me. This young woman, wise beyond her years, may not have met her own angel yet (though it did indeed seem possible to me that this Corona Noel had celestial connections), but I found myself contemplating the notion that she herself was being inspired by an angel. By my angel. Alone at my desk, I found myself sniffling back real tears because I hadn’t seen my parents’ bodies after they had died, and I grew alarmed at what I had missed. What, I wondered, had happened to them? How had they been handled and treated by the pathologist?
Moreover, I concluded that in my self-absorption-my interest in Stephen and my misguided concern for the man-I had lost sight of someone very, very important: Katie. My sister had been right that afternoon when we’d gone skinny-dipping at the funnel. I should have been focusing more on the girl. And so I looked at my calendar and I pinpointed a row of blank days. I decided I would return to Vermont and visit the newly orphaned daughter of George and Alice Hayward.
I AM NOT sure how Stephen had expected me to respond to his confession that he’d been sleeping with Alice Hayward. Had he anticipated that my heart would be so resilient that I wouldn’t be hurt? I know he didn’t believe that I would have an angel to care for my wounds, because he had no faith in angels at all. He had no faith in anything. But did he presume that I would-and here is a word that is too often misused by therapists and self-help gurus who believe we can be healed with mortal counseling alone-
But he didn’t.
The fact was, I realized, he was never going to tell me. He only confessed when he did because he had to: because that investigator with the state police had learned that he had been sleeping with Alice Hayward and he was a suspect in the murder of one or both of the Haywards-and now, it seemed, I might be, too.
It all left me a little sick and despairing in ways that I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. I honestly wasn’t sure what I found more troubling: the reality that Stephen Drew was comfortable keeping such a secret to himself or the possibility that he was capable of murder.
And as the days passed, it seemed more and more conceivable to me that he had indeed killed George Hayward. Alice? No, not really. I saw the horror unfolding in the same conventional manner as, in the end, would that state’s attorney. Stephen had gone to the house that Sunday night in July and found Alice already dead and George passed out drunk on the couch. And so he had taken the fellow’s handgun and murdered him.
The world is filled with human toxins-not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actual people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous-and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inch to their God that often they never (and I use this expression absolutely literally) see the light. As scarred and as wounded as my sister had been by the thorns that mark our paths through this world, Stephen Drew was even more seriously damaged: Unlike Amanda, he had become a thorn himself.
KATIE HAYWARD’S HIGH school was one of those sprawling two-story complexes that were built in the 1970s for durability, not aesthetics. It was designed to endure teenagers, not educate them, and so it was a labyrinth of cinder-block walls and windows reinforced with wire mesh. It smelled of antiseptic and-because the gymnasium and locker rooms were across a thin lobby from the front doors-adolescent sweat. Everything was painted a drab green, ostensibly to celebrate the Green Mountains, but I was left with no sense of foliage when I stood for a moment outside the sliding glass partition bearing the sign VISITORS SIGN IN HERE. Eventually an elderly secretary with a round face and a kind smile listened to my story and found Katie’s guidance counselor, Joanne Degraff, and then Joanne escorted me to the cafeteria, where Katie was having lunch with her friends. I wasn’t quite sure where Katie and I would speak and whether we would get to be alone, but Joanne had moonstone-blue eyes that were rich with understanding and compassion, and she suggested that Katie and I take a walk around the school. Katie seemed content with this plan. She had finished her sandwich, and it was a beautiful September afternoon. The leaves were just starting to change color in the hills to the east of the school’s athletic fields, and there were thin ribbons of red and orange beginning to form along the peak of the distant ridge.
“My friends think you’re another psychiatrist or a social worker,” she said to me as we started to stroll beside the oval where the track team practiced and out toward the football field with its two long walls of wooden bleachers with peeling evergreen paint. Students on the far side of those stands were playing soccer in gym class. Katie was wearing a black T-shirt with a Chihuahua sporting a studded collar on the front and blue jeans that clung to her legs. She had used mascara and eyeliner with great enthusiasm, and I thought I might have seen the edge of a tattoo where the back of her shirt collar met her left shoulder blade. But she also looked a little lost to me, and that gave me some comfort: She was needful and frightened, and I knew that eventually her angel was going to be there for her.
“You’ve seen a lot of social workers?” I asked.
“Yup. And two different counselors, though I seem to be spending the most time with a social worker named Josie Morrison. But it’s, like, totally okay. I get it. I know why everyone is so worried. And I know you get it.”
“Thank you.”
“Ginny loaned me her copies of your books.”
“You read them?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, thank you. I am very flattered,” I told her, and I was.
“Ginny thought they would help me.”
“Did they?”
“Little bit. Ginny said they helped her.”
“Your mother’s friend is struggling?”
“Yeah. She is. I don’t see her a ton. But I guess she’s still kind of freaked. I hear Tina’s mom and dad talking.”
“It’s hard to lose a friend-especially in such a violent fashion. It’s not as bad as losing a parent. But it is scarring. Life-altering.”
She seemed to think about this. Then: “Some of those stories about angels in your books were really out there.”
“Angel stories usually are.”
“But you don’t, like, actually believe them, do you?”
“It depends on the story. Some of them I believe. But yes, others have a significance that is more allegorical. Like a parable. That’s why I include them. But I can tell you this: There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that angels are real. As real as you and me and your friend Tina. As real as Lula,” I said, referring to the springer spaniel that she and her parents had gotten at the local humane society when she was younger.
It was clear that my declaration of faith had made her a little uncomfortable, and she wasn’t sure how to respond. “So how long are you here for?” she asked, what I presumed she viewed as an innocuous question-her way of changing the subject.
“In Haverill? Just this afternoon. Maybe a little longer in Vermont. I don’t know. I really don’t have a schedule.”
“Are you here to see Stephen?”
“No.”
“But you will, right?”
“No, I probably won’t.”
“Huh. I kinda thought you two were, you know, like an item.”
“For a time we were friends,” I said, “but he seems to have built a wall against angels.” I looked over at her, but she scrupulously avoided eye contact. The fact that we were walking and talking, I realized, made this
