Earth Angel (6 page)

And I woke up dry-mouthed and smacking my chapped lips, but wide awake with the sudden and certain knowledge of what I should
do next with my life.

Life after Death

I
WAS TWO THOUSAND MILES FROM
C
ALIFORNIA AND STILL A BIT
woozy from jet lag. Also, I had fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills stuffed into my purse. Maybe this was why
I was having so much trouble following a fourteen-year-old girl down the housewares aisle of Sears without her seeing me.

Already my genius plan was falling apart.

The young girl with the blue backpack veered into the women’s clothing department and stopped suddenly to look at some shoes
on display, gaudy red pumps with a rhinestone-studded strap around the ankle. Something Donna Summers might have worn during
her reign as disco queen. She turned the pump around in her hand, letting the fluorescent Sears lights glint off the rhinestones.
She was imagining, no doubt, how these shoes might instantly transform her from chubby schoolgirl into femme fatale. Someone
worth noticing. I winced, recalling the too-tight sweater with the sequined unicorn I’d bought back in ninth grade, hoping
for the same result.

She looked over her shoulder in my direction, and I quickly ducked behind a circular rack and feigned interest in
stirrup stretch pants while continuing to spy on her. Oddly, she sniffed the inside of the shoe, made a face, and then replaced
it. She darted off again. I dropped the sleeve I’d been pawing and hurried after her. I couldn’t afford to lose her, not after
blowing it earlier that day with her mother. This was my last chance. If I screwed this up, I didn’t know what I’d do with
my life. Sit on a counter stool next to my mother and entertain customers while serving corned beef on rye. I could become
her understudy.

I caught a glimpse of the girl’s blue backpack turning a corner and I jogged after her. I rounded a table of sweaters too
fast and whacked my hip on the corner. Pain crackled through me, but I hobbled after her.

Ten days had passed since my nightmare about Tim and my subsequent revelation. Afterward I’d lain wide awake in bed working
out all the details of my plan. I’d never felt so awake in my life, not even during the day. I could feel my brain’s synapses
popping like snapping fingers. It seemed as if when I closed my eyes I could see right through the lids straight up into the
Milky Way. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the sensation vanished and I dropped off into a deep sleep. When I woke
up a few hours later I was groggy and sore, as if I’d been beaten. By breakfast I’d already gotten over the belief that the
dream had been some sort of divine inspiration any more than my string of bad luck was divine retribution or some Job-like
endurance test. Shit happens, I’d concluded, and somehow I’d got caught in a random shit-storm. Nothing more. No cosmic conspiracy.
My dream was just my unconscious mind clumsily shuffling the marked deck of my neuroses. Still, the more I’d sat there heaping
blueberry jam on my English muffin thinking about my plan, the more it seemed like a pretty good idea after all, even if it
was inspired by nothing more than too much caramel popcorn and my mother’s good cop/bad cop interrogation about my future
plans.

Once I’d made up my mind, I became uncharacteristically decisive—and deceptive. I convinced Mom to go back home, promising
that I’d follow shortly for an extended visit. I’d hang around the store so she could show me off to the customers, maybe
help Dad parboil the bagels. I waved Mom off at the John Wayne Airport and immediately raced over to Carol’s. She agreed to
look after Blue once I told her I was going to take a long vacation in Europe. She even gave me some preaddressed postcards
to mail to her from the various countries. “Look,” she said, holding up one postcard of Big Ben, “I even wrote your part on
the first card, just to get you started.” It read:
Dear Carol, Missing you terribly. The treasures of Europe pale next to your ageless beauty and the preciousness of your friendship.
You’re the best friend anyone could possibly have, certainly better than I deserve. I only hope I live long enough to earn
the devotion you’ve given so freely. Your unworthy friend, Season. P.S. Say hi to Blue.

When I finished reading it I hugged her tightly. Tears brimmed in my eyes. I nearly lost it there, almost confessed what I
was really going to do. But I didn’t. I knew she would talk me out of it. Tell me I was nuts. Drag me to her psychiatrist
friend in Los Angeles—the one I’d met at her baby shower, the tiny woman who played cello and had an original Picasso sketch
hanging in her office—and then I’d be seeing her three days a week instead of what I was doing now: following this teenage
girl through the Sears in Chicago, hauling fifty thousand dollars in cash.

The girl was tramping through electronics now, past the TV’s, the CD players, boom boxes. She paused at the CD’s, picked up
a couple, flipped them over to read the backs, then took one to the cash register and bought it. I was surprised to see her
write a check, since I hadn’t had a checking account until I was in college. She stuffed the CD in her backpack and took off
again. She flew through the linens and out the door into the main corridor of the
mall. I was running now to keep up with her. I could feel my pulse ticking in my neck. How had I gotten so out of shape? A
couple of years ago I was swimming laps every day and lifting weights afterward. I also played tennis in a women’s league
twice a week and then on weekends played doubles with Tim and various other couples we’d met at the city tennis club. First,
I’d dropped the weights from my routine. Then the tennis league. Then when I became pregnant, I swam only every other day,
just to be safe, even though medically I knew swimming wouldn’t harm me or the baby. Still, after the miscarriage, I stopped
even swimming. Now I was puffing just to keep up with a chubby teenager.

I studied the stores, wondering where to make my move. Should I do it here or wait until she left the mall? She stopped to
look in the window of a Casual Corner clothing store and I went to the phone kiosk and pretended to make a call. Timing would
be everything. I couldn’t afford to make the same mistake I’d already made with her mother.

Finding them in the first place had been the hard part. I’d gone to the library and looked up the news accounts of the shooting.
When the shooting had first happened I’d saved the daily newspapers, thinking I would someday clip the articles and mount
them in a book like a wedding album. Then my mother saw the papers and said, “What are you saving this crap for?” I didn’t
have an answer. What indeed? As a conversation piece to show my future lovers? Something to prove to any teenagers I might
someday have that, Hey, Mom wasn’t always such a boring old broad. There was that time when she’d been engaged to a mass murderer.
Maybe I’d saved the newspapers to remind me of Tim. But that wasn’t how I wanted to remember him. So I said nothing when Mom
tossed the newspapers into the trash, saying solemnly in German,
“The past is the past.”

In the library I made my neatly printed list:

Helen Sagan

Darlene Delillo

Toshiro Yamato

Akia Sanjume

Yukio Tanaka.

The list of dead. Tim’s victims. I wrote each of their names at the top of separate pages of my yellow legal pad and jotted
down everything I could find out about each person, especially their surviving relatives. Helen and Darlene were easy because
I had access to their personnel files at work. But I didn’t want to show favoritism by starting with my friends. That would
undermine the whole point of my plan, corrupt the purity of the enterprise.

So I started with Toshiro Yamato, using reverse alphabetical order to show further impartiality. Mr. Yamato had only been
in this country six months, brought over from Japan to help develop a software program for police helicopters. He was unmarried,
but he had an American-born cousin living in Chicago, Tina Grover. Even though Mr. Yamato’s body had been flown back to Japan
to be buried beside his father, Ms. Grover and her teenage daughter, Beth, had flown out to Southern California for the public
ceremony to honor the victims put on by the city of Irvine, where the walk-in clinic was located. Ms. Grover had told a
Los Angeles Times
reporter that Toshiro and she had been very close, despite the physical distance that separated them. Their parents had also
been very close, so as children, both had spent summers alternating between each other’s homes.

So, here was my plan: to find Tina Grover and give her the fifty thousand dollars in cash. Just hand it to her without explanation
and walk away. I understood that money doesn’t make up for the loss of a loved one, but it could help relieve the grief. After
all, I had received a lot of money and now I was going to use it to relieve my grief—
and guilt. I suppose it would have been better if I’d flown to Japan and given it to Mr. Yamato’s widowed mother. But I didn’t
want to leave the country, leave what little sense of stability I had.

Finding Tina Grover had not been as easy as I had expected. She was listed in the Chicago phone directory, but without an
address. My notes indicated that she was a divorced single mother, so I could see the reason for security. Still, I couldn’t
just call and ask for her address without seeming suspicious. The whole point of my mission was to just hand over the cash
and walk away, no discussion, no thanks, nothing. Kind of like Mr. Anthony on the old TV series,
The Millionaire:
Every week he’d hand somebody a cashier’s check for a million dollars and then go home to his rich boss, and they’d sit around
grinning.