Angels of Destruction

by Keith Donohue

  Gossip reached the teachers’ lounge after a few days, and her fellow faculty members mercilessly teased Mrs. Patterson about her student angel and the miracle of the completed homework. She had been watching closely since the Valentine's incident, and in class, at least, the girl was circumspect and attentive, a model student. Bonhomie guided Mrs. Patterson's initial reactions and she laughed with her colleagues, but as the talk persisted, she felt compelled to defend her newest pupil, for the teachers’ innuendo quickly became unseemly. Over bad coffee and stale doughnuts, arguments ensued, and she nearly came to harsh words with Miss Becker, and one morning she stubbed out a cigarette in Mr. Rocco's cherry Danish. In confidence she consulted with the principal in the dank and cluttered recesses of his office.

  “You've heard the stories by now, Mr. Taylor. I'm afraid of it getting out of hand.”

  He pulled tighter the knot of his tie. “These tall tales usually peter out on their own accord if we do nothing. Let us leave sleeping dogs lay. If it gets any worse, I'll have a talk, but for now, the best thing we can say is to be quiet.”

  Shaking her head at his mangling of the language, Mrs. Patterson walked back to Room 9 more exasperated than when she had departed. The truth was that Norah did not belong in her class. The child smartly covered her tracks, but no amount of chicanery could hide the fact that she was too bright for her third-grade cohort. Mistakes were too obvious, of the kind that children usually do not make on tests and homework. On every assignment, she proffered exactly one wrong answer. An otherwise perfect math equation would be off by a single digit. A tightly constructed paragraph would be marred by misspellings of “nowledge” or “sosighity” Norah deliberately stumbled over pronunciations each time she read aloud—“inoxious” for “innocuous”—words that in other contexts Mrs. Patterson had heard her say quite precisely. The teacher had seen her kind a few times over the course of her career, the socially correcting child who, in an effort to appear normal and be accepted by the peer group, presented herself as less intelligent. But the girl could not fool her. She deserved to be skipped ahead, out of her class.

  More troubling to Mrs. Patterson was the angel fantasy, not so much for the religious overtones, though she felt absolute in keeping matters of God out of the classroom, or for the complexity of the child's role-playing, but rather for what the outburst revealed about Norah's inner life. In nearly twenty years on the job, she had seen a number of similar reactions to stress, usually stemming from a familial or domestic situation. One girl would pee in her pants right before every mathematics test. Another boy insisted on talking to an imaginary friend named Jack-Peter every recess and lunch hour. Any number of boys and girls had claimed that when they grew up, they wanted to be something entirely inhuman: a dog, a house, the moon. Why worry about an angel, for such moments usually passed, often without elucidation or lasting harm. She was even more concerned about the boy Sean Fallon, and how, since Norah's arrival, he had glommed on to her. This friendship allowed him to emerge from his cell, imprisoned as he was by feelings of anxiety and self-recrimination after his father left. In September, he had circled around the whirlpool, threatening to sink and drown, and by February, he could sail on. Norah had enchanted him and brought him back to normalcy, and Mrs. Patterson watched the transformation, the silent knowing looks, and all the stolen acts of two kindreds in a crowd that rewarded conformity. How obviously he adored her.

  Chatter in the hallways shook her from introspection. The children, returning from the playground, were abuzz about the accident on the monkeybars. All through the winter, they had clamored to play outside for their morning exercise, but January had bitten cold, and February had been too snowy. A soaking rain and three days of abiding sunshine had cleared and dried the playing field, so Mr. Taylor had decided to herd them outdoors rather than stuffing them grade by grade in the cramped gym for half an hour. Most of the children ran free, chased after a ball or each other, or massed on the pavement to skip rope or etch their marks with hard stones on the macadam. A half dozen staked out the swings and flew into the sky, and a clump of kids perched on the jungle gym—Dori Tilghman, Matt Mansur, Sean Fallon, Lucas Ford, and in her crow's nest, Norah Quinn. “You can see over the tops of the trees. You can see the whole world from here. Look, there's a river and a bridge!”

  Each child climbed the ladder of iron bars and took turns for the bird's-eye view, all except Lucas, the smallest in the group. Urged on by the boys, he inched to the rounded top, arms and legs stiff as a scuttling crab's, and from there he lost his footing, slipped and screamed, falling headfirst down the center space. Heads turned to the sound of panic. Some witnesses claimed that Lucas stopped midair, his head pointed like an arrow targeting the ground, others said that he seemed to be falling in slow motion, and later, not a soul disputed that there had not been time enough to rescue him. Norah reached through a square of space and grabbed his ankle in one hand, the weight of the boy wrenching her forward with such force that her face clanged into an iron pole as loud and sudden as a firecracker. The blow knocked her glasses to the bare ground. She managed to hold Lucas suspended three feet from impact until the others sprang to gather him into their arms like a frightened monkey fallen from the top of a tree. When she was sure the others safely had him, Norah let go and slumped forward, legs wrapped around the bars, and gingerly touched the welt thrumming across her left cheekbone. Blinking wildly, she seemed about to cry but was in fact searching for her missing glasses, and when Sean retrieved them, she put them on and peered through a lick of mud at the wallowing world. The bell called them in, and when she saw the bruise on the child's face, Mrs. Patterson asked her about the injury. Norah shrugged her shoulders. “We were playing.”

  By day's end, the teacher had pieced together a rough draft of the events, and as the third graders packed their satchels and bookbags, Mrs. Patterson requested that Sean Fallon stay behind. He signaled Norah to go on without him, and within minutes he was alone with his teacher, shifting from foot to foot at the front row as she wiped the blackboard. “I've heard all kinds of stories, Sean, about what happened out there on the playground. Some students have the crazy idea that Lucas floated in the air. At lunch, one of the children said to another that Norah put a spell on Lucas. Levitated him, so to speak, to fall not quite as fast, so that she'd have time to save him. What do you think about that?”

  “How would she do that?”

  “Impossible. You were there. What happened?”

  He chewed his bottom lip. “He was going to fall, so she just reached for him—”

  “By instinct.”

  “Right. And she made a lucky catch.”

  “Like a baseball player sticking out his glove and the ball lands in it?”

  “Just like that. And then we grabbed Lucas as she was about to drop the ball.”

  Mrs. Patterson sat back on the edge of the desk and peeked at the clock on the wall. “You and Norah are good friends, right? You shouldn't let the other kids tell stories on her. You should tell them the truth like you told me. Lucky catch.”

  Sean did not reply but stood there, staring at her shoes and crossed ankles. Thinking back, he was nearly certain. Lucas had stopped, frozen in time. She needed a second to position herself to make the catch, and everything on the playground ceased—swings locked in flight, a kicked ball as still as the sun, everyone a statue, and in that instant freed in time as everyone else was trapped, Norah moved so that her arm was already through the space between the bars, her other hand wrapped around a pole, her feet crooked to brace for the impact, and he saw it all, his friends poised to resume gesture, speech, act. Blink and begin again, the lucky catch, the wonder, and in the aftermath, imaginations straining against the mechanics of an illusion. When the rabbit is pulled from the empty hat, the crowd is certain it must have been there all along. But where? How does a magician deceive our senses, trick all reason? He nodded once without looking up at Mrs. Patterson's inquiring face.

  Her quest
ions asked and answered, his teacher sent him on his way. He shuffled home like an old man searching along the path, mumbling, trying to remember what he had intended to say. When he cut through the Quinns’ backyard, he dared not look up at the windows, afraid of his own sense of shame should her face appear in the panes, and when he unlocked the front door to his empty home, he felt certain he had done something wrong.

  8

  The mark on her face deepened from burgundy to plum, then blackened in a broad stripe tinged at the edges with a jaundice yellow. Ice first, a slab of raw steak, and then fresh air did nothing to deter the magnificent progression of hues, and Norah admired the bruise at every chance, looking at her face in the chrome toaster, the teakettle, the darkened windows, and the bathroom mirror, and she touched it often, pressing her fingertips against her cheekbone until she winced.

  Margaret, too, cringed when she first saw the contusion, and lifted her hand to her own face to touch the skin stretched across the bone and assure herself the empathetic pain was real. The child's version of the playground event downplayed her own valor, briefly mentioning a boy who tripped and the collision with the cold iron bar, but Margaret, upset by the injury, paid slight heed to the particulars of her story. The first phone call came before dinner, Mrs. Ford to say thank you, requesting to speak directly to her granddaughter, and Norah wanting nothing more than to be off the phone. During dinner, another mother, Mrs. Tilghman, who wanted to know what really happened during recess, but she was dismissed with the promise to call back when they were not in the middle of a meal. Mrs. Bellagio called. Mrs. Mansur. Sharon Hopper to check on her friend. Intimations of some miraculous heroism accompanied every voice, but Norah would have none of it. “I don't know what they are talking about. You would have done the same in my shoes. If a body fell from the sky, wouldn't you hold out your arms to save it? Even if it meant a risk that you might be hurt? Suppose it was someone you love most in the world? What would you do to save her?”

  “Anything.”

  “Lay down your life? Mine?”

  “Child, do not say such things.”

  Long after they had both gone to bed, Margaret woke in agony. A bolus of pain knotted her shoulder, and she sat up, remembering her dream of Erica falling, falling like a star, and she chased the brightness with a butterfly net, well aware of the futility of her efforts. The image left her cranky and restless, so she went downstairs to hunt for a Valium stashed in her husband's study. Shortly after Paul had died, she thought to convert his office into a sewing room or a solarium but satisfied the urge by organizing his papers and pills, confirming and arranging his secrets, and allowing the rest of the room to remain as he had left it. The filing cabinets, the cherry desk, and his diplomas on the wall needed to be dusted now and again, but she ignored everything except his medical bag. There she stored her own medicines along with his stethoscope, a handful of ancient tongue depressors, an otoscope, and a small rubber hammer. She lit a lamp against the darkness and sorted through the prescription bottles, searching the labels for the friendly comfort. From the big chair, leather creaked, and she thought she saw the silk leaves of the artificial ficus stir in an imagined draft and a figure, hat in hand, pass between her and the light. She was startled by his tempered appearance. He was losing stark edges, fading in patches, as if she could no longer hold him in her vision.

  “What do you think she meant by asking that ridiculous question? Sacrifice your own life, surely, but what of hers?”

  “You scared me. She is an unusual, sensitive child. But not tonight, I'm tired and I have a headache.”

  The chimera spoke in an insistent tone. “There is a reason Norah came here to you.”

  For a moment, she considered engaging him further, but he was already weakening like a fading signal. “Let me go to bed,” she said. “I just need a little sleep. I'm going to turn off the light, and you'll disappear.”

  In the blank darkness among her late husband's effects, a voice whispered. “Never forget, she isn't yours.”

  9

  “Who is Mary Gavin?” Diane asked. “This is my daughter, Erica Quinn. She lives here in Madrid with her daughter, Norah. The girl pointed me right to this spot.”

  Maya spoke slowly, carefully. “I don't know any Erica, and I don't know any child named Norah. If that's your daughter in the photograph, she's a dead ringer for Mary.”

  “Maybe someone else can help me?”

  “You're welcome to ask around. The rest of the staff will be here shortly, but I'm afraid you are mistaken.” She busied herself with the opening chores, and Diane dropped her protest and questions and retreated to a table in the corner of the tavern. Three times that morning the hounds pricked up their ears and lifted their noses when each new person entered. First came the cook, burly and bald and festooned with tattoos, who inspected the photograph Diane produced and agreed with a shrug that it might be a younger version of Mary Gavin. The bartender, an older man with a single gray braid that hung to his belt, affirmed more confidently Maya's surmise. “Could be,” he said, and began counting his bottles. The waitress, young and pretty and slightly hungover, immediately identified the girl in the photograph. “That's Mary,” she said, and laid two fingers over both sides of Erica's long straight hair to cut it off from view. “You have to imagine a totally different do, but otherwise she looks practically the same. What's this from, high school?”

  “Do you know a little girl around here named Norah? A third grader? Blonde hair, glasses?”

  “Can't say, though there's only about twenty kids total in the elementary school,” she said. “Just down the road.”

  Around eleven the regulars began drifting in, some for takeout coffee, others for an early lunch or late breakfast. Diane watched the customers come and go, working up the courage to approach each stranger. Not a single one knew the little girl, either by description or by name. She fought the urge to flash the photo of Erica and ask for another confirmation, but instead held her place, repeating over and over the mantra Mary Gavin.

  What's in a name? Her father would have made a game of it, rolling out the possibilities—Gavin, gave in, haven, heaven. Mistress Mary, quite contrary. Hold on to your name, girls, he'd say, it's the only thing you can be sure of to tell yourself who you are and where you've been. He used to call her Di, Diana, Diamond Lil, Didi, Dimples. Poor Margaret had it worse—Mags, Marge, Margie, Maggie, Meg, Peggy, Millie, Molly, Maghilla, Margarita, Mame. For some reason, his wife was only Peaches, and as she lay dying, Peaches confessed: he thought I was sweet and juicy. Then she returned to her morphine slumber and was heard no more. You become your name, he had told Diane, and not the other way around.

  Shortly after noon, the tavern began to fill up with diners, and Diane stretched and walked to the bar. She needed to clear her head, to sift through the information which had distorted her vision of reality. “I'm going out for some fresh air, Maya. But I'll be back, and maybe we can sort this out.”

  “Take care crossing the highway, and always look both ways,” Maya said and hurried the next order to an impatient table.

  The wolfhounds rose and followed Diane through the door, unbidden guardians for the road ahead, and she felt oddly comforted by their presence. A number of strays and wanderers loitered by the screened porch, hoping for the chance to sneak inside. Cattle dogs, a pit bull, and a pair of border collie mixes, dirt-dull mutts that belonged to nobody and everybody. They wore lean and hungry looks, a natural sneaky submis-siveness born of curses and kicks, just this wary side of their wild cousins. The yellow dog she had seen that morning slunk away, tail low, when the wolfhounds stepped outside. Crisp cool air energized her senses and swept away the lingering fatigue from her cross-country flight and the lack of sleep. She checked for approaching cars and trucks, tried to gauge the distance of the bend that curled around the next hill, but the road was empty, no sound except the huff of the hounds, the crunch of their pads on the gravel. They sauntered past a row of patchwork business
es and houses so baked they appeared almost flat and walked along a dirt berm fronting other reclaimed homes reimagined into colorful, eclectic shrines. The dogs kept pace on the packed ground, now and again bending their heads at an interesting smell, the mark of others who had passed this way. Finn lifted his leg and pissed into a brittle sage, the parched earth sucking in the liquid at once. She played out the two alternatives regarding this Mary Gavin: either Erica incognito or someone else altogether. In her staging of the meeting, the rescue went off without trouble. Erica would acquiesce and spare all queries. Lost in her thoughts, Diane did not notice that the houses had disappeared from both sides of the road and that the road itself veered off in an uncertain rising curve that promised only emptiness. “End of the line, boys.”

  To the left lay the shell of a derelict baseball park, the grandstand collapsing, the infield overgrown with thistles and clumps of stubborn grass. Stone dugouts harbored mice and the bones of a stray cat. Nothing else stirred on the winter's day, desolate and empty, the ruins of all that had once vibrated with life. A plastic bag skittered across the low hump of the pitcher's mound, and when she closed her eyes, she could imagine the bygone time, the young boys at play the stands crowded with cheering fans. All vanished, ashes, dirt, memories, and those, too, disappearing. Beyond the outfield fence, she could see another road in the distance, the houses hanging on to the side of a small mountain, and as she crossed the arroyo, she began to pray in earnest, with the plaintive heart of a schoolgirl begging for remedy or reward, of a married woman desperate for a child, of an aging wife asking for her husband to be spared misery. In the deserted hills, quiet as a chapel, she prayed that Norah had told the truth, that the child's mother could be found and restored, that Erica would come home. A pair of magpies streaked across the sky toward a juniper tree, and her hopes lit out after them.