulders sharp against the flannel. Fatherless child. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and rock and soothe him until his sadness went away. Standing on a stepstool, he had climbed onto the counter to take down the bowls and plates for dinner. She brought the silverware and napkins, two glasses of milk. They sat at an adjoining corner, saving a space for Norah, who would not be down.

  “Your mother works late sometimes. You have to take care of yourself?”

  “Sometimes.” He slurped in a long fat noodle. “Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Saturday morning, sometimes.”

  “Do you get lonesome?”

  “No, I kinda like having time to myself.” He paused, remembering Norah's instructions. “Do you?”

  “Get lonesome? Heavens, no … Sometimes.”

  “I miss my dad. Do you miss your daughter?”

  She nibbled at the burnt crust, showering crumbs. “At first you miss them all of the time. You start to say something, call them for dinner, and then you catch yourself. Or you look up from the crossword or the soaps or your book expecting to see her in the doorway, but she isn't there, she isn't anywhere. And you wonder what is she doing this very minute, wonder if she ever thinks of you, or thinks of you as o
ften as you think of her.” Margaret looked at Sean. “Of course, your dad misses you as much as you miss him, but it's the same, isn't it, for us all? We go on not understanding how it happened this way.”

  He set his spoon down in the bowl and stared at the triangle of his sandwich. Beguiled by the memories he had opened, she went on talking to herself.

  “All day long every day I thought of nothing but her. For months. To the point where I had completely lost all sense of anything else. Then one morning, Paul brought home a bunch of ripe cherries, picked them up at the farmers’ market, and they were perfect. You know, just the cherriest cherries. Temptation. So I sat there, right where you are sitting now, and ate one, and the first sweet bite reminded me of summers gone by and when I was a girl myself, just a girl, and I loved cherries more than any other part of summer, more than blueberries or strawberries or even peaches. More than the Fourth of July or swimming at the shore or just wandering on a sunny day. I had forgotten how good fresh cherries taste. So I sat there and ate one after the other, and when Paul came back in the kitchen, he saw the pits piled high in a saucer, the nearly empty bowl, and me, my lips stained with sin. I couldn't resist, and there was a look in his eyes, a happy sadness. He was relieved that I had come back from the dead.”

  With the point of her bread she motioned for him to pick up his sandwich, and they ate in silence, the ticking clock accenting the rhythm of their thoughts. She pushed away her empty plate. The boy became an afterthought.

  “You become more careful about letting in happiness, because if you do, and it leaves again … The everyday part of missing her was less acute in time, but it lingers, just waiting to strike like a panther. When Paul took sick, I had him to worry about, and when he went into the hospital—” She covered her mouth with her hand to catch her shame before it escaped. “I did not feel it as much as I thought I should, as much as I probably would, but you see, I was already numb. Erica had been gone three years, and he, he coped somehow, went on. And I think I resented him a little bit his peace. Or how he managed himself, and I was angry, too, that now there was no one to talk to about Erica. No one like my husband.”