“You have every right to be angry with me. I should have told you about Alice.”
“Were you two in love?”
He went quiet, and I couldn’t decide whether it was because they had been and for some reason he didn’t want to admit this or whether he honestly couldn’t decide. Finally: “I’m not completely sure what that means.”
“It’s not a hard question. I didn’t ask you to list for me the contents of the periodic table. Were you two in love?”
“I think she might have loved me. For a time.”
“And you?”
“I enjoyed her company.”
“And you enjoyed sleeping with her.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Her husband wanted to come home. He insisted he’d changed; he said things would be different. It seemed to me that if I told her not to take him back, I would have an obligation to marry her myself.”
“Or tell her that you didn’t love her enough to marry her.”
“In all fairness, I didn’t want to be responsible for breaking up a marriage that might have a second life.”
“Even a marriage that bad?”
“So it would seem.”
“But you didn’t care enough for Alice to fight for her. To make a serious commitment. You left her to fend for herself with George.”
“Apparently.”
My eyes were growing moist, and I tried to regain perspective. To imagine this conversation both from God’s vantage point and from an angel’s. I heard in my head the word
“Well, then: Did you kill him? Either of them?”
“Or both?”
“Yes. Or both.”
I was just beginning to wonder why Stephen wasn’t answering my question and whether he would when he said, his teeth seemingly clenched in exasperation, “I can’t believe you would even ask. Has it really come to that?”
I considered pressing him, but I knew by the glacial disgust in his tone that I didn’t dare. Besides: I had my answer.
“There’s another thing,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Aaron said you might want to get some coaching from a lawyer.”
“Me?”
“That’s right-but only so you’ll be prepared when the Vermont State Police come to interview you.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” I agreed. But still I didn’t turn around, because I didn’t want him to see that I was no longer able to bridle my tears. I didn’t turn around when I told him that I thought he should go.
“Thank you,” he said, misunderstanding me completely, perhaps because he couldn’t see my face. “I’ll return as soon as I can.”
“No,” I told him. “Please don’t. I’d rather you didn’t ever come back.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
People often share with me stories of the angels who have dropped into their lives and how they have been saved by them. When the tale comes via e-mail or the postal service and the writer seems to need a response, either my assistant or I will answer it. Usually it is my assistant who pens the first draft, and the year that the Haywards would die my assistant was a young Columbia grad student named Rick who once was less than a second away from qualifying for the Olympics in the four-hundred-meter freestyle and still looked an awful lot like a lifeguard. His fiancee, two years his senior, was already an assistant editor in publishing (though not at my house), and I expected that eventually Rick would follow her into the profession.
About an hour after I had broken up with Stephen-and this was, in my mind, an irrevocable break-Rick came by with some letters and e-mails from readers that were hauntingly beautiful and precisely what I needed at that moment. There were encounters that were stirring, and there were encounters that were poignant. A young soldier in Afghanistan e-mailed me that he had been driving a jeep with three comrades in a mountainous stretch of Uruzgan when a female angel stood in the path of the vehicle. He veered around the spirit and wound up careening into the grass off to the side. No one was hurt, and when the soldiers went to the spot on the road where the driver insisted he had seen the angel, they discovered an IED that would have detonated like a mine had they driven over it. Another reader shared with me that at the precise moment when her much-beloved mother expired in a hospice, an angel was sitting calmly on the mattress beside the older woman and lifted the hands of the two generations of women, one already cold, and clasped them together for a brief moment. Then the room filled with light, causing two of the aides at the hospice to race there because they feared that the building was on fire, and thus there were three witnesses to the sight of the angel gently lifting the soul from the dead woman’s body and carrying it like a honey moon bride off to heaven.
That evening I felt that I needed an angel rather badly. My despair wasn’t simply that Stephen had been sleeping with someone and hadn’t told me; that alone wouldn’t have sent me into such a funk. People have secrets. Certainly I do. It was that withholding this particular piece of information about Alice Hayward, given how paramount the woman’s life and desperately sad end had been in our brief time together, was a breach of faith that made tawdry our supposed intimacy. I was hurt: There is no getting around that detail. Moreover, it had caused me to question so much else of what he’d told me. If he could withhold this facet of his involvement with the Haywards, what else wasn’t he telling me? The reality is that I suspected he really had murdered at least one of the Haywards, and so I needed to separate myself from him while I prayed for guidance and tried to understand what I was feeling.
As he did every day that he came to my loft, Rick had prioritized the letters and e-mails that were most important. Usually these were from my editor or my literary or speaking agents, or they were from journalists. But the chaos that surrounds the launch of a book had settled down, and so when I was alone that evening, there were mostly e-mails and letters from readers. Among them were those stories from the soldier in Afghanistan and the woman who had witnessed an angel cradle her mother’s soul. But the one that caused me to think about what was most important in my life-what I really needed to do next-was from a fifteen-year-old girl in Ohio whose father had died a year earlier after a brief battle with brain cancer. The teenager shared with me that she was an only child and she and her father had been very close. For months after her father’s death, both she and her mother had been nearly catatonic. Her mother, an accountant in Columbus, had returned to work in the small firm where she was employed, and the teen had resumed her schooling after three weeks away. But neither was functioning especially well, and separately they both had begun seeing therapists who specialized in grief counseling.
“I know from your book that angels often have real halos and wings,” the young woman wrote to me in her e- mail, “but my mother and I both believe that Dr. Noel is an angel, too.” I Googled Dr. Noel and found that she was a psychiatrist whose first name was Corona. Corona Noel. Is there a more perfect name for an angel? The teenager said that she and her mother were getting better now, and she wanted to know if I thought angels sometimes took on the guise of a mortal and whether she might have been correct that her therapist was a celestial being. She also wanted to know more about how I had handled the deaths of my own parents and what it had been like to see their bodies after they had died. Apparently it was soothing to her to have seen her father’s face at peace after the physical and emotional agony he had endured in the last months of his life.
The e-mail, I realized, was both a responsibility-as is much of the correspondence I receive-and a message for
