Desolate Angel (5 page)

As I stared at her, a scene unfolded in my mind. I was sharing in her memories: a not-yet-middle-aged woman, beauty fading from neglect, sitting by the bedside of a dying old man. She is holding his hand and murmuring away his fears, assuring him that he does not need to be afraid, she will stay with him and he will not be alone. His terror leaves him and the old man closes his eyes, finding refuge in the sleep of the comforted. There is love in the room, as tangible as the handmade quilt folded over the end of the bed. But I know, as surely as anything I have ever known, that when the old man dies and finds his peace, his love for his dutiful daughter will die with him—and she will be the one left alone.

Just as I reached the end of this memory with her, the woman in the bar looked up at me, as if I’d spoken to her. Had she seen me? Could she feel me there? I waited, stunned. But, no, she glanced down, shaking it off, then picked up a shot glass of amber liquid and drained it. The moment had passed. Our connection was severed.

We were both left alone.

No one here would be of help to me. While I had once treasured the warm glow that the shots of bourbon gave me and thought of them as blessed release, I saw now that the more these people drank, the denser the air around them grew, until they were trapped in a carapace of hopelessness that was closer to death than to living.

I had to get out of there.

I escaped and stood outside on the sidewalk, waiting for Danny to leave. I knew he would have to report to the station eventually, even with his new partner, Maggie, picking up the slack. But when he finally stumbled out half an hour later, he did not head to his car. He turned down the block and walked toward my old neighborhood, causing curtains to flutter in windows as he staggered past. I followed him, the tail end of an invisible parade, watching the gloomy cloud he carried from the bar lighten in the light of a crisp winter day.

When he reached my block, he leaned against a tree several houses down from my yard and stared at my front door. I knew no one was home. Connie was still at work, the boys still at school.

Why was he here?

Did Danny miss me that much?

I would be astonished if that was the case. Though we’d had a friendship right out of the academy, after his divorce he had withdrawn into a sullenness that had persisted ever since. He had talked very little over our years together, done even less, disappeared often, and seldom expressed an opinion about the cases we were given. If I was unmotivated, Danny was petrified, light-years ahead of me when it came to inertia. No wonder we had been sloppy and closed so few cases while working together.

I had no illusions. Danny had not cared for me.

I could do nothing but wait while he stared at my house, grappling with unknown desires. Nearly half an hour passed before I saw what Danny had been waiting for: my wife’s car pulled up in our driveway, all the way up to the top of it, near the side door, in a place that had been cluttered with bicycles and sports equipment when I was alive. Connie climbed out of the driver’s side, then the passenger door opened and a man I had never seen before stepped out. He was tall and trim, with graying hair, and wore gold-rimmed glasses that made him look kind. He was a few years older than Connie. He followed her to the side of the house, his back turned to the neighbors as she fumbled to unlock the back door and let them both inside.

What was my wife doing at home in the middle of the day? Who was this man?

Danny stayed in the shadows of his watching place, but I had no such scruples. Invisibility has its advantages and I was curious. What secret lives we all lead, I thought.

I approached the kitchen door with no sense of guilt, nor could I feel any sense of jealousy, either. Such worldly feelings had apparently left me, along with resentment and the other petty emotions that erode our ability to love.

If someone else loved Connie, I would be glad for her. I had loved my wife once, and I felt a need, still, to look after her and my sons as best I could, perhaps to make up for how little I had looked after them when I was alive. Besides, I understood that I was gone from her life and that what she now thought of me was irrelevant. Connie’s life went on—and she deserved to be loved in a way I had never been able to give her.

I stayed only long enough to see that this man had been in my home before. He was not a stranger passing through. He belonged. Connie left him alone in the kitchen, yet he moved from cabinet to table to refrigerator with ease, pulling out plates and glasses, pouring wine, setting out a platter of cheese and slicing a pear while he waited for my wife to reappear. When she returned, she was wearing a pale blue nightgown and a matching robe edged with lace.

“I knew you would look beautiful in it,” the man said to her. He pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair, uncaring that it was streaked with gray, seeing only my wife’s beauty.

Connie put her arms around him and they kissed, then the man laughed and picked up a slice of pear. He fed Connie half, and ate the rest himself. “Are you happy?” he asked.

She nodded, beyond words, and my heart swelled with joy for my wife. I had never seen her look so beautiful; I had never felt her feel so beautiful before.

“How long do we have?” the man asked. I could tell that he was a kind man, a man unencumbered by lies or other obligations. A man with the freedom to think of nothing at this moment but my wife, and her loveliness, and the time they had together.

“The boys will be home in two hours,” she said. “You must have all your clothes back on by then.” She laughed. “They’ll be happy you’re back in town.”

He bent down and kissed her, enfolding her in his arms, and I knew the time had come for me to leave. This was no longer my life and this scene was not destined to be my memory.

It was time to let Connie go. Forever.

I left my old house with an unexpected feeling of freedom and a certainty that my time there was done. I would return, I knew, to watch my boys grow into men, but I would not and could not be the one responsible for them. I knew now that someone else would. What I had failed to do, this man would do for me, repairing my inattention, showing them love, shepherding them into adulthood. And he would do a better job than I could ever have done.

I felt nothing but gratitude toward him.

As I passed the tree where Danny stood brooding under the branches, still staring at my house, I patted my old partner on the back. He jumped, his reaction dulled by alcohol. A goose had walked over his grave.

I was both bemused and sad for him.
Whatever dreams you had about Connie are gone, my friend,
I thought.
You have my sympathies.

Danny had finally had enough. He pulled his coat tightly around him and shivered, then stumbled over the tree roots as he fell back into the sunlight. He marched to his car with the exaggerated posture of a drunk, fooling no one who saw him stagger by. I hitched a ride back to the station with him, exuberant with a freedom I had not expected, ready for something new.

I discovered a childish joy in examining the backseat, a place where I had often shoved perpetrators or relegated bums but never actually sat myself.

I found wads of gum parked on torn vinyl, scraps of paper bearing phone numbers, crumpled business cards, initials scratched into plastic. People were funny, I thought. They had a need, somehow, to prove that they had been there. They placed such importance on a cumbersome existence that I now knew was merely one form of many.

For the first time since my passing, I felt a stirring of joy that I was what I was and that I was where I was. And at that moment, a door opened in my mind. It gave off a light. I tried to cling to my epiphany, but it evaporated.

And yet, it promised me hope.

Chapter 6

My newfound sense of freedom opened the door to emotions I had not realized I still had. Though I’d thought I was beyond such things as infatuation, it felt as if my whole world stopped when I followed Danny into the station house and found myself within a few inches of his new partner. Maggie was sitting at my old desk, scrutinizing a case folder opened before her. She had showered and changed clothes. Her hair was wet and pulled back carelessly in a ponytail. She had been in too much of a hurry to get back to work to bother to dry it.

Something new infiltrated my existence as I stood near her. At first I did not realize what it was. Then I had it: I could smell again. Maggie smelled of citrus.

I inhaled the air around her deeply, thinking how fitting it was that she smelled of oranges and sunshine. She did not look as if she had stayed up all night processing a crime scene. She was clean and alert, busily cross-checking items, so absorbed she barely glanced up when Danny sat down beside her.

“Got held up,” he explained and I heard the old familiar slur in his voice. Had I been like that, that clueless about how I appeared to others? Deluded into thinking that no one would notice what a mess I was?

“I gathered as much,” she answered, without emotion. I winced. Danny was as dead to her as I was. I felt a stab of sympathy for my old partner.

“Anything I can do to help?” he asked, as if it were perfectly natural for a nineteen-year veteran to be looking to his younger female partner for the lead.

“Not until we know who she is.” Maggie took in his disheveled appearance. “You want to head down to Missing Persons and light a fire under their tail? Maybe check the college registrar after that to see if a coed’s gone missing?”

“Will do,” Danny said, shuffling off. I knew he was relieved to be leaving her. Her refusal to judge him was more awful than contempt might have been. It meant he was not even worth her appraisal.

I sat in Danny’s chair and watched Maggie work. She had astonishing concentration. After a few minutes staring at the list of evidence that had been collected at the crime scene, she picked up the phone. I knew she was calling the lab. I had done it myself many times, usually because of a lack of inspiration on my end.

“How long?” she asked into the phone. She looked so disappointed at the answer that I could not bear to simply watch.

I would help her.

I made my way through the halls of the law enforcement building, my senses hyperalert. I had gained more than my sense of smell back. Everything around me appeared in ultra-relief. I could see the brushstrokes in the green paint slapped haphazardly on the walls. Every piece of grit on the floor twinkled as if it were diamond dust. And every person that passed, from clerk to perpetrator, exuded a distinct smell that triggered a visual composite consisting of random images from their lives. It was fascinating and horrifying at the same time to read each person who passed me by.

I learned that Morty, who had walked a beat downtown for twenty-eight years, had discovered loneliness in his advancing years. A crack addict was hauled past by a pair of uniformed officers and I knew at once that he had been scalded with hot water by his mother as a child, the memory now hidden under a callus of near-constant unconsciousness. And my old lieutenant, a man I had thought of as rigid and impenetrable, was in love, but afraid of telling the woman—who worked in the public relations department—for fear of being thought old and foolish. That made me the saddest of all. I wanted to tell him to at least try, before it was too late, but of course he could not see or hear me.

By the time I reached the laboratory, I felt like an empty vessel that had been filled with the lives of others. I was connected to every person who breathed in that building at that moment, a keeper of their hopes and fears. It left me both stunned and determined.

I knew I could find a way to get through to Maggie. I knew that she would be the one who could help me set things right.

I recognized the figure on a stool near the front door of the lab, peering through a microscope. Peggy Calhoun had been perched on that stool for the past twenty-five years. She was many pounds overweight and had long since grown too old for anyone to give her a second glance. Her red hair was obviously dyed, piled high and pinned haphazardly in a bun that listed to one side. Her black glasses had slid down to the tip of her nose and her lipstick was smeared, as always. Danny and I had made fun of Peggy ceaselessly when I was alive, speculating that she lived with a dozen cats and celebrated Christmas alone with a bottle of Ama retto and takeout from Nikko’s. How cruel we were to have rejoiced in someone else’s loneliness when all we had to show for our own sorry lives was an unceasing ability to cause the ones who loved us pain.

There had been a time, many years ago, when Peggy, in her own clumsy way, had let me know that she had a thing for me and was willing to prove it. But that had been lifetimes ago, for both of us, and I had not considered her offer seriously, knowing even then that she believed me to be far better than I would ever be. I had caused her pain, I could feel it in her still, but I had not caused her that pain out of indifference. Not back then. The truth was I’d been afraid of letting her down by who I really was. Now I realized that her belief in the best of others had been all the reaching out that she could manage in the solitary life she had chosen for herself. And that her belief in the best of me would have been a gift had I been able to accept it. I felt as if I owed her an apology of sorts. But I did not know where to start.