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By Root 461 0

He was very polite to the little girl and asked her questions about herself. This struck her as appropriate. She answered him. Then they went into the kitchen and she poured iced tea from a pitcher in the refrigerator because it was the kind of thing that she had seen her mother do for guests. They sat down on the sofa in the living room and he drank his tea heartily. The room was neat and sparsely decorated mainly with bookshelves, in a typical graduate student style. The angel scanned the shelves. He noticed many books about music. In response to his question about them Honor explained that her mother was studying musicology. Did she have any instruments in the house, he wondered. Honor stood up and brought in a weathered black saxophone case. It was heavy for her and she swayed backwards as she carried it, relieved when she handed it to him. The angel relaxed and leaned back into the sofa. He opened the case. He smiled at the unpolished instrument. He stood up and began to play. He was not without talent. He closed his eyes. Honor listened to him and didn’t bother about remembering the music. He spent a while playing something slow and swinging, like a sultry lullaby, for the little girl. When it was time for him to leave she saw him to the door. She shook his hand, because she had also seen her mother do that, but she wasn’t really ready to say good-bye and so she followed behind him for a bit as he walked down the center of the empty street. Then she turned around and went back into the house in time to look out the window and see his blue shape diminishing into the distance. She put the saxophone away and waited for her mother to come home.

CHAPTER EIGHT

2005

Honor stood up in the subway car where she had been sitting and looked out into the darkness. Her stop was coming and she liked the moment before the light broke through the window. There was her reflection in the glass, a ghost with a shifting skeleton and a visible heartbeat as the columns and dim lights that made up the architecture of this underworld scrolled through her body rapid-fire in the blackness. Then she disappeared into the light. She turned toward the doors. She adjusted the strap of the bag slung across her chest and quickly stepped onto the platform.

It was raining softly when she emerged onto the street. She seemed to be looking through a scrim as she made her way along the sidewalk. From a distance, she appeared to be almost marching, silently, through the mist. With her steady gaze and long coat, her faded satchel and heavy boots, she looked both present and ancient. She looked like some beautiful soldier arrived from history.

You’re here, she said.

I’m here, he said.

That’s something, she said.

It is.

They had called her and told her he was ready to see her again. It had been several months. At night, she had dreamt about him over and over. At night, she had read his bones. Now back in the hospital she was afraid to look at him, afraid to remind him that she knew him, afraid she might lose him again. He didn’t say much. He didn’t talk about what had happened. It went on this way for weeks, as if nothing had ever happened between them. Then one day when she came in he was sitting in his wheelchair, not on the table. The nurse had gone.

He said: So what do you think was going on with that woman who lied her way into the photographer’s apartment?

The one whose husband was court-martialed? The pregnant one?

She’s not pregnant when she goes into the apartment.

I know.

So who is she? What does she want in there?

She looked around the room. Can I take off my coat?

No. He was smiling.

Okay.

She sat on the table. She took off her bag and put it down next to her. She fiddled with a string she had tied around her wrist. She hadn’t realized until now that she was nervous.

He stared at her, not fully believing that she was back. He blinked. He was bouncing his foot.

So, he said. The woman’s pregnant, he said. Her husband’s court-martialed, then a couple of years later, because that’s what it seemed like to me, she basically