The Third Angel (7 page)

“Told you what? That I must have fucked up in the eyes of God or the angels? That my life was ruined and that I was ruining Allie's life? I was so damn angry at her.”

His dinner was on a tray, uneaten. Soup, some flat soda, toast with a pale coating of butter. Paul's lips looked dry and sore.

“She didn't love me,” Paul said.

“Would you like a drink?” Maddy asked.

“Scotch and soda. A double.”

Maddy held the paper cup up and Paul sipped from the straw. Ginger ale.

“We had the dress fitting today,” Maddy said. “She looked pretty.”

“Maybe you should get her a vat and some black dye. She deserved better.”

Maddy tried to get him to drink some more, but he waved her away.

“Do you know why I'm really mad? Because I knew this would happen and it has. I can't move my legs, little sister. I can't see you.”

Maddy put the drink down, and took up the watery soup. “You should eat.”

“That's enough,” Paul said after three spoonfuls. “I'm throwing up blood.”

Maddy put the tray away and came to sit beside him on the bed; she leaned her head against his chest. There was his heart, still beating.

“Poor Allie,” Paul told Maddy. “Her childhood repeated all over again. A life spent in someone's sickroom. I wound up doing exactly what I vowed I'd never do to her. She's fucking terrified.”

“Allie was never terrified of anything,” Maddy said.

Paul laughed and then began to cough. “You don't know her as well as you think you do. She's terrified all right.”

“Stop talking. You need to rest up.”

“I don't have to rest up to die. And don't tell me I'll be well again.” Paul closed his eyes. “Let me have one person who's honest with me.”

“The way you were honest with me?”

“I never lied. You lied to yourself. If you're going to be here in my last hours, the least you can do is entertain me.”

Why did she not hate him anymore? If anything she hated herself for being stupid, for being duped, for betraying Allie. There was a blue vein across Paul's skull that Maddy had never even noticed. “Here's a true story,” she began. “There's a ghost in my hotel.”

Paul laughed again, then turned his head toward her, interested. His eyes were leaking fluid.

“Seriously,” Maddy went on. “He's haunting a fellow who spends all his time in the bar.”

“Dear Maddy. You are so innocent. You believe anything anyone tells you. Next thing you'll tell me the devil is beside me.”

The man in the first bed had started to moan.

“Close the fucking curtain,” Paul told her. “People are so damned noisy when they're dying. You'd think they'd give the rest of us some peace.”

Maddy went and drew the curtain more tightly; in the process she glimpsed an old man doubled up in pain. A shiver went through her. She turned back to Paul. On the other side of his bed there was a curtain as well. She couldn't see the patient behind the curtain, just a stream of light filtering through the fabric. Paul was curled knees to chest. It was almost as though she could see through him. It wasn't until that moment that she realized Paul truly was dying. He was half there and half not.

She'd never been good at dealing with illness. She'd always wanted to run away when it got anywhere near this point. Maddy thought of the horrible things she'd said to her mother when she was younger—if it wasn't cancer, it wasn't considered a problem. It was nothing. She had never hated herself as much as she did at this moment. Paul didn't look like the same person as the man she'd slept with in the spring. She didn't even know him. She would have liked to have gone out into the hall. She could have kept on going, out the door, continuing on until she reached the white rose garden in the park. Instead, she forced herself to pull a chair close to the bed. She was afraid she might hurt him or spill something.

“I think after what happened between us, I should be the one to take care of you,” she said.

Paul laughed, a short dry laugh that quickly faded. “Are you mad? I'm a desperate fucking narcissist in the jaws of death. You don't want me.”

He had to stop talking; he began to struggle for air. He turned his head from Maddy; his body was limp, as though his muscles were no longer connected. The cancer was along his spine. When the end came, it was ridiculously fast. The bones were like lace now, beautifully destroyed. “She's the one I love. You knew that.”

He lay there quietly. Maddy thought she heard him crying.

“We had a huge tree in our backyard,” Maddy whispered. “If you climbed it you could reach the sky. We tied bells and bows around it to call the birds to us. But they only answered the sound of Allie's voice. They never even heard me.”

“Right.” Paul's eyes were still closed, but he was nearly smiling. “There's my girl. Entertain me. I knew I could count on you for that. I knew you could tell a good story. Tell me more about her.”

W
HEN SHE RETURNED
to the Lion Park, Maddy was informed that she had a guest. Her mother was waiting for her in the restaurant. Maddy wanted to go upstairs and lie down; instead she went to join her mother.

Lucy had ordered a glass of white wine even though what she really wanted was a whisky. A plate of melted ice was beside her glass. The temperature had risen. The hotel was air-conditioned in its public rooms, but it was still stuffy. She remembered that about it.

“The place looks the same. Just older.”

For the past several nights, Lucy had walked past the hotel. This was where she first began to understand that a person could lose herself if she wasn't careful.

“I came here because I remembered you talking about it,” Maddy said. “And you had the ashtray. I thought it was going to be nicer.”

“It was the first time I'd been to London. The first time I'd been anywhere, really. I was here for a wedding then, too. I see they still have the old stone lion.”

“So tell me, Mother, was I the last person in the world to know Paul was so ill?”

“He's a very private man. And he was in terrible shape. Allie told me she didn't want to go ahead with the marriage before his diagnosis, but she stood by him. That's the way she is.”

“Fake?”

“Loyal.”

“Right. It's always Allie. The good one, the loyal one. She always gets everything.”

Lucy laughed until she saw that her daughter was serious. “What she has is a terminally ill man.”

“I could help,” Maddy said. “I could do my part and see him through.”

Lucy reached across the table and took her daughter's hand. Maddy had always believed her mother never loved her, not the way she loved Allie. The proof of it was when Maddy went into her mother's bedroom one day to find the shades pulled down and all the lights shut off. Lucy's eyes were closed. She sensed someone in the room, and she had opened her eyes and was startled to see Maddy standing by the door. Her mother said, I can't, just like that, and Maddy had run. She was sure of what it meant: I can't take care of you. I can't love you. Now she wondered if perhaps she'd been mistaken. Maybe her mother had meant, I can't have you see me this way. I love you far too much for that.

“There's nothing to take care of, Maddy. It's over. This is their business. This man is going to be Allie's husband, whether or not he's dying. She's the only one who can see him through.”

Maddy pulled away and covered her face. Her hands smelled like hospital soap, clean and sharp. She certainly didn't want her mother to see her cry. Lucy ordered another glass of wine. This was the daughter who didn't feel anything; the one she could never reach.

“You can't make someone love you, you know. I learned that with your father. I didn't want him if he didn't want me. I saw what that could do to a person.”

“I did something terrible,” Maddy said. “I can't ever be forgiven.”

“Trust me,” Lucy said. “You can.”

After Maddy went up to her room to lie down, Lucy remained at the bar. She called for a whisky and soda. She knew she hadn't been a very good mother, especially to Maddy. She thought it would be better if she kept her distance. Her daughters wouldn't miss her so terribly if anything happened to her. They wouldn't be devastated if they were already on their own.

When she'd first heard that Maddy was staying at the Lion Park, Lucy had phoned over. She hadn't even been sure Teddy Healy would still be alive. But the girl at the front desk who'd answered her call assured her that he was, and then Maddy herself mentioned him. Maybe it was fate or perhaps it was only circumstance; either way it seemed time for Lucy to go back. There were several elderly customers at the bar, but it wasn't until a gentleman came in late in the evening and spoke to the bartender that she was certain it was Teddy. She remembered his voice. His features looked familiar, even after all this time. As for Teddy, he didn't seem to recognize her at all. Lucy, after all, was a woman in her fifties and he was an old man.

Over the years Teddy had been a reliable godfather to his brother's three children. He always remembered birthdays and had been at every graduation ceremony. But drinking was the only thing that he'd taken seriously for a good part of his life. Some of the women at the bank where he'd worked had made it clear they were available, but Teddy was wary. If he wanted female companionship when he was younger, he phoned a business that offered those services. It was easy enough; an attractive woman would come up to his place, and they'd have sex and he'd pay her, and then he would go to the Lion Park and get drunk. That was the constant in his life. The bar at the hotel. The hour when he went upstairs and relived what had happened to him.

One night, many years ago, Teddy had gotten so inebriated that the porter at the Lion Park had tossed him out on the street. It was the sixties, a time of wild goings-on; drugs were everywhere and yet Teddy was the one thrown out on his ear. A girl had come over and said something to him. She was stern and very pretty. Things were different back then; young women talked to strangers. This one helped him into a taxi and told him he'd kill himself with loss of liver function if he didn't quit drinking. She told him to think of someone other than himself. You never knew who you were helping, she'd said. It's your duty as a human being, after all.

Teddy began to sober up after that. He started to travel, to Africa and the Middle East, places where the landscape was huge, where life had gone on forever and his pitiful existence seemed completely unimportant. He still drank, but it wasn't the same. He wasn't obliterating himself. He gave most of his money away, to schools in the countries he visited, to children whose tuition he paid. He also took care of his nephews' university educations. He visited elderly people in homes and read to them. He had a beautiful reading voice, people said. He went on to make recordings for unsighted readers. He thought if he did enough good in the world, perhaps that young woman he'd once met might be right; what he'd lost on the night of the accident might come back to him.

Teddy did have liver problems and emphysema, just as that young woman had once predicted, but he still went to Africa once a year, to Nigeria. He had been involved in building a school there, and was helping to raise money for a girls' dormitory, so they could attend classes as well. But he still came back to the lounge at the Lion Park, and not simply because it was a pleasant place to be. This was the place where his life had gone wrong.

Lucy was surprised by how fragile he looked, a man who needed his nap in the afternoon.

“Teddy Healy. Is it really you?”

Teddy raised his coffee cup to her. He rarely had more than a drink or two these days. “Here's to you,” he said, clearly having no idea who she was.

“I'm Lucy Green. Lucy Heller now.”

Teddy Healy stared at her. An attractive dark-haired woman. A total stranger. Then she did something with her face, a sort of half smile, and he saw the girl she had been years ago when she had stayed here.

“Lucy,” he said. “Yes.”

“I tried to write to you at this address, here at the hotel, when I returned to the States, but the letters came back to me.”

“Myself and letters were never a good match.”

“I've thought about you often, Mr. Healy.”

“Well, God bless you,” he said. “Thank you.”

“My daughter lives in London. One of them. She's about to be married, but her fiancé is very ill. They don't expect him to survive.”

“Stay away from letters and marriage,” Teddy Healy said. “That's my best advice.”

“Right,” Lucy said. She knew the pain such things had caused him.

“I'm sorry for your daughter's troubles,” Teddy added. “That's a very sad thing.”

“Thank you. I was sorry for yours. I should have come back here years ago. I meant to, but I got caught up in my own life. I made more mistakes than I could begin to count.”

Teddy Healy shrugged. He called for another coffee and one for Lucy as well. “To hell with the past,” he said.

“My daughter says the place is still haunted.”

“So I've heard.” Teddy glanced up and saw she wasn't going to let it go at that. “You don't believe in that nonsense, do you?”

“I saw it once,” Lucy said. “I wasn't much of a witness. I fell and hit my head.”

“You've got a good, long memory,” Teddy said. And that was unfortunate; that was what he always worried about. That he'd ruined her life as well as his own. “I suppose you remember I was a coward.”

“I remember I thought everything that had happened was my fault.”

“Well, that's a foolish idea. It was mine. I took away your childhood. There's no way to make amends for that. I can assure you.”

“Is that what you think? If anything, you gave my childhood back to me.”

Teddy laughed. “That I don't believe.”

“You did. My father married a woman he met over here, and we lived together in New York. I walked my dog through Central Park every day, and I was happy, something I never thought I'd be again. What I saw up on the seventh floor of this hotel was an innocent man. I definitely remember that. Come with me and we'll see.”