The Third Angel (21 page)

She left it on the bed, on his pillow. “The Ghost of Michael Macklin.” She could have gotten him a blanket or a coverlet to try and make him more comfortable on the bathroom floor, but Frieda didn't really think he would have known the difference. He'd be cold either way.

Frieda went out and closed the door behind her. She made her way downstairs and retrieved her suitcase from the front hall. Her footsteps echoed on the marble tiles. This is what Frieda knew for certain, this is the list she would have made: She would never stand by and watch him take his life into his hands so carelessly. She would never be silent while he threw the door open to the Angel of Death, while he called to him and begged him to come inside. She would never be on the outside of his life while he followed his desires. Frieda didn't want anything in return for her songs. What she'd wanted she couldn't have. She knew that. She felt she had what some people called a broken heart, but it wasn't anything physical, and it certainly wouldn't prevent her from carrying her suitcase down to the train.

Stella's mother came out from the parlor as Frieda went to the door.

“Are you done with him, or shall I tell Stella about you?” she asked. “He is your boyfriend, isn't he?”

Mrs. Ridge was a very tall woman. She looked as though she might have been a model once. She appeared softer than she had before, as if she was missing something and didn't quite know what it was.

“Tell her whatever you'd like,” Frieda said. “She's your daughter. You're the one who cares about her.”

Frieda already knew she would never be done with Jamie. She knew it as she carried her suitcase to Kensington High Street. The boots she had taken from Stella's closet were high heels, but they felt comfortable. It was as though she'd always owned them.

A couple were getting out of a cab, so Frieda got in with her suitcase and asked if the driver could go along Hyde Park on the way to the train station. It seemed the end of the yellow trees. Leaves were fluttering down. She would always think about the way they looked from Stella's bedroom window.

•                                             •

F
RIEDA WOULD NOT
be there in the winter as she had hoped. She received a letter from Lennie in December about how the park looked like diamonds after an ice storm. Ajax, the manager, had quit, and the second-floor rooms were undergoing a renovation because some of the girls had started a fire with their cigarettes.

I hope you're not worrying about me, Lennie wrote to her. My plan is going strong. I'll be gone from here in under two years.

But when Lennie and Meg were found out over Christmas week, they were both fired by the management and threatened with police action, and Frieda never heard from Lennie again. By then, Frieda was married. She had considered it before she'd run off to London, and now she'd followed it through. Bill was the sort of man who would stand by you, no matter what. He was honest and loyal and maybe that was what she was looking for. Frieda and Bill Rice had a quiet wedding in early December; they went to the register office, and afterward had a luncheon at The Swan, just their immediate families and a few friends. There was cold salmon and champagne and Bill's father, Harry Rice, made a long toast that left everyone in tears.

Except for Frieda; she was not a crier. She looked elegant with her long dark hair wound up, wearing a pale beige suit and the high-heeled suede boots. Even her father, the doctor, had tears in his eyes, something that totally surprised Frieda. She had never seen him cry, except for once, when they went to visit a little girl in an apartment in Reading who'd been going through chemotherapy. Frieda was nine, grown-up enough to be his helper, but she had to wait in the hall that time; the doctor slipped on a mask and pulled coverings over his shoes. The little girl inside was susceptible to germs.

On that visit, Frieda hadn't even realized he was crying as they were driving back until she turned to ask him if he could help her with her math homework when they got home. She must have looked shocked.

“Everybody cries,” Frieda's father told her. “Even me.”

“Is she dying?”

“Well, we're all dying,” Frieda's father had said. “Some now, some later.” That was hardly comforting. “She is just a very sweet little girl. Not a complainer. Very much like you.”

They were stopped at a light. Frieda remembered that night clearly; she had moved closer to her father. She always felt safe when she was with him. “I'm fine,” she said. “I'm not going to get sick.”

The doctor had laughed and kissed the top of her head.

He didn't do that often. “Thank you,” he said for no reason, maybe because she wasn't that little girl dying inside her bedroom, maybe because she knew that even he needed a word of comfort now and then. Or maybe it was simply because she was his daughter and he loved her.

Frieda invited him to the wedding even though she knew it would be difficult for her mother. As for the doctor, he was decent enough to leave his new wife at home. Vi did quite well in her ex-husband's presence. Everyone was civil. Frieda appreciated that. She understood the reason for manners; they were a survival technique.

“So now you're a married woman,” the doctor said to Frieda at the luncheon. It was a buffet. Frieda liked things simple. “You would have been a great doctor, my girl. You had the knack.”

“No heart?” Frieda said. “Isn't that the prerequisite?”

Her father looked at her. “Did you think I was heartless?”

No matter what he'd done, Frieda had to be honest.

“No. I thought you were brave. I'm the heartless one.” Frieda waved at Bill. Her husband was an extremely nice man. He was in his second year at Reading University, in the chemistry department. Now that they were married they would be living in a cottage on his parent's property, paying rent, of course, but at a reduced rate. He had his graduate studies to think of, after all. “Anyway, being married doesn't mean I'm dead. I'm starting nursing classes. I'm going to specialize in oncology.”

The doctor was delighted. “You'll be using your talents. That's what I like to hear.”

When Frieda realized that she was pregnant during her first term of training, Bill was over the moon.

“Oh stop.” Frieda grinned. “It's only a baby.”

“Only!” Bill said. “Only?”

It was spring and Frieda finished out the term. She was a good student, a little less good at being pregnant. She was tired and cranky and she didn't feel much like eating. On Saturdays she always made time for her mother. They went for long walks in the country. Frieda's mum seemed to have aged; she was often confused. Still, Vi was passionate about things she'd never mentioned an interest in before and had joined the local environmental club. “If we don't save the earth, who will?” she asked Frieda. She'd become a rabid bird-watcher and she didn't keep her feelings in check as she had before. She was freer somehow. Once, when they were walking across a field, Frieda's mother turned to her and said, “You won't believe how much you'll love your child.”

“Well, of course,” Frieda said. Didn't everyone?

Her mother grabbed her arm. “I mean it, Frieda. I don't want you to be shocked. Nothing else will ever matter. You have no idea.”

Frieda embraced her mother, then they resumed walking, looking for birds. Vi kept a notebook of the varieties they'd spied: dove, hawk, blackbird, sparrow, wren. Frieda was occupied with other matters as they rambled through the countryside. As always, she was thinking about Jamie. She had left him in that town house in Kensington, but she hadn't given him up. She had taken him back to Reading. Jamie might as well be sitting at the table every night at dinner while Frieda and Bill discussed their day. He might as well have been right there in bed with them. Frieda felt like a liar far too often; she played the good housewife, but at night, when she sat in the kitchen looking out the window, she was wishing for another life. Sometimes she gazed down the long gravel drive, still expecting Jamie Dunn to arrive, after he'd searched all of Reading for her in a taxi or a limousine. She had the purple jacket folded away in the closet, along with some old sweaters and the black mini-dress, things she would never again wear but couldn't bring herself to throw away.

That spring, when Frieda was seven months pregnant, she heard Jamie on the radio. She was at the kitchen table with the radio switched on. Thankfully, she was alone. She had fixed a pot of Russian tea and a muffin with jam. She was famished all the time. Outside everything was green. Bill's parents house was known as Lilac House, and their cottage was called The Hedges because it was surrounded by boxwood that had to be trimmed back each year. She actually loved living in the countryside. She who had longed for a city life had become a bird-watcher. She even went to those Save the Environment meetings with her mother and had gotten involved with all sorts of local green issues.

She was perfectly happy, and then, all at once, there was his voice. Frieda truly felt that she'd been shot, as though something had gone right through her, lead or ice or sorrow or love. She sat down. It was “The Ghost of Michael Macklin.” It was as if she'd never written it, as though it had been formed whole from the power of Jamie's voice. It was different in some ways; there were electric guitars now, and more of a beat, a pounding one, but inside it was the same song.

When I walk down this hallway, everyone thinks I've left you, but I'm here in my black coat, I won't ever be gone.

Frieda listened to the radio all day long, longing to hear it again, and then, just before Bill came home from university, she found a pop station that was playing it. This time she was more prepared, less stunned by the sound of his voice. She listened as a critic might, and was won over again. It was his first release as a single and the radio station said there was a lot of excitement about his album,
Lion Park,
due out at the end of the week. The single was already number five with a bullet. A bullet must be good; a bullet meant it was getting to people, through the heart, through the soul.

That night, Frieda couldn't sleep. She felt she'd been trapped in an alternate universe, one in which she lay beside Bill in bed and went to visit her mother on Saturdays. She belonged somewhere else, no matter what Stella had said. She belonged with him.

She continued her routine, as if in a dream. But when she went to visit on Saturday, Frieda found her mother was too ill to walk.

“It's just a headache,” Vi said, but it seemed like more. She had to lie down. Her head was throbbing. She asked Frieda to close the curtains because the light hurt her eyes. Frieda phoned her father from her mum's back hallway. He said he'd be over in fifteen minutes, but he was there in less than ten. He must have been speeding. Their house was a suburban brick row house with a pretty yard.

“I was probably stupid to phone,” Frieda said. “It's probably nothing.”

“You were right to phone.” The doctor went upstairs to what had once been his bedroom. Frieda followed behind.

“Not you,” Vi said when she saw him.

The doctor laughed. “You know I'm the best doctor in town. Even if you hate me, admit it.”

“Fine,” Frieda's mum said. “Still wearing two watches, I see.”

“Wouldn't want to be late for you,” the doctor said. He turned to Frieda. “Can you get a glass of water and two aspirin tablets?”

It wasn't until Frieda was halfway down the stairs that she realized that was what her father did whenever he wanted to get rid of a patient's family member; whenever he thought a diagnosis might be bad.

In a panic, she went into the kitchen and ran the water. She thought she saw someone in a black coat standing outside the window. Her heart flew up, thinking it might be Jamie and then she knew all at once it wasn't Jamie at all. Jamie would never be here in Reading. He would have never come after her. It was the angel who'd sat in the back of the car; the one who waited outside the window until the time was right to come inside and take whatever he wanted. It was the one you didn't want to see at your door.

Frieda's dad called an ambulance and he and Frieda followed along in his car. It was twilight and all the birds were singing. The ambulance didn't have its siren on. Frieda knew that was a bad sign. She'd told her mother everything would be all right when the medics came to get her, but her mother's eyes were closed and she didn't answer. Frieda and her father were silent as they drove. Frieda had begun to cry. She'd thought it might be a stroke, and that her mother would recover, but the doctor told her it had probably been an aneurysm.

“Oh, Frieda,” he said. “I wish I could make it turn out differently. I wish I had the power.”

Then she knew for certain. It was the tone he always had when there wasn't any hope, when the angel in the black coat had already come and gone and the other two angels were nowhere to be found.

The funeral was small, her mother's closest friends, a few people from the environmental group, Bill and his family, and Frieda's father. The service was held at the graveside because Frieda's mother never had liked anyone making a fuss over her. It was a warm day and Frieda stood in the shade. Her stomach felt huge and her feet were swelling and she thought she might faint. She could not believe that her mother would never know her grandchild. She could not believe this was the way her mother's life had turned out.

After the service, Bill's mother made a luncheon at Lilac House, cold meats and cheese and crusty yellow bread that the bakery down the road was known for.

“You all right?” Frieda's father said. He had come out to the porch to where Frieda was sitting. She could not stand the pleasant chatting going on inside. She couldn't bear to be polite.

“Not really.”

“No. Of course not. I don't know if this makes it better or worse, but when I sent you in the kitchen that day she said the best thing that ever happened to her was you.”