Read Angels of Destruction Online

Authors: Keith Donohue

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Psychological, #Literary, #Supernatural, #Psychological Fiction, #Fiction - General, #Visionary & Metaphysical, #Girls, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Widows

Angels of Destruction (3 page)

BOOK: Angels of Destruction
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7

W
inter mornings Paul would send her to school, bundled against the cold, and from their bedroom window, Margaret watched their daughter fling back the hood, unzip the overcoat, and rush to join her friends, her bundle of books hanging by a single strap. Erica had a life apart, outside the confines of their home, but her father never noticed until too late, when he was no longer her guide and protector. At age ten, she sassed him at the dinner table, a joke at first tinged with sarcasm, but soon enough she would roll her eyes at his faint attempts at endearment, his increasingly desperate maneuvers to win her back. The onset of puberty widened the gulf. She was running away, and he did not know how to bridge the distance between his adoring little girl and sullen adolescence.

From her vantage point behind the kitchen window, Margaret watched the children in the yard. She scanned the treetops in the backyard, remembering a kite Paul and Erica lost years ago, wondering if some tattered cloth still clung to bare branches. Perched high in a massive oak, a falcon screamed at first light, startled by the stranger blazing through the empty forest. The figure huddled deeper into his coat, tried to hide his identity.

The children raised their eyes, searching for the source of the piercing cry, and Norah pointed for Sean to follow the straight line from her mitten to the bird. A pair of crows, alarmed by the peregrine, gave chase, cawing raucously, harassing it until all three birds vanished over the scattering of trees.

Margaret calculated the distance and found the falcon in the sky, all the while rewriting in her mind the carefully crafted note requesting her granddaughter's admission into the third grade of the elementary school. In a panic, she had created a story about a broken family, the girl's mother with nowhere to turn, asking could they please send the proper forms home with the child, who was called Norah. Through three separate drafts, she attempted to affect an air of resigned acceptance at having to care for the poor child, and the final sentence was her coup de grâce: “We all have our crosses to bear.” Over breakfast, Mrs. Quinn rehearsed the lie, counting on Norah to memorize the details and vouch for their authenticity. She folded the letter into the threadbare jacket pocket and stood by the door until Sean Fallon arrived as promised, and then watched them walk off together, the boy's furious pace making it difficult for Norah to keep up. The curtains at the Delarosas’ kitchen window snapped shut, and Margaret knew her neighbor had seen the boy and girl depart. She would have to invent a story for the inevitable questions to come. Silence, old foe, returned to the house.

Coffee at hand, staring at the cereal bowl and empty juice glass across from her place, she wondered how she had let things get this far out of order. The girl had spent just two nights in her house, but already Margaret was willing to protect her with the most stunning untruth. As if she really were her daughter's daughter, whom she had already loved all of her life.

Had this been true, she would have walked with the child to school and proudly made the introductions. Walking had been her habit and comfort, even in the coldest part of the year, and ever since her daughter vanished, Margaret hiked everywhere, every day, along the country roads on the outskirts and, as her infamy faded, chancing to go as far as the cluster of shops and office buildings and brownstones down by the bridge that constituted the town proper. Those who knew her story claimed Margaret searched for some clue on these journeys, eyes focused on the ground or the detritus along the paths, seeking out a reason.

Over the course of the first few years following the disappearance, her husband had walked with her. They chose routes to quiet places with scant chance of encountering friend or stranger. Tramping through time, they followed deer trails or hiked along the bicycle path the town had carved beside a creek, rarely used by any cyclist. One hot summer evening, Paul calculated that they had circumnavigated the globe simply by following the same steps over and over again. Partners in loss.

Erica had come late in their marriage, an unexpected blessing after years of prayer for a baby, visits to fertility specialists, the most exotic techniques, and, finally, giving up entirely. Margaret had just turned thirty-seven when their only child was born, and Paul was a dozen years her senior, old enough to be his daughter's grandfather. He spoiled the girl despite Margaret's warnings, and when she left them, Erica broke his heart and felled him—not all at once, but slowly and surely as ivy chokes a tree. Four years later, he was gone too. A final exit. After she buried him behind St. Anne's Church, Margaret resumed her journey, walking the hills surrounding the valley to be alone, invisible, listening only to the wind or the arrival of the songbirds each March and their leave-taking each September.

Now age and the winter had enclosed her. The first deep aches infected her the past November, and by Christmas she could not bear stepping outside when the thermometer dipped below freezing. Strange pains afflicted her. Potted palms replaced her legs. Her fingertips tingled and then went dull. An elbow stiffened and would not bend. Bird-fragile, her bones seemed empty of marrow. A high wind would blow her to Kansas. Worst of all, a relentless fatigue settled in and refused all remedies of sleep or rest. She was a clock unwound and losing time. When the girl arrived, Margaret's first impulse was to find out the truth, send the child back to where she belonged, wherever that might be, but perhaps this was God's way, she thought, of answering her constant prayer. Some company, some restitution for all that had been taken from her.

All that must be done was to fool everyone—her neighbors, the school, and her sister, Diane, the only other family she had left. An eyelash circled in her coffee cup. She rubbed her palms over the tablecloth, straightening wrinkles visible only to the touch. “It is too hot in here,” she said, though no one else was there. Opening a window, she heard crying in the air, the lonesome sound of one who should not have wintered over, but she could not find the peregrine all morning long. Nothing in the sky but blue brightness.

8

T
he interview with the principal took place in his cramped and humid office, the heart of the old Craftsman-style building tottering toward extinction. Atop the filing cabinets, a fern hung limply, fronds crisping to brown. Spangled on the walls, a gallery of photographs and banners marked the passage of his time at Friendship Elementary—the oldest sign, from 1970, welcomed him “on board.” Despite the constant blowing heat from the furnace, he seemed frigid beneath his baby blue sweater, out of which peeped a yellow striped shirt and a navy tie with a pattern of repeating anchors. Principal Taylor read part of Mrs. Quinn's letter, glanced up at the girl across from him, who smiled every time their eyes met, and then searched for his place in the text. At last he reached the ending, his lips twisted into befuddlement as he muttered the phrase “crosses to bear.” Norah hooked her wilting hair behind her ears and lifted an eyebrow when he turned his attention to her.

“Very curious.”

“About what part?”

“About the whole thing. Your notorious mother. Your grandmother, Mrs. Quinn. Why didn't she just bring you in herself today?”

Prepared for the question, she told her first lie. “She is something of an invalid.”

“An invalid? How can someone be somewhat an invalid? Do you even know the meaning of the word ‘invalid’?”

Norah lowered her voice, spoke slowly. “Agoraphobia, I'm afraid.” Seeing that her meaning was lost on the man, she restated. “A fear of the out of doors. Doesn't leave the house if she can help it.”

“I know perfectly well, young lady, what agro—”

“She can't quite shake it. I'm a godsend, really. You can't imagine the strain of the simplest things. Groceries, taking out the trash, fetching the mail.”

“And you are her granddaughter. What about your parents?”

“It says right there in the letter, Mr. Taylor. Are you going to make me say it out loud?”

“Yes, but—”

“Neither one of them really wants me, simple as that, I'm sorry to report.” She looked directly at his eyes.

He dug into his desk for the proper forms, flipping through a multicolored stack of papers. “I suppose we can accommodate you, Miss …”

“Quinn.” She leaned forward and laid her fingertips along the edge of his desk. Her nails were bitten to the quick.

“Right. Have your grandmother fill these out and sign them, and once your grades are transferred, you'll be official.”

Norah sighed and bowed her head. “I've never been to another school before. Have you ever heard of John Holt and
Teach Your Own?.
Homeschooling?”

Mr. Taylor looked up from the folder he had been inspecting. “You mean, your mother never sent you to school? Did she teach you at home enough so that you're even ready?”

He studied her eager, expectant face and then bent to his papers, brushing her away with a hastily scribbled note to the teacher. She could be the third grade's problem that day. In the margins, he jotted a reminder to call Mrs. Quinn, and then he added the letter to his overflowing in-box.

Norah flew down the hallway to her classroom, coat trailing like a windblown sheet, her sole-thin shoes squealing on the linoleum with every triumphant step. Catching her breath outside Room 9, Norah peered through the rectangular aperture cut into the door, as narrow as a window in a castle wall. Sean Fallon sat in the second row, fourth seat, and the nearest empty desk was in the third row, fifth seat, close enough for direct observation of him, far enough for her to go undetected. None of the other children spotted her face framed in the casement, for, scrupulous at their cursive penmanship, they watched their hands roll right-leaning spirals favored by practitioners of the Palmer method. Eight boys and twelve girls, and if no child was absent or out at the restroom, she would be number twenty-one, not as good as a prime, but a multiple of three and seven, two lucky numbers indeed. With these auguries in mind, she opened the door and marched directly to the teacher, presented her with the note from the principal, and stood like a willow hanging over her shoulder to read along silently. All of the children had stopped in their strokes. The teacher corrected her posture and stuck out her hand. “How do you do, Norah Quinn,” she stage-whispered. “I'm Mrs. Patterson.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Norah whispered back, and shook her hand, pumping her wiry arm like a piston.

Mrs. Patterson unclenched and stood beside the girl, facing the twenty curious pairs of eyes peering out as if hidden inside twenty firkins. “Class, this is Norah Quinn, and she will be joining us, starting today. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Norah?”

Curious and ready to judge, the children straightened in their chairs, awaiting word from the new creature flung into their midst.

“I am almost nine. I like birds—anything that flies really—and leopards. I don't like Brussels sprouts. The last time someone gave me Brussels sprouts, I dumped them behind the radiator when nobody was looking.”

The boys and girls laughed, but Mrs. Patterson's withering glare reproached them at once. “Where are you from, Norah?”

“Oh, I've lived all over, here and there. Right now, I live with Mrs. Quinn. My grandmother.”

The second outburst of gasps and giggles could not be suppressed by a mere stare. Mrs. Patterson rapped her knuckles upon the desktop. “Class, plenty of children live with their grandparents, so I don't think that's any excuse—”

Two boys in the back pointed at Norah's old shoes and enjoyed a conspiratorial laugh. Sensing her control of the entire day ebbing, the teacher cut short the introduction. “All right, class, back to your circles. Norah, there's a nice seat over there by the window.”

“If it's all the same to you, Mrs. Patterson, I would prefer that one in the back.”

“Sit where you please, child. I expect the rest of you to introduce yourselves to Norah during recess, and I'm sure you'll all become fast friends. We won't be going outside today, as it is entirely too cold.”

On her way to the fifth seat of the third row, she stopped to wink at Sean Fallon, and turning to the girl across from him, she asked, “Do you have an extra pen and paper, Sharon?” Without thinking, the girl held down her papers and opened the lid to her desk, and only when she had handed over the pen did she wonder how the stranger knew her name.

“I can read upside down,” Norah said, and put her finger on the
Sharon
in the upper right corner of the page.

The morning passed quietly until the bell signaled lunch. Mrs. Quinn had neglected to pack a meal, so Sean Fallon gave Norah half of his sandwich, apple butter on white bread. Counting out her pretzel sticks, Sharon Hopper divided and handed over half. Gail Watts offered her a small carton of milk that she bought at her mother's insistence and threw away unopened every day. Mark Bellagio presented the greater part of a tangerine. Dori Tilghman, a shortbread cookie in the shape of a keystone. “They're called Pennsylvanians,” she informed Norah, as if speaking to a student from some foreign land.

In the elementary school hierarchy, their table was far from the circle of popularity, though they were not the shunned freaks, merely the forgotten and the overlooked. The cafeteria hummed with the fall and rise of one hundred voices. Laughter rolled and slipped away. A shout rang out from a far corner, prelude to a chase around a table. Chair legs yelped across the linoleum, and a red-haired boy carried his tray to the trashcan, pulled out a paperback novel from his pocket, and leaned against the wall to read. At another table, a middle-aged lothario in a brown corduroy sports coat begged for potato chips from a gaggle of admiring girls. In a third direction, Norah spotted twin sisters licking pudding from plastic spoons, perfect mirrors of one another. All around her, the third graders traded stories about their friends and classmates, but she could not follow the gist of their gossip.

When the feast was over, Norah slapped her hands on the tabletop and thanked her tablemates for their generosity. Tearing a section from a brown paper bag, she folded the square into an intricate pattern, and taking care to tuck corners into fabricated openings, she blew into a tiny hole. Like an inflated balloon, the paper expanded into a hollow cube, which she served into the air with a pat of her palm. Sean watched the progress of the creation, hypnotized by the play of the trick. The children took turns batting it across the table like a volleyball, and when the cube came back round to Norah, she captured it in flight, brought it to her lips, leaned back her head, and with a steady puff of breath, kept blowing, spinning the box on one corner like a dreidel, until Mr. Taylor came along to snatch it midair and confiscate their fun. The children all cheered for her when, the moment his back was turned, she stuck out her tongue like a battle flag.

BOOK: Angels of Destruction
11.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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