Silent Girl (16 page)

Angel put her hands over Mira's. “What a treasure you are.”

“I'm hungry,” Matty wailed. Their show was over.

At dinner, Anthony was quiet and watchful. The moody one, like Marko. Then Matty made farting sounds with the ketchup bottle and got Anthony laughing so hard, food came out his nose. Angel lifted up her hands in mock despair and said, “Boys. What can you do?”

“Don't let them bamboozle you,” Mira said.

“What's boozle?” Matty asked.

“Tricking people. I had a boozler brother. I know all the tricks.”

Anthony blew on his fist and studied Mira.

“I don't want any more,” Matty said, pushing his plate away.

“How 'bout I make you spaghetti and meat balls on Tuesday?” Mira said.

“I don't like meatballs,” he said.

“I'll put them on the side.”

Anthony took his fist away from his mouth. “Can you cook it here? Nothing to do at your place.”

“How do you know? I might have every set of baseball cards since 1957.”

“Do you?” Anthony's expression hovered between mistrust and hopefulness.

“You'll have to come up and find out.”

Mira felt a weird and wonderful sense of purpose. If her soul had had a mission before, it could only have been to watch over Marko and she'd blown that. She'd been given a second chance with Angel – the boys, too, even though she had no maternal stirrings. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she ferried them home from the sitter's in the Mustang, the top down, smiling at the sight of them in the rear view mirror, hair whipping around their faces. She filled their tummies. She recruited them in transforming her living room into a set for
Cyrano.
Draped the furniture with sheets and covered the carpet with drop sheets; covered the boys with Marko's work shirts; set paint, brushes, and water jars on the big glass coffee table. A forest began to form on either side of the sliding glass door to the balcony. She had sketched floor-to-ceiling trees on the wall and let the boys loose to fill them in with green leaves and blue leaves or no leaves at all. Trees with funny faces and scary faces. Trees bearing squirrels, apples, and birds.

“You're looney,” Angel said. “The management will have your hide.”

“I can always paint over it,” Mira said. “Or maybe I'll tell them what Rhonda would say: the trees are there and not there at the same time.”

Mira told Anthony and Matty the story of the large-nosed poet who courted the beautiful Roxane on another's behalf, even though the poet, himself, was secretly in love with Roxane. Except for the part about the duel, the story bored them until Mira bought them rubber noses to wear while they painted.

Angel said she'd never felt so supported, that Mira was what she imagined a sister would be. Mira wondered if Angel was what a best friend was supposed to be. She'd only ever had Marko, never a close girlfriend. They started eating most suppers together, pooling their grocery money, amazed at how cheaply they could eat with imagination and planning. To save even more, Mira gave up study group – not a big sacrifice – and Angel limited herself to every other week.

After Anthony and Matty were in bed each night, they'd sit side by side on Angel's floor, their backs against the couch, keeping their voices low. Angel would talk about her dreams for the boys. How her desire to do right by them was almost a physical ache. Mira told Angel about the paintings that formed in her sleep and scribbled their way onto notepads and blotters at work. All that marred Mira's happiness was the spectre of Charles's visit and that was a long way off. He called Angel every Wednesday night at seven but the calls were short.

Three weeks before Thanksgiving, Angel showed up early at Mira's, her green eyes puffy from crying. “I could hardly see the road for my tears,” she said at the door. “Where are they?”

“In the living room playing
Parcheesi
.”

“I don't want them to see me upset, don't want them asking questions.”

Mira took Angel in her room and quietly closed the door.

“They've changed the commission structure,” Angel said. “The top ten percent will make twenty percent more, the rest twenty percent less. It's heartless, Mira, so heartless.” The change was effective December first. Her regional manager had handed out motivational cassette tapes the sales reps were supposed to play in their cars to and from appointments. Angel's car didn't have a cassette player.

Mira gave Angel a consoling hug, but hopeful ideas were afloat in her head. “Take the Mustang,” she said. “And we can rent a three-bedroom together. Only forty dollars a month more than what you're paying all by yourself.”

Angel lifted her eyebrows in surprise.

“I've been thinking about it for a while,” Mira said. “I checked it out.”

Angel smiled weakly. “You're so sweet, you really are, but this must be the sign. I drove out to the river today, walked the path. The wind was bitter, already, and we're still weeks from winter. I thought about how warm California is all year. And how meaningless my work is: trying to interest busy doctors in a brand. Charles will need a nurse one day. It's the least I can do for him. I called him before I came upstairs. He's flying out this weekend to talk it over.”

Mira sat down hard on the edge of her bed. “Why didn't you ask me first?”

“Your permission? You're kidding, right?”

“For help. Why didn't you ask me for help?”

“You're as poor as I am. Where's the percentage in that?”

Mira got up and opened the door. “I'll tell the boys you're here. And wrap up the leftovers for you. We had Meat-za Pie. I hid mushrooms under the cheese and Matty ate them.”

She sat in the dark for hours that night, passing a flashlight beam back and forth across Cyrano and Roxane's forest. It had brought tears to Angel's eyes when it was finished. “Their little souls are all over that wall,” she had said. Mira replayed other conversations, looking for where she'd read too much into Angel's words. The next day she booked a private session with Rhonda. Seventy-five dollars on her credit card for advice from what was probably only Jackie's imagination.

“What do you believe you deserve?” Rhonda said. “What you believe is what you'll get.”

Mira had to think about whether she felt herself deserving of anything. “More time, I guess. To show Angel she has options. She's giving up too soon.”

“What is she giving up, exactly?”

Mira had to think again. “Me,” she said softly.

“So schlep yourself out to California, continue your friendship there.”

“It wouldn't be the same. I'd have to share her with Charles.”

“Aha, okay, the heart of the matter. Listen. Here comes a clue. It's not a coincidence you three have come together. A play you wrote in another life is having a revival in this one.”

Mira listened, incredulous, as Rhonda told her that she, Angel, and Charles plunged to their deaths while climbing the Alps in the seventh century. They were close friends, young men all, eager for adventure before settling down. It wasn't their first expedition. Charles had someone waiting for him and he'd promised her it would be his last. Angel had chosen the mountain face the three would climb that day. Mira had been as aimless as “a fart in a barrel,” as Rhonda expressed it, willing to let the others write her lines.

“What
should
I have done?” Mira asked.

“There's no should or shouldn't,” Rhonda said. “There just is.”

“Was Marko on that mountain, too?”

“No, he is your sister in that life and she has the same birthmark you do now. Then, as now, you believe one of you has to exit for the other to star.”

“Where is my birthmark?” Mira asked.

“I don't play parlour games. You choose to believe or not.” Unless something unforeseen happened, Rhonda said, the probability was for Angel to marry Charles. Mira would have to be content knowing she and Angel had deeper relationships in other realities.

But this is who I am now, Mira thought, and now is all I can be content with.

Charles arrived that Friday. “He wants to meet you,” Angel said when she called to invite Mira to dinner the following night. “Please say yes.”

Seconds after Mira knocked, a tall, balding man with a barrel chest flung open Angel's door. Balancing wire-rimmed glasses on the edge of his long nose. Over his charcoal wool suit – hadn't Angel said casual? – he wore a navy blue bib apron that shouted
Cocktails with Charles
in orange letters. He handed Mira a little napkin that said the same.

“C-c-care to try my special mmmartini?”

“Why not?” Mira said. She'd had two fortifying beers at her place and was feeling loose. She stepped into the kitchen, steamy from whatever was in the oven. Angel lifted her gaze from the green peppers she was chopping, a wary look. Mira kissed her soapy-scented cheek and said, “Smells great.” Angel gave her a grateful smile.

“Where did you find that apron?” Mira asked Charles. “And the napkins?”

He'd had them custom made, Charles said, in anticipation of meeting Mira at Thanksgiving. Luckily, they were ready early.

“I'm flattered.”

“He's been driving me batty getting ready for you,” Angel said. “Commandeered half the counter space for his bar.” She smiled indulgently at Charles, and Mira could see something pass between them, a history she couldn't match – in this life, anyway.

“I'll stand over here, then, out of the combat zone,” she said, sidestepping her way to the dining area. “Been to the storage locker, I see.” The table was set with a sky blue cloth, tall white candles, and china Mira had never seen. Only a week ago, she and Angel, famished and lazy, had sat there eating leftover chili straight out of the pan.

“Food tastes so mmmuch better when you take time to set a p-p-proper table,” Charles said. He was mashing mint leaves, lime juice, and brown sugar with a wooden thingamajig he called a muddler. He'd had one foot out the door, he stammered, before he remembered to slip it into his carry-on case. He was gesturing so widely he almost whacked Angel in the head.

What Mira would soon have in her hand, he said, was
La Mojita,
a drink he learned to make from a Cuban exile in Miami. “Angel was kind enough – p-p-patience personified,” he said, to drive him around that morning to find the fresh ingredients he needed. He had purchased the vital raspberry twist vodka in California, not wanting to leave that to chance. Because of his condition, he'd have his with juice. Mira must tell him what she thought of the real thing. Would she care to join him in the living room? What a scriptwriter this Charles was.

“I
love
this drink,” Mira called after him. The first sip had gone right to her head and she was softening towards him. Imagining him in lederhosen. Angel had cleaned up the place. It was usually littered with newspapers, GI Joes, unopened mail, and abandoned mugs with half an inch of cold tea in them. Mira watched Charles ponder where to sit before he landed on the couch next to the phoney palm. He seemed to swallow the space. The boys – more scrubbed and subdued than usual – were on the floor playing
Battleship
. Matty gave her a smile she wished Angel could see.

“Hey, boozlers,” she said, lowering herself to the floor beside them, careful not to spill her drink, aware that she wasn't in total control.

“B-b-boozlers?”

“Private joke,” Mira said and winked at the boys.

Angel entered the room carrying a five-string banjo emblazoned with a gold eagle on the back. It must have been three feet tall.

“Look what Charles brought us.” She took a seat beside him.

“I didn't know you played banjo,” Mira said.

“We don't. Yet. Charles bought an extra plane ticket so he could keep it on the seat next to him.” She patted his knee. “He's too much.”

Charles beamed and burst into loud song, “I come from Monterey-yay with a banjo on my knee.” Not a single stutter.

Anthony and Matty exchanged smirks.

“So, when were you in Miami?” Mira asked, hoisting her
La Mojita
in Charles's direction.

“Mmmany times.”

“Charles manages his own investments,” Angel said. “He likes to visit the companies he invests in.”

“Do you play much baseball?” Mira asked him.

Charles looked appalled, as if she'd asked if he did much dope. “I wwwasn't well as a ch-ch-child,” he said. “Nnnot much time for sports.”

Angel jumped in to say he'd had rheumatic fever as a child and it had damaged his heart. Medication seemed to be doing the trick for now, although his doctor had mentioned the possibility of valve surgery, something Angel intended to discuss with that doctor. Her voice had clothed itself in a nurse's uniform already.