Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

Tired as he was, he walked through the Quarter rather than spend the few bucks for a cab, and he rode the St. Charles car up home, staring dumbly out the window.

He wanted desperately to see Liona. He knew that she had come last night to see him graduate--she and her parents, in fact--and he wanted to explain to her why he had not been there.

He remembered that they had had plans afterwards, but now it seemed remote and he was too tired to think of what he would say to her when he finally spoke to her. He thought of her large loving eyes, of the ready wit and sharp intellect she never concealed, and her ringing laugh. He thought of all the wondrous traits she had, and he knew that as the college years passed, he would surely lose her. She had a scholarship at the Conservatory too, but how could he compete with the young men who would inevitably surround her?

She had a glorious voice, and in the production at Jesuit, she had seemed a natural star, loving the stage, and graciously but confidently accepting applause and flowers and compliments.

He didn't understand why she had bothered with him at all. And he felt he had to draw back, let her go, and yet he almost cried thinking about her.

As the rattling clanking streetcar moved uptown, he hugged his lute and even went to sleep against it for a little while. But he woke with a start at his stop, and got off and dragged his feet as he went down the pavement.

As soon as he entered the apartment he knew something was wrong.

He found Jacob and Emily drowned in the bathtub. And she, with her wrists slit, lay dead on the bed, the blood soaking the spread and half of the pillow.

For a long time, he stared at the bodies of his brother and sister. The water had drained out but their pajamas were in moist wrinkles. He could see the bruises all over Jacob. What a fight he had put up. But the face of Emily at the other end of the tub was smooth and perfect, with eyes closed. Maybe she hadn't been awake when their mother had drowned her. There was blood in the water. There was blood on the waterspout where Jacob must have cracked his head as she pushed him down.

The kitchen knife lay beside his mother. She'd all but chopped off her left hand, so deep was the wound, but she'd bled to death from both wrists.

All this had happened hours ago, he knew it.

The blood was dry or at best sticky.

Yet still he lifted his brother out of the tub and actually tried to breathe life into him. His brother's body was icy cold, or so it seemed. And it was soggy.

He couldn't bear to touch his mother or his sister.

His mother lay with her lids half shut, her mouth open. She looked already dried out, like a husk. A husk, he thought, exactly. He stared at the rosary in the blood. The blood was all over the painted wood floor.

Only the smell of wine hung over all these pitiable visions. Only the smell of the malt in the beer. Outside cars passed. A block away, there came the roar of the passing streetcar.

Toby went into the living room, and sat for a long time with his lute on his lap.

Why hadn't he known such a thing could happen? Why had he left Jacob and Emily alone with her? Dear God, why had he not seen that it would come to this? Jacob was only ten years old. How in the name of Heaven had Toby let this happen to them?

It was all his fault. He had no doubt of it. That she might hurt herself, yes, of this he'd thought, and God forgive him, maybe he had even prayed for that in the cathedral. But this? His brother and sister dead? His breathing stopped again. For a moment he thought he'd never be able to breathe again. He stood up and only then did the breath come out of him in a dry soundless sob.

Listlessly he stared at the mean apartment with its ugly mismatched furnishings, its old oak desk and cheap flowered chairs, and all the world to him seemed filthy and gray and he felt a fear and then a growing terror.

His heart pounded. He stared at the drugstore prints of flowers in their ugly frames--these foolish things he'd bought--ranged around the papered walls of the apartment. He stared at the flimsy curtains he'd bought as well, and the cheap white window shades behind them.

He didn't want to go into the bedroom and see the print of the guardian angel. He felt he would rip it to pieces if he saw it. He would not ever again, ever, raise his eyes to such a thing.

A gloom followed the pain. A gloom came when the pain could not be sustained. It covered every object that he beheld, and concepts such as warmth and love seemed unreal to him, or forever beyond reach, as he sat in the midst of this ugliness and ruin.

Sometime or other during the hours he sat there, he heard the answering machine on the phone. It was Liona calling him. He knew that he could not pick up the phone. He knew that he could never see her again, or speak to her, or tell her about what had happened.

He didn't pray. It didn't even occur to him. It didn't even occur to him to talk to the angel at his side, or the Lord to whom he'd prayed only an hour and a half ago. He'd never see his brother and sister alive again, or his mother, or his father, or anyone he knew. This is what he thought. They were dead, irrevocably dead. He believed in nothing. If someone had come to him at that moment, as his guardian angel sought to do, and told him,You will see them all again, he might have spat at that person in a perfect fury.

All day he remained in the apartment with his dead family ranged around him. He kept the bathroom and bedroom doors open, because he didn't want the bodies to be alone. It seemed horribly disrespectful.

Liona called twice more, and the second time he was half dozing and wasn't sure whether or not he had really heard her.

Finally he fell deep asleep on the sofa, and when he first opened his eyes, he forgot what had happened, and he thought they were all alive and things were as usual. At once, the truth came back to him with the force of a hammer.

He changed into his blazer and khakis and packed up all his fine clothes. He got them into the suitcase his mother had taken to the hospital years ago when she'd had her babies. He took all the cash from the hiding places.

He kissed his little brother. Rolling up his sleeve, he reached down into the soiled bathtub to put a kiss with his fingers on his sister's cheek. Then he kissed his mother's shoulder. Again he stared at the rosary. She hadn't been saying it as she died. It was just there, caught in the snarled spread, forgotten.

He picked it up, took it into the bathroom, and ran the basin water over it until it was clean. Then he dried it on a towel and put it in his pocket.

Everybody looked very dead now, very empty. There was no odor yet, but they were very dead. The rigidity of his mother's face absorbed him. The body of Jacob on the floor was dry and wrinkled.

Then, as he turned to go, he went back to his desk. He wanted to take two books with him. He took his prayer book, and he took the book calledThe Angels by Fr. Pascal Parente.