Fear to Tread (5 page)

When Laura got home, she turned off the ringer on the phone and changed into painting clothes, yoga pants and one of Jake’s old tee-shirts with her hair pulled back.

In the studio, she cracked open a window in spite of the bitter cold. A draft knifed in and around her, giving her goosebumps, and she thought about getting a sweater, but she didn’t want to wait. All of a sudden, she needed to get this done.

She dragged a pair of sawhorses out from under some clean towels she had never gotten around to folding and walked one of the huge canvases over and laid it across them, face up. She touched a fingertip to a corner more from habit than necessity. It was dry; Jake had finished this one months ago, right after he was diagnosed. She smiled down at the image, Jake’s mother and sister shelling peas on the back porch of a house in flames. His mother was going to hate it. She was going to say it made her look “country.” But it was beautiful. She ran her fingertips lightly over the faces, feeling the texture, the complicated love expressed in every brushstroke. “I love you, baby,” she whispered. “I miss you.”

She mixed the crackled-sugar powdered varnish with turpentine, the precise recipe so clear in her mind she barely thought about it. The smell as she stirred took her back to Savannah and the first tiny apartment she and Jake had shared on the second floor of an old white house near school. When it was warm, Jake had painted on the porch roof outside their living room window. Tourists passing in the square below had thought he was part of the local color, a half-naked giant in cargo shorts. He had always had paint in his hair, head and chest. She had fallen asleep every night smelling the paint on him, snuggled close to his bare skin.

When it was cold, they had both worked in the tiny kitchen, huddled as close as they dared to the open oven door, the only source of artificial heat in the damp, Southern winter. She had worked at the kitchen table on a neat easel that she folded away every night, her canvases leaned against the bookcases that lined the living room walls. Jake had blocked the kitchen cabinets for weeks at a time; she would have to move his canvases to get to the oatmeal or the spice rack. He had gone through a triptych phase that had almost driven her out of her mind as a housekeeper. Everywhere she had looked, three images in progress had looked back.

If she had asked her mother for money, they could have easily moved to a bigger, better place with heat and extra bedrooms. But she had refused, and Jake had never suggested she should. He had worked part-time jobs at pizza joints and tourist bars; she had worked the customer service counter at a big department store in the mall, wrapping packages and processing credit card payments, and somehow they had made ends meet. Later, after Mama had gone into the hospital, she could have just written herself a check; she’d had her mother’s power of attorney. It wouldn’t have been stealing; technically the money had all been as much hers as it was her mother’s, a shared inheritance from her grandparents and what was left of her father’s insurance. But she had never been able to stand the thought of letting her family’s legacy into her life with Jake, even as cash.

She was so caught up in remembering, she barely registered the knocking at the door until it became frantic. “Laura!” Jason’s voice echoed down the hallway. “Are you there? Are you all right?”

She put down the jar of varnish and headed to the door. “Oh thank God,” he said when she opened it. “I was calling and calling, and you didn’t answer.” He hugged her tight.

“I turned off the phone,” she said. “I’m varnishing Jake’s paintings.” She shouldn’t be annoyed with him, she knew, but she wanted to slam the door in his face. She wanted to be alone with Jake’s paintings, alone with her own thoughts.

“Can I see?” he said.

“Of course.” He was sweet and concerned about her; he didn’t deserve her anger. “Come on in.”

He followed her back to the studio. “I was going to try to get you to come out to dinner with me.”

“No, thanks.” She chose a fresh brush. “We can order out if you want.”

“You should get out,” he said.

“I don’t want to get out, Jason.” She went back to the painting.

“Fine, fine.” He settled into the ratty office chair at her desk. “Jake said you always varnished his stuff.”

“I did, even in college.” She painted on the varnish with careful, vertical strokes. When the first layer had dried, she would go back and do it again horizontally, creating a perfect, barely-detectable grid of delicate brushstrokes. “He always said he couldn’t face them any more after they were finished.” She found the work soothing, the pure, uncreative technique of covering the paint in a perfectly even layer of gloss, keeping the image safe. “He would always see things that he wanted to fix and end up screwing it up.”

“I remember.” He turned his chair to face the last, unfinished painting. “He was amazing.”

She smiled down on the painting in front of her. “Yes, he was.”

“It just kills me that he didn’t finish this,” he said. “I think it might have been his best work.” She made a noise, not looking up. “You don’t think so? You don’t like it?”

“No, I don’t.” She looked over at the huge, unfinished canvas, barely able to face it even from across the room. “To tell you the truth, I hate it.”

“Laura, how can you say that?” he said. “It’s a beautiful portrait of you—it’s so obvious how much he loved you.”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s not just a portrait of me. It’s kind of cruel, actually, and that wasn’t Jake.”

“Cruel?” Jason said, sounding intrigued. “How do you mean?”

“It’s kind of complicated,” she said. “It’s the angel—the beginning of the angel he was going to paint in the background. It’s like a joke—a not very nice joke on me.” She glanced over at him. “Did Jake ever tell you anything about my mother?”

“Not much,” Jason said. “Why? Is the angel her?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.” Her hand was shaking slightly, and she stopped painting on the varnish, willing the tremor to stop so she could go on. “She killed herself right before Jake and I got married. I think I might have told you that before.”

“You did,” he said.

“She was very…religious, I guess you could call it.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Batshit crazy, actually.” She steadied her hand and went back to work. That was the thing about varnishing; you couldn’t stop in the middle of a coat, no matter what, or the painting would be ruined.

“Did she and Jake not get along?” Jason said. “Did she not want you to marry him?”

“No, she loved him,” she said. “They were very close, closer than she and I were, really, at the end. She was lovely, really, really beautiful when I was kid. And don’t get me wrong, she loved me. No, she cherished me completely. But she was insane.” Focused completely on the canvas of Jake’s mother and sister, she could still feel the other painting lurking behind her, peering over her shoulder. “She saw angels,” she said. “Saw them, heard them speaking to her, felt them touching her, touched them back, talked back. She saw angels all around her the same way I see you now.” She looked over and saw his eyes had gone wide. “When I was little, she told me all about it, said she had always seen them, that they had always been with her. She acted like it was the most natural thing in the world. She used to say she was blessed.”

“Wow.” He seemed completely fascinated. “Like William Blake.”

“Gosh, I don’t know, Jason,” she snapped, returning her attention to the varnish. “Did William Blake ever tell his six-year-old daughter to be sure to save the angel a seat on the school bus?”

“I doubt it,” he admitted.

“It wasn’t some cool, freaky, mystic crystals kind of thing, trust me,” she said. “These angels weren’t dainty or cute. I hated them.” But that wasn’t really true, she thought. Before her father had left them, she had loved it when the angels came, had loved watching her mother’s face as she talked to them. She had believed absolutely that her mother’s visions were real. She had even thought a few times that she could see them herself. “My poor dad couldn’t take it,” she said. “Even before she got so bad her angels turned on her, she drove him crazy with it. Imagine your wife kissing you good-bye every morning and saying, ‘Behave yourself, honey—I’m sending an angel to watch.’”

He grinned. “He didn’t just think she was being cute?” She had seen that grin before. Jake had grinned that way back in college when she’d first tried to explain about Mama and her angels.

“No,” she said. “Trust me. She wasn’t cute, and he knew it.” She thought about the last time she had seen her mother alive, the memory she tried so religiously to avoid. It had been a week before the wedding, and she and Jake had driven up to the hospital to visit her, hoping against hope she might be well enough to come home for the ceremony. But as soon as they’d seen her, they’d both known it couldn’t happen.

“Baby, I was wrong!” she had screamed as soon as she saw Laura. “They’re bad!” Her mother’s black hair, still long enough to brush the base of her spine and shot through with streaks of white, had been hanging loose and wild, and she had scratched deep welts in her own cheeks, still so smooth and creamy pink. “The angels are bad!”

“It’s all right, Mama,” Laura had said, holding both her hands, the nails broken and filthy, not her mama’s hands at all. “The angels aren’t here, I promise.”

“They’ll come back.” She had still been crying, but she had let Laura lead her to a chair. “They always come back. And I sent them after you.” The agony on her face had broken Laura’s heart. “My baby girl. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right, Mama,” Laura had promised. “I’ll send them all away.”

“You do that,” Mama had said. “Don’t even look at them.”

“I won’t, I promise.” She had brushed the knots from her mother’s hair so carefully she never pulled, the same way her mama had always brushed the tangles out of her own curls when she was a child. “Jake will keep them away from me.”

“He will,” Mama had agreed, relaxing. “I never thought of that, but you’re right. Jake is so good. He’ll keep them all away.”

“That’s right.” She had braided her mother’s beautiful hair and cleaned the dirt from under her nails, and on her way out, she had hollered at the duty nurse until she made her cry for letting her mama get in such a state.

Three days later, her mama had been dead, her wrists and ankles slashed on the sharp edge of a metal bed slat. The wedding had been cancelled, of course. She and Jake had taken their license back to the probate court and gotten married there. Instead of going on a honeymoon, they had managed the funeral arrangements and packed. The day after the funeral, they had moved north, and neither of them had ever gone back.

“So he left,” Jason said, bringing her back to the now. “Your father.”

“Yeah,” she said. “When I was eight. He died of a massive coronary in his car about a year later out in California.” The angels got him, her mother had said at the time, neither smiling nor crying, neither happy or afraid. To her, it had just been a fact.

“Laura, Jesus,” Jason said. “I had no idea.”

“That I was so interesting?” She smiled. “Trust me, I’m not.” She looked over at Jake’s last painting, her own image so oblivious to the winged shadow looming over her. “So anyway, I don’t much care for that painting.”

“What did Jake think of your mother’s angels?” Jason asked.

“He thought I overreacted about them,” she said, keeping her tone as casual as possible. The truth was, she and Jake had screamed at one another more often and more bitterly about the angels than they ever had about money or family or leaving the toilet seat up. “He thought I should embrace my mama’s kind of crazy, to explore it.” She brushed varnish carefully over Jake’s signature, still clear and steady when he’d painted it, before he’d known he was going to die. “I’m sure he was trying to tell me something with the painting,” she said. “But I’d just as soon not hear it.”

“I can’t believe he would have wanted to hurt you, Laura,” Jason said. “Did the two of you ever talk about it?”

“About the painting? No.” By the time Jake had started his last painting, they weren’t talking about anything that might make him tired. “It doesn’t matter. And no, I don’t think he meant to hurt me at all.” She put on the last vertical stroke of varnish and straightened up. “I just don’t like it, that’s all.”

Jason nodded. “Okay.” He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “We’ll move it out of here soon, and you never have to look at it again if you don’t want to. I’ll keep it warehoused at the gallery until you know what you want to do with it.”

“Thanks. Once the varnish dries, y’all can come get all of them.” She reached back and patted his hand. “You’re kinda great, you know.”

“I know.” He kissed her cheek. “Now come on. Let me take you out to dinner.”

“No, please, I’m really not hungry.” She looked around the studio at the thirteen canvases Jake had left behind. Some were as small as a notebook, but most of them were taller than she was. “I want to get this done.”

“Okay.” He let her go. “Then I’ll order us a pizza.”

Caleb looked up at the apartment building, mentally counting his way to Laura’s windows. The studio windows were still glowing with light. He thought of her smile, the smell of her skin, the feel of her heartbeat when he’d held her close, pretending to be her dead husband.

He turned away and walked to the curb. He waited for a yellow cab to pass, throwing up dirty, gray slush in its wake. He stepped off the curb….and into the realms of Light.

The sunlight was blinding. He was standing at the crest of a steep, grassy hill overlooking a deep valley. The breeze was warm and sweet, rippling the tall grass into waves all around him. Down in the valley on either side of the silver river, he could see the seraphim encampment, a hundred pure white tents pitched in perfect rows.

Other seraphim came out of their tents as he came into the camp, calling out greetings. All of them looked curious; a few came to embrace him. Some of the young ones looked afraid. It had been a thousand years since his last visit home; they were probably afraid to hear why he had come now.

Michael the Archangel was alone in a tent that looked no different from any of the others. His head was bent over a chessboard, a familiar sight to all his seraphim, no matter how long they might have been away. He was dressed as always in a patched tunic stained as if from armor with leather boots and leggings to match. His dark hair was cropped close as if to accommodate a helmet. Like all angels, Michael lived in all moments of human history at once and none at all, but he had adopted the costume of a knight for as long as Caleb had known him. His handsome face was scarred with five white ridges slashed deep into his sun-bronzed skin—Lucifer’s final blow as he fell from grace.

The archangel must have been surprised to see him after so long with no warning. But he barely glanced up from the chessboard. “The prodigal returns,” he said, moving a knight on the board with the ghost of a smile.

Caleb unsheathed his sword of light. He had been entrusted with the sacred blade on the day of his making, and no other angel had touched it since. It was a concrete manifestation of his mission, as much a part of his identity as his corporeal form. “More prodigal than you know.” He knelt and offered the sword to Michael.

Now his captain looked shocked. “What is this?”

“I’m resigning my commission.” He was surprised by how easy it was to say the words. “I’m no longer fit.”

“Not fit?” The archangel’s pure white wings rustled, twitching like a hawk’s before the strike. “Who are you to say so?”

“I am falling,” Caleb said, forcing himself to face his captain’s gaze. “And I have endangered a mortal’s soul.”

“How so?” Michael didn’t take the sword. “Tell me what’s happened.”

Caleb told him everything from the first moment he’d seen Laura in the cemetery. He told about reading her letters, impersonating her husband to comfort her, and his conversation with Lucifer the next morning. Finally, he told him about seeing her again that night. “She saw me,” he finished. “I didn’t intend to be seen, but she could see me.”

“You didn’t want to reveal yourself to her?” Michael said.

“Consciously, no,” Caleb said. “But subconsciously, I must have.” An angel’s ability to watch over a human unseen was one of his most basic, most vital powers. “And that’s bad, right? It means I want to be known by her, that I have feelings for her.”

“Feelings aren’t really my area,” Michael said with a wry smile. “But I’ve never thought of them as inherently bad.”

“Desire?” Caleb said. “Jealousy? Covetousness?”

“Love?” Michael suggested. “Just because Lucifer confused one with the other doesn’t mean you will.”

“But I could,” Caleb said. “And my interest has already made Lucifer take notice of her.”

“You don’t know that,” Michael said. “She was considering suicide when you met her, wasn’t she? Isn’t that why you first made contact with her? To save her?”

“Yes, but once I actually met her, once I touched her…I don’t just want to protect her, Michael. I want her. I can’t stop thinking about her and how it felt to be with her. I am jealous of her dead husband. I hate that when she thought I was him, she wanted me, but when she met me tonight…I hated that I was a stranger to her.” Michael was studying his face the same way he had studied the chessboard. “Lucifer knows how I feel. He told me I would destroy her.”

“And so he would do in your place,” Michael said. “But you are not your brother.” He reached out and gripped Caleb’s shoulder. “He is the Father of Lies.”

“But how can I take that risk?” Caleb asked. “I have the same free will as any mortal. I can fall. And I can resign my commission.”

Michael grabbed the hilt of the sword, putting his hand over Caleb’s. The blade blazed suddenly with holy fire, and words in the high speech of heaven appeared, etched into the metal. “Defender of All Those Created in the Image of the Light,” the archangel read aloud. Caleb felt a deep, unbearable ache in the center of his heart. “You are chosen to wield this sword,” Michael said. “Chosen to protect this woman and all those like her. Your path has led you to this purpose.” He let go of Caleb’s hand and the sword, and the fire faded. “You are meant to face it, not run and hide. You are a seraph. Will you really give that up?”

Caleb wanted to say yes. For the first time in millennia of being, he was afraid. But Michael was right. He couldn’t give up his mission. “No.” He sheathed the sword, and a shock raced up his arm, familiar, but no comfort.

The archangel smiled. “The Light is with you, Caleb. Your purpose with this woman serves the Light. If you were unfit, I would know it.”