Authors: Christopher Conlon
I’ll see, Frances. I’ll ask Jess what she thinks about it.
“Come in.”
I opened the door. She was on her bed, facing away from me, head propped up on her elbow. She was thumbing through a book. She wore her usual T-shirt and jeans; her feet were covered with pink socks with little fuzzy balls on their ends. For once her baseball cap wasn’t on her head; her hair was down, loose over her shoulders. I could see her face only in profile as she stared down at the book.
I stepped in, closed the door softly behind me.
“Jess,” I said quietly, “is it okay with you that I’m here?”
She shrugged.
I looked around her room. It was the room of an athletic twelve-year-old girl. Her softball uniform was sprawled on the floor; there was a soccer ball in the corner. Posters of sports stars competed with posters of young TV hunks for wall space.
“How are you, Jess?”
She shrugged again.
I looked at her. Though she was a sturdy, athletic girl, she suddenly seemed hopelessly fragile to me, as if she might shatter completely in the first gust of wind that came her way. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, protect her forever, save her. And yet I was the person from whom she’d needed to be saved.
I sat down gingerly behind her on the corner of the bed.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
She held it up over her shoulder: it was
Mary’s Amazing Morning,
one of the early Mary the Motor Scooter books.
“Oh my gosh, Jess. That one goes back to when you were little.”
“I know,” she said. “I remember you drawing it.”
“Do you really?” I was surprised; she must have been very young.
“Sure. I used to watch you. I was, like, in awe of you. That you could draw like that. And write those stories.”
I leaned over, looking at the page she had open. It was an illustration of a happy-looking Mary making a milkshake. As I stared at the drawing it occurred to me for the first time that Mary not only looked like Jess—that had been deliberate—but also a bit like Lucy Sparrow. The same eyes, the wild dirty-blonde hair. I’d never noticed before.
“I like this one,” she said. “It’s my favorite.”
“I didn’t know you had favorites,” I said. “Of those books, I mean.”
“Sure I do. I still read them sometimes.”
“Not the newer ones, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, I do.” She pointed to her bookcase across the room where, indeed, there was a long line of Mary and Fred books. I always gave her a copy of each one, of course. But I didn’t imagine she read them. I thought perhaps she threw them away. “I like the earlier ones better. The later ones are…I don’t know. Kind of sad, sometimes.”
“I guess they are.”
There was a long silence. She turned the pages.
“Dad says that you’ve been working really hard.”
“Working…?”
“At that place. That clinic.”
“Well—yes.”
“But you’re done with it now.”
“Done? Well, honey, I—I hope so. I hope I’m done. I’m going to try to be done. I’m going to try as hard as I can.”
“That’s cool,” she said, looking at Mary the Motor Scooter. “Lots of cool people go to rehab. Like, famous people.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was about to stand up and go—I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. But, without consciously intending it, I found myself lying down behind her on the bed. I touched her waist gently.
“Is it okay?” I asked. “Just for a minute?”
Another shrug. “You’re my mom.”
But after a while she closed the book and her head dropped to her pillow. I felt her body relax, ease slowly into mine.
We didn’t say anything.
I breathed the scent of her hair. I knew that I was on my last chance with my daughter, my absolutely final chance—that if I failed this time I’d be cast out from her life forever. Therefore I couldn’t fail. The ouroboros had to unwind at last, open the endless circle that had been closed for so long.
After a time, unable to stop myself, I whispered, “Jess, I love you.”
And later—very, very much later, so much later that I thought I might never hear her voice again in this life—I heard her whisper to me in return, nearly inaudibly, but audibly: “I love you too.”
In my dream Lucy Sparrow stands facing me in the night surf, fists on her hips, waves bursting softly about her thighs, looking much as I remember her at twelve when the two of us were best friends forever: blood sisters. She wears no bathing suit, but isn’t exactly naked; instead her body appears featureless, like a doll’s, lacking nipples or navel, freckles or scars—incomplete, unfinished. Yet her face is as it was in life. The big raincloud-colored eyes, the shapeless nose, the tangled dirty-blonde hair splayed to her shoulders.
Little happens in the dream. She just stares at me, her expression flat, unreadable—neither friendly nor hostile—while from the shore I whisper over and over, a hot ache pulsing in my throat:
Lucy. Lucy.
There’s a sudden shriek overhead (a bird? a bat?) but this time I know not to look away. After a moment Lucy begins to walk toward me, stops when she reaches the surf’s edge. She beckons to me.
I step to her, noticing that I’m not the little girl that I was then. I’ve grown up. I know that I’m middle-aged, a writer of children’s books, a mother, an alcoholic. But my appearance seems not to affect her. She drops to her knees and begins digging in the wet sand. I kneel to help her.
After a while we bring up a sand-encrusted Mason jar. Lucy runs it through the surf once to clean it off. We look at it together, smiling. Our time capsule. Never finished, in life. Finished here.
She strips away the tape we used thirty years before to seal it and unscrews the lid. It comes away easily. She reaches inside and together we look at what we put there so long ago. School photos of each of us, perfectly preserved. A map of the town as it was then, so different from now. Newspaper headlines with names like Ford and Kissinger and Rockefeller. Clippings from magazines—one picture of Donny Osmond, half a dozen of John Travolta.
Finally she pulls out our drawings. There’s mine, the illustration of the two of us floating together with angels’ wings, but it’s completed now, luminously colored-in. Behind us in the picture float dozens, even hundreds of angels departing the earth, as if this were the jumping-off point for every angel in the world, a matrix of angels stepping off into an endless sky. My neat, precise inscription is at the bottom:
For Lucy, With All My Love, Franny-Fran.
Finally Lucy brings forth the last item in the jar. It’s her own drawing. She moves to hand it to me, but the wind catches it; the paper swoops and dives and lands finally in the surf. I leap to grab it before the picture on the sheet is obliterated forever, but it’s too late. Holding it up in the moonlight, I can make out only a single part of the image she’s drawn: a pair of big silver hearts entwined. But the wet ink loosens, slides down the paper; the hearts look for a moment strangely like angels’ wings before they drop away, melt irretrievably into the sea. Lucy’s heart. Mine.
By the time I look toward her again, I’m alone in the darkness.
Author’s
Note
Truman Capote once wrote a friend about a work in progress, “I have a novel, something on a large and serious scale, that pursues me like a crazy wind.” The phrase encapsulates my experience with
A Matrix of Angels
—I felt that “crazy wind” whipping at me for nearly two years, in a way unlike anything else I’ve ever written, pushing me to discover the final form of the story of Fran and Lucy.
The novel began life as a long short story, also titled “A Matrix of Angels,” which, in a moment of misdirected altruism, I gave to a publisher who was soliciting stories for a charity anthology. Alas, like many such efforts, the book—unreviewed, mostly unread—sank like a stone immediately upon its publication, taking my piece with it. Naturally I was frustrated. But even before this debacle, I’d noticed something odd about this story, this theme, these characters. In every previous instance of my writing life, when a story was finished, I was done with it. However much the plot and people had preoccupied me before and during the writing, they would vanish from my mind like a forgotten dream after it, never to be revisited—so much so that by the time a work was published I would sometimes be startled by its content, which seemed nearly as fresh to me as if the piece had been written by someone else entirely.
Not so with “A Matrix of Angels.” In the year or so after I completed the story, I found my imagination swirling back again and again to Fran and Lucy—they seemed to pursue me like that crazy wind. New scenes and dialogue came to my mind, ideas that I initially resisted—the story was
done,
after all—but which I eventually began noting down. Yet the voices of these two girls still didn’t stop, and finally I realized I needed to start all over again—not to expand the original story, but to take an entirely fresh approach.
I ultimately completed the novel version of
A Matrix of Angels
over several summer months, never consulting the short story—this was to be an entirely new work, not an adaptation of something already written. When it was finished the voices of Fran and Lucy grew silent at last, and I knew that the tale had finally, truly, reached its end.
While I consider the novel to be the definitive version of this material, it’s a pleasure to unearth the original story and present it here. Whatever its flaws, Fran and Lucy first saw the light of day in this much briefer work—a work I’d believed complete in itself, until the crazy wind blew my way.
C.C.
A
Matrix
of Angels
The Original Short Story
1
THIRTY-SIX DAYS BEFORE Lucy Sparrow was abducted and murdered by the Riverbed Killer (who turned out to be a local dropout we both knew named Mike McCoy, then working at the nearby Red Ball gas station; we both knew him), she and I met for the first time at the school bus stop. This was thirty years ago. More than ten thousand mornings away.
Lucy came rushing out her front door at the last possible moment, just as the big yellow bus—the “cheese bus,” the other students called it—was rounding the curve from Thumbelina Avenue and rumbling up Kendale Road. I checked my watch: eight-fourteen, on the nose. I was waiting a full ten minutes beforehand, but Lucy only appeared just as the bus itself was pulling up. Since she had to cross the street, she would have to run in front of the vehicle to reach the door, before it had come to a complete stop. This earned a blaring honk from the driver, Mr. Cox, who cried indignantly, “No running in front of the bus!” as she mounted the steps breathlessly.
All this I would recognize as routine only later. On that first day as the new girl at Soames Middle School in Quiet, California, a few miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, I knew only that I had been told to meet the bus at the corner at exactly eight-fourteen a.m., that if I weren’t there Mr. Cox would not wait, that if I failed to appear the bus would leave without me and I would be left to explain why I had been unable to perform such a simple task. And to expect punishment commensurate with such a venal and intolerable crime.
The people with whom I was living, not my parents, were a phlegmatic distant cousin of my father’s named Frank and his wife Louise. By issuing such dire warnings they proved that they did not know their girl. Having been with them only a few weeks, they could have no idea that order, routine, punctuality,
control,
were the hallmarks of my existence. Never for me the unfinished chore, the neglected homework assignment, the missed bus, all of which seemed to me mere invitations to chaos and disaster. Never for me the hair out of place, the stained T-shirt, the dirty or ragged fingernail. Thus—needless to say—in every school I ever attended I was quickly branded as “stuck up,” yet it was not a belief in my superiority that made me act this way; it was my absolute conviction that I was hopelessly inferior to everyone else, so much so that all I could do was try to be as close to perfect as I possibly could, in the desperate hope that others might at least learn to tolerate me. To be
accepted
was only a forlorn dream.
So it was eight-fourteen on a gray morning in March—March the eleventh, in fact, as indicated under “Date of Entry” on the Soames Middle School report card I still possess—that I first beheld Lucy Sparrow crashing out her front door, slamming it shut behind her and charging heedlessly into the street. She was wearing sandals, blue jeans, and a tattered T-shirt—which, all these years later, I can state with confidence because in the slightly more than a month that I knew her, I never saw Lucy Sparrow wear anything else. There were different colored shirts, but they were all the same, all of them badly worn and frayed. She would wear the same shirt for a week, having found it on her bedroom floor in the same place she deposited it every night. Only when I would point out that it reeked to high heaven would she lift her arm, stick her nose into her armpit and inhale. “Mmm-yeah!”
she would call out. “Lucy’s
ripe
!”
But she would change the shirt.