Turning Angel

right.

I close my eyes, slip my hands from beneath Mia’s, and grip her upper arms. ”Listen to me, Mia. Do you have any idea of the power you possess? You sitting there saying that-the way you said it-makes me believe in witchcraft. It’s like a spell. And I know you’re telling the truth. You have outgrown this town and its people. You are ready to taste a deeper level of life. You’re ready to explore yourself, and you probably do need a man for some parts of that journey.“

”But you’re not that man?“ she says.

I nod slowly. ”We both have to tell the truth here, okay? That’s the only way to be fair to each other. Do I want you in this moment? Yes, I do. Do I have any idea of what it would be like to experience with you what we saw in that picture? I think I do. Do I have any inkling of the connection you and I could have, despite our age difference? Of course I do. Because we already have it. I’ve been forcing myself to ignore it for weeks. It’s a cliche, I know, but I feel as though I’ve known you all my life. But the thing is…I haven’t. I couldn’t have. Because you’re half my age. You are literally young enough to be my daughter.“

”But I’m not your daughter,“ she says, laying her hands over mine again.

I breathe slowly, trying to stay focused. ”In some ways, I feel you are.“

Mia shakes her head, her eyes anxious now. ”Don’t say that. Because it’s not true. I’ve seen things in your eyes that a father doesn’t feel for a daughter.“

”Of course you have. I’m a man, and I respond to all that you are. But I also feel things that a father feels for a daughter. Mainly, I feel very protective of you. And my first duty is to protect you from me.“

She stares at me in silence, trying to process what I’ve said. In this strange lacuna of time, I feel the shattering intensity of the moment that Drew stepped over the line with Kate. He looked into a face this beautiful; he gazed into eyes like twin pools in some mythic grove; he touched skin this flawless; he listened to the siren song of eternal youth falling from bloodred lips, and then he leaned forward-not back. And from that moment forward he was lost.

Mia reads my eyes with the precision of a clairvoyant. Sadness touches her lips for a moment; then she blinks three times and looks back at the computer screen.

”Forget I said anything,“ she says, clicking the mouse to open a WordPerfect document. ”I was being retarded.“

”No, you weren’t. You were just…“ I stop talking. I’ve lost her. The walls have gone up, and nothing is going to bring them down any time soon.

”Look at this,“ she says. ”It looks like e-mail from that guy you talked about.“

”Who?“

”The drug dealer. Cyrus?“

The name shocks me back to the present. Mia’s right. The letter is three paragraphs long, and incredibly enough, it’s signed: Peace+, Cyrus. I read it aloud, searching for a sense of Cyrus White in the way his words feel in my mouth.

Dear Kate, I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I don’t want to freak you out, but I don’t think you’re the kind of girl who freaks out too easy. I’ve been looking at that picture, the one Jaderious took. You look so fine in that, girl. You look like a movie star in a magazine, when they catch them coming out of a theater or something. I mean it. I saw a girl on the cover of ”US“ magazine that made me think of you. I looked inside to find out who she was. Her name is Katie Holmes. Y’all even have the same name, so I rented two of her flicks. You’re kind of like her, only with blond hair and blue eyes, and more together. Not silly or flighty or anything.

I hope what I gave you did you right. I can’t see you doing that myself, but I don’t really know you yet. Everybody carries some pain around, and I’m sure you’ve been through your share. You told me your old man was never around, and I can relate to that. I didn’t even know who my father was. The guy I thought it was, turned out he was just some guy, you know? My mama’s boyfriend. But that was a long time ago.

I just want you to know I’m thinking about you. That I see you’re different from everybody else. I know you already know that, but I want you to know I know it too. I know it cause I’m the same way. I live in a different world, of course. But I always knew I was different. That’s how I got where I am now. When the plants closed down around here, a lot of guys just gave up. Some took shit jobs, but others just sit at home with their head in a bottle, or smoke weed, whatever. I guess that’s all right for them. But not me. I got screwed out of my living, so I give it right back to the bastards who did it. I’m not letting them take me down. I’m getting enough money to do anything I might ever want to do. I got big plans, I want you to know that. I know you got plans too. If you ever want to talk, like you said, just mail me back, or call me, whatever. I’m open to it, you know? That’s all I want to say. You be cool. Peace+, Cyrus.

”Let’s look for the picture he’s talking about,“ Mia says.

”Look for ‘CW’ in the file name,“ I think aloud. ”Or ‘CK.’ “

”Snap!“ says Mia. ”There it is.“

She clicks on another.jpeg file, and a new photo fills the screen. A large, sullen-faced black man stands before a gray wall with his arm around Kate, almost crushing her against him. Kate has a smile of sorts on her face, but it’s the smile of someone making the best of a bad situation. She looks like a girl being molested by a customs official while trying to get out of a hostile country; she has to play along to get out of the situation, but she’s not okay with it. But then again, maybe that’s just prejudice coloring my view of the photograph.

”Does she look happy to you?“ I ask.

Mia shakes her head. ”That’s one of Kate’s fake smiles. Everybody has one, of course. Kate has about five, and that’s one of them. She looks scared to me.“

”I agree.“

I lean closer to the screen and try to read Cyrus’s eyes, but the flat-panel model doesn’t have the fine resolution of a CRT. Still, his whole appearance and posture radiate a sense of threat. Sonny Cross told me that Cyrus was thirty-four, but the drug dealer looks about twenty-eight in this photo. He’s built like an NFL cornerback: his bullet head is shaved clean, his neck is corded with muscle, and his biceps are thicker than Kate’s thighs. His skin is the color of cafe au lait-I’m guessing a quarter of his blood could be Caucasian. He’s wearing a black wife- beater tank top and tight white painter’s pants. A solitary gold chain hangs around his neck, but the links are thick enough to pull a truck out of a mudhole. I wonder if the chain is meant to symbolize the chains of slavery.

”Look for more letters,“ I murmur.

”Definitely,“ says Mia.

She begins opening WordPerfect files. Most of them seem like diary pages that didn’t make Kate’s handwritten journal. Ironically, these entries are of the more casual sort:

Ate crawfish pasta at Pearl Street Pasta…

Got an acceptance letter from Colgate-too late, people…

Grandma sent me a check for $10. What does she think I can buy with that?…

Steve almost cracked his skull today on his 4-wheeler. He made a huge deal out of it, but I couldn’t pretend to be too worried. It’s not like there was much risk of brain damage…

For some reason, Kate chronicled the most sensitive events of her life by hand, where they could easily be discovered, while her quotidian record was saved to a password-protected disk. Why? The password was to protect the pictures, I realize. The person most likely to discover Kate’s journal was her mother, and Kate wasn’t worried about that. She simply wanted to spare her mother from the explicit visual evidence of her sexual life.

”That looks like the only letter from Cyrus,“ Mia says.

”I’m going to have to find a way to get a look at Kate’s actual computer.“

”Would Mrs. Townsend let you do that? She gave you the journal.“

”I think she would. But the police probably have it by now. I’ll get Quentin to request access to it.“

”Wait! Here’s another letter!“

As I read the next e-mail from Cyrus, my face grows hot. The chatty tone of the first letter is gone, replaced by seething anger. This time Mia reads aloud:

What the fuck, huh? You said you were going to write me back, talk to me, but you just leave me sitting here like I don’t exist. And that’s the truth, isn’t it? In your world, I don’t exist. I only pop into your head when the dope gets low. Yeah, I know how it is. I know more junkies than I can count, and they’re all the same. You just look