Angels Unawares Page 7

Day Six

  Laura sat beside Josh. The clock on the nightstand read 2:12—that would be AM: clear cold night outside the window, the quarter-moon’s silver glow hinting at the late frost’s steady approach. Inside, the room was generously warm. Sherri’d recommended turning up the thermostat to help warm Josh as his metabolism had slowed dramatically and his blood pressure was very low. In this seemingly casual suggestion, Laura had noted in Sherri the shadow of deeper concern—her words too carefully chosen, the skin around her eyes tightening into the briefest of winces.

  The patient for his part seemed to be resting comfortably, on his back with the covers tight to his chin, his hands and arms outside the covers at his side. They’d honored his request and not reconnected the sensors. The monitor and its stand had been rolled off to a corner of the room and stood there in the dim light like a one-eyed judge surveying the proceedings. Without the anchoring tethers of the sensors’ leads, Josh’s body appeared marooned on the bed’s island—lost at sea and utterly alone.

  Which of course he was, Laura thought—totally alone from here on out. Whatever her caring ministrations—her words and love and actions, even her warm body pushed up against his cooler parts (a gift she’d not venture tonight, out of respect for him, the others in the house, and most especially herself)—the balance of Josh’s journey was requisitely solitary, at least in regards to worldly companions or supplies. Laura thought about that long-ago Chinese emperor with his thousands of terracotta soldiers to accompany him in his final walk, the Egyptian pharaohs with their servants and pets and abundant provisions—all just as alone as Josh now: no marathoner’s training for this, no trumpet’s call of reinforcements, no siren’s wail of civil preparedness.

  But what about her preparedness—to witness, to say good-bye (after only so recently saying hello for the first time in decades). Well, no prohibition on supplies for her. She had this comfortable chair, this nightstand’s light, this can of diet cola (the full-caffeine kind, with plenty more in the fridge). She’d stay awake this whole night—least she could do: for Devon, for herself, even if it mattered naught for the lone-travelling Josh.

  Laura took a long swallow from the can, set it carefully on the pottery coaster on the nightstand, took up her pen and pad, and began to write.

  It was the day after we first had sex. I wish I could use the euphemism “made love” to refer to that auspicious event, but there was no love there in the back of your mom’s car in that awkward, uncomfortable, sometimes painful groping then probing then sweaty panting release by you into my undefended vagina—well, let’s call it what it was: my unprotected, pristinely vulnerable womb (a flagrant risk we both were aware of before we started, as we commenced, while we continued, and when you climaxed, and in the heart-slowing seconds after you finished that turned into a heart-stopping anxious wait through the ensuing minutes, hours, days, and weeks till the onset of my long-delayed period—no doubt delayed by the probing of your penis and the stress of our wait—finally granted us a reprieve).

  But the day after that forgettable unforgettable event, in the full-blown gale of the chance we’d taken and its potential consequences (pregnant at sixteen!) and in the midst of a late fall blizzard, you decided to go hunting and left me alone in your bedroom in your family’s empty house (all other occupants off doing chores of one sort or another) to stew in the juices of my full-boiling fears.

  And I was far into those fears, weighing the challenges of getting an abortion without my parents’ knowledge against the challenges of carrying a baby while keeping up with my homework, when I heard the pop-pop of two gunshots through the muffling effects of the storm and the thick walls of the house.

  I went to the window that overlooked the side yard that led to the fields that led to the swamp that led to the river. The snow had slackened some and I could just make out the river flowing slate gray in the approaching dusk. In the middle distance, where the clean mowed hayfields now a flat sheet of six inches of luminous snow merged into the marsh-grass hummocks of the swamp, I could barely see a lone figure standing still amidst the storm. Your shotgun, which had surely been the source of those two quick shots, was again on your shoulder. In the whole panorama, nothing was moving except the swirling snow and the barely perceptible southward flow of the river.

  My eyes locked on your figure and waited for you to move. The seconds stretched into minutes and still you didn’t budge. I began to wonder if you were an apparition borne of the storm and my stress, or maybe a sapling that had grown up on that spot since I’d last had cause to look, a sapling that my eyes and heart had made into you out of need and hope.

  Then finally you moved, so slowly and deliberately that I wondered if it was my mind making you move, desiring you to move. But no—it was real movement, amidst the snow and the gathering dark. I could see you raise one leg slowly, set it on a hummock, then raise the other leg and step carefully to the next. And in that moment I began to sense everything you sensed—your deliberate strides carefully from one hummock to the next, not wanting to fall into the dark uncertain water and muck between those dry mounds; the gun on your shoulder, the barrels damp with melting snow; the near-numb fingers of your right hand gripping the slick cold wood of the gun’s stock, brushing the frozen trigger guard. I felt you sigh at the discovery of the dead pheasant in the shallow water between two clumps of grass, felt you take a deep breath as you bent and grabbed the bird, its flesh still warm beneath damp cold feathers, and placed it in your game pouch.

  When I stepped back from the window, your room was startlingly dark. But I didn’t turn on the light, didn’t need to or want to. I sat down on your bed in the heaviness of the early dark and knew just then the lightness—both brilliance and freedom from weight—of true love. Whatever had happened or did happen inside my womb—embryo lodged or egg flushed away—we would find a way onward and together.

  I didn’t think of it then in so many words. In fact I’ve never put words to the moment at all till just now, and in so doing wonder if mere words—these or others—could come close to capturing that moment’s full import or ramifications. I mean, how can one ever capture the flash of the creation of permanent love?

  Permanent despite lengthy separation and estrangement—indeed, permanent because it outlasted such gaps and wanderings and mistakes and absences, with one more separation to come.

  Oh Josh, my Josh, emerge again from the gray shadows at any time of your choosing or Heaven’s choosing or God’s, come home to me with the double pop of gunshots or lonely trumpet’s mourn in the distance or the whisper of flake fall through dimming day, but come home to me! Don’t leave me to the ravages of aloneness or the enticing fallacy of self-sufficiency. Don’t ever leave me again.

  How could we have drifted so far apart then? How can we be ripped apart now? The answer both times—we weren’t, we aren’t, we won’t be.

  I pray.

  Laura set her pen down and closed the pad. She looked across Josh to the window beyond. The moon had set and taken with it the night’s silver glow. Yawning voracious dark poured into the room, trailed by the twinkle of stars, even that light already dead—millions of years gone. She leaned back in the chair and exhaled slowly, understanding for the first time the full embracing peace of resignation.

  The eastern horizon offered forth the first tentative glimmer of the dawn to come as Angie turned the rental car into the gravel drive. She’d been out ahead of that dawn all night long, leaving Baghdad after dark (though who would’ve known in the glare of that military facility’s artificial day) and flying across the dark invisible Mediterranean and darker still Atlantic to land at another island of artificial light amidst the darkened former sea of the North Carolina coastal plain.

  In the gradual curving rise of the drive, she noted the lower limbs of the trees extending like skeletal arms into the reach of the headlights. The sight of those branches slightly unsettled her, and she realized it’d been months since she’d last seen trees so close at
hand. “What other surprises does this long night hold?” she whispered aloud as she let the car roll to a stop behind the other cars parked in the drive.

  She well recognized the dark silhouette of the house etched against the slightly textured dark of the trees behind. This was her clearest and most intimate memory of the outside of the house, a memory stored on her return from a late-night high school party, out past her curfew and dropped off at the end of the drive by a half-drunk senior boy. She’d stood outside the house then, studying its every dim line in the dark, wondering if her parents were up, wondering how heavily they’d punish her for the tardiness. The same two lights were on then as now—the one, clearly visible, in the kitchen over the sink; and a fainter glow leaking down the hallway and into the living room from a light in her parents’ bedroom. Her parents had let her off easy that time. Her dad was the only one awake, reading in bed; and as she’d tried to slip past their doorway undetected, he’d said softly but firmly, “Call next time.” She’d paused long enough in her skulking entrance to whisper back, “I promise,” before continuing to her room. It was only later, lying in her bed, that she wondered if her dad had heard her vow, wondered if she should go back and apologize directly for her tardiness and assure him that it would never happen again. But she hadn’t done so, had eventually drifted off to sleep. And she was never late again, at least not to his curfew, as it was less than two months later that they parted forever.

  Well, till now. She opened the car door and stepped out into the chill night. The temperature and humidity was surprisingly similar to the night air she’d left in Baghdad—cold and dry—but the smell and feel of the air was dramatically different, close and safe and fecund. It was only here that she realized just how sterile, how stripped bare of life, the Iraqi desert was, realized the spiritual cost of breathing in that sterility twenty-four hours a day. It was a condition she’d accepted all too readily.

  She retrieved her duffel from the backseat and closed the door. With the dome light out, new dark ensued but Angie didn’t feel threatened. The lights in the house were adequate beacon; and off to the east, beyond the row of tall pines, dawn steadily approached. She walked across the parking area, down the steps to the front walk. She was in her Army fatigues and standard-issue boots. The attire was comfortable enough, and she’d grown used to it these past three months, but it felt awkward and out-of-place in this North Carolina setting. She wished she’d taken time to change back at the Air Station but too late now. She shortened her stride in an attempt to quiet her noisy footsteps.

  At the bottom of the steps up to the landing beside the kitchen door, she set her duffel down and reached up under the band to the deck. She hoped it was still too early for copperheads to be active, and she recalled the shiny black spider with the red hourglass on its thorax she’d brought cupped in her hands to her mother as a Mayday present when she was six. Benign nature had left her unharmed then; she could risk trust in it again now. She counted the joists with her fingers—one, two, three—then reached up to the top of the fourth. Sure enough, there it was—the door key hanging on its nail all these years later. It felt cool and smooth—no rust evident to the touch—as she lifted it off the nail.

  She unlocked the deadbolt, opened the door, and stepped silently into the dimly lit kitchen. The room felt warm as an incubator after the brittle outdoors; the air was moist and close. Her nurse’s training made her wonder if fear or anxiety had caused her adrenal gland to secrete adrenaline into her bloodstream, raising her heart rate and blood pressure, and in turn causing her to feel hot and sweaty. But a secondary analysis of her body’s vitals assured her that her pulse and pressure were normal, her breathing calm. It was the room, not her, that was very warm, warm and humid after the chill dark.

  She set her duffel to the side under the coat hooks then turned to head down the darkened hallway toward the faint light emanating from the bedroom. Halfway there, in the darkest spot between the kitchen and the bedroom light, just in front of the coat closet that had been converted into storage for board games and athletic gear, her physiology did have a reaction to her heightened emotional state, only the opposite of the one she’d contemplated moments earlier—her blood pressure plummeted, her heart rate slowed, and her skin was suddenly cold and clammy. She felt light-headed and would’ve hit the floor with a thud if her hand hadn’t reached out and found the closet door’s knob to steady her.

  Using the knob as a crutch and tether, she slowly lowered herself to the floor then leaned against the wall, raised her knees to her chest, and lowered her head between her knees so that it was below the level of her heart. She closed her eyes and waited for the blood to return to her brain.

  “It’ll be O.K.” a voice whispered.

  Angie tensed at the words but didn’t raise her head or open her eyes.

  “You didn’t think I’d let you walk in there alone, did you?”

  “Mom?” Angie wondered if she’d spoken the word or just thought it.

  “Darling.”

  “This is the last place I thought I’d find you.”

  “More likely the Iraqi desert or the Trauma Center?”

  “So much pain here for you—the betrayal.”

  “For you, dear; I go where you need me.”

  “Even if it hurts?”

  “It doesn’t hurt me anymore—maybe once, not now.”

  “Why not? He betrayed you!”

  “Two answers, dear—one, I’m beyond hurt here; two, being beyond hurt allows me to see that he didn’t betray me, he didn’t betray you, he betrayed himself. More specifically, his body betrayed his heart. I’m sorry for him and I’ve told him so, or at least tried.”

  “His body?”

  “His body needed Joan, needed her body—her feel, her scent, her breath, her taste—since the day he was conceived. Once he stumbled on her, he could’ve no more resisted her than a starving child could turn away from a sumptuous banquet.”

  “He could’ve chosen not to.”

  “No.”

  “He could’ve tried.”

  “Oh, he tried; Lord knows he tried. He took cold showers, freezing cold; he took hot showers. He hit the porno shops and the strip clubs and the Internet sites. He took long walks into the woods and howled at the moon, the sun. He screamed into his pillow in the night, bit his pillow, gnawed his hand, his arm. He tried every way he could. It didn’t work.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s the good thing about here—you know everything about those you love. But on this one point, I have to admit I knew it then, while it was happening.”

  “And you didn’t stop it?”

  “I couldn’t, no more than Josh could. But at least he tried. I didn’t even try, and I’m sorry for that. Even knowing it wouldn’t have worked, I still should’ve tried.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I was scared. There was this yawning hole of need at the center of Josh that I discovered early on that I had no chance of filling. I was frightened by his need and shamed by my inability to meet it. I guess I gambled that Joan might fill that void and still leave me the parts of Josh I loved and needed.”

  “Some gamble.”

  “A foolish bet, in retrospect; but one I freely chose. But I never considered the risk to you. That was my fault, my selfishness. I should’ve weighed the risk to you and done something, anything, to spare you that hurt.”

  Angie could only agree. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, darling.”

  “We all are.”

  “Josh most of all.”

  “You know?”

  “I know. He’s paid, many times over. Forgive him.”

  “Is there time?”

  “Enough.”

  Angie opened her eyes and raised her head. Blood throbbed in her ears. The hall was perceptibly brighter though still locked in gray pre-dawn. Directly across from where she sat, a few feet above on the wall, a framed portrait photo of the three of them stared down at
her. Even in the dim light, she could see the images. Far as she knew, it was the last photo ever taken of the three of them together. They all looked so calm, relaxed, and happy.

  Laura’s eyes were locked on Angie like some majestic hawk—high up in the tree surveying the whole countryside with regal detachment and assurance before focusing all her attention on this new entrant—as she pushed open the ajar door to her parents’ bedroom. Angie stood in the doorway looking calmly at Laura seated in the chair with the nightstand light on behind her. Then she redirected her gaze to the slight figure lying in the bed and wondered if that pale, wizened old man were really her father. Seeing that helpless figure caused her to redefine Laura’s intense glare as protective rather than aloof.

  “I figured you as resourceful,” Laura said quietly but firmly, “but I didn’t know the half of it. Must be your father in you.”

  Angie tilted her head in silent question.

  “Maybe your mother too,” Laura added quickly. “I can’t speak to that. But your father was the most resourceful person I ever knew. You wanted something done, give him the task. He’d find a way, whatever it took.”

  Angie noted her persistent use of the past tense but temporarily balked at its meaning. “Still?”

  Laura smiled. The expression did wonders for her face. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  Angie nodded. “But is he?”

  Laura took Josh’s near cool wrist in her fingers and waited for a pulse. It arrived after a long pause, barely perceptible, more an echo of life than life itself. She nodded. “Yes,” then added, “But I don’t know that he’ll come back from this one.”

  This one what? Angie wondered—this crisis, this coma, this infection, this dream, this sleep, this what? Her nurse’s training wanted an immediate diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment regimen. Time was wasting—she needed to act, not watch. Her legs began to wobble.

  Laura stood quickly, caught Angie around the waist, and guided her into the bedside chair she’d just occupied. “Drink some of this,” she said and raised her can of cola to Angie’s nearly blue lips.

  Angie took a sip or two then sat back in the chair. “Thanks. Long night.”

  “For us all,” she said, glancing at Josh as she set the soft-drink can on the nightstand.

  Angie followed Laura’s gaze to her father. The sight of him so radically changed from her last image of him cut her deeply, deeper than she’d ever been cut or thought she could be. So this is it, she thought. This is the reckoning.

  Laura squatted in front of Angie, reached up and gently turned Angie’s gaze from Josh to her. “I’m Laura, in case you didn’t know; Josh’s first wife.”

  Angie nodded but said nothing.

  “Devon, Josh’s other daughter, is asleep down the hall. And Sherri, the home nurse, is asleep in the guestroom. He’s been well cared for.”

  “I can see that.”

  “We had the sensors on him, but he made us take them off the last time he was conscious.”

  “When was that?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “So we’re flying blind.” It was a statement, not a question. As a nurse—particularly one less than a day removed from service in Iraq, one huge testing ground for the latest in diagnostic technologies—this absence of even the most basic of patient data seemed almost criminally negligent.

  Laura noted her objection and understood, at least in a general way, its origins. But she chose to avoid direct confrontation. “He’s flying—well, somewhere. I almost said ‘home,’ but realized this is his home. This is where he wanted to be; this is where he wanted to die. He called me here from California to help guarantee that he died here at home—no hospital equipment, no strangers hovering, no extraordinary measures or last-ditch heroic stands. He wanted—.” She paused then corrected herself. “He wants to die at home.”

  Angie, her blood pressure and heart rate stabilized by the dose of cola and caffeine and her seated posture, looked first to her father then to Laura and nodded silent assent—she’d not made herself available for any of the decision-making; she’d not question or try to undo any of those choices now (too late anyway, she could clearly see). She recalled returning to base from a briefing in Baghdad when the Humvee she was riding in came on the aftermath of a recent bombing. She jumped out and focused on an unconscious Marine being cradled in the lap of a buddy. At first glance, except for being unconscious, the Marine showed no visible injuries. She bent down to begin providing care when the buddy pointed a pistol at her and gestured for her to step back. Tears streamed down the pistol-waver’s dusty face. She protested firmly, said the man (no more than a boy, really—maybe nineteen or twenty) needed immediate medical attention and that she was a nurse (in case he didn’t recognize her regiment’s medical insignia on her uniform) and trained in battlefield trauma care. Still, the protector wouldn’t relent, kept the pistol drawn and pointed loosely in her direction. She was about to turn and try to find help in subduing this clearly shocked guardian when the unconscious soldier released an awful groan from his core, tensed from head to toe, then fell limp. The guardian took a deep breath, wiped the tears from his face with the sleeve of his free arm, lowered the pistol, and said, “You can have him now.” He gently, tenderly, rolled his buddy’s limp body off his lap. The deceased Marine had a gaping six-inch hole torn out of his back, and the guardian’s lap had trapped a deep pool of blood that was just now beginning to seep out into the sand beneath his knees. Sometimes love was the only efficacious treatment. “So if not home, then where?”

  Laura looked at her questioningly.

  “You said he’s flying somewhere. Where do you think?”

  Laura considered the question a long moment. She recalled sleeping with her body glued full-length to his, first time in decades. She wondered if somehow his dreams had transmitted through his flesh into hers. “He’s making amends. It’s not been painful but hopeful, and ultimately peaceful. He’s almost finished.”

  Angie nodded. “So he is flying home.”

  Laura shrugged. “You might say—different home, maybe better.”

  “We hope.”

  Laura nodded. “If you think you’re O.K., I’ll leave you for a little while.”

  Angie said, “I’m O.K.”

  “I’ll be in the kitchen, brewing a pot of coffee.”

  “Make it strong.”

  “I always do.”

  “Extra strong.”

  Laura smiled and left silently, pulling the door partway closed on her way.

  So here she was. It’d all happened so quickly—the phone call, the request for emergency leave, the flight home in a vast cargo bay with two dozen other silent soldiers (all male) and four tarped Apache helicopters (one with dried blood on its port-side landing skid), securing the rental car from the civilian side of the airbase, the long drive over dark and empty roads, the homecoming to a dark house that was no longer home, to sit beside the death bed of a man who was once her father but seemed now (and looked) a stranger. It’d all happened so fast.

  Yet, on another level, this latest sequence seemed part of a larger and longer arc, an arc that began that day she came home from school and watched her father—this same though changed body hidden beneath the sheets—arched in rhythmic undulations over the girl she’d trusted to be her best friend, an arc that continued through her exodus from a home and family that no longer existed, exodus from a childhood and adolescence balked in an instant, an exodus that also marked an entrance—into adulthood, where possibility was constrained, potential truncated, hope starved. This downward-curving arc of destiny had connected the dots of a half-starved life to return her to the bedside where it had begun. So not an arc but a circle, Angie thought—a circle begun at betrayal to end at death.

  She’d thought her way through that loop of self-pity without once looking at her father. She’d looked at the door Laura’d pulled halfway closed as she left; she’d looked at the mahogany dresser and matching framed mirror;
she’d gazed blankly at the blank darkness beyond the picture window. But she’d resolutely avoided looking at her father.

  Finally, with a deep breath like that taken before jumping from the high quarry wall toward the frigid water far below, she forced herself to look at the unconscious man before her. And, like the plunge from the quarry ledge, it was a shock; but she of course survived.

  On closer examination, she saw that he was indeed her father—the deep-set eyes beneath the bony brow, the dangling lobe of his ear (that she shared), the thin white scar line on his lower lip. His face in profile summoned a rush of images of the younger Josh, the one she’d grown up with and cherished. She saw him racing down the beach, holding high a piece of leathery brown seaweed that trailed behind him like a pennant, saw him swinging a machete to clear a path through the brush as they sought a site for her treehouse, saw him winking at her as she sat to one side while he taught his class at the university on the day she trailed him to work. These and many other memories flooded her mind; and in each of them he was moving, full of life and vitality, a stark contrast to the unmoving dying man lying before her.

  Yet the unmoving man before her was still her father; and she’d traveled a long way to be beside him now—not to recollect the bygone father (which she could’ve done anywhere) but to be with the current one.

  But she didn’t know what to do with the current father. She couldn’t talk to him, couldn’t say she was sorry for not keeping in touch (was she sorry?), sorry for not letting him into Mom’s cancer and funeral (she was sorry for that), sorry for not opening those gifts and cards of those first years apart (had one of those packages contained the chance of trust restored?)—so many sorrys to say. So she said it—“I’m sorry, Dad.”

  He didn’t move at the words or give the slightest sign of acknowledgement, but it seemed the room did—vibrating ever so slightly at the sound waves, the picture window brightening, the air in the close space taking on a kind of tangibility of weight and pressure. Angie actually turned and looked behind her to see if someone or something had entered the room—but no, nothing.

  So she slid the chair closer, till her knees touched the bed, then leaned forward and wrapped her right arm over his head on the pillow, curved her left arm in front of her on the mattress beside his hand, laid her head gently on his chest atop the neat covers, closed her eyes, and quickly passed into a state between blank sleep and dreaming.

  In the distance there was a rhythm, like the gentle lap of waves striking a far-off shore—this rise and fall, rise and fall. That rhythm eased her into a realm of peace, comfort, and security. She felt safe, truly safe, for the first time in—what? months certainly (since being deployed), but maybe years, maybe since fleeing (or being ejected from) home and childhood. She was, well, home again—a place, finally, of rest, whatever the circumstances.

  And rest came in a vision of a sloping treeless hillside in full morning sun, succulent spring grass bright and inviting green beneath the crisp blue sky, the gentlest brush of a breeze, the scent of spring flowers—violets, lilacs. And there on the hill, in soft middle distance, a troop of white farm geese, plodding upward in single file from the pond below toward the crest of the slope. The geese moved as if not walking, in their clumsy side-to-side goose waddle, but as if being carried forth by the earth and time in a graceful effortless flow toward the ridge.

  And Angie realized now that she was at the base of the hill, lying on a soft blanket on the grass beneath a tree in the shade. The blanket was almost unbearably soft, as if she were floating on air, though she could smell the grass so near at hand, smelled the fertile loam that had given the grass life. So she didn’t panic at the soft airiness of the blanket, didn’t fear being dropped. She closed her eyes, inhaled the scents of spring, reveled in the soft breeze brushing her cheek, basked in the leaf-filtered sun. It was so good to be loved.

  “Find Joan.”

  Angie didn’t open her eyes. She was not startled by the voice. It seemed part of the whole scene, part of what she’d been expecting.

  “Find Joan. Tell her I’m sorry. Let her tell you she’s sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “She’ll save your life.”

  Angie had no response.

  So Josh added, “Save the life I helped create but could never save, hard as I tried.”

  “That wasn’t your job.”

  “If not that, then what?”

  “Love.”

  “Easy.”

  “Just love.”

  “Always.”

  “I know.”

  “Finally?”

  “All along.”

  Josh was silent.

  “It’s been there all along.”

  “Yes.”

  Angie held her eyes closed, waited to hear more. Then she realized there was no more; she had all she’d ever need. She opened her eyes. The hillside was still there—brilliant green under resonant blue. The sun was higher in the sky, brighter. The troop of geese had vanished. The breeze picked up, ruffling the spring grass, birthing a fragile dust devil or two at the base of the hill, there by the pond.

  Oh, to sit cross-legged on the pinnacle of the highest peak with the universe laid out before you in dazzling array of myriad stars brilliant in crystal clear night sky, stars so close and intense that it seemed you might reach your hand out and collect a scoop, drop them in a jar to light your path home; infinite stars so remote and ponderous that it seemed they hid, there just behind their shine, the source of all time and space. Oh, to be in such a spot, Josh thought as he gazed out on all eternity. What did I do to deserve this?

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why?” Josh asked.

  “It’s the gift that’s been waiting for you.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since the start.”

  “The start of me?”

  “The start of everything.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “Or short.”

  “Either way, thank you.”

  “So few say that.”

  “Thanks?”

  “It’s not required, of course.”

  “Seems obvious. Seems only right.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a sudden brilliant streak across one small sector of the panorama, then gone.

  “What was that?” Josh asked.

  “You.”

  “Seemed so brief.”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  Day Seven

  Angie found Joan standing in the light rain without an umbrella or hat out by the line of cars parked on the paved drive that looped around the cemetery. She stood watching from afar the proceedings that were taking place under the green tents five rows of headstones away. Some of the minister’s words reached their ears on the slight breeze that blew their way—whether we live or whether we die—in the company of all your saints—lo, I tell you a mystery—we commit his body—but most of the ceremony was lost to the rain and the low clouds and the rustling leaves.

  Angie came up from behind and stood beside Joan, mere inches away.

  Joan looked at her calmly, as if she’d been expecting her all along, had said “See you later” just yesterday, not twelve years ago. “I figured you’d be with the family, such as it is.”

  “I am, such as it is.”

  “I meant down there—lowering him into the ground, saying your good-byes.”

  “I said my good-bye.”

  “Was it hard?”

  Angie looked up at her. It was unclear if the water streaking Joan’s cheeks was rain or tears. “It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “How?”

  “He told me to find you.”

  “They said he was comatose.”

  Angie turned back toward the grave site. The minister was tossing dirt in the hole. “He was.”

  Joan was silent.

  “He told me to tell you he was sorry.”

  Joan nodded. “He told me himself.” />
  “When?”

  “About then.”

  “And?”

  “That you’d find me, that I’d have a chance to say what I’ve wanted to say every day for twelve years.” Joan turned to her. “I’m sorry, Angie, more sorry than you can ever realize.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Not more sorry than I can realize. I know it perfectly. I’ve lived in that regret all this time.”

  Joan nodded. “Long enough.”

  “Long enough.”

  The gathering around the grave site was beginning to break up—the minister shaking hands with Laura, Devon, the Chair of the English Department. A few grad students tossed roses into the hole.

  Joan turned to Angie. “I’d like you to meet someone.” She walked toward the end of the line of cars.

  Angie followed.

  Joan stopped beside a well-kept but older model Japanese compact. She tapped on the passenger-door window. The rain-splattered glass descended into the door. “Angie, I’d like you to meet my son.”

  Angie stepped forward and peered into the car.

  A blonde-haired boy of about ten or eleven gazed calmly at her. After a pause, he unleashed a beautiful and familiar smile. “The rain makes it look like you’ve been crying.”

  Angie smiled back. “Not anymore.” She extended her hand toward the car. “I’m Angela Earl.”

  The boy took her hand in his. “We have the same last name.”

  Angie nodded.

  The boy said proudly, “I’m Joshua Earl.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Angie said.