The Day the Angels Fell Read online

  They looked intently across the table, but I couldn’t see that side of the room through the crack in the door. Someone was there, though. Their shadow, short and wide, draped itself across the table and toward the women. When the person spoke, it was a man’s voice. At first he muttered and grunted to himself, the words all jumbled together. But I could only see the three old women, and they stared at him as if trying to decide if they should stay or go.

  Out of nowhere, the three old women interrupted him, quietly at first and then louder. They chanted words, but not English words, not old, dead words that can barely stand on their own two feet. No, the words they chanted were alive, words I couldn’t understand, words that had a fluttering, startling life of their own. Their words terrified me, but they also intrigued me. I was like a confused magnet, repelled and attracted all at once.

  Part of me wanted to turn and run back out into the storm I had escaped from, back into the hair-trigger lightning and the thunder and the rain that had drenched me, but their words pulled me forward until I was braced against the frame, fighting to stay outside the room.

  The lights in the building flickered, then went out.

  3

  THE STORM RAGED OUTSIDE. The women’s faces held a grayish tint from the stormy light dripping in through the one small window in the prep room. Sometimes, when the lightning flashed, their skin went white, almost transparent, and the man’s shadow appeared solid black on the table. I kept expecting one of the women to look at me in those flashes of lightning, those moments of clarity, but their eyes focused on the table, where their fingers had joined together in one big pile. They swayed with the words, and their six hands writhed in an uneven rhythm.

  I wondered if those women were traveling with the fair that had recently arrived in town. My dad called them “carnies,” that rough group of travelers who brought wonder to our small community every summer, leaving behind deep tire tracks in the park outside of town and puddles filled with unredeemed ride tickets. These women could have been anything—funnel cake vendors or ticket takers outside the mirror maze or fortune-tellers. They might have been the ones who try to guess your age or spin the prize wheel. They could have been anything.

  Their chanting stopped as quickly as it had started, and the world fell back into its natural order. I could hear the rain softening on the roof and the wind tapering down to random gusts through the alleyway, but the front of the storm had passed and the thunder had moved off into the distance. The woman in the middle straightened the large scarf tied around her head and pushed all those jingling bracelets and rings and necklaces back into place. She didn’t seem to realize she had been saying anything out of the ordinary. She looked up as if expecting the person in the shadows to tell them what to do next.

  “Is that it?” the man’s voice rumbled. It growled with thick phlegm and the beginnings of an earthquake.

  “Is what it?” the woman in the middle asked, leaning forward. She raised her stenciled eyebrows toward the ceiling. Some of her teeth were so sideways that they looked backward. There was nothing straight about her.

  “I paid you good money for my fortune, the future, whatever you want to call it. Chanted words, spooky humming . . . is that it? Is that all I get?”

  She looked back and forth at the women on either side of her and whispered over one shoulder as if consulting with someone. Someone who wasn’t there.

  “But you didn’t tell us who you were,” she said in a polite voice that I realized carried hints of a foreign accent. “The fortunes of your kind are dark. Men are easily read, but you?”

  She stared at him with a face completely at peace. His threatening tone of voice did not seem to affect her in the least. The room was quiet for a moment, and then she spoke again.

  “You didn’t tell us what you were.”

  The man cleared his throat.

  “But you saw something?” He sounded unsettled, even a bit distracted, by her knowledge of “what” he was.

  “Something to write with?” she asked.

  The man grunted and threw a pen onto the table. It slid toward the women. The one in the middle grabbed the pen before it stopped moving and began scribbling on the table. I cringed—Mr. Pelle would not be happy if he saw them doing that. But she kept writing. She’d cross out what she wrote and write again. And again. She spent a solid five minutes defacing that table with more ink than I thought any pen could hold, and it looked like she crossed out and scribbled over every single word she wrote.

  Finally, with the sound of fluid clothes and wind-chiming jewelry, the three women stood up.

  “This is for you,” the one in the middle said, pushing the point of the pen into the table, where it stuck for a moment before falling over. “You may read it after we leave.”

  The man grunted again.

  “The rest of the money?” the woman asked.

  At first nothing happened, and I thought they might keep arguing. But three green bills floated down onto the scribbled surface. The woman picked them up and stuffed them into the recesses of her long, flowing skirt. She was clearly impatient to leave, and when she stood up her movements seemed anxious. The other two women were a half second behind her, as if they were three marionettes all controlled by the same puppet master.

  Then something strange happened.

  She glanced at me.

  Or at least she glanced at the crack in the door. But I thought it was more than that. I thought I felt her eyes locking onto mine, and I was sure that if the man wasn’t in the room, she would have come over and told me something. Something very important. But her sudden look scared me, and I spun around, stood with my back to the wall. I held my breath and listened, hoping no one would come that way.

  The women must have left through the other door, the one that led into the front area of the antique store. Moments later I heard, far away at the front of the building, the bell ring over the entrance. They were gone.

  There was a loud sound from outside the window—the last strong rumble of thunder, or a downspout leaning under so much weight—and the man left without getting a chance to spend much time looking at the table.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled. “Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.”

  He walked quickly toward the same door the women had gone through. I didn’t get a look at his face, but I did see him from behind. He was short and wide. There was something very powerful about his neck and shoulders. He turned sideways so that he could fit through the narrow door.

  The room was empty now. I pushed the swinging door aside and approached the table. The storm seemed to have passed. Sunlight lit up the room, and for the first time I noticed the window was open. The floor had a large puddle on it that reflected the light. I could hear water still running through the gutters and downspouts, splashing into the alley.

  The woman with the pen had made a complete mess of the table. Ink was everywhere, filling deep gouges in the wood. She had written many things. Many things. But everything had been scratched out so effectively that it was all impossible to read.

  Everything, that is, except for one small sentence I almost missed in the middle of that black cloud of dead, crossed-out words.

  Find the Tree of Life.

  Voices. The sound of someone coming back from the front of the antique store. If it was Mr. Pelle, I didn’t want him to find me there with the window open, the water on the floor, and the ruined table, so I raced through the swinging door, through the storeroom, and out the side door into the alley. There wasn’t a sidewalk back there, only a six-foot strip of dirt and loose rocks separating Mr. Pelle’s store from Uncle Sal’s.

  I wasn’t sure what I had just seen, but I knew I had never seen anything like it, not in my small town. I turned to walk back the way I had come, away from the main street, back toward the baseball field. I hoped my mother would be waiting there for me. But I stopped. I heard someone walking, their feet crunching slow steps over the loose gravel.

  Drip. Drip
. Drip. Water fell from a clogged gutter at the top of the building. I turned around. Coming toward me was the woman I had seen sitting at the table inside, the one in the middle who had written everything. She was alone, the other two women nowhere to be found. She walked unsteadily, in the trembling way of someone very old, and I froze. I stood there, staring. She was sort of hunched over, and her robe flapped every once in a while as leftover gusts of wind dashed through the alley, chasing the storm that had left them behind. The air felt cool for July, that kind of after-storm coolness that reminds you summer will not last forever.

  She smiled as she walked, and her mouth opened as if she was about to say something, but then she closed it again. She stopped a few feet away, and I saw the stick she carried. It was a gnarled, barkless thing that bent this way and that. She grasped it with both hands, plunged it into the ground, and limped around me, muttering a small stream of those living words. The stick made a harsh, scratching noise in the dirt and the rocks. Her strength amazed me—the line she made was deep. A small trickle of rainwater welled up and filled it.

  At that point I almost started to feel bad for her. She was obviously losing her mind. I held my breath, waiting for her to finish, trying to think of something nice to say. She made a circle in the dirt all the way around me with that stick, and I got another glimpse of those sideways teeth crowding for space in her mouth. Her eyes were kind and knowing.

  I nodded at her, and she walked away. I sighed with relief and watched her turn the corner.

  But I couldn’t leave the circle she had made.

  4

  THERE WASN’T ANYTHING IN THE AIR, nothing that I could see that might be keeping me in that spot. I could hear everything going on around me. And I could move, but there was some kind of force keeping me inside the circle she had drawn.

  “Sam!” I heard a voice shout. It was my friend Abra coming down the alley.

  I tried to lift my arm to wave her over, but the circle kept my arms tight to my sides.

  “Come on,” she called out. “Your mom’s been looking for you. She’s going to take us home.”

  At that point I realized I couldn’t talk. I could breathe, but that was it. My voice was gone. Nothing.

  “Why are you standing there?” she said. “Your mom is waiting. C’mon!”

  When she got closer she slowed down. I stared at her, and she looked confused. She reached out and pushed me playfully. Her foot scuffed mud and stones over the circle the old lady had drawn, and suddenly I could move. I jumped away from the circle.

  What had just happened?

  “What’s your problem?” she asked. “Let’s go. The Ferris wheel is going up and the livestock tents are out. I’m pretty sure I saw Steve and Bo sneaking onto the fairgrounds over by the break in the fence, where the cotton candy always is . . .”

  She chattered on and on about the fair, and I followed her through the alley, expecting the old woman to jump out at us or that huge man to sweep down and question me. But nothing happened. We wandered out onto the sidewalk that ran in front of the antique store and walked toward my mother waiting in her car.

  I climbed into the passenger seat and didn’t say a word. I couldn’t get the image of that woman out of my mind, the way she scraped that circle, the way it held me frozen.

  “Hey,” my mom said, disapproval on her face, “where were you? And where’s your glove?”

  I realized I had left my glove in Mr. Pelle’s back room.

  “Where was I?” I said. “Where were you?”

  She could tell I had been upset when she didn’t show up, so she let me get away with talking back to her.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” she said, tilting her head and frowning. “I know I’m never late, but I got caught up talking to Abra’s mom, and she asked if I could pick Abra up at the school, so by the time I got to practice you were gone. What a storm!”

  Abra sat in the backseat and put her bag beside her. She kept glancing at me with a strange look on her face, but I tried to ignore her.

  Yeah, what a storm, I thought, once again picturing the dark cloud of scribbles on the table around those words.

  Find the Tree of Life.

  We drove north onto Kincade Road. That’s where the fair was setting up, in a park on the outskirts of town. The workers swarmed the area, building rides and putting up food tents, pulling trailers and backing up trucks. I looked and looked for the three old ladies, but I didn’t see them.

  “Look, the Ferris wheel!” Abra said. “I can’t wait.”

  There was a whimsical sound to her voice, and I knew exactly how she felt. The rides, the food, the lights—everything about the fair embodied summer and freedom and being young.

  At the far end of the fair I saw the Ferris wheel going up, section by section. Three or four large men joined the massive, curving pieces of iron pulled from the back of a semi.

  We left town. Abra and I both looked out the back window of my mom’s car for as long as the fair was visible. It was the best part of the summer, and I couldn’t wait.

  Today’s Friday, tomorrow’s Saturday, then Sunday night the fair opens, I thought.

  “Can we come on Sunday night?” I asked my mom.

  “Of course we can,” she said.

  We always think we have one more day. We always think tomorrow can do nothing but come around. It’s one of the great illusions we live with, that time will go on and on, that our lives will never end.

  “Of course we can,” she’d said, but my mom wouldn’t make it to the fair that year.

  Route 126 and Kincade Road were both lined with restaurants and gas stations and a small grid of houses in those days, population 1,931 (or so said the small sign as you drove into town, and so said that sign for many years). Route 126 traveled east to west. Kincade Road was my road, the road that went north into the farmland and the valley where the eastern and western mountain ranges started pinching together.

  We had already dropped Abra off at her farmhouse and were driving the last stretch of Kincade Road before getting to our place. There was only one more farm north of us, and Kincade Road ended just past its lane, giving way first to woods and then to the two mountains that lined the opposite sides of our valley as they converged to a point. A river spilled out of their collision and drifted south through the valley, all the way to Deen.

  When I was a kid, that valley was my entire world, and the mountains that lined it were the boundaries. Beyond them, there was nothing. I loved my life there at the edge of the world. I feel sorry for children who live in the midst and never have a chance to wander close to where everything ends.

  A clean, delicious wind rushed into the car. We had driven mile after mile out of town until the houses dispersed and gradually gave way to cornfields. The cornstalks were about two feet tall, their narrow green tassels waving back and forth. In most places the fields went all the way from the edge of Kincade Road to the forests that lined the mountains. Everything smelled like cut grass and blue sky. The farming families in the valley tried to squeeze as much out of the land as we could, and as I had grown older I had begun to feel part of the earth, part of the struggle for life.

  We approached a meaningless stop sign. The road that used to cross Kincade Road was no longer there, but my mom still insisted on stopping. I wondered if anyone would ever take that sign down. As I glanced over at the grassy bank that kept the cornfields at bay, I saw the cat.

  “Wait! Pull over!”

  It was pure white, really small, practically a kitten, and it walked like it was proud of itself, flicking its tail behind it like a tall, white snake.

  “What, for a cat?” my mom asked, but she was already pulling over. That’s the kind of mom she was.

  “Yeah, for a cat.” I opened my door. The cat turned and looked at me.

  Now, decades later, I still wonder why that cat couldn’t have simply run away from me, disappearing into the corn and saving everything. Why did it have to come so willingly?

&nbs
p; “Look at that,” I said. “He likes me.”

  “How do you know it’s a he?” my mom asked.

  “Can we take him home?” I asked, reaching out to the cat. It paused for a moment, moved away from me, then leaned back into my reach.

  “I don’t know if your father will like that,” Mom said, but I had already brought the cat into the car and closed the door. I looked at my mom and made sad eyes, a great big pretend frown.

  She laughed. I loved how my mom laughed.

  Then she sighed and shook her head, but she couldn’t stop smiling. “You are going to get me into trouble,” she said. “What will you name him?”

  “I think I’ll name him Icarus.”

  “Icarus? Where’s that from?”

  I shrugged. “Remember the story Dad told us the other night after dinner? The story about the father who built wings for himself and his son out of wax and feathers so they could escape the island they were on?”

  “I think I was washing the dishes,” Mom said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “By myself.”

  “It was a good story,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You missed out.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “The father warned his son about flying too low because the sea’s spray would clog his wings. But he couldn’t fly too high or the sun would melt them.”

  “And?”

  “He flew too high, the wings melted, and he drowned in the sea.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  I shrugged again. “I like the name. Icarus.”

  “You’ll have to buy food,” she warned me. “Where will you get money for that?”