The Third Angel (8 page)

“To tell you the truth I don't go upstairs anymore. Not since I cut down on the drinking.” The barman brought over their coffees. “Put that on my tab.” Teddy looked up at the clock. It was nearly ten-thirty, that dreadful time.

“I think we should go upstairs and be done with it, Mr. Healy.” She'd already stood up.

“I won't get rid of you until I do, will I, Lucy?”

She shook her head. He recalled that she'd been stubborn then, too.

They took the lift up. She hadn't remembered it to be so small or so creaky. They got out on the top floor. Seven. There had been some work done along the molding where the pet rabbit who'd lived in the hotel back when Lucy was a girl had torn off strips of wallpaper. But most everything seemed very dim, in need of repair.

“My daughter's staying on this floor.”

“She could have found a better place to stay,” Teddy said.

“We all could have done that.”

Teddy chuckled. He looked quite pale.

When they got to 707, Lucy knocked, then opened the door.

The room was empty and cold. Some extra mattresses were stored against one wall. Lucy left the door open and she and Teddy stood in the hallway, looking in. Teddy glanced at her once and she felt his uncertainty. They both remembered everything. They might not recall what they'd had for breakfast, but they assuredly recalled exactly what had happened in this room.

It was now ten-thirty. When Lucy's husband had left, she had often thought about Teddy Healy. She knew that love wasn't something you could bargain for. She remembered the girl she had been; in many ways, she was still that girl. She had lost her faith in people when she was young, long before she'd come to London.

They could hear some guests down on the sixth floor, a little tipsy, laughing. It was ten-thirty and then ten thirty-five and then it was a quarter to eleven. There was no evidence of a ghost, or whatever the thing had been.

“What happened to it?” Teddy Healy asked.

Lucy leaned in close to him. “You're a good man. Maybe that's all you needed to know. You always were. You were good to me.”

“What I did for you was nothing.”

“You couldn't be more wrong, Mr. Healy. It was everything to me.”

M
ADDY SPENT THE
next day alone. It was nothing new to her. But this day was different. Today she wished she was with the rest of her family. She went out wearing jeans and flip-flops and the T-shirt she had slept in. The heat wave hadn't eased and many restaurants had run out of ice and cold drinks.

Maddy had her hotel key and some money in her pocket. She felt homeless and lost. She found her way to the garden in the park with the huge white roses, where she sat on a bench. A man was sleeping on the bench directly across from hers. It was quiet in the garden. Maddy couldn't hear the traffic on Brompton Road. Time seemed to have slowed down. For once she thought about the things she had done and she wasn't pleased. When the man began to moan in his sleep, Maddy got up. She walked for miles. By the end of the day her feet hurt; she went into a pub in the late afternoon where she drank a warm Coke. No one bothered her. A few people glanced at her, then looked away. A pretty woman in bad shape. She hadn't washed her hair, only pinned it up. Her clothes were rumpled and she looked on edge, as though she'd had better days in some other place and time.

Maddy tried to phone her mother's hotel room several times to check in and see how Paul was doing, but Lucy was never in. She left six messages with the front desk. She phoned the hospital, but when the switchboard answered and asked who it was she'd like to speak to, she hung up.

It was nearly dark when Maddy made her way out of the pub. She had wasted the entire day with soda and chips. The air was ashy and deep. There was a rosebush growing by a garden gate around the block from the hotel, with flowers that appeared almost blood red in the gathering dark. That night underneath the sycamore tree when they cut themselves, Maddy realized that if she decided not to feel any pain, nothing could hurt her. She let her sister be the one with hope, while she believed in nothing. She was more like her mother than she would ever have imagined.

Maddy ate her dinner in the hotel restaurant that night. She sat at the bar.

“You're here more than Teddy is,” the barman said. “A regular. He's even been getting his post here.” He held up an envelope. Inside was an old snapshot of a girl and a dog sitting on a bench. The barman had peeked. Someone had written with gratitude on the back of the photograph.

“Well, I won't be a regular after this week,” Maddy assured him. “I'll be going home.” She ordered soup and wine, but she drank just the wine. The soup was watery with thinly cut vegetables floating on top. She had no appetite anyway.

“I hear we're rid of our ghost,” the barman went on. “I have no idea how it was done, but it's a miracle. Teddy himself tried to shoot him once, but the bullet went right through him. As far as I can tell, ghosts are the essence of a person filtered down to the basics. A circle of vibrant illumination. That's what we're supposedly all made of.”

“You sound like a believer,” Maddy said.

“I saw him on occasion,” the barman confided. “Wandering the hallway. Lost as a mouse. Poor fellow. I guess he finally went on to his just reward.”

When Maddy went upstairs she ran her hand along the wall to feel for the bullet hole in the plaster outside the door to 708. She went into her room, took off all her clothes, and put on her blue dress. She had to stand on the desk chair to get a look since the mirror was small. The dress suited her; Allie had chosen well. She knew Maddy. The color was perfect.

Maddy had seemed not to need anyone, but inside she was broken, made of bones and black ribbons, blood and darkness. She fell asleep in the hot, sticky room with the desk lamp switched on, still wearing the bridesmaid's dress. She heard a whisper in her dream; a man was speaking, and she was guided by his voice. There was a trail of stones, and she followed them until she saw Paul. He was wrapped in white tape and his eyes were white as well. He said, Bury me under the sycamore tree. In her dream, Maddy was barefoot and standing on stones; her feet had begun to bleed. She wanted to say, Of course, I'll do anything you ask, but she couldn't speak. She was falling into pieces. A hand, an arm, a leg. She wondered if she could put herself together again with red thread and needles. She wondered if she would have the strength to lift the shovel and dig the grave he'd asked her for. There were white roses growing, but she couldn't see them in the dark. She'd simply have to believe they were there.

•                                             •

A
LLIE WAS BY
his bedside when it happened. It was 5:22 a.m. She noticed the clock, the way people notice odd, practical things just at the moment when everything seems so unreal. There was the table. There was a water glass with a straw. It was that silver-colored time between night and morning, when the sky is still dark, but lights are flicking on all over the city. It was quiet, the way it is in winter when snow first begins to fall. But it was the fifteenth of August, the morning after her wedding day. She had been married a week ahead of schedule.

On the day of her marriage, the doctor had called Allie into his office to say that he thought Paul would not last twenty-four hours. He might not even last the day. His vital signs were slipping and he was unresponsive; his dosage of morphine was so high it was toxic. Allie thanked the doctor and sat there unable to move.

“You don't have to thank me,” the doctor said. His name was Crane. He had a huge heart and probably shouldn't have been a doctor. “You can hit me if you want to.”

All Allie wanted to do was use his phone. She called Paul's parents to tell them to drive up to London immediately. His mother would fall to pieces. All through the autumn, when Paul had been having the chemo that made him so desperately ill, he had wanted to go home on the weekends. And then early that summer, when it came back so quickly, he looked forward to those visits more than ever. It was a tiring trip, but he didn't care. Allie often had to drive. Paul had never allowed himself to be a passenger before, but now he dozed on the way. That was when she first began to understand what was happening. That was when she began to fall in love with him.

She hadn't lied to Maddy; she'd hadn't loved him before. When she accepted his proposal of marriage she had done so because it appeared to be the next step. It had seemed the right time, if not the right man. Paul was indeed difficult and self-centered. He always had his defenses up. The charm that had attracted her at first had worn thin. Allie had wanted out so badly, she didn't even care that he had prowled around when he was at his angriest. And then this summer, after the recurrence, when she least expected it, everything had changed.

On those trips to Reading, Paul would often vomit out the window, or they'd have to stop by the side of the road or at a tea shop because he was so nauseated he couldn't stand the movement of the car. But as soon as he got to the village where he'd grown up, he was happy. The house was called Lilac House and had been in the family for years, nothing very elaborate, just a small pretty country house with a little cottage in the rear of the property that was surrounded by boxwood. There was indeed a row of huge old lilacs in the garden. Some were purple, some violet, some were the color of cream. In the summertime, however, they were just a hedge of green, heart-shaped leaves.

Paul was a bird-watcher, something Allie hadn't known about him till then. As it turned out, there was a great deal she didn't know. That he was kind, for instance. He went out of his way to speak to old people whenever they stopped for tea on their travels, taking time to discuss the weather and state of the world. He liked to go to a fruit stand and bring his mother a basket of apples when they came to visit. “Get the good ones,” he'd call to Allie when he could no longer step out of the car to choose the fruit himself.

“Absolute best apples in the universe,” he would insist when she came back to the car. “I was a vegetarian when I was ten,” he told her.

“Were you?” Allie was surprised. He liked his roasts and stews.

“My grandfather was one and I wanted to please him. He was quite the old guy. A doctor. I admired the hell out of him. Whatever he did, I did.”

“What else did you do when you were ten?” Allie asked. Paul was already having difficulty with his eyes.

“I dreamed of you,” he said.

“Bullshit.” She'd laughed.

“Football,” he said. “Cooking.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes. Jam pancakes and puddings and apple tarts. Vegetable stews. I was good at it. And I did dream of you,” he added. “Whether or not you believe it, it's true.”

Once they'd arrived, Paul would sit on the lawn of Lilac House bundled up in a sweater, a wool blanket covering him. He could identify almost any bird from its song. He was a fan of the underdog, birds other people thought of as pests: ravens, magpies, kestrels. On the other hand, he could be sentimental; he adored mourning doves and said they had the sweetest voices of all. At Lilac House, he spread out seed and bread crumbs and sat there on the lawn, still as could be, as birds gathered around him.

“He has perfect pitch,” Frieda told Allie one evening as they were fixing dinner together in the kitchen.

“I didn't know that,” Allie said.

Although the house wasn't fancy, it was quite lovely, with the details of another era when workmen were artists. There were intricate moldings and fireplace mantels framed by carved owls; there was an old earthenware sink in the kitchen and a stove with six burners. On the pine table sat a huge pot of cut flowers from the kitchen garden. Everything smelled sweet.

“He should have been a musician really,” Paul's mother said.

She had been scraping vegetables into the sink. Then suddenly she stopped; she seemed withdrawn into silence. Frieda bent over, no longer speaking, felled by despair. She was sobbing without any noise or any tears as the tap water ran.

Allie went to Paul's mother and embraced her. She felt no one could understand this except the two of them. Only they knew how it felt to be watching Paul on the lawn, slipping away.

“This cannot happen to him,” Frieda had said.

There were bits of onion and carrot in the sink. When Allie half shut her eyes and gazed across the room, past the bunch of cut lilacs, everything looked purple.

“I'm so, so sorry,” Allie said.

“How can I live without him in the world?” Frieda had said. “He's not like other people, you know. He hides his true self because he's so easily hurt. And now this is the end. There is no way back.”

They stood there crying, then they pulled themselves together and went back to fixing dinner. They were similar in that way; women who made the best of things, even their own mistakes. That night, they cooked some of Paul's favorite dishes. Beef stew, which he couldn't even take a bite of. Too heavy, but his favorite all the same. He loved the scent and called from the parlor, “Thank God I'm not a vegetarian, ladies.” But sometimes the essence of a thing was enough; he could never have digested the stew. Frieda had also cooked creamed peas. That would be better. He might manage a few bites. Saffron rice. He loved the color and was a huge fan of Indian cuisine. A strawberry mousse with cream. Just the sight of the dessert would suffice. Paul's father helped him back inside the house; he was too weak to sit at the table in the dining room, so he went to the couch in the parlor and stretched out there, exhausted from the trip across the room.

“Mother, I can't believe you fixed all this!” Allie heard him say when Frieda brought him his dinner on a tray. She adored him for that, for the way he appreciated his parents and older people in general, for kindnesses she'd never even known about, for the way he lit up when he talked about football and his grandfather and this house where he'd grown up. She loved him at last, when it was too late. He hadn't even the energy to get off the sofa. “You don't have to be this good to me,” he said to his mother. “I don't deserve it.”