After a while, Owen said, “IT’S GONE. IT MUST HAVE SEEN ME THE FIRST TIME.”
I pointed innocently at the dummy. “What’s that?” I whispered.
“THAT’S THE DUMMY, YOU IDIOT!” Owen said. “THE ANGEL WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BED.”
I touched his forehead; he was burning up. “You have a fever, Owen,” I said.
“I SAW AN ANGEL,” he said.
“Is that you, boys?” my mother asked sleepily.
“Owen has a fever,” I said. “He feels sick.”
“Come here, Owen,” my mother said, sitting up in bed. He went to her and she felt his forehead and told me to get him an aspirin and a glass of water.
“Owen saw an angel,” I said.
“Did you have a nightmare, Owen?” my mother asked him, as he crawled into bed beside her.
Owen’s voice was muffled in the pillows. “NOT EXACTLY,” he said.
When I returned with the water and the aspirin, my mother had fallen asleep with her arm around Owen; with his protrusive ears spread on the pillow, and my mother’s arm across his chest, he looked like a butterfly trapped by a cat. He managed to take the aspirin and drink the water without disturbing my mother, and he handed the glass back to me with a stoical expression.
“I’M GOING TO STAY HERE,” he said bravely. “IN CASE IT COMES BACK.”
He looked so absurd, I couldn’t look at him. “I thought you said it was an angel,” I whispered. “What harm would an angel do?”
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT KIND OF ANGEL IT WAS,” he whispered, and my mother stirred in her sleep; she tightened her grip around Owen, which must have simultaneously frightened and thrilled him, and I went back to my room alone.
From what nonsense did Owen Meany discern what he would later call a PATTERN? From his feverish imagination? Years later, when he would refer to THAT FATED BASEBALL, I corrected him too impatiently.
“That accident, you mean,” I said.
It made him furious when I suggested that anything was an “accident”—especially anything that had happened to him; on the subject of predestination, Owen Meany would accuse Calvin of bad faith. There were no accidents; there was a reason for that baseball—just as there was a reason for Owen being small, and a reason for his voice. In Owen’s opinion, he had INTERRUPTED AN ANGEL, he had DISTURBED AN ANGEL AT WORK, he had UPSET THE SCHEME OF THINGS.
I realize now that he never thought he saw a guardian angel; he was quite convinced, especially after THAT FATED BASEBALL, that he had interrupted the Angel of Death. Although he did not (at the time) delineate the plot of this Divine Narrative to me, I know that’s what he believed: he, Owen Meany, had interrupted the Angel of Death at her holy work; she had reassigned the task—she gave it to him. How could these fantasies become so monstrous, and so convincing to him?
My mother was too sleepy to take his temperature, but it’s a fact that he had a fever, and that his fever led him to a night in my mother’s bed—in her arms. And wouldn’t his excitement to find himself there, with her—not to mention his fever—have contributed to his readiness to remain wide-eyed and wide awake, alert for the next intruder, be it angel or ghost or hapless family member? I think so.
Several hours later, there came to my mother’s room the second fearful apparition. I say “fearful” because Owen was, at that time, afraid of my grandmother; he must have sensed her distaste for the granite business. I had left the light on in my mother’s bathroom and the door to her bathroom open—into the hall—and worse, I had left the cold-water tap running (when I’d fixed Owen a glass of water for his aspirin). My grandmother always claimed she could hear the electric meter counting each kilowatt; as soon as it was dark, she followed my mother through the house, turning off the lights that my mother had turned on. And this night, in addition to her sensing that a light had been left on, Grandmother heard the water running—either the pump in the basement, or the cold-water tap itself. Finding my mother’s bathroom in such reckless abandon, Grandmother proceeded to my mother’s room—anxious that my mother was ill or else indignant with budget-mindedness and determined to point out my mother’s carelessness, even if she had to wake her up.
Grandmother might have just turned out the light, turned off the water, and gone back to bed, if she hadn’t made the mistake of turning the cold-water tap the wrong way—she turned it much more forcefully on, dousing herself in a spray of the coldest possible water; the tap had been left running for hours. Thus was her nightgown soaked; she would have to change it. This must have inspired her to wake my mother; not only had electricity and water been awasting, but here Grandmother was—soaked to the skin in her efforts to put a stop to all this escaping energy. I would guess, therefore, that her manner, upon entering my mother’s room, was not calm. And although Owen was prepared for an angel, he might have expected that even the Angel of Death would reappear in a serene fashion.
My grandmother, dripping wet—her usually flowing nightgown plastered to her gaunt, hunched body, her hair arrayed in its nightly curlers, her face thickly creamed the lifeless color of the moon—burst into my mother’s room. It was days before Owen could tell me what he thought: when you scare off the Angel of Death, the Divine Plan calls for the kind of angels you can’t scare away; they even call you by name.
“Tabitha!” my grandmother said.
“AAAAAAHHHHHH!”
Owen Meany screamed so terribly that my grandmother could not catch her breath. Beside my mother on the bed, she saw a tiny demon spring bolt upright—propelled by such a sudden and unreal force that my grandmother imagined the little creature was preparing to fly. My mother appeared to levitate beside him. Lydia, who still had both her legs, leaped from her bed and ran straight into her dresser drawers; for days, she would display her bruised nose. Sagamore, who was a short time away from his appointment with the diaper truck, woke up Mr. Fish with his barking. Throughout the neighborhood, the lids of trash cans clattered—as cats and raccoons made good their escape from Owen Meany’s alarm. A small segment of Gravesend must have rolled over in their beds, imagining that the Angel of Death had clearly come for someone.
“Tabitha,” my grandmother said the next day. “I think it is most strange and improper that you should allow that little devil to sleep in your bed.”
“He had a fever,” my mother said. “And I was very sleepy.”
“He has something more serious than a fever, all the time,” my grandmother said. “He acts and sounds as if he’s possessed.”
“You find fault with everyone who isn’t absolutely perfect,” my mother said.