Mrs. Schrom wore a black halo the day before she died. Raymond saw it when she spiked her tomatoes out back and when she walked her dog. The next day her husband drove their horse trailer off the road. On Route 50 just past Gunnison. He lived because he was thrown from the truck, but Mrs. Schrom was wearing her seatbelt and she was strapped in tight. His mom told him not to draw any lessons from the accident. You should always buckle up, she said. Mrs. Schrom was the exception that proved the rule. Sister Mary Bee up the street wore a halo, too, but she was old and Raymond didn’t notice at first. You had to watch carefully if you wanted to see them. They looked a lot like shadows.
The first time he saw one he reached for it, but his fingers went right through. His mom apologized. He must like your hair, she told old Mrs. Dreisser, who died the next day. She went to sleep and didn’t wake up, and her daughter said it was a blessing. His mom had scolded him afterward. She shook her finger and said it wasn’t nice to point, and Raymond knew then she couldn’t see the things he saw.
He called the people angels though some of them were mean. They had halos, and they drove their cars and rolled past him in their wheelchairs. He saw them in shopping malls and in the hospital when his mom had her attack. It was her gallbladder. The doctors said it was filled with stones. She screamed until she was hoarse and the nurses all came running. Raymond waited in the hallway and covered up his ears, and the old man in the room next door had a halo over his bed. It hung in the air like a cloud. Like a swarm of honey bees. The next day the nurses changed the sheets in the old man’s room. They stripped down his bed and rolled a new lady in, and that’s when he started counting. He counted the floor tiles and the pictures in the hallway. He counted ambulances when they ran their sirens and the steps between her bathroom and the door, and all his counting made his mom well again. The numbers brought her home.
How many peas were on his plate and how many birds sitting on the wire and he counted them while they flew. There was magic in them. He knew this without anyone saying so. The magic would keep his dad’s plane from crashing. He was a pilot for Continental and gone three days a week. The food was cold by the time Raymond finished his counting. Sometimes he lost track and had to begin again. His mom didn’t understand why he took so long to eat. “Something’s not right with you,” she said. “Don’t be like your Aunt Leslie. Twenty years of counseling and she still can’t eat a cookie.” He pushed his food around when she started to worry. He took a forkful of peas and counted them against his tongue and she looked happy then. She relaxed a little and smiled, and she didn’t know he was keeping score. He was holding up heaven with his numbers. He was keeping the halos away.
His Grandma Hooper knew her angels. Michael and Raphael the healer and Uriel who stands by people just before they die. She had angel heads on her wall and pictures of Saint George killing the serpent. Raymond sat with her because his mom was at the gym. They watched TV together even though her eyes were bad. She couldn’t read her magazines anymore or her mystery books, but she didn’t want cataract surgery either because those doctors could mess you up. She knew a lady whose eyelids started drooping the day after the surgeons cut her. Her friend’s eyes were clear now, but what good did it do if she couldn’t keep them open.
His grandma made him grilled cheese sandwiches with extra butter. She made caramel corn in the microwave, and they ate together from the bowl. They watched Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven. Thank God for those reruns and for Lawrence Welk, she said. She didn’t like violence in her house. She didn’t allow cuss words either because bad thoughts leave traces. If they linger they become a sin. “Fix your mind on righteous things,” she told him, and her eyes were gray and bright.
There were clouds on the TV, and the angel was walking along the road. He was in the desert where there weren’t any people. It was his job to help people so he could earn his wings. Look how nice TV used to be, she was saying. It used to lift us up. It wasn’t like it is now with all those naked ladies. You can’t go half an hour without seeing something bad. Raymond nodded though he didn’t know exactly what she meant. He reached for the popcorn bowl she held on her knee.
“I see angels sometimes,” he said. “I see them with their halos.”
His grandma scratched her chin. Her fingers were bent from her years in the shoe store. She talked about it sometimes. All the orthopedic shoes she sold to women with hammer toes and bunions.
“Their halos are black,” Raymond said.
His grandma looked at him now. “We don’t talk about those,” she said, but her voice wasn’t angry. She reached for the remote and turned the volume up. “They’re traveling, and we leave them alone.”
He washed the bowl for her once her shows were done, and he pulled the weeds from her gravel beds. She used gasoline sometimes, too, but the neighbors didn’t like it. She sat on the porch with a sweating can of Sprite. “You’re a good boy,” she called out when he tossed the weeds into the bin and rolled it to the curb. “Come sit with me before you burn.” She was careful with the sun because that’s what killed Grandpa Hooper. It started with a spot at the top of his head. Just a single brown spot that set down roots and spread.
Raymond sat beside her on the bench, and she patted his sweaty head. “I used to have hair just as red as yours,” she said. “It was what your grandpa noticed first.” It skipped a generation with his momma, she was saying. She got the German and not the Irish with that straight blond hair she had. They watched the sun set behind the mountains, and she looked right at it with her cloudy eyes and she didn’t blink or shade herself. He wanted to ask her more about the angels. He wanted to ask her where they were going, but he already knew.
On Friday afternoons he and his mom went to Leon Gessi’s to share a pepperoni pizza. She said carbs were okay once a week. That’s why she took those spinning classes and lifted all those weights. They were early today. They went at three o’clock and not at five, and most of the high school students were still waiting for their slices. They clustered around the foosball table and some ancient video games. The boys and girls dressed alike. They wore tight jeans and black nail polish, and their skin was so white he could see the veins around their eyes. They looked like spirits, those high school kids. They looked like the anime his parents wouldn’t let him watch. A group of them pushed by, three boys and two girls with pale pale eyes. They carried greasy plates and cans of soda pop. They laughed as they went out, and they wore halos, all of them. He watched them climb into a dented old car. It was rusted through in places. They pulled into the street so fast the tires left long marks and another car honked at them and had to hit the brakes.
Two weeks since his dad had been gone. Two weeks and three days, and Raymond sorted his Legos by color and grouped them in batches of ten. He counted the paper clips his dad kept in a jar. The pennies in the kitchen and the bolts and screws on his dad’s workbench. He wrote the numbers down, one after the next, and the lists kept getting longer. He piled them on his floor and taped them to his headboard. He went outside, too, behind the compost heap where the crickets had built a nest. Some were as long as his pinkie, and their backs were spotted with green and gold. All their moving made it hard to count them, and so he took his mom’s garden shoes and crushed them one by one. He made them beautiful while he counted them. He set them out like sun rays over the patio stones.
His mom shouted when she saw them. She dropped her laundry basket. “What’s wrong with you?” She pulled him up and into the house. She looked scared like when she had to brake the car too fast and she’d throw her arm across his chest. They went together to his room, and she opened up the blinds. “Why don’t you play like the other kids? Why don’t you ride your bike anymore or play video games at Ryan’s?”
He sat on his bed and watched her walk back and forth across the room, from his desk to his sliding closet doors. She stopped beside his bed. She pulled the lists off the headboard. “What are these?” She waved the papers in the air. She’d probably seen them a hundred times before, when she made his bed each morning and when she ran the vacuum, but she noticed them only now. “What’s all this stuff you keep writing?” She brought the papers to the window and looked at them in the sunlight. She squinted a little because she didn’t have her glasses, and for the first time he noticed how she looked like his Grandma Hooper. Not her hair but the lines in her forehead and how she worked her jaw.
“What are these numbers?” She waved the papers again as if they’d talk to her if she shook them hard enough. “What do they mean?”
Raymond shifted on his bed. There were some birds in the plum tree just outside his window. They sat in a perfect line. It looked like five of them, but there might be more if he could only see them. “I’m just counting,” he said. “I’m counting them before they go away.”
She sat beside him on the bed and put her arm around his shoulders. “Nobody’s going away,” she said. “I’m right here, and your dad’s coming home in another week. He just needs a little time.” She gathered up all the papers from his desk and from under his bed. She even found the ones he’d taped inside his closet doors. She started talking about how eleven was a difficult age and sometimes even the good kids needed a little help. She took his lists away. She clipped them together and didn’t tell him where she’d put them, but it didn’t matter. As soon as she’d left he opened his notebook and started a new one.
His therapist Dr. Winer had thirty-seven snow globes. Her husband brought them back from all his business trips, and she bought her own, too, when they went together on vacation. She had dancing hula girls from when they went to Hawaii and snow angels from Vienna. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—the prettiest city in the country, Dr. Winer said, if you can stand the fog—and a stern-looking Lincoln sitting in his chair. She had a mermaid, too, with white blond hair streaming upward in the water. Her eyes were closed, and there were golden flowers behind her ears. Dr. Winer kept them on a ledge just below her window, and on sunny days Raymond liked to shake them and watch the glitter settle.
Dr. Winer’s face had no wrinkles, not a single line, but her hair was mostly silver. She wore it loose, and it made her look young and old at once. She listened closely when he talked. She wanted to know about school and how often his dad was gone. He talked about his counting sometimes but not in ways she’d understand. He couldn’t tell her how it was a relief and how it kept away the halos. She wanted to know why he’d killed all those crickets. “Why did you spread them on the sidewalk?” She looked at him the way his mom did when she was worried. She wrinkled up her forehead, and the sun came through the window and lit up her gray hair.
“I was praying,” he told her. And he didn’t know why he said it or exactly what it meant, but it was true. True the way dreams are or tears when you’re hurt. He was praying for the people with halos and those who were still waiting.
His mom was proud of how he was acting. “You’re calmer than you were before,” she said. “You’re not tapping the way you used to or playing with your food.” She was wearing a sweatshirt from the gym and her Adidas running shoes. She exercised every day now and not just at the gym. She watched the fitness shows in the morning and bought a purple yoga mat. She did sit-ups on a rubber ball and old-fashioned push-ups and jumping jacks. “This is the way your Grandpa Hooper did it when he was in the army,” she said. “I never saw a man who could do so many push-ups.” Raymond helped her count when she got tired. He kept track of all the numbers.
She wiped her forehead when she was done and drank from her bottle of vitamin water. “All you needed was somebody who could listen,” she said. “A professional and not just me or your Grandma Hooper.” She screwed the cap back on and set the bottle down. “She’s gotten strange since your grandpa died. It’s all that time alone.”
His mom was looking at him, and her eyes were serious. She was waiting for him to agree, but she was wrong about the doctor and about his grandma, too. “Grandma’s not alone,” he said. “Every week I go to see her.” Her eyes were full with angels and spirits, he wanted to say. How could she be lonely when she wasn’t ever alone.
Dr. Winer said people need space to breathe. That was true for grown-ups like his parents and it was true for kids, too. She asked him if he thought the numbers were keeping him from making friends. Maybe he spent too much time alone when he should be playing instead. She was wrong, of course, but he didn’t mind. He liked the sound of her voice and the way the light came through her office window. There was a courtyard two floors down and a maple tree that had started to flower. Another month and the choppers would fall from the branches. Those seeds would flutter down like wings. All that time he spent in Dr. Winer’s office, all that time talking and watching the branches through the window, and this is what he learned: It’s good to have somebody who will listen even if they don’t understand.
Count the tiles in the bathroom floor, but not the cracked one by the tub. That one brought bad luck. The cans in the pantry and the empty water bottles. His mother never stacked them right. She piled them by the washer. Count them and carry the numbers with you because you’ll need them where you’re going. Mr. Driscoll the school bus driver coughed six times before they got to Chelton. He had asthma this time of year. He said it was the pollen. Count them and keep them and work them round and round until they give him back his air.
He cleaned out his Grandma Hooper’s gutters. It was May already, and she was worried about rain. She let him climb the ladder and walk along the roof. There were needles up there and bent rusty nails, and he felt like his dad when he stood on those shingles. He was flying in the clouds. Grandma Hooper looked so small down there. She was wearing her jogging pants and her VFW visor. “Be careful at the edges,” she was saying. “Take it slow and steady.” He gathered up the leaves and all the needles and stuffed them in a garbage bag. By the time he was halfway around the house the bag was full to bursting. He found a dead raccoon and a bird’s nest with cracked pieces of pale green shell. He wondered where the birds had gone and whether the babies had lived. He’d seen a blue jay once eat a baby starling. It lifted the baby right from the nest and carried it away. “Tie it up,” his grandma said. Her hands were on her hips. “Drop it down when it’s full.”
He’d filled up two bags and started a third before he was done. He went back down the ladder, and that was worse than climbing up. He couldn’t see where he was going. His grandma dusted him off and made him wipe his shoes, and she had the ice cream ready. She’d let it get a little soft so she could work the scooper. “Don’t tell your momma what you did for me,” she said. “I don’t want her to worry. And don’t tell her about the ice cream either. She’s fussy when it comes to sugar.”
“I won’t tell,” he said. His mom had too many worries already, and they were mostly about him.
He ate his ice cream, stirring it around until it was smooth as pudding, and his grandma started to pray. She prayed when the mood hit her because she didn’t believe in churches. She set her hands together and talked directly to the king of kings. The one who knows things that are uncertain and obscure. “Grant me strength,” she said, “and bless my babies all of them and the travelers far from home.” Her voice went deep, and her eyes were closed so she could feel the spirit.
She kissed him on the cheek when his mom came to pick him up. Her lips were dry as paper. She leaned in close and held him by the shoulders, and her hands were stronger than they looked. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “Show them kindness while they’re here.”
Four weeks and six days and eleven hours. The numbers didn’t bring his father home. Forty-nine thousand six hundred and twenty minutes. It was longer than he’d ever been gone before, and his mom was on the LifeCycle again. She’d stopped putting on her lipstick and blow-drying her hair. She worked out until her face was shiny. “One thing in this life is true as the stars,” she said. “Your daddy and I both love you.”
Dr. Winer wasn’t sitting in her chair when he came in to see her. She was underneath her desk. “I’ve lost my earring,” she was saying. “I heard it when it fell.” She was moving around down there, and Raymond went on his knees, too, so he could help her look. He crawled on the outside of the desk and felt the wood floor with his fingers.
“I’ve got the backing right here,” she said. “But I can’t find the pearl.”
Raymond worked his way in circles away from the desk. The sun was coming through the window, and it shone across the wooden floors and made them look like honey. He was halfway to the wall before he found the earring. It was gold and not white like the pearls his mom put on when she wore her party dress.
“I’ve got it,” he said. He pushed himself up and held it high so she could see it was okay. “Look how far it rolled.”
Doctor Winer came up from behind her desk. She smiled and pulled her sweater straight, and everything about her was touched with silver. Raymond had to cover his eyes. “You saved me today,” she said, and she came to him and took it from his hand. “My husband bought me these on our honeymoon.”
She stepped out from the light. She put the earring back in her ear and checked to make sure it was in tight, and when she turned around there was a shadow over her head. Raymond saw it floating in the air. It was real as the pearl he’d found or the scabs on his hands from cleaning his grandma’s gutters.
“We’re going to the Bahamas next week,” Dr. Winer said. She rolled her chair back to its spot, and the halo went with her. “I want to take this pair along.”
She sat down the way she always did, and she reached for her pen and notebook. “Three months taking lessons in a pool, and I’ll finally see some fish.”
Raymond looked out the window. The gardeners were wheeling the mowers off their truck. The lawn was green already, and they’d started planting the flower beds. “Look how nice it is out there,” he said. “It’s warm enough for shorts.” He could hear the halo this time. It was thrumming like a hive. The sound filled the room, and the doctor didn’t notice. “Are you sure you have to go?”
“It won’t be long. Not even two weeks.”
Raymond didn’t sit down in his chair. He went to the window where she kept her snow globes and picked up the sleeping mermaid. He cradled her in his hand. She sat beside a treasure chest, and there were stones inside and strands of silver pearls.
He shook the globe and set it back down. He leaned over the window ledge. Three of the gardeners were gathered around the fountain. They were wet from working the nozzle. One of them had a metal brush, and he was scrubbing down the cement and the tiles around the basin. The water made a rainbow in the sun. They were working beneath it and didn’t look up, but Raymond saw it from where he was. He saw the droplets and the birds in the branches. He saw every tile and tree.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go.” He wanted to tell her that he saw bad things sometimes. That he knew what was going to happen. She should stay where she was because it was almost summer. The air was sweet, but the mountains still had their snow. “My mom says people fall off those cruise ships.”
“That’s true,” Dr. Winer said. “But people can fall at home, too. And we’re just going on a little sailboat. Even if I fall they’ll turn around and find me.” It was beautiful where she was going, she told him. The water was bathtub-warm.
She turned serious again and started to ask him questions. She wanted to know about things that weren’t important. His dad was flying planes from Denver to Phoenix and staying in a hotel. His mom was working out more every day, and the veins were starting to show in her arms. All those sets he counted and her face was clenched from the strain and she didn’t look stronger when she was done. The exercise was wearing her down.
He walked back and forth behind Dr. Winer’s desk. He could hear her pen pushing against the paper, and he didn’t look at her or the cloud over her head. Her computer was humming and the halo, too, and he wanted to cover his ears. It’d be a blessing if his eyes went cloudy. He could go outside then. He wouldn’t have to look at the ground. He’d pray for people he couldn’t see, and he wouldn’t feel their passing.
His mother rang the office bell before the hour was over. Her watch was always a little fast. Dr. Winer stood up at the sound. She went to the window and picked up the mermaid. “Keep her,” she said. “This one’s always been your favorite. I could tell from the first day you came.”
She set it in his hands. Before he could say no or give it back, she pulled him in for a hug. She hadn’t done that before, and he held on to her and didn’t let go, not until his mother came through the door.