John Connolly - The Black Angel

I rose. I entered a hallway in Maine, and descended stairs in New York. In the living room, she waited. Beyond the window, the marshes shone with silver, incandescent with moonlight. Shadows moved across the waters, although there was a cloudless night sky above. The shapes drifted endlessly east, until at last they were swallowed up by the waiting ocean beyond. There was no traffic now, and no sounds of the city broke the fragile quiet of the night. All was stillness, but for the shadows on the marsh.

Susan sat by the window, her back to me, her hair tied with an aquamarine bow. She stared through the glass at a little girl who skipped on the lawn. Her hair was like her mother’s. Her head was down as she counted her steps.

And then my dead wife spoke.

You have forgotten us.

No, I have not forgotten.

Then who is that who sleeps beside you now, in the place where I once slept? Who is it that holds you in the night? Who is it that has borne you a child? How can you say that you have not forgotten, when the scent of her is upon you?

I am here. You are here. I cannot forget.

You cannot love two women with all of your heart. One of us must be lost to you. Is it not true that you no longer think of us in the silences between every heartbeat? Are there not times when we are absent from your thoughts while you twine yourself in her arms?

She spit the words, and the power of her anger sprayed blood upon the glass. Outside, the child stopped her skipping and stared at me through the pane. The darkness obscured her face, and I was grateful.

She was your child.

She will always be my child. In this world or the next, she will always be mine.

We will not go away. We will not disappear. We refuse to leave you. You will remember us. You will not forget.

And she turned, and once again I saw her ruined face, and the empty sockets of her eyes, and the memory of the agonies that she endured in my name were brought back to me with such force that I spasmed, my limbs extending, my back arching with such force that I heard the vertebrae crack. I woke suddenly with my arms curled around my chest, hands upon my skin and hair, my mouth open in agony, and Rachel was holding me and whispering-“Hush, hush”-and my new daughter was crying in the voice of the old, and the world was a place that the dead chose not to leave, for to leave was to be forgotten, and they would not be forgotten.

Rachel stroked my hair, calming me, then went to attend to our child. I listened to her cooing to the infant, walking with her in her arms until the tears ceased. She so rarely cried, this little girl, our Samantha. She was so quiet. She was not like the one that was lost, and yet I sometimes saw a little of Jennifer in her face, even in her first months. Sometimes, too, I thought I caught the ghost of Susan in her features, but that could not be.

I closed my eyes. I would not forget. Their names were written upon my heart, along with those of so many others: those who once were lost, and those whom I had failed to find; those who trusted me, and those who stood against me; those who died at my hand, and those who died at the hands of others. Each name was written, carved with a blade upon my flesh, name upon name, tangled one unto another, yet each clearly legible, each subtly engraved upon this great palimpsest of the heart.

I would not forget.

They would not let me forget.

The visiting priest at Saint Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church struggled to articulate his dismay at what he was seeing.

“What…What is he wearing?”

The object of his dismay was a diminutive ex-burglar, dressed in a suit that appeared to be made from some form of NASA-endorsed synthetic material. To say that it shimmered as its wearer moved was to underestimate its capacity for distorting light. This suit shone like a bright new star, embracing every available color in the spectrum, and a couple more that the Creator Himself had presumably passed over on the grounds of good taste. If the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz had opted for a makeover at a car-valeting service, he would have emerged looking something like Angel.

“It seems to be made of some kind of metal,” said the priest. He was squinting slightly.

“It’s also reflective,” I added.

“It is,” said the priest. He sounded almost impressed, in a confused way. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it before. Is he, er, a friend of yours?”

I tried to keep the vague sense of embarrassment out of my voice.

“He’s one of the godparents.”

There was a noticeable pause. The visiting priest was a missionary home on leave from Southeast Asia. He had probably seen a great deal in his time. It was flattering, in a way, to think that it had taken a baptism in southern Maine to render him speechless.

“Perhaps we should keep him away from naked flames,” said the priest, once he had given the implications some thought.

“That might be wise.”

“He will have to hold a candle, of course, but I’ll ask him to keep it outstretched. That should be all right. And the godmother?”

Now it was my turn to pause before continuing.

“That’s where things get complicated. See the gentleman standing close by him?”

Beside Angel, and towering at least a foot above him, was his partner, Louis. One might have described Louis as a Log Cabin Republican, except that any self-respecting Log Cabin Republican would have bolted the doors, pulled the shutters, and waited for the cavalry to arrive rather than admit this man to his company. He was wearing a dark blue suit and sunglasses, but even with the shades on he seemed to be trying hard not to look directly at his significant other. In fact, he was doing a pretty good impression of a man without a significant other at all, hampered only by the fact that Angel insisted on following him around and talking to him occasionally.

“The tall gentleman? He seems a little out of place.”

It was an astute observation. Louis was fastidiously turned out, as always, and apart from his height and his color there was little about his physical appearance that would seem to invite such a comment. Yet somehow he radiated difference, and a vague sense of potential threat.

“Well, I guess he would be a godfather too.”

“Two godfathers?”

“And a godmother: my partner’s sister. She’s outside somewhere.”

The priest did a little soft-shoe shuffle to emphasize his discomfort.

“It’s most unusual.”

“I know,” I said, “but then, they’re unusual people.”

It was late January, and there was still snow on sheltered ground. Two days earlier, I had driven down to New Hampshire to buy cheap booze in the state liquor store in preparation for the celebrations after the christening. When I was done, I walked for a time by the Piscataqua River, the ice still a foot thick by the shore but webbed by cracks. The center was free of encumbrance, though, and the water flowed slowly and steadily toward the sea. I walked against the current, following a wooded berm, thick with fir, that the river had created over time, cutting off a patch of bog land where early-budding blueberry and blackberry, and gray-black winterberry and tan winter maleberry, coexisted with spruce and larch and rhodora. At last I came to the floating area of the bog, all green and purple where the sphagnum moss was interwoven with cranberry vines. I plucked a berry, sweetened by the frost, and placed it between my teeth. When I bit down, the taste of the juice filled my mouth. I found a tree trunk, long fallen and now gray and rotted, and sat upon it. Spring was coming, and with it the long, slow thaw. There would be new leaves, and new life.

But I have always been a winter person. Now, more than ever before, I desired to remain frozen amid snow and ice, cocooned and unchanging. I thought of Rachel and my daughter, Sam, and those others who had gone before them. Life slows in winter, but now I wanted it to cease its forward momentum entirely, except for us three. If I could hold us here, wrapped all in white, then perhaps everything would be fine. If the days advanced only for us, then no ill could come. No strangers would arrive at our door, and no demands would be made upon us other than those elemental things that we required from one another, and that we freely gave in return.