Angel Over My Shoulder (13 page)

Her chest was rising and falling in a stilted manner, as if she was on a breathing machine that was doing all of the work for her. Her eyes scanned the neat bedroom; Angel’s room. There were drawings on the walls, many drawings, and they were all of her.

The drawings were so perfect that they even captured the raised scars on her face. Some were done in charcoal, some in colored pencil and some in water colors. Sometimes her hair was short, sometimes it was long yet, they were incredibly good pieces of art.

“My son is a very talented artist.” Nancy moved to a book shelf and retrieved a large folder. She sat on the neatly made bed and began pulling out more art work. Tears had filled Leslie’s eyes. He’d never forgotten her…

Nancy watched her intently. “He started talking about this person in his dreams from the first time that he could string words together into a sentence. We never paid much attention because…well, frankly, Alan is our third and by the time he came along, we knew that kids had huge imaginations.”

Nancy took on a distant expression and suddenly looked just like Angel…Alan. “He always talked about things that you and he had done together. He would say that his name back then was Angel. I was secretly convinced that my son was having memories of a past life.” She chuckled, mostly to herself. “For a while, I actually thought that he had been a little black boy. And sometimes,” She glanced at Leslie. “I was a little jealous of you, since he always talked about you and the places you took him: like to the park, to the zoo and places that we had never been, he could describe…and then draw with clarity.”

Her expression was full of wonder. “In a way, I guess we could still just brush off these things as fantasy. But he explained that the lady in his dreams showed him things; things that would eventually come true.”

Leslie’s breath caught in her chest. She was trembling so hard that she had to ball her hands into fists on her lap to bring herself under control.

Nancy took in Leslie’s reaction and then drew in a deep breath. “The lady in my son’s dreams showed him his father’s death. You showed him his father’s death. You took him to the funeral and told him to say goodbye.” Leslie swiped at her eyes before the tears had a chance to fall. “How did you know that my husband was going to die?”

Leslie was shaking her head. “I don’t. I don’t have any memory of being in your son’s dreams.” The air seemed to deflate from Nancy’s lungs and she seemed to get a bit smaller. Finally, she stood up slowly and began to pace.

“Am I crazy? Because when my son came to me, telling me that his Daddy was going to die I…I believed him and then I yelled at him for saying such a horrible thing. Several months later his father did die. He was seven.” She looked at Leslie again. “Leslie, how is that possible? How is it that he dreams of you, but you don’t know?”

Leslie dug through her purse for a tissue. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I’m not sure how this is possible, Nancy.” She found a tissue and wiped her eyes and then her nose. “I don’t remember being in your son’s dreams. But when I was a kid, he was in mine.” Nancy gasped and covered her mouth. “He showed me my parents’ death and he made me tell them goodbye.”

Nancy sat down on the bed again. She seemed to be having trouble forming words. “Leslie. I used to think that it was horrible…horrible that my son drew a woman that had such facial scars. I asked him how you’d gotten them and he said he didn’t know. And in the beginning, I could never understand why he’d draw something so horrible on a woman.” She blushed crimson, “Can I-Can I ask you how you got the scars? I’ve always wondered.”

“When I was a teenager I wore a lot of face piercings. I did them mostly myself.” Things seemed so unreal, as she casually spoke of this to a person that she had never before set eyes on. “And one day, I ripped them out.” Nancy looked down at her hands.

“I always thought that you looked so haunted.” Leslie couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.

“I was. But he was my friend, sometimes my only friend. And he helped me get through it.”

“I just don’t understand how this can be possible. You are a real live person, and you don’t remember being in my son’s dreams. You don’t remember taking him to the Jersey Shore when he was six, or the scary roller coaster that he was too little to ride. Leslie you took him to his first day of school before I did!”

Leslie watched her in amazement at the words coming from this woman’s mouth. She had been Angel’s guardian Angel…

“I’ll try to explain the best that I can, but believe me, I don’t know if I can tell you much more then you already know. You see, Angel was a grown up already when I first saw him.” She explained about her muteness and how they had both been quiet, neither seeing a need for words. She explained about her uncle and the events that led up to her blaming Angel and pushing him aside. As the story spilled from her lips, she found that it was therapeutic. She had never been able to tell this much of her life to anyone, but the telling of it began lifting a weight that had been present for most of her life.

She discreetly left out the details of their love affair, but there was not much more that she felt the need to leave to herself.

Nancy was shaking her head. “When he was a little boy and he said that he was Angel…I thought that he meant that he was AN angel. It wouldn’t have been much of a stretch. Alan is the type of person that, even though he’s a loner, people gravitate towards him. There is some quality about him that seems older. After his Dad passed away, he seemed to be able to recognize my sadness on a level that none of my other kids or family could.

“I guess Alan has always felt alone, even in a crowd of people. One day, I just came out and asked him, are you an angel? He looked really surprised. No, was his answer. That’s just what Leslie calls me.” She stopped her pacing and sat down on the bed again. “But if he would have said yes, then Leslie, I would have believed him.”

“So, Alan was a good kid?”

“Not always. He had some problems later. I think it began with the birthday cakes. Can you please explain about those birthday cakes?”

Leslie’s eyes flashed. “What?” She whispered.

Nancy stood and moved to another folder. She spread more artwork onto the bed. Leslie picked them up one by one. She was just too overwhelmed to be shocked anymore. Silently, she studied the drawings of the birthday cakes that she had made Angel. Not all of them were represented; not the first three. She picked up the one that she had made for his fourth birthday. It was raw, but definitely something more advanced than any four year old should have been able to draw. The top had a race car and Alan had used crayons to color perfectly within the lines.

As she went through each picture she knew what would happen, they would just stop. The last one she had baked for him was the sixteenth cake. It was just too hard to explain her ritual to James…and it just started to seem a little crazy.

“I baked a cake e-every…” Leslie stumbled to her feet, feeling lightheaded. Nancy guided her back down to the bed.

“Oh! Are you okay?!” She hurried out of the room. “I’ll get you something to drink!” She called as Leslie squeezed the bridge of her nose and tried to catch her breath.

Nancy returned a moment later with a glass of water and Leslie sipped it carefully, feeling foolish that she’d reacted in that way. She handed the glass back to the anxious woman and offered her a shaky smile. Then her eyes moved back to the drawings and the smile seemed to crack at her lips.

“These are the cakes that I baked every year on November 7th. And I can’t believe he saw them. Did he hear what I…” Leslie shook her head and squeezed her eyes closed. “His birthday is November 7th, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Nancy responded solemnly, further proof that this was something mysterious and frightening. “He didn’t get a cake when he was seventeen, or eighteen.” Nancy began pacing again, still holding Leslie’s glass of water. “Alan stopped talking to me about his visions or you after his Dad died. For the most part, I was happy because…this is all so strange. I’d see these drawings and knew that he hadn’t given up on it, though. After his seventeenth birthday, Alan began to withdraw and become moody. He broke curfew and sometimes came home drunk or high. His grades dropped and he was very depressed.”

Nancy looked at her. “So I specifically asked him if it was about…you, or the dream you. And he told me that he saw you in Tribeca, and you didn’t make him a cake. You were with a man and that you didn’t want him anymore.”

Leslie’s heart was pounding. God... He’d seen her! She had been struggling with her memories of Angel and her reality with a man that she had grown to love. Her struggle wasn’t with whether or not he was real…she knew that he existed. Her struggle was with coming face to face with a man that she’d never met before, one half her age and that she was madly in love with. Who would this person be? A kid, a man?

She looked at Nancy closely. “I met someone for the first time in…well in my entire life. And I think that I stopped making the cakes because I didn’t know what the reality would be. It was easy to wait…not at first, but after awhile it became easy to put my life on hold because I didn’t know how to live life. I was used to putting it aside.” God…had she used James to keep from having to face this moment? Did she want it or did she want to fall back to the safety of James?

Nancy looked at her watch. “He’ll be home shortly.” Leslie’s heart seemed to spike, while Nancy gathered up the drawings carefully and put them away. She looked suddenly uncomfortable. Before she’d been anxious, sad and even afraid, but not quite uncomfortable and it terrified Leslie with this new change in emotion.

“I have to show you something else.” She moved slowly to her son’s closet and dug behind something before she came up with another accordion file folder. Nancy handed it to her. “When my son started to fall apart, I guess I did what any mother would and I started digging around his room for information. I found this. If he knew that I’d peeked into that he’d be very upset.” Leslie began to open it and Leslie held up a hand to halt her.

“I’m going to leave the room, join me when you’re done. I…I don’t judge you Leslie. My son is not just a young man who is about to turn nineteen and go out to discover the world. He was born already knowing the things that people have to live in order to learn. I guess you understand what I mean. But he’s also an unsure boy that is trying to understand and make sense of life.” Leslie nodded her head and then Nancy left the room, closing the door behind her.

With shaky hands, Leslie removed the stretchy band that kept the contents enclosed within the folder. She pulled out a rather large sheath of artwork. The first few showed herself nude. Leslie held her breath. They were breathtaking. Sometimes with just a few simple strokes of a pencil, he’d captured her form. Others were detailed sketches of her, most showed her sleeping. God, he’d watched her that closely…

As she moved through the drawings, she saw some of him as well; making love to her. She was captivated by his expression as he climaxed and the idea of the drawings took her. These images were pieces of their shared dreams.

Alan had captured that moment perfectly in time; as he pushed himself into her, when he sucked at her breast, and as his fingers spread the crease of her. A rush of breath left her body. No wonder, Nancy had left the room. These drawings were intimate; as intensely private as if these acts were just now happening. His talented artist’s fingers had perfectly portrayed these happenings.

Her eyes caught something that made her fingers tremble. There was a drawing of them at the Jersey Shore and her stomach flip flopped. She wanted to cry, she didn’t know how she would stop herself from crying. Alan had captured their last day together, exactly as she remembered. He was holding her in his arms, her feet not quite touching the sand and she was looking down at him with so much love…

This young man, that she had never set eyes on, had lived the same dreams that she had. Did the loss of her affect him the same as it had her? Did he feel empty, even when there were others around? Was there loneliness that could never be filled by anything or anyone?

An unnoticed tear fell from her cheek and splashed onto the drawing. She was alarmed that she had marred the perfect picture. Quickly, she dabbed away the tear and carefully replaced the drawings back into the folder. She wiped her eyes and headed for the closet, searching for the folder’s hiding place. As she replaced it into its likely spot, she heard a car pull up. Leslie quickly closed the door and left the room, her heart was drumming madly in her chest. Nancy looked at her nervously and then turned to watch the front door. Leslie moved down the hall until she entered the living room with her. They both watched anxiously.

When the young man entered the room, he already wore a strange look on his face. His eyes went straight to Leslie and his expression didn’t change. A book bag was slung across his body and he wore a denim jacket, an Ed Hardy t-shirt, jeans and chucks on his feet. Absently, he pulled off the book bag and dropped it on the floor near the door.

“The Escalade in the drive-way,” he gestured to the door without taking his eyes from Leslie. “It’s yours.”

Leslie almost felt as if she would black out. She weaved on her feet and Alan rushed into the room but Nancy reached her first.

“Maybe you should sit down.” She led her to the couch and Alan was suddenly on the other side of her, looking concerned and helping her to sit. The slight pressure of his hand on her arm was all that she could focus on. She couldn’t look at him again, because if she did, she would black out…however she couldn’t stop herself from doing just that.