“No, she loved him,” she said. “They were very close, closer than she and I were, really, at the end. She was lovely, really, really beautiful when I was kid. And don’t get me wrong, she loved me. No, she cherished me completely. But she was insane.” Focused completely on the canvas of Jake’s mother and sister, she could still feel the other painting lurking behind her, peering over her shoulder. “She saw angels,” she said. “Saw them, heard them speaking to her, felt them touching her, touched them back, talked back. She saw angels all around her the same way I see you now.” She looked over and saw his eyes had gone wide. “When I was little, she told me all about it, said she had always seen them, that they had always been with her. She acted like it was the most natural thing in the world. She used to say she was blessed.”
“Wow.” He seemed completely fascinated. “Like William Blake.”
“Gosh, I don’t know, Jason,” she snapped, returning her attention to the varnish. “Did William Blake ever tell his six-year-old daughter to be sure to save the angel a seat on the school bus?”
“I doubt it,” he admitted.
“It wasn’t some cool, freaky, mystic crystals kind of thing, trust me,” she said. “These angels weren’t dainty or cute. I hated them.” But that wasn’t really true, she thought. Before her father had left them, she had loved it when the angels came, had loved watching her mother’s face as she talked to them. She had believed absolutely that her mother’s visions were real. She had even thought a few times that she could see them herself. “My poor dad couldn’t take it,” she said. “Even before she got so bad her angels turned on her, she drove him crazy with it. Imagine your wife kissing you goodbye every morning and saying, ‘Behave yourself, honey—I’m sending an angel to watch.’”
He grinned. “He didn’t just think she was being cute?” She had seen that grin before. Jake had grinned that way back in college when she’d first tried to explain about Mama and her angels.
“No,” she said. “Trust me. She wasn’t cute, and he knew it.” She thought about the last time she had seen her mother alive, the memory she tried so religiously to avoid. It had been a week before the wedding, and she and Jake had driven up to the hospital to visit her, hoping against hope she might be well enough to come home for the ceremony. But as soon as they’d seen her, they’d both known it couldn’t happen.
“Baby, I was wrong!” she had screamed as soon as she saw Kelsey. “They’re bad!” Her mother’s black hair, still long enough to brush the base of her spine and shot through with streaks of white, had been hanging loose and wild, and she had scratched deep welts in her own cheeks, still so smooth and creamy pink. “The angels are bad!”
“It’s all right, Mama,” Kelsey had said, holding both her hands, the nails broken and filthy, not her mama’s hands at all. “The angels aren’t here, I promise.”
“They’ll come back.” She had still been crying, but she had let Kelsey lead her to a chair. “They always come back. And I sent them after you.” The agony on her face had broken Kelsey’s heart. “My baby girl. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right, Mama,” Kelsey had promised. “I’ll send them all away.”
“You do that,” Mama had said. “Don’t even look at them.”
“I won’t, I promise.” She had brushed the knots from her mother’s hair so carefully she never pulled, the same way her mama had always brushed the tangles out of her own curls when she was a child. “Jake will keep them away from me.”
“He will,” Mama had agreed, relaxing. “I never thought of that, but you’re right. Jake is so good. He’ll keep them all away.”
“That’s right.” She had braided her mother’s beautiful hair and cleaned the dirt from under her nails, and on her way out, she had hollered at the duty nurse until she made her cry for letting her mama get in such a state.
Three days later, her mama had been dead, her wrists and ankles slashed on the sharp edge of a metal bed slat. The wedding had been cancelled, of course. She and Jake had taken their license back to the probate court and gotten married there. Instead of going on a honeymoon, they had managed the funeral arrangements and packed. The day after the funeral, they had moved north, and neither of them had ever gone back.
“So he left,” Jason said, bringing her back to the now. “Your father.”
“Yeah,” she said. “When I was eight. He died of a massive coronary in his car about a year later out in California.” The angels got him, her mother had said at the time, neither smiling nor crying, neither happy or afraid. To her, it had just been a fact.
“Kelsey, Jesus,” Jason said. “I had no idea.”
“That I was so interesting?” She smiled. “Trust me, I’m not.” She looked over at Jake’s last painting, her own image so oblivious to the winged shadow looming over her. “So anyway, I don’t much care for that painting.”
“What did Jake think of your mother’s angels?” Jason asked.
“He thought I overreacted about them,” she said, keeping her tone as casual as possible. The truth was, she and Jake had screamed at one another more often and more bitterly about the angels than they ever had about money or family or leaving the toilet seat up. “He thought I should embrace my mama’s kind of crazy, to explore it.” She brushed varnish carefully over Jake’s signature, still clear and steady when he’d painted it, before he’d known he was going to die. “I’m sure he was trying to tell me something with the painting,” she said. “But I’d just as soon not hear it.”
“I can’t believe he would have wanted to hurt you, Kelsey,” Jason said. “Did the two of you ever talk about it?”
“About the painting? No.” By the time Jake had started his last painting, they weren’t talking about anything that might make him tired. “It doesn’t matter. And no, I don’t think he meant to hurt me at all.” She put on the last vertical stroke of varnish and straightened up. “I just don’t like it, that’s all.”
Jason nodded. “Okay.” He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “We’ll move it out of here soon, and you never have to look at it again if you don’t want to. I’ll keep it warehoused at the gallery until you know what you want to do with it.”
“Thanks. Once the varnish dries, y’all can come get all of them.” She reached back and patted his hand. “You’re kinda great, you know.”
“I know.” He kissed her cheek. “Now come on. Let me take you out to dinner.”
“No, please, I’m really not hungry.” She looked around the studio at the thirteen canvases Jake had left behind. Some were as small as a notebook, but most of them were taller than she was. “I want to get this done.”
“Okay.” He let her go. “Then I’ll order us a pizza.”
In the Valley of the Light