Cardigan hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Cardigan hugged me again before running home.
Now that I was alone, I felt more afraid than free; the dark seemed more formidable. I took a deep breath and reminded myself of all the times I’d wished I were out here instead of in my room. Still, I quickened my pace and pretended that my mother was standing on our front porch, watching over me.
By the time I reached the reservoir, the deep blue of the night sky had lightened — the color now diluted with specks of white clouds. Still, the shadows of the leafless trees danced eerily on the water. A birdcall became a woman’s scream. A dog’s howl became a cry of warning, the wind in my feathers, the hand of a ghost.
I found the cloak and harness — just where I’d dropped them — grabbed them, and ran, keeping my wings folded tightly against my back to keep them from slowing me down. It wasn’t until I passed the drugstore where my mother once worked that I slowed to a walk. At my grandmother’s bakery, I paused briefly and ran my fingers over the script on the window.
Wisps of orange and red were making their way across the blue sky, and I realized with a happy start that I had been out all night and hadn’t gotten caught. I let out a giddy little laugh and skipped toward home, feeling miraculously like a normal teenager.
From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:
May 11, 1959
I’ve begun attending services at the Lutheran church. I had hoped to entice Aunt Marigold to return to her virtuous ways. My plan didn’t work. I, the baptized Catholic, have been well received by the parishioners and by Pastor Trace Graves, but Marigold remains snug beneath the crumb-covered blankets on her bed. The other old women find me charming. The Altar Guild elected me as their new head — it is my responsibility to put away the Communion wafers and wine after the service. In the Catholic church, not even the altar boys are trusted to do that.
I like to set up for worship and make it a point to get up early on Sunday mornings just to be sure I can set up the altar, just to make sure nothing is forgotten by a more neglectful parishioner.
There are parts about the Lutheran service I will never get used to. For one, there is too much singing. For another, these Lutherans have little reverence for sacred space. Once the service is done, they leave their Bibles and hymnals discarded in the pews, laugh, and slap each other on the back.
The worst part, however, is that midnight services are reserved for Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. My Saturday nights feel empty and Godless without my usual midnight Mass. I try to spend that time on my knees in prayer, which is how I remain awake until she walks by, returning home in those early morning hours from her nightly escapes to the reservoir, accompanied as always by the other two. As she passes my window, her feathers ruffle in the wind, and I am seized by a memory of the Nativity set my mother unpacks at Christmastime — I remember how the angel’s robes reveal a long white neck and how her lips seem stuck in a perpetual holy pout.
I didn’t plan on speaking to her that first night, but as she skipped by the place where I stood, hidden behind the dense rhododendron bushes that line Aunt Marigold’s property, I couldn’t help myself. I called hello.
She froze and her wings instinctively sprang open, as if for flight. “Who’s there?” she called, her voice like church bells.
I stepped out into the road. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you,” I said.
Her wings fluttered closed. “You didn’t,” she replied defensively. “I just wasn’t expecting to see anyone — that’s all.”
I admit I wasn’t anticipating her to be so very human, as much a young girl as she is a holy creature. It was quiet for the next few moments as I awaited my grand message from Him through her: a point of the moral compass, perhaps even a The Lord is with you. But it seemed that was not her purpose. Not this time, at least.
“I should go,” the Angel said, turning to continue up the hill.
“Wait,” I called after her.
She stopped and turned an awkward circle. “Yes?”
I smiled and took a few steps toward her. “I was wondering if I could touch them.”
She hesitated at first. Perhaps she didn’t know what I meant. But then she nodded. I ran my hand across her wings, felt the softness of the feathers course through the tips of my fingers to settle magnificently in my groin. When she broke away from me, she did so with a curt “Good night.” I watched her make her way up the hill. I raised my hands in exaltation to the Lord for granting me a visit of supreme ecstasy as only ever experienced by Saint Teresa of Ávila herself, I’m sure.
“WHAT’S HIS NAME?” I asked. Cardigan and I sat in my bedroom, awaiting the arrival of night and my freedom. In the days following my first escape, my trips to the reservoir continued, and I began to catch on to the things other teenagers took for granted. I learned, for example, how to smoke with a cigarette holder balanced between my fingers and how to paint in my eyebrows using black eyeliner. Through Cardigan, I learned which of the high-school boys knew what to do once they got a girl alone (answer: none), how many of the girls were sincere in their kindness (answer: very few, especially the candy stripers), and what sort of stir the arrival of Marigold Pie’s nephew had caused in the neighborhood.
Cardigan thought for a moment as she studied the deep-red polish she’d just applied to her nails. “Nathaniel Sorrows.”
I repeated his name, softly, under my breath. I liked the way it felt in my mouth. I saved it on the tip of my tongue to use later, when I wanted to hear my voice wrap itself around the syllables. Na-than-iel Sor-rows. In the middle of the night — when the neighborhood cats mated in the yard or when Trouver ran in his dreams — I would awake, calling out his name.
“What do you think about him?” I asked, hoping my voice didn’t give me away. I stole a peek at Cardigan, still busy admiring her nails, and was grateful that her self-absorption made her deaf to the increased beat of my heart. I never told Cardigan about my encounter with him. I wasn’t sure why, but every time I thought of telling her, some impulse held me back. Maybe I felt that I’d finally earned the right to a secret, something to keep from even my best friend. Just like any other normal girl.
Cardigan blew on her nails. “He seems kinda square. Cute, though.”
I nodded, lost in thought. I found it odd that this stranger affected me so. He was attractive, sure. But was that it? When he’d asked to touch my wings, I wanted to say yes. So I did. And afterward, as I lay in bed, I could still feel the warmth of his fingers on the tips of my wings.
My mother often suffered extended bouts of melancholy, times when her thoughts of Jack Griffith would not dissolve with a sigh or a shake of the head. In bed she would think of that solstice night beneath the dahlias and Jack’s chest, white in the moonlight, until her skin tingled. She flushed thinking of his mouth moving across her collarbone, his hand pressed hotly against hers, their palms slick with mingled sweat. Like warm wax, the memory of his touch melted on her thighs, dripped down her leg.
For several nights’ running, she would dream of him: his smile revealing the gap between his incisors, his hands clasping a bouquet of flowers — all wilted but for the daffodil, the symbol for unrequited love. She would awake with tears in her hair. Before bed, she drank cups of tea made from the crushed dried leaves of California poppies, which Wilhelmina swore could cure any type of insomnia. Only then could she sleep, a dark sleep of empty hallways and locked doors.