“I only know the story Norah invented for school, how she lived with you out here in New Mexico and was only at her Gramma's because you and your husband were fighting.”
She stared at the bandoliered santo in the corner. “Wiley.”
“Norah had me expecting coyotes and roadrunners overrunning the place.”
Beginning with the long-ago night that she and the boy snuck out of the house, she told him about the Angels of Destruction and their plans to save the world by destroying it and starting all over. She told him of their encounters with the strangers on the road, ending with her abandonment and the baby who never arrived. “They were warning me,” she said, sweeping her hand to the figures on the wall. “Warning me away from perdition and back to grace. They were trying to get me home while still possible, but I didn't listen.”
She sat at a stool and picked up a brush. “All kinds of angels, something missing in our souls, we re-create when we are awake and in need. Like your Norah.”
Hanging on the wall behind her shoulders was a series of abstractions, life-size canvases each dominated by a single color in different hues and shadings. Each piece featured a dark figure reminiscent of the human form—a splayed hand, the pear of a derriere, flattened circles with bull's-eye nipples, a face, a nose, lips. The bodies in the paintings struggled to escape from the blues and reds and greens, or perhaps to meld into the canvas, or transcend this world for another. Desire, coming into being.
“And these?” he asked.
“I call them the Nagasaki angels, a long story.”
Sean walked over to the paintings and considered them one by one. “Norah told me about your father, what he did for those poor people after the atom bomb.”
The figures in the paintings strained to the surface, between imagination and reality, waiting to be borne into another world. He could see their pain at letting go of this life, caught between here and there, nowhere.
Mary chewed on the end of the brush. “If Norah knew, then my mother must have told her. My mother must have known all along and never said a word to my father.”
“Maybe that was her way of letting it go, her way of forgiveness.”
“Maybe my father was their angel, caught up in the chaos between mercy and pain.”
One of the dogs padded into the room and settled in front of her. Mary reached down and scratched the coarse hair between his eyes. “They were Maya's dogs. The last pups in a long line of wolfhounds my friend Maya used to keep. She passed away too, and told me to watch over them, but they really kind of watch over me. And the kids.”
“Maya.” He smiled. “From the Upanishads. The veil thrown over the world.”
Mary laughed, and then drew her hand to her mouth. “I'm sorry, Sean. Who knows? Maya could have been right. Norah could have been right. Who's to say what's real and what's an illusion? Why do we believe in things we cannot see?” From the corner her little girl laughed and called to her mother to come look at what she had made.
BEFORE DAWN, SEAN woke and dressed and tiptoed past the rooms where Mary and her husband, Dan, slept and past the two children nestled in their beds. He could not bear to wake them. At the kitchen table, he scribbled a note thanking them for the hospitality. For her boy Cole, he left the slouch hat, “for the dusty trail.” From his bag, he took a small parcel swaddled in layers of tissue paper. He unwrapped the gift and left it atop his postscript: “This is all Norah left behind. For your little girl.” The wolfhounds lifted their shaggy heads and thumped their tails against the floor, goodbye. As the sky faded to plum, he found his way back to the car, pointed north, and drove away.