The Angel In The Darkness Part 1

The Angel in the Darkness.

by Kage Baker.

August 6,1991.

Maria Aguilar slammed the door of her apartment, dropped her keys and purse on the coffee table, threw her head back, and screamed in perfect silence. She had not had a good day at work.

She seldom had good days at work, lately; she was an underpaid insurance underwriter in a firm that had just been sold to new owners, and the future was dubious. Today, with rumors of relocation and layoffs, it was especially dubious. The weather was stickily hot, the air acrid with smog. She was forty-six, single, overweight, and drove an eight-year-old Buick Century.

And the red light on the answering machine was blinking at her.

She stepped out of one of her high heels and threw it at the wall, not quite close enough to hit the phone table.

"What the h.e.l.l is it now, Tina?" she muttered, as she undressed. "Philip's daddy didn't show up to drive you to the clinic for his shots? Philip's cutting another tooth and you can't get him to stop crying? Philip ran out of Similac and you need somebody to drive you to the market? Or maybe you just can't get the cork out of your G.o.ddam bottle of Pink Chablis?"

Stalking back through the living room in her bathrobe, Maria glared at the answering machine. "You can d.a.m.n well wait," she told it, and leaned sideways into her tiny kitchen. Rummaging in the freezer, she withdrew a pint of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia. She pulled a spoon from the drainer, shoved a pile of unfolded laundry to one end of the couch, and settled down to work her way through some consolation.

Halfway through the pint, however, she sighed, set it aside, and pressed the play messages b.u.t.ton. She braced herself for Tina's voice weepy and alcoholic, or, worse, with the abnormally bright and chirpy tone that meant something had gone really wrong. Instead, she heard a total stranger.

"Uha Ms. Aguilera, this is Marcy Jackson of Senior Outreach. Mrs. Avila at the Evergreen Care Home gave me your number and suggested we might discuss the best possible outlook for your father, uh, what we can do to make him more, uh, to improve the quality of his care. There are some other facilities I can recommenda""

Maria said a four-letter-word. Five minutes later, having pulled on sweats and sneakers, she was back in the Buick Century fighting traffic, on her way to the Evergreen Care Home.

Mrs. Avila was younger than Maria, but she always spoke as though she were a kindergarten teacher gently rebuking a five-year-old.

"It's specifically stated in the terms of admission," she said. "No open flames in any room at any time. He's had two warnings now. Today was his third infraction."

"Why the h.e.l.l didn't you tell me he had a lighted candle in his room?" Maria cried.

Mrs. Avila pursed her lips. "We had a.s.sumed you'd noticed. When you visited your father."

"Buta"" Maria fell silent, realizing she had seen the candle after all. As long as she could remember, there had been a votive candle flickering in its little ruby-gla.s.s cup in front of the wooden figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, familiar to the point of invisibility. For most of Maria's life, the Virgin had stood on the mantelpiece of the house on Fountain Avenue. Recently, she had relocated to a shelf above Hector's television set in the Evergreen Care Home.

She was still there, smiling through five generations of candle-soot, when Maria stepped into her father's room; but there was no light in the gla.s.s cup now.

Hector, seated on the edge of his narrow bed, blinked at her and smiled wide.

"Hey, shweetie," he exclaimed, rising painfully to his feet. "It's sho good to see you!"

He struggled forward and she came quickly to take his hands, seat him again. His hands were soft now, felt fragile as chicken feathers. "Papi, we have to talk. Do you understand they want you to move out of here?" said Maria.

He smiled, nodding, looking into her eyes; then the meaning of her words got through and he scowled, looked away.

"I'm moving back to my daughter's plashe," he said.

"No, no, Papi, listena"why are you talking like that? Did you break your upper plate again?"

"No, no. Ia"wait! Yesh I did." He fished in his mouth, produced it for her inspection. Maria stared at it bleakly. She dug in her purse and found the Papi kit: disposable plastic gloves, antibacterial ointment, Band-Aids, denture adhesive, tube of Superglue. She pulled on a pair of gloves.

"Christ Jesus, Papi. Give it here."

He looked on mildly as she dried the pieces with a paper napkin and fitted them together.

"Did you know, my wife used to be in the movies?" he said.

"I know, Papi. Three Republic Studios serials, one monster flick, and a TV commercial for bananas. I'm your daughter Maria, remember?"

"Oh. When's Tina bringing the little man?" he asked, smiling again.

"Pretty soon, Papi. He's teething right now, and he's a handful. Here we go; you have to make this last, Papi, please, okay? I still haven't got your paperwork straightened out at the dental clinic. The only time I can do it is during the day when I'm at work, and there's only so long I can wait on hold on a personal call. You see?"

"Uh-huh."

"Have they said what your white blood cell count was, from last Tuesday?"

"No. n.o.body tells me anything."

"d.a.m.n. And where have you been getting votive candles for Our Lady?"

"Corner store."

"You mean somebody went down there and got them for you?" Maria looked up sharply.

"No. I take my walk."

"Oh, my G.o.d." Maria closed her eyes, imagining her father toddling through traffic like Mr. Magoo. "n.o.body told me they were letting you out for walks. Papi, you can't do that! You get lost. Remember?"

He just shrugged, smiling in a vague kind of way.

"Look, Papia"Papi, are you listening to me? You aren't supposed to have candles in your room. They're this close to throwing you out of here, Papi, you hear me? I got them to give you one more chance. But you have to promise me you're not going to break the rules again. No more candles, okay? You could burn the place down."

When that sank in on Hector he looked askance, elaborately scornful.

"Why, they're crazy. I never burned our house down," he stated. "Fifty years Our Lady has her candle, on Fountain. S'not dangerous."

"It's the law nowadays, Papi," Maria said. She had a flash of inspiration. "Listen, you know what they're doing now, in churches? They've got little electric votive lights in front of the statues. You drop in a dime, you push the b.u.t.ton, a light comes on in the cup." Gingerly she set his upper plate on the top of the bureau, wedging it between Hector's Bible and water gla.s.s, and peeled off the disposable gloves. Grabbing up her purse, she searched through it.

"Here! I'll show you what we're going to do." She pulled out her keys and undipped the mini Maglite flashlight she kept there for emergency occasions. "See this teeny flashlight? Cute, huh? Red, just like a rose. Look, Papi, we're going to dedicate this flashlight to the Blessed Mother, okay? Here!" Maria turned on the mini Mag and stuck it in the candle cup, then hastily tilted it outward so the Blessed Mother didn't look quite so much as though she were telling a scary story at a slumber party.

"Ta-da! And, uh, look, see the little spot of light it throws up in the corner? Think of that as, like, a little window into Heaven. That's where your guardian angel is watching over you, all right?"

Hector eyed it doubtfully.

"You're wasting the battery."

"It's not wasting!" Maria threw her hands up in the air. "It's burning in honor of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, okay? Papi, I'll go to Bargain Mart and buy you a whole case of triple-A batteries, I swear. It'll be just like candles, only safer. And then you can go on living here."

Hector's mouth trembled.

"I want to go home," he said.

"Oh, Papi, don't start that again," Maria begged. "These are nice people. They drive you to your doctor appointments. They make sure you take all your medications, don't they? And you know I can't do that unless I quit my job. And I can't afford to quit my job. I used up my personal leave when you had pneumonia as it is. Please. This is how it has to be."

But his attention had wandered away, and he gazed up at the light on the ceiling now.

"My guardian angel," he mused. "Your Uncle Porfirio came to see me, you know?"

She nearly screamed out Uncle Porfirio has been dead for thirty-five G.o.dd.a.m.ned years, Papi! Containing her fury, she merely said: "Gosh. Did you have a nice visit?"

Hector just nodded, smiling now, tranquil and enigmatic as Buddha.

She got him to promise he'd be good, to promise he'd leave his upper plate out until tomorrow morning when the glue would be set, promised in turn she'd be back the next evening with more batteries, and kissed him good-bye. His kiss was wet and soft. Maria fled from his room down the pastel hallway, hating herself for her anger.

At the elevator, a man waited. He merely turned and smiled at Maria, as she drew near; but something about his smile chilled her.

She smiled back, though, and studied him out of the corner of one eye. What was it? She knew, if she looked long enough, she'd figure out what was setting off subliminal alarm bells in her mind.

Maria had been sensitive, all her life, to physical differences in others. Her acuteness of observation had often embarra.s.sed her parents, when she had been too little to know better than to blurt out Mama, that lady has a wig on her head! or Papi, why is that man dressed up like a lady? It had enraged her sister, when Maria had been able to spot dilated pupils or smell the chemical sweat that betrayed drug use in Isabel's boyfriends. Isabel had remarked often, acidly, that Maria would make a great vampire hunter.

What was it about this man, now? Gla.s.s eye? Prosthetic limb? A trace of ketone on the breath? He wore a white coat, though somehow he didn't look like a doctor. He was young, too, perhaps in his mid-twenties. And the smile was still on his face even though he was no longer meeting her eyes, a self-a.s.sured smirk that reminded her of, of, ofa the Cat in the Hat.

The elevator arrived, the doors slid open. Maria stepped in and turned, but the man remained where he stood. He lifted his eyes to her look of inquiry.

"No thanks, Maria, I'm going up," he said.

"How'd youa"" she said, before the doors closed and the elevator dropped with her.

"Well, that was creepy," she remarked aloud.

Two ambulances had pulled up outside the lobby, sirens wailing, lights flashing. She barely noticed them, striding back to her car. Somebody was always dying at the Evergreen Care Home.

She drove too fast heading back into LA, through a lurid purple evening shot with red sunlight. Would there be a thunderstorm tonight? An earthquake? The freeway rose and fell like a serpent, offering her chaotic glimpses of the tumbled city as she sped along. Aztec pyramids, palm trees, Babylonian ziggurat, graffiti cryptic as hieroglyphs along the dry river channels. The air was muggy with wet heat, trembling. Something was out of balance somehow, something portended doom; but that was normal for Los Angeles.

Still, the feeling nagged at her enough to make her pull off the freeway and stop in at the house on Fountain, to check on Tina and the baby.

Everything looked normal enough there, if sad: old bungalow set back from the street in its unkempt garden, half hidden by banana trees, rubber trees, hibiscus bushes. Even the for sale by owner sign was beginning to be engulfed by creepers. Again, the reproachful little voice in her memory told her Papi used to keep all this so nicea "Everything changes," she replied stolidly, and made her way up the front walk to the door.

Tina, to her pleasant surprise, was being Good Tina. She was sober, cheerful, and the house was clean. Philip was rolling about in his walker, chewing on a toaster waffle.

"Baby, look! It's Auntie!" cried Tina, and Philip grinned and bounced in his walker. He waddled it laboriously across the floor, right up to Maria's feet, and stared up into her face. Her heart broke with love and she leaned down to scoop him up, kiss his fat little chin and cheeks. He gurgled, waving his waffle.

"How's everything been today?" Maria inquired. Tina, washing her hands in the kitchen, shouted: "Really fine, Auntie! I cleaned that little storage room behind the garage. Hauled out tons of old junk Grandpa had h.o.a.rded in there. Most of it had been rained on and was just a mess, so I trashbagged it, but there was this one box I thought you'd want to seea"" She emerged from the kitchen drying her hands on a dishtowel, and tossed it aside as she stooped to lift a cardboard carton from the floor.

"It's mostly old photo alb.u.ms," she added.

"That's the only box that wasn't ruined?" said Maria, with a sinking feeling. "Honey, some of that stuff was Mama's, from the house back in Durangoa""

"It was covered in black mold," Tina told her firmly. "And we have to learn to let go of the past, like my therapist says. Look, I thought we could sit down and look at the pictures together. You should see Grandma's old movie stuff! It'll cheer you up. Want a gla.s.s of wine?"

So she had alcohol in the house again. "Okay," said Maria heavily, and sank down on the couch with the baby.

But Tina brought out only the one gla.s.s, and though Maria disliked Pink Chablis intensely she drank it, grateful that Tina wasn't joining her.

They went through the first alb.u.m, as Philip babbled and reduced his waffle to eggy bits. This alb.u.m contained a few black and white glossies, glamorous Lupe Montalban's publicity shots, including one hilarious shot from a monster B-movie where she was standing at the mouth of a cave, screaming in terror at a robot who looked like a trash can. The rest were family snapshots from the fifties, tiny black-and-white images with white scalloped borders.

"December 25,1951. See how new the house looked?" said Tina, smiling and pointing. Maria sighed. Everything looked new, and full of light: what a tidy lawn, dichondra for G.o.d's sake, who had dichondra lawns anymore? And the front porch empty and clean, the hibiscus bushes clipped to neat boxes, the front walk straight and clear. Who were the two little girls on Christmas-morning-new tricycles? Why, the pretty one would grow up to be the famous Isabel Aguilar O'Hara, gracing the cover of Vanity Fair only last year! And the older one? Oh, that was her sister. Maria somebody.

"That was Grandpa, can you believe it?" Tina shook her head at the handsome young man crouched on the walk behind the little girls. "And Grandma. This was before she got sick?"

"Years before." Maria peered at the figure half-shadowed on the porch, smiling from a swing chair. "She didn't get the cancer until I was a soph.o.m.ore.You look a lot like her."

"Why'd she give up acting?"

"It was just what women did back then, once they married and settled down," said Maria. And her career was over, thanks to Uncle Porfirio, she added silently.

"And here you are at your First Communion," said Tina, "And that's my mom, and there's Grandpa and Grandma with the priest, right? And that's you on a streetcar with Grandpa somewhere."

"It's not a streetcar. That was Angel's Flight. It was a funicular railroad with two little cars, one block long. It's gone now; used to be downtown. That's your mom and your grandmother behind us."

"And this is all of you in Chinatown, I guess, huh?" Tina angled the book in the light. "Or is that Olvera Street? The thing I began to wonder about, looking through these, was: who took the pictures? Most of the time it's Grandma, Grandpa, you and my mom in one shot."

"Uncle Porfirio had a camera. He was sort of Papi's cousin," said Maria, setting Philip back in his walker. She thought of Hector, staring up dreamy-eyed at the spot of light on his ceiling, and grimaced.

"What's the matter?" said Tina, watching her.

"Nothing."

"Was he the one who was a policeman?"

"LAPD," Maria affirmed, getting up and going to the kitchen to pour out her wine. "Plainclothes detective. He got killed when I was eleven. That's why there aren't that many pictures later on."

"How come there's no pictures of him?"

"There's one," said Maria, returning. She sat down and paged through the book, past the Christmases, past the trips to Disneyland, past the loving color portraits of the brand-new two-tone 1956 Chevy Bel-Air (pink and black!).

"Here," she said at last, setting her finger on a shot taken in this very room. A black-and-white picture of Isabel, seated on this very couch, proudly holding up for the camera the cardboard model she'd made for school: Mission San Fernando, with kidney bean tiles glued on its roof.

"That's just my mom," said Tina. She leaned closer. "Oh!"

The big mirror had still hung over the fireplace back then. Its surface reflected a glimpse of the breakfast nook, otherwise out of sight through the doorway. A man in a suit could just be seen there, seated at the table, head bowed over a newspaper.

"He looksa mean," said Tina at last.

"He was mean," said Maria. "He was a real harda.s.s, and he had a face like Satan. But he was a good man."