Authors: Barbara Hall
“So I jotted something down. I wrote down, ‘Safe from harm.’”
I just looked at her.
“Safe from harm,” she repeated. “Why would I put that? I couldn’t even imagine being in any kind of danger. I just put it down without thinking about it.”
“That’s not so strange, Viv. People always pray for health and safety.”
“You didn’t, did you?”
I thought about it. It was true, I hadn’t.
And Gigi had prayed to win the talent contest. No telling what Ella had prayed for.
But my prayer hadn’t been serious. And I hadn’t expected anyone’s to be. The outing had been no more meaningful to me than going to a coffee place. I had to believe that Viv was just dreaming, just suffering from some strange aftereffect of nearly dying.
Her eyes were bearing down on me, though, and I felt she was expecting me to realize something of great importance. I just kept holding her hand and I waited.
“My prayer was answered,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Blanche, don’t you get it? It’s all real. That whole idea of God. It’s not a dream.”
“Okay, Viv.”
She stared at me for a moment and then her face changed. She let go of my hand and lay back down on her pillows.
“You don’t believe me,” she said.
“I don’t not believe you,” I said. “I just don’t know what to think.”
She lay there for a moment, then sat back up.
“So let me tell you the rest of it.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
She cleared her throat and said, “The way they found me. Do you know about the way they found me?”
“No,” I said.
“My cell phone had died so I couldn’t call anyone. I kept checking it right after I got lost but it wouldn’t even turn on. But after that dream, or whatever it was, I woke up because my cell phone was making a noise. Like an alarm. I woke up and my cell phone was on and blinking. I couldn’t believe it. I started dialing numbers. At first it just bleeped but finally I called my mother and she answered and I started talking to her. I told her where I thought I was. And the cell phone stayed on and the rescue people, they started picking up my signal. I kept talking on the phone until finally it died and about two minutes after it died, there was a helicopter and they somehow saw me. And I was rescued. I picked up my phone again to talk to them but it was completely dead. Like it had always been dead. When I checked my log of sent calls, it hadn’t recorded any of the time I spent talking to my mother. It was dead from the time it died, you know? It’s like it never happened except it did.”
I didn’t know what to make of any of this. I just sat very still, listening to Viv.
We were quiet for a while and I could tell she was waiting for some kind of reaction to her story but I didn’t have one.
She was staring at me and then she collapsed into the pillows again.
“I thought you’d understand,” she said. “You of all people.”
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you’re the one who got me to pray. You’re the one who led me to the prayer box.”
I shook my head. “It was just a game. The prayer box. I didn’t really think … It was like wishing on candles.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Listen, on Christmas Eve I went with Mom and Ed the Guitar Guy to church. When I was sitting there with all the candles and the music, I started to think it might be real, the whole God thing. It had that effect on me. But then when I walked out, I realized I had just been imagining things. Wishful thinking. I’m fine now. You will be, too.”
She lay down and turned over on her side, away from me.
“Never mind. I want to go to sleep now.”
“Viv, I don’t think it matters how you were rescued. The important thing is you’re okay. We were all so worried.”
“I’d like to sleep now,” she repeated.
I touched her arm but she twisted away from me and turned more on her side.
I felt like I’d let her down. No, I knew I had let her
down. But what was I supposed to do with all that information?
I stood up and said, “Good night. I’ll come back tomorrow with Gigi and Ella.”
She didn’t answer.
I didn’t say what I was thinking and hoping—that by then she’d be back to normal. She would forget the white shiny presence and the prayer box and this would all be what it really was. A bad thing that nearly happened but somehow turned out all right.
S
CHOOL STARTED AGAIN AND WE DECIDED IT WAS OKAY FOR
our singer to have a bizarre story about an angel saving her life. I argued that it was practically a requirement for the singer to be a little unhinged. I listed a lot of examples from Billie Holiday to Bj?rk. In fact, it was probably a good thing that Viv now had this flighty, creative side. Maybe she could participate in the songwriting and I wouldn’t have to feel like that part was all on my shoulders.
Initially, I hadn’t told the others. I had intended to keep it to myself. But Viv wouldn’t shut up about it. She stuck to the story and told everyone who would listen. She had gone from being noncommittal about the white shiny thing and had turned it into a definite messenger from beyond.
“The crazy singer theory is an interesting one,” Gigi said. “But I’m still holding on to Viv comes to her senses.”
But that wasn’t what happened. Viv just became more adamant about her story. She wrote about it in her English class and she submitted the essay to the
Manifesto.
Josh Hammer showed it to me when I stopped by to drop off my latest piece for “Perspective, People.” I had chosen to write about the Faces, a greatly ignored British band, whose songs my father liked. I also wrote about Coachella and the Unsigned Competition. It was a little bit self-serving but it was music and it was news.
Josh pulled me aside and said, “Do you know about this whole angel thing with Viv?”
“Oh. Yeah. How did you know?”
He showed me the essay. It was pretty much what she had told me, written in plain prose. Something about the minimalist style made it seem even crazier than when I heard it in the hospital.
“Was she nutty before?” Josh asked me.
“No, she wasn’t nutty. And she’s not nutty now. Lots of people think they see angels. Doesn’t
Newsweek
do a story about that every other month? Reporting on how many people believe in God and angels, something like seventy percent of people? You and I, we’re in the minority.”
Josh just blinked at me. “She said the angel talked to her.”
“She never actually calls it an angel.”
“And it made her cell phone work.”
“Crazier stuff has happened. Lots of them. You believe in time flaps, don’t you, Josh? As a nerd, aren’t you required to?”
“Sure,” he said, without taking offense. “But there’s a scientific explanation for those. Angels? That’s nuts.”
That was pretty much how everyone felt. But Viv wouldn’t back down and wouldn’t shut up.
Her parents were even more disturbed than her friends. You can imagine. Famous scientists whose daughter was now giving regular interviews to local newspapers and TV stations about her angel encounter. (It didn’t matter that she never called it an angel; the press was filling in the blank.) She was dubbed Angel Girl. Viv found it not the least bit disturbing and she didn’t even put up a protest when her parents sent her to a therapist.
“Of course they’re doing that,” she told me. “They have to because until you’ve seen that dimension of life, it seems crazy. I understand.”
“Viv,” I said, trying to sound calm and nonjudgmental. “Everybody gets that this happened to you and you really believe it, but is it necessary to talk about it?”
“Why wouldn’t I talk about it?”
“Because it’s freaking people out.”
“I know. That’s going to have to be their problem, though.”
It was our problem. And it was about to become an even bigger problem.
The first thing that happened was that Gigi stopped talking to her.
It started with an argument at lunch. We were eating outside in our usual spot and I was desperately trying to talk about school or anything except Viv’s experience. But Gigi couldn’t leave it alone. She kept saying, “How can you believe that? You’re smarter than that. You’ve been raised to think scientifically.”
“It doesn’t matter how I was raised,” Viv said, nibbling on bread. She nibbled now. Everything she did was different, softer, quieter, and stranger. “What matters is my experience.”
“Don’t you see how it could have been a hallucination?”
“I can see how you could think that.”
“You guys,” Ella said. “Can we table it? It’s hard to chew and swallow when you’re yelling.”
“I’m not yelling,” Gigi yelled.
“Okay, when you’re talking enthusiastically in a loud voice,” Ella said.
“I’m just making a point. Angels don’t come down and save people and fix their problems.”
“Hey, they came down and fixed hers, so leave it alone.”
“I didn’t say it was an angel,” Viv reminded us.
“But why her? Why didn’t they come down and fix all those people in New Orleans’s problems during Katrina? Why don’t they fix global warming? Why didn’t they fix my mother’s problem so she didn’t have to leave me in a basket in a hospital parking lot?”
“I don’t know,” Viv said quietly. “I don’t have to know the answer to that.”
“Well, I have to know the answer to that,” Gigi said.
“Then you should pray about it.”
“I don’t think I can have a friend who tells me to pray about it.”
Viv didn’t argue with that. She just smiled.
Ella said, “Why do her beliefs have to square with your beliefs?”
“Why are you defending her?” She turned to me. “And why aren’t you contributing?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You’re just trying to keep the band together.”
“We’re close to Coachella. Let’s just talk about other things till then. Like music. I think we can survive for a couple of months and then we don’t have to like each other anymore. Lots of bands do that.”
“Okay, but I have to warn you, I don’t think I can have actual conversations with her,” she said, talking about Viv as if she weren’t there.
Viv just smiled.
Gigi pulled at her hair again and left.
“Guidance told me this was going to happen.”
“What?” I asked, unable to stifle the incredulous tone.
“Yeah, she said no one would believe me. Or he. Spirits don’t really have a gender, turns out. Anyway, part of what she or he told me was that.”
“In actual words, she or he said no one was going to believe you.”
“No, with her or his mind. It’s hard to explain.”
“Please stop trying.”
“I’ll try, Blanche, but it’s hard.”
Coachella and the band weren’t just a hobby to me, a fun preoccupation. It was the thing that was going to bring my father back into my life. Not quite the same as being rescued from the jaws of death by an angel. But to me, in a lot of ways, just as unlikely.
“Let’s rehearse tonight,” Ella said. “I’ll text Toby and
get the room. As soon as we start playing again, it’ll feel normal.”
“Good idea,” I said.
We stopped in the hallway before heading our separate ways and I had to ask:
“You kind of believe her, don’t you?”
“If it were true, wouldn’t life be more interesting?” she asked.
“That’s not a reason to believe something.”
She shrugged. “More than most people need.”
“Okay, let me ask you something. What did you put in the prayer box?”
“You can’t ask me that.”
“Why not?”
“The rules are you don’t tell anybody.”
“I just need to know if you think it came true.”
“Too soon to tell,” she said. “World peace.”
“Very original, Miss America.”
“Look, let me ask you something,” Ella said, her face softening. “Why couldn’t prayers and wishes be like the same thing? Sometimes if you want it hard enough, it kind of happens. Power of positive thinking and all that. Couldn’t you call it angels?”
“Ella. What you’re talking about is superstition.”
“How do you know?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know, of course. And I had a flash of the feeling I had in church on Christmas Eve. That seductive feeling that all that faith and all those prayers and all that willingness to believe somehow had the power to make things happen.
I shrugged it off before Ella could see the doubt in my face.
“Okay,” I said. “When we achieve world peace, you can say you told me so.”
“It’s a date,” she said.
She punched my arm and walked away.
A
NOTHER ARTICLE CAME OUT ABOUT
V
IV IN THE
S
ANTA
M
ONICA
newspaper and it mentioned the band, the Fringers, and the fact that I was Duncan Kelly’s daughter.
The last line of the article was: “If Vivien Wyler’s vision was true, the Fringers are not just a band to watch. They have been touched by angels.”
“Great. Now we’re all nuts,” Gigi said.
“We can use this,” I told them. “Anything that gets publicity for the band is a good thing.”
“Oh, really,” Gigi said, “then why don’t we all go get arrested?”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious. I couldn’t be more serious.”
We were sitting at rehearsal at the back room of Peace Pizza, waiting for Viv.
“I don’t want our band to be the touched-by-an-angel act if it’s all the same to you,” Gigi said. “You forget that the band is just a hobby for me. I have plans. I’m running for school office at the end of the semester. And not on the angel ticket.”
“This isn’t going to interfere with your political career.”
“Well, you say that, but we were just doing it for the talent show to begin with and now we’re playing at Coachella,” Gigi argued.
Ella was sitting behind her drum kit, inspecting her fingernails.
“Do you have an opinion about this?” I asked.
“I’m of the opinion that we should just rehearse,” she said.
“What about Viv?”
“We can rehearse till she gets here.”
“I wonder if her chariot got stuck in traffic,” Gigi said.