Элизабет Чандлер: Kissed by an Angel

"Well, you are wanted in the dining room," he said crisply. "It is time for the toast. Everyone is waiting."

Ivy hurried out. They were indeed waiting, and she couldn't avoid an entrance. Ivy blushed as she crossed the room. Gregory pulled her toward him, laughing. Then he handed her a champagne glass.

A friend of Andrew's made the toast. It went on and on.

"Hear, hear," all the guests cried out at last.

"Hear, hear, sister!" Gregory said, and drank down the contents of the glass. He held it out to be filled again.

Ivy took a small sip from hers.

"Here, here, sister," he said again, but low and soft this time, his eyes burning with a strange light. He clinked his glass against hers and downed the champagne once more.

Then he pulled Ivy to him, so close she couldn't breathe, and kissed her hard on the mouth.

Ivy sat at her piano, staring at the same measures of music she had opened to five minutes before, one hand resting lightly on her lips. She dropped her hand down to the yellowed keys and ran her fingers over them, eliciting ripples of music, not quite in tune. Then she ran her tongue over her lips. They weren't really bruised; it was all in her mind.

Still, she was glad that she had talked her mother into letting Philip and her stay in their apartment until after the honeymoon. Six days alone with Gregory in that huge house on the ridge was more than she could face, especially with Philip acting up.

Philip, who in their crowded Norwalk apartment had rigged up old curtains around his bed because he wanted to be away from "the girls," had been begging to sleep with her for the past two weeks. The night before the wedding she had let him bring his sleeping bag into her room.

She had awakened to find him and Ella the cat on top of her. After their long day at the wedding, she'd probably let him sleep in her room again that night.

He was on the floor behind her, playing with his baseball cards, arranging dream teams on the scatter rug. As usual, Ella wanted to stretch out in the middle of the baseball diamond. The pitcher rode on her black belly, up and down. Every once in a while, a soft phrase would escape Philip. "Fly ball deep to center field," he'd whisper, then Don Mattingly would make his home-run trot around the bases.

I shouldn't let him stay up this late, Ivy thought. But she herself couldn't sleep, and she was glad for his company. Besides, Philip had eaten such a conglomeration of party food, and so many sweets on top of that-thanks to Tristan-he'd probably throw up all over his sleeping bag. And clean sheets, like most everything else in their apartment, were packed.

"Ivy, I decided," Philip said suddenly. "I'm not going to move."

"What?" She lifted her legs and spun around on the piano bench.

"I'm staying here. Do you and Ella want to stay with me?"

"And what about Mom?"

"She can be Gregory's mother now," Philip said.

Ivy winced, the way she did each time her mother made a fuss over Gregory. Maggie was warmhearted and affectionate-and trying hard, much too hard. She had no idea how ridiculous Gregory found her.

"Mom will always be our mother, and right now she needs us."

"Okay," Philip said agreeably. "You and Ella go. I'm going to ask Tristan to move in with me."

"Tristan!"

He nodded, then said softly to himself, "Walked the batter. Tying run coming up to the plate."

Apparently he had made up his eight-year-old mind and didn't figure that the matter needed to be discussed further. He played contentedly. It was the strangest thing, how he had begun to play again after his fun with Tristan.

What had Tristan said to Philip that helped him so? Perhaps nothing, Ivy thought. Perhaps instead of trying to explain their mother's marriage for the last three weeks, she should have just stuck some shrimp in her nose.

"Philip," she said sharply.

The tying run had to come home before he was willing to talk to her again. "Huh?"

"Did Tristan say anything to you about me?"

"About you?" He thought for a moment. "No."

"Oh." Not that I care, she told herself.

"Do you know him?" Philip asked.

"No. No, I just thought that maybe, after I found you in the storeroom, he'd say something about me."

Philip's brow knitted. "Oh, yeah. He asked me if you like to wear pink dresses like that, and if you really believe in angels. I told him about your collection of statues."

"What did you tell him about my dress?"

"Yes."

"Yes?" she exclaimed.

"You told Mommy you thought it was pretty."

And her mother had believed her. Why shouldn't Philip?

"Did Tristan say why he was working there tonight?"

"Yup."

The inning was over. Philip was setting up a new defense.

"Well, why?" Ivy asked, exasperated.

"He has to make some money for a swim meet. He's a swimmer, Ivy. He goes to other states and swims. He needs to fly, I can't remember where."

Ivy nodded. Of course. Tristan was just hard up, earning his way. She should stop listening to Suzanne.

Philip stood up suddenly. "Ivy, don't make me go to that big house. Don't make me go. I don't want to eat dinner with him!"

Ivy reached out for her brother. "New things always seem scary," she reassured him. "But Andrew has been nice to you, right from the start. Remember who bought you Don Mattingly's rookie card?"

"I don't want to eat dinner with Gregory."

She didn't know what to say to that.

Philip stood next to her, his fingers moving silently over the old piano's keys. When he'd been younger he used to do that and sing the tunes he was supposed to be playing.

"I need a hug," she said. "How about it?"

He gave her an unenthusiastic one.

"Let's do our new duet, okay?"

He shrugged. He'd play along with her, but the happiness that she had glimpsed in him earlier had disappeared.

They were five measures through when he slammed his hands down on the piano. He banged and banged and banged.

"I won't go! I won't go! I won't!"

Philip burst into tears, and Ivy pulled him toward her, letting him sob in her arms. When he had settled into exhausted hiccups, she said, "You're tired, Philip. You're just tired," but she knew it was more than that.

While he rested against her she played for him his favorite songs, then softened the medley into lullabies. Soon he was almost asleep and much too big for her to carry into bed.

"Come on," she said, helping him up from the bench. Ella followed them into her room.

"Ivy."

"Hmmm?"

"Can I have one of your angels tonight?"

"Sure. Which one?"

"Tony."

Tony was the dark brown one, carved out of wood, Ivy's father angel. She stood Tony next to the sleeping bag and Don Mattingly. Then Philip crawled into the bag, and she zipped him in.

"Do you want to say an angel prayer?" she asked.

Together they said, "Angel of light, angel above, take care of me tonight. Take care of everyone I love."

"That's you, Ivy," Philip added, and closed his eyes.

Ivy felt as if she floated through most of the week that followed the wedding, with one day slipping into the next, marked only by frustrating discussions with Philip. Suzanne and Beth teased her about her absent-mindedness, but more gently than usual. Gregory passed her in the hall once or twice and made little jokes about straightening up his room before Friday. Tristan didn't cross her path that week-at least she didn't see him.

Everyone in school knew by then about her mother and Andrew's marriage. The wedding had made all the local papers as well as the New York Times. Ivy shouldn't have been surprised, for Andrew was often in the paper, but it was odd to see photos of her mother as well.

Friday morning finally arrived, and Ivy nosed her rusty little Dodge out of the apartment driveway, feeling suddenly homesick for every crowded, noisy, dilapidated rental place her family had ever lived in. When she returned from school that afternoon, she'd enter a different driveway, one that climbed a ridge high above the train station and river. The road to the house hugged a low stone wall and ran between patches of woods, daffodils, and laurel. Andrew's woods, daffodils, and laurel.