The Third Angel (28 page)

“I've got a daughter who likes books.” The doctor had taken note of the copy of Anne Frank's diary on the night table. “She's a big reader, too.”

Lucy glanced at the doctor. His voice sounded sad; he had probably seen a lot of sick people. She noticed that he was wearing two wristwatches. That seemed very odd indeed.

“You're not a quack, are you?” Lucy asked. Her chest hurt her and she was coughing at night. She kept her face in the pillow so her father wouldn't hear her. She had worried enough people. She didn't intend to worry anyone anymore.

“As in duck?” the doctor said, puzzled. “That sort of quack quack?”

Lucy might have laughed, if she hadn't felt so dreadful. “As in lunatic,” she said.

“Ah, the watches. One I use to take your pulse.” Which he then did. “The other is to make sure I'm always on time. It's a time-traveling watch.”

“Really.” Lucy had never had a doctor quite like this one. She sat up straight.

“Mind if I listen to your lungs?” he asked.

Lucy shrugged. The doctor had an old black bag that opened when he pushed on a silver clasp. He took out a stethoscope and listened to Lucy's back, then her front. She could hear herself wheezing. When he was done she had one of her coughing fits. She covered her mouth up. She felt her ribs would shatter. The doctor waited politely until she had finished choking and had managed to catch her breath.

“The rabbit doesn't cough, does he?”

“She,” Lucy corrected. “No. She's totally silent. Never a peep.”

The doctor asked Lucy to sit on the edge of the bed and when she did, he tapped on her elbows and knees. She felt like a puppet. When he asked her to cough again, she did so and then couldn't stop. This time the rabbit startled and jumped down, then skittered beneath the bed. “What do you mean a time-traveling watch?” Lucy asked when she got her breath back.

“I set it an hour later, so when I get home and see my daughter I'm actually an hour ahead.”

Lucy laughed, then wheezed.

“You know what I think?” the doctor said.

Lucy shook her head. There were certain things she hated now, ever since that night. Traffic, blood, the color red, sudden noises, the thud of her own heartbeat.

“I think you've got pneumonia. And some very serious asthma. Have you ever had an asthma attack before? Any huffing and puffing?”

Lucy shook her head. “We're taking the ship home soon. I'll be better by then.” She realized she hadn't thought about her turtle, Mrs. Henderson, at all and she felt like a bad pet-owner and a bad person. For all she knew Mrs. Henderson had already died and no one had bothered to tell her. She had better get home right away. She wished she could leave that very day.

“I think you'd be better off if you went to the hospital for a bit,” the doctor told Lucy.

“Well, that would be impossible, really.” For some stupid reason Lucy had begun to cry. She had nothing to cry about. She wasn't Anne Frank after all. She wasn't living in an attic to be carted away to a death camp. She was in a comfortable hotel room with her father.

“Why is it impossible?” The doctor had written down the name of a cough syrup for her father to get at the chemist so that Lucy could get some immediate relief. “Do you have something else you need to be doing that prevents you from going to the hospital?” He was listening quite carefully for her answer in a way adults usually didn't.

“I'm taking care of a rabbit,” Lucy said. “Isn't that obvious?”

The doctor thought that over. He put away his stethoscope and the thermometer and his prescription pad, all back into his black bag.

“I'll take the rabbit home with me,” he said.

“And eat it?”

The doctor recognized someone who had lost her faith. He had seen it before.

“I'm a vegetarian,” he told her.

Lucy studied his face. He didn't seem like a liar.

“Actually, I wasn't thinking of keeping it as a pet. I was thinking of letting it stay in my house for the winter, and then setting it free in the field behind my house.”

“She,” Lucy said.

“She,” the doctor amended. “She could still come and eat from the garden. We usually have lettuce and peas planted. She could sleep under the shed.”

“I wish I could time travel.” Lucy called to the rabbit under the bed, but it wouldn't budge.

“Any particular time?”

Lucy considered. “The moment before the bad things started happening.”

“Well that would have to be before the universe existed. That would be blank and empty space I'm afraid. You really don't have to worry about the rabbit. I'll take good care of her.”

Lucy realized how difficult it was to breathe. She didn't think the doctor was a quack anymore. “Yes,” she agreed. “That would be good. Her name is Millie.”

Lucy went into the hospital that night; she had to sleep in a plastic tent where warm wet air was circulated. She was far more ill than the doctor had let on. She was wheezing until she thought she might vomit and when she closed her eyes she saw things that weren't there, probably because of her fever. She saw black trees covered with thorns. She saw a man she thought she recognized and she wondered if he was the Third Angel come to visit her, the one who made mistakes. She saw a mourning dove that could no longer fly. The nurses were very nice and let Lucy change her nightgown three times in a row when she got too sweaty from being inside the plastic tent. They had to keep the air damp and warm to hydrate her lungs. Her father came to sit beside her bed. He wanted to hold her hand, but the nurses told him that wouldn't be a good idea; he'd let all the steam out of the tent. So he read the
London Observer.
Once he read a
Time
magazine with Katharine Hepburn on the cover; even through the plastic tent Lucy could see she looked nothing like her. Nothing at all.

Ben told her that Charlotte was going home on the ship, but that they would be staying for a while. He had rented a flat for the rest of August and September; Lucy could make up the work she would miss at school with a tutor whenever she was well enough to study again. While she'd been ill, Lucy's eyes hurt and she had no desire to read. When she got ready to go to the hospital on the night she saw the doctor with the two watches, she had given her copy of
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
to the hotel library. It was really only a bookcase where guests left the books they had finished. Ever since she'd given the book away, Lucy had a lost feeling, as though she really were floating in blank, empty space.

After the first week in the hospital, Lucy's hair was so tangled and wet from the humidifiers and the damp air in the plastic tent she couldn't stand it. She begged the nicest nurse, Rebecca, to cut it for her. They went out to the sunroom and Rebecca spread out some towels. Rebecca cut Lucy's hair in a pixie cut. It was such a relief to be rid of her long hair; Lucy shook her head and there was no heavy weight.

“You look just like Audrey Hepburn!” Rebecca said.

“Not Katharine Hepburn?”

“Oh, no. Audrey.” Rebecca sounded sure. “She has the same haircut and the same beautiful face.”

When Lucy looked into a mirror she was surprised by what she saw. She looked older, like a teenager; she looked like the person she was meant to be.

Her breathing had gotten much better, and after two weeks, the hospital let Lucy go home to the flat with her father. Rebecca came by every day to check on her and have her breathe into some tube thing and listen to her lungs. The nurse often stayed through lunch—they were all worried because Lucy had lost a great deal of weight. Lucy was glad to have the nurse visit; she liked to listen to Rebecca and her father talking in the kitchen as they made tomato soup and cheese sandwiches; they laughed over silly things, English things Ben Green didn't know about. What a kipper was, how he wasn't to eat Ploughman's pickle straight from the jar, how to use the funny old-fashioned toaster with the holes in it that left a pretty brown pattern on the bread.

Sometimes when Lucy looked out at the street she still saw blood. She didn't tell anyone this. She knew it wasn't real. It was like the hallucinations she'd had when she was in the hospital. The man in the black coat who might have been an angel; the doves falling from the ceiling. She had asked her father to tell Charlotte that Michael and Bryn had been married and that they should be buried together, and he had; but Bryn's family didn't believe her. In their opinion, Lucy was a liar and a thief and they went ahead with the funeral arrangements of their choice. Lucy didn't know what had happened to Michael Macklin's remains; he didn't seem like a man who had a family.

One day when her father was out, Lucy went for a walk. It was the first time she'd been out by herself since the accident. She roamed around, feeling her way, and at last she found the church. She had remembered Westbourne Grove. She went inside and crossed herself the way Michael Macklin had done, then sat in one of the wooden pews. She couldn't tell if she believed in anything or not, but she prayed anyway. At least she thought it was a prayer. She said it for Michael. She wished that he and Bryn were together. She wished that love was real.

When she left, Lucy noticed a bookstore across the street. She went inside. She missed reading; she felt empty without it. It was a used bookstore, and it smelled of paper and ink. It was a very disorderly place but Lucy managed to find water-stained copies of
Through the Looking-Glass
and
Alice in Wonderland.

“Good choices,” the clerk said to her, and he gave her a discount. “Those two would see you through on a desert island, wouldn't they? They'd be books enough.”

Lucy took her Alice books in their brown paper wrappings tied with string and walked toward the park. She'd grown so much that Rebecca had taken her shopping at Selfridges earlier in the week and they'd picked out new slacks and shirts. Rebecca was a fan of casual clothes. They bought sweaters and shirts and hiking boots and a new handbag. If those two English women she had met in the park that first week had seen her they would never have recognized her. They'd be looking for someone who resembled Katharine Hepburn and they'd be wrong.

It was September and the park smelled spicy. There were people riding horses on the bridle path and the air held the odor of horseflesh and fresh earth. Lucy walked and walked and then she crossed the bridle path on the far side. She had gone all the way across Hyde Park. She faced the street where it had happened. She hadn't thought it out, but somehow she found herself on Brompton Road. Now that she was here, she knew she had to go farther. She really had known it all along.

It was late in the day, nearing suppertime, but the light was still clear. People were rushing home from work. It had been so dark on the night when it happened; everything had been black and blue and red. Now everything looked normal. Lucy wondered how many people from America who weren't used to people driving on the left had stepped out in front of traffic. She held her breath; she didn't know if she could cross the street, but she managed to get to the other side. She just waited for a crowd and when the light turned she crossed with them. When Lucy reached the sidewalk, she bent over and took a few deep breaths.

She made her way to the Lion Park Hotel and stood outside and looked up into the windows. She counted up seven floors, but she couldn't tell which room had been hers. She went into the lobby. There was the old stone lion covered with moss in the courtyard. There was the flowered wallpaper. A new young doorman called her miss and welcomed her to the hotel. Lucy went over to the desk. Dorey was there; she had been promoted to day clerk.

“Can I help you?” Dorey asked formally, and then she recognized Lucy. “Oh my lord! You look brilliant!!! What have you done to your hair?” Dorey came around to give Lucy a hug. “I adore it!”

“It's a pixie cut,” Lucy said. She had been feeling guilty about taking Millie without a word, so now she told Dorey the truth. “Just so you know—I stole the rabbit.”

“Well, I wasn't going to cry over a rabbit, even if it was Millie. I figured she found her way back to Hyde Park.”

“I gave her to a doctor who'll take her out to the countryside.”

“She'll be happy hopping around in the woods. It's only natural, I guess. But she'll probably miss eating wallpaper. She was a real wallpaper lover.” Dorey took out some chocolates and offered Lucy her pick. “That was a bad time back then,” Dorey said quietly. “We had news reporters and everything here afterward. I was interviewed twice.”

“I made it happen,” Lucy said.

“You? You had nothing to do with it. The real culprit comes here every night and gets sloshed. As if that could help.” When Lucy looked confused, Dorey added, “The groom. That fellow Teddy Healy. He should have found a woman who loved him back, that was the problem. You can't force things like that. She wanted Mr. Macklin, and who can blame her? It's chemistry, , you know. There've been studies done and it's been proven. Love is ancient and mysterious and you can't mess with it. If you do it just backfires and you meet with disaster. That's a fact.”

Lucy considered this. “He comes here every night?”

“I no longer work that shift, but that's what Miles Donnelly told me. Nights are his now. I've been promoted. I was the one who called the authorities and the hospital, you know. I handled the whole thing. And that room where they were, the one across from yours? We can't rent it. It's haunted. That's a fact as well. Every night at ten-thirty there's a racket of some sort.” Dorey seemed relieved to have someone to talk this over with. “People think I'm crazy, but I saw the ghost myself. That's another reason I made them switch me to days. I'm not going to sit here alone at night with some ghost wandering about.”

“Who is it?” Lucy's chest had started to feel funny, as though she'd soon have difficulty breathing, just like in the hospital. She had an inhaler she was supposed to use when she felt this way, but she'd left it on her bedside table.