the hard shell of her fist. Grinding anger had sharpened her once-pretty face into a collection of knives. I didn’t think she would want me to touch her just then.
Instead, after standing awkwardly at the table for seconds that were interminable, not sure what to do, I went at last to the back door and double-checked the dead bolt to confirm that it was engaged.
“I know Rod loved me,” she said, although the anger in her voice didn’t soften. “It broke his heart, just broke him entirely, to do what he had to do. Broke his heart to cooperate with them, tricking me into surgery. He was never the same after that.”
I turned and saw that her fist was cocked. The blades of her face were polished by candlelight.
“And if his superiors had understood how close Rod and I had always been, they would have known he couldn’t go on keeping secrets from me, not when I’d suffered so much for them.”
“Eventually he told you all of it,” I guessed.
“Yes. And I forgave him, truly forgave him for what had been done to me, but he was still in despair. There was nothing I could do to nurse him out of it. So deep in despair…and so scared.” Now her anger was veined with pity and with sorrow. “So scared he had no joy in anything anymore. Finally he killed himself…and when he was dead, there was nothing left to cut out of me.”
She lowered her fist. She opened it. She stared at the cordial glass — and then carefully set it on the table.
“Angela, what was wrong with the monkey?” I asked.
She didn’t reply.
Images of candle flames danced in her eyes. Her solemn face was like a stone shrine to a dead goddess.
I repeated the question: “What was wrong with the monkey?”
When at last Angela spoke, her voice was hardly louder than a whisper: “It wasn’t a monkey.”
I knew that I had heard her correctly, yet her words made no sense. “Not a monkey? But you said—”
“It appeared to be a monkey.”
“Appeared?”
“And it was a monkey, of course.”
Lost, I said nothing.
“Was and wasn’t,” she whispered. “And that’s what was wrong with it.”
She did not seem entirely rational. I began to wonder if her fantastic story had been more fantasy than truth — and if she knew the difference.
Turning away from the votive candles, she met my eyes. She was not ugly anymore, but she wasn’t pretty again, either. Hers was a face of ashes and shadows. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called you. I was emotional about your dad dying. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“You said I need to know…to defend myself.”
She nodded. “You do. That’s right. You need to know. You’re hanging by such a thin thread. You need to know who hates you.”
I held out my hand to her, but she didn’t take it.
“Angela,” I pleaded, “I want to know what really happened to my parents.”
“They’re dead. They’re gone. I loved them, Chris, loved them as friends, but they’re gone.”
“I still need to know.”
“If you’re thinking that somebody has to pay for their deaths…then you have to realize that nobody ever will. Not in your lifetime. Not in anyone’s. No matter how much of the truth you learn, no one will be made to pay. No matter what you try to do.”
I found that I had drawn my hand back and had curled it into a fist on the table. After a silence, I said, “We’ll see.”
“I’ve quit my job at Mercy this evening.” Revealing this sad news, she appeared to shrink, until she resembled a child in adult clothing, once more the girl who had brought iced tea, medicine, and pillows to her disabled mother. “I’m not a nurse anymore.”
“What will you do?”
She didn’t answer.
“It was all you ever wanted to be,” I reminded her.
“Doesn’t seem any point to it now. Bandaging wounds in a war is vital work. Bandaging wounds in the middle of Armageddon is foolish. Besides, I’m becoming. I’m becoming. Don’t you see?”
In fact, I didn’t see.
“I’m becoming. Another me. Another Angela. Someone I don’t want to be. Something I don’t dare think about.”
I still didn’t know what to make of her apocalyptic talk. Was it a rational response to the secrets of Wyvern or the result of the personal despair arising from the loss of her husband?
She said, “If you insist on knowing about this, then once you know, there’s nothing to do but sit back, drink what pleases you most, and watch it all end.”
“I insist anyway.”
“Then I guess it’s time for show-and-tell,” Angela said with evident ambivalence. “But…oh, Chris, it’s going to break your heart.” Sadness elongated her features. “I think you need to know…but it’s going to break your heart.”
When she turned from me and crossed the kitchen, I began to follow her.
She stopped me. “I’ll have to turn some lights on to get what I need. You better wait here, and I’ll bring everything back.”
I watched her navigate the dark dining room. In the living room, she switched on a single lamp, and from there she moved out of sight.
Restlessly, I circled this room to which I had been confined, my mind spinning as I prowled. The monkey was and was not a monkey, and its wrongness lay in this simultaneous wasness and notness. This would seem to make sense only in a Lewis Carroll world, with Alice at the bottom of a magical rabbit hole.
At the back door, I tried the dead bolt again. Locked.
I drew the curtain aside and surveyed the night. I could not see Orson.
Trees were stirring. The wind had returned.
Moonlight was on the move. Apparently, new weather was coming in from the Pacific. As the wind flung tattered clouds across the face of the moon, a silvery radiance appeared to ripple across the nightscape. In fact, what traveled were the dappling shadows of the clouds, and the movement of the light was but an illusion. Nevertheless, the backyard was transformed into a winter stream, and the light purled like water moving under ice.
From elsewhere in the house came a brief wordless cry. It was as thin and forlorn as Angela herself.
13
The cry was so short-lived and so hollow that it might have been no more real than the movement of the moonlight across the backyard, merely a ghost of sound haunting a room in my mind. Like the monkey, it possessed both a quality of wasness and notness.
As the door curtain slipped through my fingers and fell silently across the glass, however, a muffled thump sounded elsewhere in the house and shuddered through the walls.
The second cry was briefer and thinner than the first — but it was unmistakably a bleat of pain and terror.
Maybe she had merely fallen off a step stool and sprained her ankle. Maybe I’d heard only wind and birds in the eaves. Maybe the moon is made of cheese and the sky is a chocolate nonpareil with sugar stars.
I called loudly to Angela.
She didn’t answer.
The house was not so large that she could have failed to hear me. Her silence was ominous.
