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The AA meeting around the tables in the church basement took the open topic format. Kate shared her struggles with anger and impatience and explained how she had always used self-righteousness as an excuse to drink. An old man in a cowboy hat said, after a pause, “Shit. You needed an excuse?” When the laughter subsided, the chairman reminded him to introduce himself. “Oh. I’m Dougie and I’m an alcoholic.”
Everyone replied, “Hi, Dougie.”
The laughter, the unloading, Tim’s solid, reassuring presence beside her—Kate felt better than she had all day. She let go of the plague, the fair, the prairie dogs, Jamie, and everything else that had bothered her, and finally relaxed. The meeting was like coming home.
A brunette in a fitted T-shirt and tight jeans spoke up. She was about forty, with short, crisply styled hair and precise makeup. “Hello. I’m Hilda and I’m an alcoholic.” The group greeted her and she continued. “You don’t recognize me because this is my first meeting, even though I’ve been sober ten years.”
Kate did recognize her, though. Hilda Davis painted abstract art and composed electronic music, creations she described as inspired by angels. She’d sold her work at the fair the last two years, and had not signed up yet for this year. Maybe after the meeting—Kate stopped the thought and made herself pay attention to what Hilda was saying. Work could wait.
The artist’s voice was steady but weak. “I’ve been struggling this past week. Something strange happened.” Pausing, she rubbed both hands on the back of her neck. “Like my spiritual wires have been cut.” She let her arms drop. “I’m sorry. That’s as much as I can handle telling right now.”
The group members shared their experiences coping with cravings or with loss of faith and Hilda listened, silent except to express her thanks.
When the meeting was over, people broke up into chatting groups like a sober cocktail party, with the smokers going outside. Kate spotted Tim’s thicket of white-blond curls across the room. He was talking with two young men he sponsored, rounding them up to go out for coffee, no doubt. Kate had ridden with Tim. She would have a couple of minutes to catch Hilda before leaving for what Tim called “the real meeting.”
Kate found the artist surrounded by a cluster of nurturing women.
“I pray,” said one.
“So do I, even when I don’t believe in what I’m praying to,” added another.
“Chocolate helps, too,” said a third. They all laughed except Hilda.
“You need a sponsor.” A tall, forceful woman in a linen suit sounded like she was about to take on that role. “Do you have one?”
Hilda’s perfectly painted lips formed a tired smile. “No. I don’t even know what that is. I ... didn’t get sober in the usual way.”
“You really haven’t been in the program, have you? It’s a wonder you made it so long. Your sponsor is someone you can call, day or night.” The woman handed Hilda a business card. “She helps you. She listens.”
This woman sounded more likely to give orders. A sponsor like that could drive Hilda to drink. Kate cut in. “My boyfriend will probably take his sponsees out for coffee. We usually hit the Starbucks at Zafarano.” Kate could do a little twelfth-step work and remind Hilda to commit to the fair at the same time. “Why don’t we get our own table at the same place?”
“Thank you. I don’t think I’ll go, but I do need to talk with you. I’ve been meaning to get in touch ever since this happened.”
Kate was open about her alcoholism, but she didn’t remember telling Hilda. “Did you know I was in AA?”
“No. I’d been meaning to call about not doing the fair.”
No. Not another. Kate tried to sound more compassionate than alarmed. “Why aren’t you?”
Hilda took a moment to accept phone numbers from some of the helpful women and then slipped away from them, closer to Kate. “Sorry. It’s the same reason I’ve felt like drinking. Can we step outside?”
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Hilda sat on the low stone wall that separated the narrow yard on one side of the church from the back of the bed and breakfast next door. A strong, cool breeze pushed Kate’s hair into her face and ruffled Lobo’s fur. Hilda’s hair didn’t move. Kate lengthened Lobo’s lead to its maximum and gave him permission to explore.
“I was so relieved to see you,” Hilda said, her brown eyes wet. She dabbed a finger under her lower lashes, catching the tears before her mascara could run. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me, though. You were always so busy at the fair.”
“Busy? Probably chain-smoking and biting heads off. As soon as I got sober, I thought I could rule the world.”
Hilda put on a faint smile. “I noticed you haven’t lit up. Congratulations on not smoking.”
“Thanks. But I’m still biting heads and ruling the world. It’s as hard to quit that as smoking and drinking.” Kate paused. A noisy, dressed-up couple emerged from a back door of the B and B, arguing. The woman stumbled on her high heels in the gravel. “What’s going on with you?”
“The angels can’t reach me.”
Dread of the plague hit Kate like wet clay. “Do you mean that literally?” Until now she’d thought of Hilda’s work as an interpretation of spiritual experience. “Like you used to channel them?”
“I did. For ten years.”
Ten years during which she hadn’t had a drink. This was more serious than not being able to do the fair. Hilda’s sobriety was at risk. “That’s amazing. You had one of those spiritual events—like that story in the Big Book—”
“The what?”
“The original AA book. Or it might have been in one of the other books. Anyway, this man prayed to have the desire to drink removed, and this light full of love showed up and his prayers were answered.” The story had bothered Kate, so she couldn’t forget it. Miracles were too capricious for the God of her understanding. “I never met anyone that actually happened to.”
“You still haven’t.” Hilda looked down at her hands. “I didn’t pray.”
“The angels just showed up?”
“I must have done something to attract them but I don’t know what.” Hilda rubbed the wall as if studying its texture. “I was a landscape artist, living in Taos. Professionally successful, but my marriage was failing because I was in a heavy party scene. I came home drunk at three or four in the morning—nothing unusual—but this time my husband had locked the doors with those little chains. I yelled and tried break them off the door. Finally a neighbor came over and took me to his house to sleep on the couch. The next day Rob kicked me out.”
“That could make a drunk hit bottom and ask for help. Even in the back of your mind.”
“It didn’t. I got a hotel room. I was so upset and hungover I just lay on the bed and cried for about an hour, feeling sorry for myself. I blamed Rob, not my drinking. My only plan for the day was to get smashed as soon as I could stop bawling, but when I sat up to go down to the bar I got knocked back flat. I thought I was having a stroke or something, even though I was only thirty.”
“You didn’t pray at all?”
“No.” Hilda closed her eyes, and her hands turned up as if to receive something. “The room turned into pale blue light. It broke into shafts like a forest of crystals, and beings of light were moving through this forest.” She opened her eyes, vibrant and alive with the memory. “And the music. Tones. Chants. Something like bells. Not played on instruments, though, but on sound waves themselves. The voices were so pure they were beyond human. The colors shifted like the aurora borealis and the angels danced between them like light between leaves. One of them sang a single long note and I fell asleep. Not wanting to drink.”
Hilda smiled sadly and dropped her hands to the wall. “Rob still divorced me, of course—he could hardly believe I was sober or that I’d seen and heard angels. But they stayed with me. I learned to channel their music into electronic sounds. I painted their world. It changed my life, my art. Everything.”
“But they didn’t heal you. You want to drink now that they’re gone.”
“Desperately.”
“What happened to make them leave?”
“I don’t know. I was at the Secrist Gallery when they sold one of my angel prints. I don’t always get to meet the people who buy my work, but when I do I like to share something about the angels with them, so they get a glimpse of what’s behind my art. By the time I finished talking with the woman who bought this one, they were gone. They’ve always been in the background even when I wasn’t immersed in a vision, but when she walked out the door with that print I was as empty and isolated as when I was about to drink in that hotel.”
Kate saw a chance to test Jamie’s plague idea. “Do you remember the customer’s name?”
Hilda frowned. “No. I’d never seen her before. She was very young. Pretty. Looked like she could be a model. I think her name was something unusual, but unusual is sort of usual around here.”
Shit. It was a plague. “Dahlia? No last name?”
“Oh my god. Yes. How did you know?
Kate hesitated. Talk of contagious soul loss might be too disturbing for someone struggling to stay sober, or so bizarre Hilda wouldn’t believe her. “She came to me for fortune telling. She didn’t like my reading. I was too unspiritual for her.”
“She thought I was very spiritual.” Hilda’s hand explored the wall again, rubbing a stone. “We talked quite a while. She’d been through a personal tragedy and she was fascinated by the angels, especially by the way they had helped me. Maybe I connected them with her too well and they left with her.”
“If they did, she didn’t keep them. There was nothing like that anywhere near her.”
Hilda’s eyes flashed a hint of hope. “Do you think they could return, then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Could beings that showed up uninvited, took over an artist’s life, and then vanished really be angels? Kate wasn’t religious, but she thought angels would be more reliable than that. Whatever these spirits were, though, Hilda seemed to need them. “You should do the fair this year if you still have CDs and prints to sell. It might attract them back to you.”
“You make it sound like I’m their agent.”
“Sorry. That’s not how I meant it.” But almost. Kate spotted Tim with his sponsees waving to her from the sidewalk at the front of the church. Hastily, she took out her business card case and dropped it. Lobo picked it up and Kate handed Hilda a card. “Think about it. At least it can sustain your career.”
Hilda nodded and forced a faint smile.
“And go to as many AA meetings as you can stand, too.” Kate shortened Lobo’s lead. “That’s how people without angels get sober.”
“Can I call you as a sponsor?”
“Me? I’m kind of young, and I’ve never sponsored anyone before. Are you sure?”
“I don’t want to try to explain my story to ...” Hilda examined the other card she’d been given. “Joan.”
The pushy woman in the linen suit. “No. I can see that.” Tim’s frequently struggling sponsees called him at all hours of the night. Kate didn’t want that kind of relationship with Hilda—or anyone, if she was honest with herself—but she did want her in the fair, and didn’t want her stuck with Joan or relapsing into drinking. “Then I guess I’m your sponsor.”
“Thanks.” Hilda hugged Kate. “I’ll only need you until I get the angels back.”