Elizabeth sat with her leg draped over the chair and the scissors tucked into her hand. She said nothing at first (which wasn’t surprising, given what I’d just said), but she kept her eyes in line with my own. That did surprise me. We cannot keep our secrets deep within ourselves. They will fester outward and manifest in some way, leaving us with a disfigurement that others may not see but is surely felt. I did not doubt that Elizabeth sensed my deformity, yet she did not look away.
“That’s pretty incredible,” she said. “All of it.”
I suppose there wasn’t much she could say that would have made me feel better. Even if she had said That’s the most factual story I’ve ever heard! I wouldn’t have believed her. The Old Man had never made me promise to tell no one about him. That secret was mine alone.
“Incredible like amazing,” I asked, “or incredible like…not…credible?”
“Oh, I believe the Old Man is real, Andy,” she said. She spun the scissors in her hand and then stopped. “Real to you, at the very least. The human mind is an amazing creation. It will go to great lengths to try and put order to the chaos life can bring.”
“The human mind?” I asked. “So you think he is all in my head?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m saying you went through a great trauma when you were too young to understand it. And between you and me, I don’t discount the possibility that something else is going on here. The world isn’t solid, Andy. There are aspects of existence we simply cannot comprehend. If God decided to give you an angel, then He did. I can accept that. Either way, you two seemed to have a pretty comfortable relationship from the start.”
I chuckled and said, “It would appear. Like I said, back then he was more of an imaginary friend. I wasn’t convinced it was anything more.”
“Was he always so carefree?”
“Wouldn’t you be? Being able to waltz around unseen and unheard by all but one person and knowing things no one else could know? That would make me feel pretty carefree. So yeah, he enjoyed himself. It was like he was experiencing life for the first time. Which I guess maybe he was.”
“Maybe,” Elizabeth said. She leaned back in her chair and propped her feet on the sides of my bed. At some point she had kicked off her shoes, and now ten red toenails played peek-a-boo with the bed sheets. It was a gesture of ease. Of comfort. And though I yet felt neither toward her, I appreciated the fact that she felt both in my presence. “But I get something else from that story. He wasn’t just along for the ride. I don’t get the sense he was hanging around under that birdhouse just to see you screw up. He was there for a purpose. He was trying to teach you something.”
I said, “Or he was just trying to keep me from looking like an idiot.”
“No. He let you fail, Andy. You know that, right? He tried to talk you out of not shooting that rock, but you didn’t listen. He let you choose, even though from what I gather he knew that choice would be wrong. Just to show you that sometimes the reasons you have for your actions don’t mean much, no matter how well-intentioned. In the end, it’s what you do and not what you meant to do that matters.”
“I never thought of it that way,” I said.
She leaned forward and slapped me on the hand. “Well see, that’s why I’m here.”
Elizabeth offered me a wink as a small gesture of faith that she had snuck into my room and convinced me to talk to her for my own good. I wasn’t completely ready to agree with her. But a part of me knew it was just a matter of time before the last bricks in the walls I’d built around myself fell before her, and another part of me knew there wasn’t much I could do about it.
“So were you always so contrary to your grandparents’ wishes?”
“Oh, I guess I grew out of that,” I told her. “As much as I could, anyway.”
Elizabeth lifted her eyebrows. “And what’s that mean?”
“Nothing. I’m just the kind of person who thinks we all might grow up and learn more, but we’re still always gonna be who we are.”
“And who are you, Andy?”
“My father’s son. Not that I’m a drunk or anything—I don’t drink at all. But there are times when I feel like if I took a small slip down a dark hole, I’d come out him on the other side. I guess we’re all like that. We’re all children. From the moment we’re born until the moment we die. We might learn how to talk, but we never quite learn what to say. And we learn how to walk, but we never stop stumbling.”
“And the Old Man told you that?”
“Not really.”
I motioned for the box that sat by my leg. Elizabeth reached over and handed it to me. I picked through the contents with my good hand, shuffling them around until I found it.
I held the paintbrush up to my nose and sniffed. The paint had dried, of course, along with the scent. A dozen summers had passed since it had last been used, and even then it had been held under the water hose to clean afterward. But I sniffed anyway.
“It was more Mary’s telling,” I said.