The Angel In The Darkness Part 2

"Mm, good! See, it's all stuff you can manage with your plate out. Just in case they screw up downstairs and serve you the wrong meal. And I got this, tooa"" Maria pulled two cans from her purse. "It's like a vitamin shake. If you get hungry between meals, you just open one. I'll put them up here by the Blessed Mother so you don't forget, okay?"

"Mmhm," Hector replied, through a mouthful of hot dog.

She brought out her own hot dogs and soda, and they dined together companionably.

"I saw your mother today," said Hector.

Maria halted, soda halfway to her mouth. "Papia Mama's in Heaven, remember?"

"I know that," he replied, indignant. "It was on TV."

"Oh! You mean, one of her movies? OmiG.o.d, which one?"

"The one with the s.p.a.ceships." Hector strained for his malt, unable to reach it. She got up and handed it to him.

"Aztec Robots from Mars? No kidding! Maybe they'll finally put that out on tape, huh? Then I'll buy you a VCR, so you can see her whenever you want."

But Hector was blinking back tears. "I miss your mothera"

"Oh, Papi, don't cry," said Maria hurriedly, kissing his cheek. "One of these days Mama's going to come for you in a pink Cadillac, okay? And you'll live happily ever after, up with the angels. You just have to hang on until then."

As she was wadding up paper bags for the trash basket afterward, Maria noticed the gauze pad taped to his inner arm. "What happened to your arm, Papi?"

"Lab work," Hector replied.

"What kind of lab work? What for?"

"Don't know," said Hector, waving a hand. "Doctor came and did it."

"They're supposed to tell me if you need to go to the clinic. Did you have to be taken to the clinic?" Maria narrowed her eyes.

"Nope," said Hector. "Doctor made a house call."

"House call?" Maria was baffled. "And what's this I hear about somebody jumping off the roof?"

"There was a big fight up there," said Hector, nodding.

"A fight?"

"Yeah." Hector's smile vanished again. He looked uneasy. "I mean, I don't know."

She tried to see Mrs. Avila to ask her about what kind of lab work Hector had required, but the office door was closed and the blinds were drawn. Fuming, Maria drove home, deciding to call on her lunch hour tomorrow.

When she walked through the door of her apartment, the first thing she noticed was that Hector's upper plate was sitting beside her answering machine.

The second thing she noticed was the slip of paper under the plate.

Standing perfectly motionless, she thought: Wow, it really does feel like ice water along your spine. She looked right, at the closet door; she looked left, at the door to her bedroom. Ahead of her was the kitchen doorway. Her gun was in the bedroom.

Quietly as she could, she withdrew a can of Mace from her purse and advanced. No masked killer burst from closet, bedroom, or kitchen, and so she was able to get to the phone table. She read the note under the plate, being careful not to touch anything, and called the police. Then she withdrew to her bedroom and sat, shaking.

The note read simply: WE CAN TOUCH YOU.

The cops were interested in her love life to an excessive degree.

"You're sure this wouldn't be an ex-boyfriend?" the younger one wanted to know.

"Yes, I'm sure," Maria snapped, because it was the third time she had been asked that question.

"No ex-husbands?" asked the older one. "None."

"Well, why would anybody leave a note like this?" The younger cop hefted the plastic bag and peered through it at the note, stashed in there with the plate for fingerprinting.

"Because somebody's a total psycho and has decided to terrorize a complete stranger?" said Maria. "That happens, doesn't it?"

"So, you've got, like, noa"uha"nephews or brothers who might be in gangs?" the older cop inquired.

"No brothers. One grand-nephew, ten months old. Gosh, maybe he's in a gang," said Maria. "I should have thought of that before, huh?"

"Anybody in your family ever a.s.saulted?"

"My father, two years ago, when he lived with me," Maria admitted. "He's nearly eighty. He used to open the door to anybody, during the day when I was at work. I came home and found he'd been beaten up and robbed. He's in a care facility now."

"Anybody in your family ever murdered?"

"Only my uncle who was a cop," Maria replied. "Shot five times and beaten to death. He worked Vice Squad. You can look him up: Lieutenant Porfirio Aguilar, 1956."

There was a silence, and a perceptible change in the temperature of the room. The older cop cleared his throat.

"Well.You should probably get your locks changed. And, uh, go and stay with somebody until you get that taken care of, okay? And you can call me if anything else happens." He took a card from his wallet and gave it to her. "Do you have anyplace else to stay?"

The house was dark, though it was only eight-thirty. Maria climbed the porch steps with her overnight bag, heart hammering. On the porch, closed in by ivy and hibiscus, it was nearly pitch-black.

"Tina?" she called, pounding on the door. No answer.

She found her old key and opened the door; reached in to the right and flipped the switch that turned on the porch light, and instantly stood in a pool of yellow illumination from the cobwebbed gla.s.s globe above her head. The door was open about six inches, and through its gap she could make out toys scattered on the carpet, surreal, fearful-looking in the gloom. She groped farther inward, trying to find the interior light switch, and heard something dragging itself toward the door.

"Jesus," she murmured. She froze there with her arm halfway into the room, as the rattling came nearer; then mastered herself and pushed the door open.

The light from the porch fell on Philip's little upturned face. He rolled himself to the door in his walker and peered up at her.

"Honey bunny, what's going on?" she said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. She picked him upa"he was soaking wet, stinky, how long since he'd been changed?a"and turned on the overhead light, bracing herself for what she'd see.

Not so horrible as it might have been. Sufficient unto the day are the horrors thereof, she thought numbly.

Tina on the couch, pa.s.sed out. Two empty wine bottles, an empty gla.s.s, an ashtray, a plastic Baggie with a little pot in it, a box of kitchen matches and a book of rolling papers. Philip's toys all over the floor, along with what looked like the contents of the kitchen trash basket.

"Jesus," Maria repeated. Leaving Tina where she lay, she took the pot and flushed it down the toilet. Then she went through the house with Philip, turning on lights in every room. He watched her in solemn silence.

She gave Philip a bath, fed him, put him into jammies and fixed him a bottle; then retreated with him to Hector's armchair, and sang quietly to him. It took a while to get him to sleep. He kept sitting up to stare across at his mother, black eyes wide and worried.

"Mommy's just depressed again, sweetheart," Maria said quietly. "I wonder what did it this time?"

He nestled back down, took his bottle, and fell asleep at last.

Maria looked across the room and time and saw herself on that couch at twenty-three, with a bottle of gin and a bottle of Seven-Up and a big gla.s.s of ice, getting drunk fast, furious with the world, as Hector sat in the other room staring at Lupe's empty bed. And little Tina had sat next to her and watched, with black eyes wide and worried.

I could tell her I'm this close to calling Child Protective Services; but she'd only try to commit suicide again. I could actually call Child Protective Services; they'd take Philip away to foster care, where somebody would molest him, and then she really would check out. I could call Philip's daddy and tell him to take custody; I'm sure his wife would love being presented with Philip, especially when she's just had her own baby. I could call Isabela and she'd move to New Zealand.

"What am I going to do, mi hija?" she wondered. "Please, G.o.d, somebody, tell me."

She was late for work the next morning. Tina had been weepy, apologetic, resentful, and finally indignant when she discovered that her stash had been disposed of. Maria had countered by telling her about the stalker. While this had been enough of a shock to abruptly change Bad Tina to Good Tina, it had also terrified her, and Maria had to spend a half-hour calming her down.

There was no point in explaining any of this to Yvette, the new departmental supervisor. Yvette lived in a world where such things didn't happen. Maria simply apologized for oversleeping and offered to work through her lunch hour.

On her afternoon break, however, she called Mrs. Avila's office.

She got a recorded message informing her that the switchboard was temporarily unavailable due to the high volume of incoming calls, and she could leave a message after the tone. Wondering grumpily how that many people could be calling the Evergreen residents, most of whom never heard from their kids except at holidays, she left a message for Mrs. Avila.

Two hours later, as she was on the phone explaining rate increases to a client, Yvette appeared at the doorway to her cubicle. She bore a message scrawled on a yellow legal pad: emergency call in my office.

Maria knocked over a chair in her haste to get to Yvette's desk, relaxing only momentarily when she heard Mrs. Avila's voice on the line, rather than the police.

"Ms. Aguilar? I'm afraid I have some bad news." Mrs. Avila's voice was trembling. "We've had to admit your father to County General."

It never rains but it pours, Maria thought. "Has he had a stroke?"

"No," said Mrs. Avila, and it sounded as though she was drawing a deep breath. "He hasa"aha"a virus."

"What? He was fine yesterday!"

"This isa"" Mrs. Avila's voice broke. "This is some new thing. We've had several cases. He's in the ICU, and I don't know if you'll be able to get in to see hima""

By the time Maria had explained to Yvette, fought traffic all the way downtown to County General, found a parking s.p.a.ce and bullied her way upstairs, Hector was dead.

"What do you mean, I can't see him?" she asked the floor nurse, but the presence of men in hazmat suits going in and out of the Intensive Care Unit answered her question. She fought her way to the window and stared through. All she could see was a confused tentage of plastic, tubes, pipes, one skinny little mottled arm hanging down. Hector looked like an abandoned construction site.

The doctor, whose name she didn't catch, explained that Hector had died from a rapidly-progressing pneumonic infection, just as all the others had, but because he had fought it off longer, there was some hope thata"

"Longer?" Maria said. "What do you mean, all the others? How long were you treating him for this? He had no immune system, you know that?"

"He was brought in this morning," said the doctor.

"Buta"he said a doctor came and did some kind of lab work on him yesterday. There was a bandage on his arm," Maria protested. "He said the doctor made a house call."

The doctor looked at her in silence a moment.

"Really," he said. "That's interesting."

Maria was numb, going back down in the elevator, wandering past the gurneys full of moaning people parked in the hallways, threading her way between the cars in the parking lot. It wasn't until she got to the Buick and opened her purse for her keys that she saw the Papi kit, and the reality sank in: My father is dead.

And for about thirty seconds she felt the sense of release, of relief, that she had expected to feel. Then the mental image of the old man, the shrunken, childish, infinitely vulnerable thing he had become, vanished away forever. All she could remember was her father the way he had been in her childhood, young Hector who had put on dance records and waltzed in the living room with his two little girls, one on either arm, as Lupe sang from the kitchen where she fixed breakfasta The memory went through Maria like a knife. She leaned against the car and wept.

The next day it was in all the papers and even on the local news: how the Evergreen Care Home was being evacuated following the deaths of more than half of its residents and three members of its staff, of what was thought to be a new super-virus. Maria had to go to Kmart to buy clothes for Hector to be buried in, once his body was abruptly released, because she was unable to enter the Evergreen's building; it was full of more men in hazmat suits, carrying equipment in and out. Too surreal.

The funeral was surreal, too. Hector had been a member of the Knights of Columbus and they turned out for him in full regalia, a file of grandfathers in Captain Crunch hats. They were most of them too frail to be pallbearersa"six st.u.r.dy ushers wheeled Hector's coffin down the aislea"but they drew their sabers and formed an arch for him. Philip stared, absolutely fascinated, turning now and then to his mother and great aunt to point at the feathered hats.

There were more old men at the cemetery, ancient rifle-bearing veterans, one of whom carried a ca.s.sette player identical to the one Hector had owned. He slipped in a ca.s.sette and set it down to salute as "Taps" played, tinny and faint. The veterans fired off a twenty-one-gun salute; Philip started in his mother's arms and lay his head on her shoulder, trembling until the noise had stopped. At the end they folded the coffin flag into a triangle, just as Maria remembered the Marines doing at JFK's funeral long ago. As a final touch, they zipped it into a tidy plastic case, presenting it to her solemnly. Before leaving they asked for a donation, and Maria fished in her purse for a five-dollar bill to give them.

The old veterans left in a Chevy van painted with the Veterans of Foreign Wars insignia. The Knights of Columbus departed in two minivans and a Mercury Grand Marquis. Were Hector and Lupe going, too, away in a pink Cadillac to live happily ever after in the Land of the Dead?

Maria and Tina were left staring at Hector's coffin, poised on its gantry between the mounds of earth neatly covered by green carpet. Lupe's grave was hidden by them, and so was Uncle Porfirio's, but when the earth had been shoveled back in its hole the cemetery custodian would hose away the mud. They would lie there all three together, tidy, filed away, their stories finished. End of an era.

As Tina was buckling Philip into his car seat, Maria noticed a man standing alone by a near grave, head bowed, hands folded. He wore sungla.s.ses. Their black regard was turned on her, just for a moment. She stared hard at him; no, he wasn't the man with the Cat in the Hat smile. He lowered his head again, apparently deep in a prayer for his dead.

Maria shrugged and got into the Buick, wincing at the hot vinyl seat. She drove out carefully through the acres of manicured. lawn, flat and bright in the sticky heat of the morning. Questing for the nearest freeway on-ramp, she pa.s.sed Mission San Fernando. It sat like a postcard for Old California, orange groves, graceful adobe arches, painted wooden angels, pepper trees. The past stood guard on the past.

They drove home in a weary silence that was not broken until they walked into the living room, when Maria played the messages on the answering machine. There were two.

"Hi Maria, hi Tina, this is Rob O'Hara. I just thought I'd call and let you know again how sorry Isabel is that she can't make the funerala""

Tina stormed out of the room with Philip, muttering, "f.u.c.king selfish b.i.t.c.h!"

"a"know how much her father would have wanted her to do well, and the New York exhibit is turning out to be a terrific success. I'm sure he's looking down from Heaven, very proud of all of youa"

Rob's message ended abruptly, cut off in mid-sentence, and Maria smiled involuntarily. She expected him to resume in the second recording. Instead, there was a moment of silence but for background noise, and a hesitant throat-clearing. Maria tensed.

"Maria, Isabel, this is Frank Colton. Will you give me a call? I'm still at the same number in Seal Beach. I have some information for you."

Frowning, Maria sorted through the junk on the phone table for the family address book. She flipped through it. Who on earth was Frank Colton? She found a listing for him, seeing with a pang that it was in her mother's handwriting. As she dialed, she began to place the name: a long-ago Sat.u.r.day drive to the beach. She had been twelve. Hector anda yes, his name had been Frank, had sat together on the sand and talked about Uncle Porfirio. They had both gotten drunk, and Lupe had had to drive home.

She remembered him as a young man, with freckles and a crew cut: Uncle Porfirio's partner. He must be a retiree now. His voice had sounded old, tired. Maria dialed the number, hoping he wouldn't be home. But: "Colton," said the voice on the other end of the line.

"Mr. Colton? I'm Maria Aguilar. I'm sorry I didn't call you in timea""

"Oh! Hector's daughter. Right."

"You were the lieutenant who worked with my uncle, weren't you?"

"That's right." There was a long pause. "Looka I'm retired now, but I still get news. Your uncle's case was never solved, you know, and when anything related turns up, theya I get told. I heard you had some trouble, you thought, with a stalker?"

"Somebody was stalking me," Maria said. "My dad had some, uh, property stolen from his room. It tuned up in my apartment, with a threatening note. The cops took it away to test for fingerprints."

"Yeah, honey, I know. That's what I was calling about." The voice on the other end of the line sounded embarra.s.sed. "Hector's teeth, of all things. I guess we all get older, huh? Anywaya they're not going to tell you this, but they didn't find anything. No usable prints."

"Usable?"