BEFORE THE CHILDREN were due home, the phone rang. Had not Diane been trying to nap in the upstairs bedroom, Margaret would have let it go. But she picked up the receiver, and at the sound of Principal Taylor's voice, Margaret drifted into true fear. He spoke of episodes and disruptions, counselors and psychologists. During their conversation, she thought immediately of the other two times panic had gripped her so. The first was when they told her about the explosion and she finally understood that Erica was gone. The most recent had been about Paul, not the day her husband finally died, that was more relief buoyed by a sloughing sorrow, but the moment of his diagnosis; the two of them faced the doctor confirming what Paul had long suspected. She shuddered at the finality of the news, the shockingly few days left in the game, and the paucity of remedies. There would be none. He had been through it with her the first time such dread arrived. But now there was no one to help her. Diane would be heading back to Washington, and Margaret would have to face the coming danger all alone. She prayed again for some help.
“There is something wrong with your granddaughter,” the principal said. “She stood in front of the class and announced she was an angel of the Lord, and threatened that there would be fire and plagues and forty thousand more angels. She frightened the other children, not to mention poor Mrs. Patterson. I'm not even sure this girl is legally registered in my school, Mrs. Quinn, and on top of that, all this trouble today. You need to do something about Norah.”
The child's claims did not bother her. Children are capable of believing anything and telling the most outrageous lies with unerring confidence. No, her fear was where such a story would lead. Norah had to escape scrutiny and stay out of trouble. If the right people pulled the right thread, their ruse might unravel, and in the end, the girl would be taken away. She hung up the phone and stared out at the blank landscape through a rime of frost etched on the glass.
A figure materialized out of the whiteness, and in the afternoon light, she first mistook him for a ghost, her husband coming back to her, but as the man approached and came into greater clarity, his features shifted beneath his brimmed hat, and he seemed in his gestures more like her father or what she imagined her father would have looked like had he aged into late life. He moved as if on ice, gliding to her, filling the win-dowpane with his form, the camel hair coat, the jaunty scarf, his face kind and creased, his hair yellow against the snow, blond as the boy she had known and loved long ago, before Paul, and his countenance changed again as fleeting as a thought and he became all that she both desired and dreaded, moving toward her. From afar, she heard his name on her lips voiced across space, penetrating the glass. “Just don't hurt me,” she whispered a prayer, and in reply his voice sounded Norah in her imagination, so she closed her eyes until he was gone. Banished as suddenly as he had been summoned. Margaret collapsed in a chair by the window, staring at the failing light of four o'clock, numbed to the nothing of the world beyond the thin glass panes. She was sitting there still when the door flew open and in slipped a cold breeze, followed shortly by the child. Wordless, Norah came to her in a moment of need and threw her arms around Margaret's shoulders and laid her head upon her breast.
BOOK II
October 1975
1
Down the highway they flew, bound for destruction. Fearing they would be chased, they charted a southerly route, moving in an unexpected direction, plotting along a crescent line through the Bible Belt, then shooting across the western wasteland to Vegas, and on to rendezvous with the other Angels in Berkeley. When the rising sun broke upon her face, Erica cringed and shielded her eyes. For a moment she did not know where she was, and the landscape racing by the window confused her further until she turned to find Wiley fixed on the road ahead. She remembered having dozed off an hour or so after their escape, and now in the brilliant morning, the night's events came rushing to mind—Wiley in the bedroom, the gun, stealing past her father—and her pulse thumped in her temples. Sunlight streamed through breaks in the treeline, sawn into shafts that pulsed like a strobe.
“Where are we?” The croak of her voice surprised them both. She cleared her throat and asked again.
“West Virginia somewheres.” He put on a thick bumpkin accent. “Over the hills and through the woods.”
In the branching light, Erica had to angle her wrist to shield her eyes. “Near anywhere?”
“Morning, Merry Sunshine.” Stop that, she thought. It sounded old, something her father would have said, and put her off the mood. “You missed the first strip mine,” he said. “Bastards took half the mountain like blowing the top off someone's head and scooping out the brains.”
“You are gross and disgusting. First thing in the morning, to be talking like that.”
The car whined as it pushed up and over a bare hill. “Are we near anywhere else a girl can find a little privacy?”
At the next straight stretch of road, he pulled over and stopped the engine. Along the berm, a mist filtered through the ferns and tall grasses, spilling out from between the trees, and pooled ankle-deep where Erica stepped from the car. She looked into the alien fog, then back at Wiley in the driver's seat, wishing he would get out, too, and keep her company. Behind a sheltering oak, she pulled down her pants, squatted, and waited to relax. The morning air chilled her bare bottom, and when the car door opened and slammed shut, she reflexively peed. When she stepped out from behind the trees, she saw him leaning against the hood of the Pinto, pistol in hand. “What are you doing?”
“Protecting you. From the wilderness. You never know what creatures live in them thar hills.”
“My hero.”