[Back to the Agent of Angels tales. This one picks up immediately after Pink for Danger. Willow’s Keeper —sort of like her guardian angel, but there’s definitely something not right about him — has lost his assigned human, a young woman named Willow. To find the missing woman, he recruits our narrator to help. The narrator apparently is also a Keeper but hasn’t realized it, so she’s fair game to be co-opted. Finders … Keepers, I suppose.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
As the Keeper puts his hand on the back of my neck, two fingers behind my right ear, thumb behind my left ear, I see her.
See the front room with its paneled walls circle 1979 and gold carpet circa 1972, television circa 2001, kids circa 2014 through 2023, grandma circa 1930 — a century captured in a circle of yellow lamplight and the diffuse blue glare of a CCFL monitor.
On the monitor, Spearow — clawed anime birds — hover suspended in their attack vector. The boy hero is also frozen in time, his Pikachu ever about to leap from his arms in a last-ditch counterattack.
In the same arrested motion, Willow captures a falling toddler in one arm and turns to look back over her shoulder toward the kitchen door, where a man stands in silhouette, his shadow piercing her heart.
I have long enough to feel guilty for peering into this poor woman’s life, then to feel guilty again for thinking of her as a poor woman, a victim, then —
Willow’s Keeper grips me harder. Enough bullshit. LOOK.
I see her with his eyes.
Her body can’t move but her mind races ahead as the figure strides through the kitchen door and into the living room.
He’s a white man, I think, or maybe she’s thinking it, though with his big fedora hat shadowing his face it’s hard to be sure. He wears a soot-colored trench coat. His soot-colored hair touches his shoulders. He also looks like something out of a cartoon, one of those sinister shapes from a 1970s Scooby Doo episode, maybe, outlined in thick soft jagged pencil.
The man in the fedora steps right through the cake batter hanging in a wide arc where it flew from Willow’s wooden spoon. He leans over the sofa where Grandma sits wearing her rose-pink polyester pants and cotton-candy pink tee shirt. Her knees make points in the pants. Her collarbones stand out above the shirt. She’s sewing a carnelian button to a scrap of yellow calico. Her hands are trapped mid-stitch. She frowns at the needle.
The man grabs Grandma by the scruff of the neck. His hand, too, is the color of soot, but paler, almost lavender.
He starts to haul something translucent, wet, and shimmering up through the skin.
Willow makes a decision. Chloe can hold the fort for a few minutes. If she needs help, she’s got a good head on her shoulders; she’ll call Aunt Bill. Willow doesn’t need to see the screen of her phone to text her 11-year-old daughter. She drops the spoon, reaches into her pocket, uses her fingerprint to unlock the phone, and taps out a message for Chloe. Back soon. Everything’s all right. Love you.
Then she sets Dio, the toddler, on the sofa.
Willow’s moving faster than Mister Fedora, now, and as he yanks at Grandma’s neck, dragging out what doesn’t belong to him like a man extracting a bag worm from its cocoon, she flings herself toward the pair and wraps her arms tightly around the old woman as her soul exits her body.
Pikachu sails toward the attacking Spearow. A gout of lightening spouts from his chest. Demi, the 8-year-old, a boy with a head of soft curls, cheers on the anime battle. Toddler Dio slides down from the sofa and tumbles head-first into Chloe’s lap. His big sister bends forward over him, the lavender and plum-colored beads in her braids grazing her cheek.
In the back pocket of Chloe’s size 11 Jordache jeans, her phone chimes.
But I don’t see those last moments with the children, I guess them, perhaps as if I’m picturing them along with Willow. As soon as Mister Fedora snaps out of existence, yanking Willow with him, my connection to her space and time also snaps.
“I was right.” The Keeper puts down his beer. “Someone took her.”
His lips, full and severely folded just now, look like someone could pay him to drink high-end beer in a commercial.
“You listening?” he asks me sharply. But no, I’ve been distracted. How could I help it? This dapper, stacked, and more-than-a-little-annoying man, half twin, half late-night-spy-thriller swoon god, has been sitting beside me, hand on the back of my neck, as he more or less extracts this memory from my mind, or helps me extract it from his.
“Why couldn’t you see this?” I ask him. I tend to be defensive, I admit. “You’re Willow’s Keeper, not me. Aren’t you more or less watching a baby cam of her life, or hovering over her shoulder, at all times? Why weren’t you there for this? What did you need me for?”
Not that I mind, except for the part of my mind, somewhere between the two lobes, that keeps insisting, Something’s missing.
He shakes his head. We’re sitting at a wrought-iron table now, somewhere on a wide terrace paved with sandstone, somewhere overlooking the city in the river valley. It’s completely dark except for tea candles at the tables and fairy lights wrapped around the smooth-barked lemon and sweetbay magnolia trees.
A club of some kind, I think. The Fairyland Club? I have never been to the Fairyland Club, of course. And how did we get here? Last I remember — before the excursion into Willow’s recent history — we were driving down Missionary Ridge in some kind of space-age sports car.
Orion swings overhead. Peering over the low stone wall beside me, I see the dogleg line of old Ninth Street, the other streets traversing the valley to Missionary Ridge. Lookout Mountain, then, but the north end. There’s no club here.
Is there?
“I needed you to help me find her,” the Keeper says, smiling at me, that secret smile with his lips folded together.
“How did you know I could do that?” No lies, it took me completely by surprise. I never knew anything about this Willow until he crashed a church potluck supper and showed me her picture earlier this evening.
“Because I knew this would happen.” He studies my face. “I knew you from this moment, here, tonight. I was looking for the woman I remembered from now.”
I scratched my ear. It’s been decades since I read any science fiction. I’m usually satisfied with steamy bodice-rippers or urban fiction, you know, badass broads with lots of firepower and vampire lovers.
“You travel backward through time?” I asked.
“It’s complicated.”
Of course he’d say that.
I can’t help feeling like he’s using me. But of course handsome men use plain women; they wouldn’t give us the time of day if they didn’t need something. It’s too tedious to think about. I suppose angels use mortals the same way, and the Keeper, near as I can understand, is some kind of angel.
Right, then. He’ll use me for a while. He got me fired from my job, after all. I have nothing better to do. And at least I’ll get an eyeful of those lips and eyes and hands for a few hours or days. Sometimes you gotta be glad for what little you can get. Plus, I want to find out what happened to Willow. I want to know whether she’s all right, and if she isn’t, I want to help her.
“So who was the guy with the gray skin?” I ask. “You know, Mister Fedora?”
“My opposite. Well, the opposite of her Grandma’s Keeper.” He takes a drink of his beer and, lowering the glass, looks at me over the rim. “He’s a death angel, I suppose you’d call him.”
I realize I want a drink and luckily, as if in a dream, there it is at my elbow. Something fruity with strawberry and lime. I am beginning to understand this Keeper’s approach. From the past he glanced ahead and saw Now Me wanting a drink, so he supplied it. When we caught up to the present, the strawberry lime vodka smash was ready.
I pick up my glass and sip. Delicious.
“So where is Willow?” I ask.
“If she managed to hang on, she followed her Grandma’s soul to the Abyss.”
A moth has gotten into the tea lamp’s globe. It bats against the glass.
“The Abyss as in fire and brimstone?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “The Abyss as the place where nothing ever happens, not ever again.”
The moth’s papery wings flare and falter. It falls to the bottom of the globe, just below the level of the flame hovering on a pool of liquid wax. It might struggle a bit. I can’t tell.