I sunk my head deeper into Elizabeth’s shoulder, shocked at my own confession. I could only hope that somehow the words had come out muffled against her shoulder, that just as I’d spoken them the phone had rung or the air had kicked on and she hadn’t heard me. That way, she would ask me to repeat it, and I could say something else. Anything else. But Elizabeth had heard me. She’d heard me clear.
“Oh,” she said, “is that all?”
She chuckled at her own wit and gently patted my head. The sensation was not unlike being hit with a sledgehammer. Evidently all the tape and gauze served more as a barrier for germs than any real sort of protection. But I neither flinched nor uttered a word of protest. I would have endured that pain for eternity and a day if it meant I could stay right where I was.
Elizabeth released me and returned to her seat, careful to keep her hand on mine. There was nothing flirtatious in that small act, no hint of romance or desire. But it was magic just the same.
“You gonna take me to the rubber room now?” I asked.
“Sorry, no. It’s occupied at the moment by a guy who thinks he sees the Tooth Fairy.”
The heaviness between us was shooed away by laughter. It was the one thing I needed and the one thing I didn’t expect.
“All the same,” I said, “maybe you should reserve some space.”
“Why’s that? Do you think that’s where you belong?”
I shrugged. “You’re the counselor. I can guess you don’t hear a lot of folks saying they see imaginary people.”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows and asked, “Is that what he is to you? Imaginary?”
“I know it ain’t normal.”
“Normal?” Elizabeth followed the word with a soft laugh. “Well, I guess that depends on who you are. Some people would think you’d had your brain baked along with your head. Others would give you a clap on the back and ask what took you so long to share the obvious. It’s all about what you believe.”
“Didn’t know what I believed was important,” I said.
“What a person believes is the only thing that’s important.”
“Then what do you believe?”
Her eyes widened. It was a question I don’t think Elizabeth had anticipated. With her free hand she stroked the wrinkle that had appeared in her khakis. “That’s a question you can ask if I’m ever in that bed and you’re ever in this chair.”
“Ah,” I said. “Gotcha. Me patient, you doctor.”
Elizabeth nodded.
“Well, Doc,” I said, finally comfortable enough to settle back into my bed, “congratulations. You’ve managed to get something out of me no one ever has.”
“I think there’s more than one thing no one’s managed to get out of you,” she said. “But for now, let’s concentrate on this one thing. So this ‘angel’ has been around for a while?”
I let out a very long and very slow exhale. “Yes,” I said. I was determined to keep my answers short as long as I could, testing to see if this new ground I was walking upon was solid or quicksand.
“When did you first see…it?”
“Him,” I corrected.
“Right, sorry. When did you first see him?”
There was a part of me that still begged for quietness. Enough had been said already, more would only lead to trouble. Elizabeth must have sensed my wariness, because at that moment she said, “It takes a lot of courage to open some of the doors in life, Andy. It takes even more courage to walk through them.”
Maybe that was true and maybe not, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t in much shape at the moment to either open or walk through a door. I had been beaten and burned, poked and prodded. I had been educated. Not just in the nastiness of the world, but in the suddenness of it. I’d lived most of my years in a town where nothing much ever changed, and yet in the span of five minutes everything had. The Andy Sommerville who went to work three days ago and had nothing to worry about except a loose nozzle on the gas pump was gone. I didn’t know who or what had replaced him, and I didn’t know how to find out.
I need you to listen to me. I need you to let this lady help you.
The Old Man had said that. The same Old Man who had said so many other things over the years. Who had kept me as much company as I’d ever known and encouraged me and made sure I kept to…well, maybe not the straight and narrow, but the closest thing to it. And though at that moment I despised him with a hatred only the Devil himself could appreciate, he had never been wrong. Not once.
“My parents died when I was ten,” I told her. “It was my daddy’s fault. He was a drunk, and a mean one at that. I remember hiding behind the couch while he beat my mama with his belt because she’d taken his drinking money to buy me clothes. I hated him. He was the worst man I’ve ever known.
“One day he comes home from work and starts drinkin’ like usual, and he runs out of beer. Says he’s driving to the store. Mama says, ‘No you’re not, you’re too drunk.’ So he makes her drive him. I wanted to go, too. The thought of being alone made me scared. But Mama said no, that they’d be right back.” I paused, not sure how to finish the rest, and then decided to go ahead and say it. “Guess she didn’t do a good enough job driving, because when they left the store he was behind the wheel. He ran a red light and got T-boned by a beer truck. Can you imagine that? My drunk dad gets hit by a beer truck.”
Elizabeth said nothing.
“Both of ’em died right off. Least I got that. They didn’t hurt. That was all saved up for me, I guess.”
“What happened to you?”
“We were living up in Richmond then. I loved that city. So big and bustling. It swallowed me up, and I liked that feeling. But I couldn’t stay after that. The only kin I had left were my grandparents on Mama’s side who lived here in Mattingly. They came for the funeral and then brought me back here with them. Been here ever since.”
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, and she said nothing more. That alone endeared her to me. Life was full of tragedy and there was no reasoning with it. Sometimes I’m sorry is all you can say because it’s all you should say. That was when I thought my new ground was solid.
“It was tough,” I told her. “Real tough. I got settled well enough on the outside—got to school and made friends and all that—but on the inside I was broken.
“I turned eleven about a month after I got here. My grandparents decided to go all out to try and make me feel better. Like I was a part of something, you know? They wanted to make their family and their town my own, so they threw a party and invited all my friends. That was a great day, it really was. But deep down I knew I couldn’t be given more than what had been taken away, and I think everyone else knew that, too.”
“Nice of them to try,” she said.
I nodded. “It was, and I loved them for it. But all it did was prove to me that I’d lost everything. I was in bed that night staring up at the ceiling, and I got an idea. I figured that Daddy took my mama away from me, but God must have allowed it. I didn’t deserve that to happen to me. So I figured by all rights God should send me someone else. Not someone to replace Mama—no one could do that—but someone who could help me just the same. Someone who could understand. So I got out of bed, went to the window, and looked up at the Big Dipper.”
“The Big Dipper?”
“Mama always said the second star from the end of the handle was the door to heaven. ‘That’s where the answers to our prayers come from,’ she’d say. To this day I don’t know where she got that, but I was willing to give it a shot. I think I’d have tried anything at that point. It was hanging right there in the sky, right for me. I stood there and looked at that star for the longest time. Then I prayed. Prayed like I’d never prayed before. And when I said my amen…”
“What?” Elizabeth asked.
I cleared my throat. “When I said my amen, that star…winked. I swear it did. It was there like normal one second, and then all of a sudden it sorta puffed up and shined and then shrank right back down again. I thought it was my eyes playing tricks on me. I don’t know. Maybe that’s exactly what it was. I was hurtin’. Sometimes when you’re hurtin’ you see things that aren’t so.”
Elizabeth looked down and smiled at the wrinkle she was smoothing out. The way she did it, so calm and smooth, enchanted me. “And how long did you have to wait for your answer?” she asked.
“Not long. I woke up later that night and rolled over, and he was just standing there by the window staring at me.”
“What did he look like?”
“Just normal, I guess. Old. No wings or halo or anything like that. He said, ‘Hiya, Andy.’ He just stood there for a bit, and he was gone. I thought I was dreaming until I saw him again the next day. He started his thing right after that.”
“His thing?”
“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t really know how else to put it. He just kinda…shows up. From time to time.”
“Why?” Elizabeth asked. “Is there a reason?”
“I don’t know. He tells me stuff. Tells me to pay attention to something or gives me advice. Sometimes it’s a warning.” I said those words and trailed off, thinking of the one warning he never bothered to offer. “He seems to get a kick out of it. No one can see him, but sometimes he’ll be dressed different or doing something to try and blend in. Sometimes it’s a costume or a suit, sometimes not. He always wears a bracelet on his wrist, though. Always. Thin and black. Silk, I think. It’s nothing fancy. Actually looks pretty cheap to me, but I can tell it means a lot to him. I’ll catch him rubbing it sometimes, especially when he doesn’t think I’m looking. It’s crazy.”
“That’s interesting,” Elizabeth said.
“Sometimes it’s like he shows up for no reason. Just to talk or whatever. Other times it’s when something’s either happening or about to. Not something life changing, just something he thinks is important. Like a lesson. He told me that early on.”
“Told you what?”
“That his job was to get me to pay attention. He said that everything means something, no matter how small it is. ‘The familiar is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over,’ he told me once. He also told me I’d need the box.”
Elizabeth and I both looked at the wooden container on the table.
“This box?” she said.
“He told me to go up in the attic and find it. My grandparents kept everything over the years, but I’d never seen a box. He told me exactly where to look, and there it was.” I kept my eyes on the box. It was the only friend I had left. “The Old Man told me to always keep this handy. He said I’d need it in the end.”
“Need it for what?”
“He didn’t say. The Old Man’s never been one to offer much in the way of specifics.”
Elizabeth kept her eyes on the box and began rubbing my hand again. I knew what she was thinking, what she wanted to say. Counselors were much like lawyers in their reluctance to ask a question to which they didn’t know the answer. She studied my eyes and then decided yes, she would anyway.
“What’s in the box, Andy?”
Everything I’ve shown you from then until now, every little thing, comes down to this.
This was the moment when I had to make a choice between keeping the secret of the Old Man in the shadows where it had always been or daring to drag it into the light.
I let go of her hand. Elizabeth didn’t draw it back but kept it where I could find it. Without a word I reached over with my good hand and grasped one end of the box. Elizabeth took hold of the other end. Together we lifted and set it between us. I felt the top of the box and moved my hand around its edges. Close to opening it, but not quite. No one had ever seen the inside of my box, not even the Old Man, but that wasn’t what weighed on me. It was the fact that if I were to open my box, I would open me. “The Old Man said I’d need this in the end. Guess this might be the end.”
“Every end is just a new beginning,” she said. I didn’t believe it and didn’t say so.
Elizabeth’s hand went to the latch. With a soft click she pushed it up and out of the way. The box creaked and popped, reluctant to give up its secrets, and then it surrendered to her just as I had.
She slid both hands to the sides of the box and peered inside. I could see her eyes darting over the contents, trying to find a plausible explanation for the madness inside.
A baseball cap sat top down on the left side of the box. Never worn—the price tag was still on the underside of the brim. Sitting inside the cap was a small bundle of dead pine needles, each about three inches long and wrapped inside a letter to Santa Claus. I suspected that if Elizabeth opened the letter and picked up the needles, they would disintegrate in her hand. A small wooden cross, two inches long, rested beside the bundle. Its wood was dark and thick, its edges sharp. Laying on top of the cross was half of a fingernail painted in the brightest red I had ever seen, red like fire, like the color of an October sun yawning its good night over the mountains. Or red like anger, as the case may be. A lime-green golf tee sat near the brim of the hat, its bottom caked with dirt I’d never trodden upon. They were all gifts in their own right, whether they were given or taken, but the tee especially was one. I just didn’t know that yet. Covering the tee was a folded and worn business card with a smiley face on the front that always managed to make me cringe rather than imitate. BE HAPPY!! GOD LOVES YOU!! had been written below the smiley face, though I still wondered if the one had any bearing on the other.
Beside the hat on the other side of the box was the sort of slingshot you used to see in the movies, right down to the rubber hose and the Y-shaped end of a tree branch. The hose had grown brittle over the years, a victim of the constant taking out and putting back in. It had been shot once (and oh my, what a shot it had been) and then stolen, though I’d justified that since with the fact that I couldn’t steal what was already mine. A paintbrush rested atop the slingshot—I could still see white paint near the bottom of the bristles. A small stack of five paper napkins had been folded and tucked into the corner. They had never been used, as evidenced by the crisp Dairy Queen logo on the fronts of them. They were held in place by an undelivered envelope to a stranger I had seen once but never again, though I was still looking for him. If Elizabeth had chosen to pick it up, she could have felt the letter inside. ALEX was written in pencil on the front. I never got his last name. I didn’t see the piece of bubble gum but knew it was in there somewhere, probably stuck to the bottom or along one of the sides. I could still smell the watermelon, like an air freshener of a long-ago autumn day.
And there, right on top of it all, right there to remind me of what I could never possibly forget, was the pewter angel—Eric’s key chain. It stared at me with wings outstretched and trumpet blowing, shouting to the world not that a king had been born but that a boy had been killed, that Eric was gone and there wasn’t anything that would bring him back.
Elizabeth peered around my hand and into the box. Her hands didn’t move toward it, but her eyes touched everything inside. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What is all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Memories, I guess. Signposts of some of the people I’ve met and some of the things he’s shown me. That’s what the Old Man would say.”
“What would you say?” she asked.
“It’s junk, really. I used to think it all meant something, but there’s nothing of value in there.”
“He said you’d need these one day?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Don’t make much sense to me, really.”
Elizabeth kept her eyes on the contents, moving from one object to the other. I saw her mouth grow into a hidden smile, saw it tighten into thoughtfulness. Saw it draw in like she were about to cry. She nodded and smiled, then looked over to me. “Makes sense to me,” she said.
“It does?”
“What do we take out of this world, Andy?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“No, you’re wrong. We take one thing with us—the narrative of our lives. You’re not flesh and bone as much as you are a story, a first chapter and a last and everything in between. In the end, Andy, your story is all you have. And that’s why it needs to be told.”
“Looks like my story ends with a question mark,” I said.
“Oh, I doubt that. You haven’t told me what brought you here, but there was a reason behind it. Maybe the reason is in that box.”
“I know why this happened. It doesn’t have anything to do with that box. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything. I know you have to help me, Elizabeth, but I promise I just don’t see what you can do.”
“I don’t have to help,” she said. “I want to. But you have to let me.”
I looked at Elizabeth’s face and then down into the box. The fingers of the good hand I had left slipped over the objects inside. I touched them and touched my memories—times when everything had been good and right and solid. Not like then.
“I’m willing to play along, but just so you’ll let me leave.”
“Good,” Elizabeth said. She smiled again and patted my arm. “That’s good, Andy.”
“Where do we start?”
She reached into the box and rooted through its contents, finally settling on the slingshot. She carefully lifted it from the box without disturbing anything else and held it up to me.
“Let’s start here,” she said.
A chuckle managed to escape through my bandages.
“What?” Elizabeth asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just remembering. He hadn’t been around for very long then.”
“The Old Man?”
I nodded. “I hadn’t been with my grandparents very long, either. Like I said, they were great people. Mennonites. Nothing wrong with that, but boy, they were strict. No television, no radio. The phone was a necessity, but an evil one. I hated living like that at first, but it actually ended up doing a lot more good for me than harm.”
“How so?”
I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Taught me to slow down, I guess. I couldn’t listen to the radio, so I listened to myself. And I couldn’t watch television, so I watched my grandparents. How they lived, what they did, what they believed. And the birds. I watched the birds. Grandma loved her birds. Grandpa put up a bunch of feeders and houses and baths to draw them, and Grandma tended to them. We’d walk through the yard in the evenings and she’d point out this tree and that, and where the birds were, and what they ate and where they went. Our whole backyard sounded like a symphony. Robins, jays, mockingbirds, cardinals, you name it. But it was the purple martins she loved the most.” I paused, remembering, and finished, “That’s what got me into trouble.”
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair and said, “Well you know I gotta hear about that.”
She smiled again, smiled that beautiful smile, and I offered a pained one back.
And I began my story.