Angels of Destruction (5 page)

11

H
aving managed the most difficult part of their ruse, the beginning, Margaret and Norah looked forward to their first weekend together as a chance to slow the pace and get to know each other better. Come Saturday, the girl pushed open the woman's bedroom door with breakfast, burnt toast and strong coffee, and she sat at the foot of the bed while Margaret crunched and sipped, feigned delight on her pursed lips, and then Norah took the tray and washed the dishes while Margaret bathed and readied herself for the day. Conversation, which had been missing for years, filled the house, questions about school and friends, how nice that Fallon boy turned out to be after all.

Heavy footsteps on the porch, stomping snow from boot treads, announced the presence of the visitors before the first sharp knock. Norah surprised the couple standing outside the door as they unwrapped their coats and gloves. The man, a woolen skullcap over his bald head, seemed embarrassed to be discovered, but the woman craned her neck forward to take a closer look at the girl. “I'm Mrs. Delarosa,” she said. “We're your neighbors. This is my husband, Pasquale.”

“Hello, miss,” he said, offering his hand. “Everybody calls me Pat. What's your name?”

Simonetta tapped him on the elbow for silence. “Is Mrs. Quinn at home?”

“Gramma!” Norah yelled toward the kitchen. “It's the next-doors come to call.”

She waited a beat, and when Margaret did not arrive at once, Norah sped back and found her, flustered and uncertain, struggling from the easy chair. “Follow my lead,” she whispered to her young confederate.

Waiting patiently in the foyer, the Delarosas offered a warm greeting. Simonetta handed over fresh-baked muffins in a wicker basket. Pat presented a bouquet of Peruvian lilies accented by bright orange poppies.

“Pat, Simonetta.” Margaret ushered them inside. “Where did you get these flowers in the middle of winter?”

“Blueberry?” Norah peeked beneath the gingham cloth.

“My granddaughter. Norah.”

Lifting her hand to her mouth, Simonetta appeared on the verge of tears. “So she came back to you. After all this time. We pray for you every Sunday, and now Erica's come home. Where is she?”

“No, not her, just her daughter. Norah, this is Mr. and Mrs. De-larosa.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Oh.” Simonetta shifted her enthusiasm. “What a lovely girl. You must be so happy.”

Marking the passage of the bouquet, Pat Delarosa stepped closer. “You forget I have a flower shop. Flowers flown in from all over the world.”

“You pray every Sunday?” Norah asked.

Bending to the girl's eye level, Simonetta took her hands. “For your grandmother. For your mother.”

The women retreated to the kitchen to brew another pot of coffee. An explanation was hatched over blueberry muffins, elaborations on the story Margaret had prepared for the principal of the elementary school.

In the living room, Norah admired the arrangement in the vase. “Al-stroemeria,” Pat told her. “Don't tell your gramma but I had too many in the shop.”

“She wouldn't mind. She's happy to have any.”

“Hey, look here, I show you something you never known you seen. This kind of lily has twists at the bottom.” He pointed to the resupinate leaves. “So what's the bottom is really the top, and what's the top is the underneath.”

“Things aren't always what they seem.”

“You have a favorite?”

“A favorite flower?”

“Your mama, she liked the scent of jasmine. I knew her since she was a little girl your age.”

“Was she anything like me?”

Pat considered her question, taking her in as for the first time and straining to remember his earlier encounters with Erica. “She was a smart cookie like you, eh? And friendly like you. And Paul, that's her father you never met, she was the apple of his eye. A nice girl, too, and too bad what happened.”

“Was my grandmother very sad when my mother left?”

“Sad? Oh, yes, heartbroken.” The brusqueness of his confession caught up with him. “No, I mean, she was sad, yes. But happy now, right, that you're here?” Turning away from the child's gaze, he went to the window and looked out at the frosty lawn, his rough hands worried together. She did not move toward him but remained by the flowers and their fragrance building in the heat of the room. “I'm sorry,” he said at last. “I don't mean to bring up such things, but we worry about her, your grandmother, kind of lonesome by herself. I keep out an eye, and my wife too. But you know, she don't ask much, and ever since your mother, well, she holds her heart to herself, eh?”

Norah approached from behind and stood next to him, staring at the bare winter scene.“You watch over her.”

“Like a neighbor should. What's a neighbor for, anyhow? She don't go out much lately, and I worry.”

“You make sure she's safe.”

“Like the other night.” With his chin, he gestured beyond the glass. “Simonetta, she hears something in the middle of the night, and I was dead asleep. But she says, Pat, Pat, and wakes me out of the bed to come see through the window, and I don't see nothing. But she tells me there's someone out in the yard. A man? Not so much a man, she says, an
ombra.
A spirit, maybe? Simonetta, she's so shook up and can't sleep, so I don't know.”

He read the fear on her face, and bent down to her to speak in a low voice.

“Don't be too concerned with what she says she sees. She's from the old country, eh? Superstitious. Not important, what she thought she saw, only to say that a noise over here gets her worried. Then we see you and that boy coming through the snow. So let's go see for ourselves, and you know, everybody loves a mystery.”

She reached out and touched him on the arm. “Until the mystery is solved.”

Her touch alarmed him at first, by the overwhelming sense of rejuvenation he felt at the slight pressure of her hand. Most children dared not even approach him, and he could not place the feeling till later that night, in bed next to Simonetta, as he told her stories of the free and happy days of his own boyhood, tales he had long forgotten, and in the morning, Pat woke with shock at the wet patch on his pillowcase where his dreams had brought him to tears.

12

A
t dinner each night they went over the lies necessary to protect their fiction.

“You mustn't say you are an orphan,” Mrs. Quinn began that Sunday night. “You are my daughter's daughter and she has sent you here to live with me while she is trying to patch together her life after a broken marriage.”

“I will look sad when I speak of my father.” Norah bowed her head to the mashed potatoes.

“You will behave yourself, that's what you'll do. Stick to our story. Your mother is staying in New Mexico to put her affairs in order.”

“Is that what broke the marriage? Affairs?”

A wicked smile lit her face. “Yes,
his
affairs. No, no, you wouldn't know. You don't know, only that your mother felt it best, under the circumstances, for me to look after you for a while, and she'll send for you once she's on her feet again.”

Norah speared a broccoli floret, considered its resemblance to a tree in summer, and popped it whole into her mouth. She crunched on as Mrs. Quinn spun out the rest of her tale.

“I can't explain you without explaining her away, and I can't bring myself to say it.”

“That you never hear from her?”

“That I've heard from her exactly twice since she ran away.” She eased herself from her chair, sighing as her knees ached, and left the room. Staring at the blank space across the table, Norah buttered a biscuit, and savored every crumb. Margaret returned clutching an envelope to her bosom, and with great ceremony undid the clasp and slid two items onto the tablecloth. A postcard stood on its narrow end and flopped over, and a thin sheet of paper hit the edge of a glass and fluttered like a leaf to the floor. Margaret could have been no more startled had she dropped a vase that shattered on impact, so Norah fetched the paper and stood at the woman's shoulder to read along.

“Thank you. This postcard came a few weeks after she left, and you see it's from Memphis.” The picture on its face was labeled
Historic Elm-wood Cemetery.
“Why anyone would send a postcard of a graveyard, of all things, I don't know. But I was so grateful to have it, although my husband was just livid. But Erica thought she was in love, so. Paul swore he'd get on a plane and fly right out there, and it was all I could do to stop him.” A memory made her cut off the sentence. She picked up the letter and started reading it to herself. “They were long gone, you see. Nothing until this, four years later. Paul was dead by then, and I had given up all hope, well, almost beyond hoping, and then this. No return address, just a mention of the town Madrid, and of course, I thought Madrid, Spain. Who wouldn't have thought of Spain?”

“Spain sounds entirely logical.”

“But this Madrid is a flyspeck town with the same name in New Mexico. I was tempted at first to give it to the FBI—especially since that man was shot—but she would have been arrested and ended up in prison, so I kept the letter hidden. Not a soul knows. I was too scared to say anything.”

Without a word, Norah patted Mrs. Quinn on the hand and went to the den to retrieve the atlas. The book hid her body from nose to navel, and when she set it down on the table, a puff of dust rose and settled like silt. “There is old York and New York. London and New London. Athens, Georgia, and Athens, Greece. And at least forty-two Springfields,” she recited while turning the leaves. “But who would have thought to look for Madrid in New Mexico?” Finding the vectors, she zeroed in on the spot. “Right exactly in the center of the middle of nowhere.” Norah pointed to a dot on the map roughly halfway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and read aloud the legend written along the road. “The Turquoise Trail, doesn't that sound beautiful? Now that you know where she is, why don't you go see her?”

“Who knows if she is still there? And who knows if she would even want to see me anymore? She's made no effort all this time. It's enough to know she was there. I can think she's still alive and well.”

“But you're her mother—”

“She doesn't want me. If she hasn't told me to come for her by now, she doesn't want me in her life.”

“But you should go while you can.”

“That's enough for tonight. I only brought it up so that we might get our stories straight. Your supper's getting cold.”

A truce struck, they finished their meal in silence. Later, side by side, they washed and dried the dishes, and after her bath, Norah curled her small body next to Margaret on the couch, and they read together under a circle of light until the bedtime hour. Well after midnight, Norah moved in whispers down the stairs, found the letters tucked inside the atlas at New Mexico, and read each word by starlight. And after she was finished, she tucked them back in place, closed the book, and began to cry. Outside in the moonlight, the one who watched the house drew in the wings of his camel hair coat and walked away.

13

D
own in Washington, bitter weather forced indoors the ceremonies surrounding the second inauguration of President Reagan. The television news that evening showed empty streets, wind whipping plastic bags along the sidewalks, the grandstands silent but for the crisp fluttering of bunting. No recitation of the oath at the Capitol portico. No march down Pennsylvania Avenue. No shining city on a hill. Only the desolate cold.

The telephone rang in the Quinns’ living room, a rare enough occurrence any day, all the more strange in the evening. Norah picked up the receiver and said hello.

“I'm sorry, I must have dialed the wrong number,” the voice said.

“Who were you trying to reach?”

“Margaret Quinn. I could have sworn—”

“Oh, she's here. This is the right number. May I tell her who's calling?”

“My name is Diane Cicogna. With whom am I speaking?”

“Her granddaughter. Norah Quinn.”

“Granddaughter?” A long pause on the line. “Tell your grandmother her sister is on the phone.”

Before speaking, Margaret held the phone against her chest, composing what she would say. With a backhand wave, she sent Norah out of earshot to the living room and the rest of the television coverage. “Diane. I should have known you would call to commiserate. It is a sad day. To think they let a little cold spell—”

Norah moved her finger to the screen, aimed to touch Reagan's face, but a quarter inch away, a spark of static electricity leapt and zapped her. She sat back and considered his half smile. He seemed to understand what he was doing and to enjoy some tremendous personal joke on the rest of the people, the catch in his voice and cant of the head, the stardust in his eyes, and the shining pompadour. More pictures of Washington as a ghost town, patriotic theme music trumpeting as the credits rolled.

A quiz show began. Three people received an answer and had to compose the correct question, a concept that appealed to her philosophical nature, until she realized that there was only one solution. How much more interesting if there were a multiplicity of possible correct questions, just as in real life, where every question had an infinite number of likely answers, dependent entirely on where one wished the conversation to go. Margaret stayed on the phone the entire length of the program, and when the quiz was over, Norah turned off the TV to better eavesdrop.

“The reason I never said anything is because it happened out of the blue… No, she just showed up here one night… No, she's not planning on coming home… Of course, I don't mind in the slightest, she's sweet…. I don't know when Erica will send for her, I don't know if she ever will. It hasn't been decided.”

A long pause. Norah could hear a tiny voice shouting through the handset.

“That's fine, that's fine,” Margaret pleaded. “But hardly necessary. No, no, no, I don't mind. Come. You're always welcome. No, great, come. Next month. You'll love her.”

An even longer pause, an even more animated voice.

“I'm absolutely sick about it too. Such a faker, how anyone could vote—”

When at last she came into the living room, Mrs. Quinn looked older, the joy of the past two weeks drained from her features. She appeared as tired as she was the night Norah had arrived on her doorstep, but seeing the child again, she brightened and smiled, yet could not shake completely her distractions. Sitting next to Norah on the sofa, she stared at the blank television set.

“When I answered, I didn't know that was your sister.”

“That makes you two even. She didn't know I have a granddaughter to take my phone calls. We'll have to be careful with her.”

“Like a leopard. We'll use our spots to mimic the shadows.”

Margaret nodded. “Something like that. She will be visiting for a couple of days in February, and I just now had a hard time with her. She's naturally suspicious. A born skeptic.”

Gathering an afghan about her shoulders, Norah huddled into a ball and rested her head on Mrs. Quinn's lap. The woman sighed and began to stroke the girl's hair while a ticking clock measured their silence. She could not imagine her life without the presence of the child and wondered how she had managed to endure the emptiness that had preceded Norahs arrival. Not just the comfort of another breath in the house, not just the sound of footsteps in the middle of the night when the child crept to the bathroom, not merely the fact of her being. The ruse was more than a game; it was a way of gaining some mastery over what had seemed cruel and arbitrary. She questioned her conscience for the thousandth time and resolved to her own satisfaction her right to claim the girl, just as the girl had seemed to claim her, one the necessity of the other.

When Norah finally spoke, her tone reflected a shifting mood. “I'd like to invite Sean Fallon over to visit. Maybe after school or Saturday.”

“He could come play and stay for dinner.”

“I think having another child here will make it easier for my aunt to believe, and I can practice calling you Grandma with him around.”

Margaret laughed and tapped her on the shoulder, signaling her to sit up. “You have a devious mind, Norah Quinn.”