The only horizontal painting was worked in a deliberate style more primitive and traditional, like the folk art at the Café de Santeros. In imitation of a Madonna and child, a grandmother and granddaughter faced the viewer head-on. The child held a glass chalice filled with milk, and nearly invisible, etched on the white surface, were a skull and crossbones. Despite the simplicity of style, Diane recognized the girl at once by the glasses and toothy smile, the ragged crown of hair and beatific look in her eyes that gave her away as Norah, but Diane could not see her sister in the portrait of the older woman. Perhaps, she thought to herself, this is how Erica imagines her mother after years apart, but this woman was no Margaret. Too old, and crazed in the eyes. Escaping the frame, in the left-hand corner, a bare foot and ankle, the tip of one large white wing.
Protruding from the wall at the center of the group was a small shadow box covered in tin, and when Diane stepped in front of a sensor, a small light came on behind the surface and poured through a constellation of pinholes punched through the metal. Initially, the beam obscured the hammered face of a man and, above the hair like a sign, a pen with a trigger. Next to the shattered face was a cartoon drawing of an Indian maid, like the girl on the Land O'Lakes box, offering instead of the usual carton a new baby molded from butter. Beside her, a man with radio antennae sticking straight out of his scalp, his wasted eyes staring at a stack of pancakes, and above, obscured by a melting pat of butter and a lake of maple syrup, the face of Jesus burned onto the surface. The last retablo featured a uniformed waitress with a magnificent beehive hairdo spun three times the size of her head, and nesting in the tresses, seven blackbirds, a pistol, and a bus ticket stamped H-O-M-E. In the corner stood a wooden statue thin as a candle and three feet high. Diane took it for an ascetic santo, but on inspection, she saw that the cross on his chest was actually a bandolier packed with ammunition and the staff in his hand was a semiautomatic machine gun. “Who are these saints of yours?”
“They are the people I met ten years ago when I ran away, the people who tried to protect me or warn me that I was on the wrong path.”
Diane put her hand on the statue and felt at once a deep sense of fatigue and despair. “And this one?”
“El diablo.”
“You should come home and see your mother. She's not the way at all that you've pictured her.” Diane crossed to the picture of the woman and the child. “Although I'd recognize the girl anywhere. This looks just like Norah.”
“Who?”
Surprised by the answer, Diane faced her and pointed to the scene. “This picture of your mother and your daughter.”
Erica put her fingers to her lips. “That's not who you think it is. That little girl is one of the people along the way—”
“It looks just like your daughter.”
Her eyes searched Diane's face for some intent of cruelty, but she saw only that her aunt was sincerely puzzled. “There never was a baby. I was pregnant, yes, but I didn't have the baby.”
“But what about Norah?” Diane insisted. “She said she was your daughter.”
“I don't know anyone named Norah. Wiley ditched me in the middle of nowhere.” Trembling, she sat on a stool and wrapped her arms across her waist. “When you first told me about the child, all I could think about was the one I was expecting, but not a real child.”
“But I saw her, I talked to her. The girl in the picture.”
“That girl's name is Una Gavin. A nine-year-old I met on the road. Her mother ran out on her. I had no baby.”
“But she's with your mother and says she is your daughter. Why would Margaret lie about such a thing? The girl calls her Gramma and knows where you live, what you did. She told me how to find you. Your daughter knows all about the Angels of Destruction—”
“I tell you,” she said in a forceful tone of voice, “there is no Norah.”
12
Hair still wet from the bath, Sean Fallon stood at the stormdoor, watching the sun set on another weekend. Barefoot and ready for bed, he savored the fresh air on his skin and was transfixed by contrails pluming across the empty sky, reflecting the reds and oranges of the disappearing star. The pants crept up his ankles, and the shirt was too small and tight, but he would not part with the cowboy pajamas that his father had given him on his seventh birthday. Outside on the street, an older boy flashed by on a bicycle, trying to beat the darkness home. In the kitchen, his mother checked the bubbling casserole and swore softly when her forearm grazed the oven rack. Sean dreaded Sunday evenings, for this last hour marked the end of freedom from school. Macaroni and cheese, apple pie, a half hour to read or watch TV, and so to bed. He would lie there alone in the dark while she puttered or listened to the radio, and then after she performed her nightly rituals, the house would go quiet before the creaks and moans and ticks and knocks that threatened to never end.
Venus appeared on the horizon, just as Sean had nearly run out of hope waiting for the chance to make a wish, though he did so with some reluctance, knowing that so far every talisman had failed to gather the desired result. Testing his faith in such notions risked inevitable disappointment and raised questions of fate and circumstance that he would rather not trust. They said grace together over two plates with frugal servings. His mother smiled at him, and he wanted to believe. In her tired eyes, some hope that he would fall asleep early this night.
Over dessert, Sean asked, “Mom, you know the bridge in town? How high is it to the water?”
The question caught her with a swallow of milk. “Forty, fifty feet I'd guess.”
“And how deep is the river?”