bird’s body and were arched at the top like a harp.
“The reality is that I probably view angels in much the same way that you do,” she said. “The fact you’ve come here suggests you don’t believe I’m a complete phony.” We were sitting on an elegant wrought-iron daybed with black bolsters. It was adjacent to the wall with the windows, near a row of hulking stainless-steel kitchen appliances: The refrigerator doors alone looked wide enough to be the entrance to a walk-in closet. There was another corner of the loft with a regular couch, a mirrored coffee table, and a pair of reupholstered easy chairs without arms that looked as if they were from the 1950s. She slept on a bed in an alcove ledge high above the corner in which-based on the desk and computer-she wrote. Along the wall opposite all those windows, broken only by the entryway, was a long line of modern wardrobe doors: the critical renovation she had made, she would tell me later, because the loft was wholly bereft of closets. I counted five wardrobes on each side of the entryway. And scattered along the walls that had neither windows nor wardrobes were framed dust jackets of her books beside specific bestseller lists, as well as a half dozen prints of angels: grown-up angels, I was happy to see, not pudgy child ones with naked ham hocks for thighs. There was a small painting of an angel in a copse of cedar trees that looked a bit like a Botticelli, but she had assured me that it was the work of a minor painter from Siena and it was barely two hundred years old.
“I don’t believe you’re a phony at all,” I said.
“A bit loopy, maybe,” she suggested. “But not phony.”
“You’re putting words in my mouth,” I insisted. “Just last Sunday a fellow in my church who is five years younger than I am and dying of cancer gave the children’s message, and he talked all about the angels among us. He told the kids angels don’t always have wings.”
“He’s right.”
“He said they were the women who drive him to and from his chemotherapy. Who make him his carrot juice.”
She nodded. “I have readers, of course, who see angels in a pretty literal sense. When I was in Vermont the other day, I had one reader tell me that a particularly amazing angel had caught her husband’s small plane in midair when the engine flamed out and stopped it from crashing.”
“How?”
“You know, with his hands.”
“Just brought it safely to earth?”
“Because the angel had wings,” she said, as if this explained everything. I found myself imagining, no doubt as this reader had, an angel in a white robe flying atop a Cessna, holding the fuselage in his hands while flapping his wings to keep both him and the plane aloft. “As you might imagine, my books do better with some sorts of readers than with others.”
She was wearing black jeans and a white linen top, which was untucked. Her feet were bare, and she had curled them beneath her on the couch. Her toenails were plum.
“What would you be doing if I hadn’t appeared?” I asked.
“Going through the piles of mail my assistant prioritized in my absence. Reading e-mail. Grocery shopping. It was going to be a pretty glamorous Saturday.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Oh, let’s see. Today’s the first day of August. A little less than two years. I call this the Loft That
“And you’ve always lived here alone?”
“I have.”
“May I ask you something?”
“You seem to be asking me a great many somethings. Go ahead.”
“Do you pray?” I hadn’t meant it to be an especially challenging or antagonistic inquiry-though I did hear in my head the homonym,
“So it seems,” I answered, and I told her how hard I had tried that past week to connect with a living God-and how I had even faked it late Tuesday afternoon before the altar with Joanie Gaylord. I had, in truth, spent a good part of Wednesday afternoon at the church. I was either alone in my office in the wing by the Sunday-school classrooms or in the sanctuary itself trying to pray. I let Betsy or the answering machine handle the usual sorts of calls that came in-a request to give the invocation at a special Masonic gathering at the lodge in Bennington, a change in the date of an upcoming Church Council meeting, the increasingly urgent need as September approached to find a Sunday-school teacher for the third-and fourth-graders-as well as the barrage that was linked directly to the Haywards’ deaths and upcoming funeral: The mortician. A deacon. The high-school principal. Ginny.
In theory I knew a very great deal about prayer, so praying shouldn’t have been all that difficult. I had studied it at seminary, I had read all the right books. I’d led prayer groups in my little church, I’d conducted seminars for pastors and lay people in our region. And though I never had expectations of a miracle when someone was actively dying, there had been a period in my life when I had believed fervently in the healing powers of prayer. For over two decades, I had prayed every single day of my life.
Yet when I’d fall on my knees in the days immediately after Alice and George Hayward had died, praying in different measures for forgiveness and healing and understanding, I’d come to realize that I didn’t know a bloody thing about prayer-at least not anything useful. When I needed to find the Lord most desperately, I hadn’t a clue where to begin.
“Can you tell me why?” Heather was asking. “A minister must have a reason to stop praying.”
“I was no longer confident that anyone was listening.”
“In that case you sure put on one hell of a good show on Thursday morning.”
“At the funeral service?”
“Yup.”
“Thank you.”
She shook her head-bemused, incredulous, I couldn’t say for sure-and a lock of her hair fell over one of her eyes. It was, perhaps, the most arousing thing I had seen since the last time I’d been alone with Alice Hayward and I’d allowed myself to savor the sight of the small of her back when she rose from the bed to get dressed. The sense that no one was listening-no one was watching, no one cared-had begun to feel unexpectedly liberating since I had climbed into my car and left Vermont. Originally I had felt only loneliness and despair at the realization that there might be nobody out there. No more.
“Did you always know that your faith was so weak?” she asked.
“No. I actually thought it was rather strong for most of the last two decades. Trust me, it withstood plenty of sickness. Plenty of death. I have prayed with parents who have lost children, I have knelt before the very old in the moments before they would die. I’ve done funerals for teenagers and young mothers. I know the inside of the hospice as well as anyone who works there.”
“But your faith couldn’t withstand the deaths of the Haywards.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Apparently not.”
“What made their deaths so different?”
“Guilt. Anger.”
“I understand the guilt. What is the anger?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No.”
“It’s George. It’s the fact that he killed her. It seems that faith-at least my faith-is perfectly comfortable with benign disgust but absolutely no match for rage.”
“Come with me,” she said, and she stood and brought her glass of iced tea to the kitchen island with the black marble countertop. “We’re going out.”
“Okay.”
“You need to do something completely different. You need a change of pace.”
