Angels of Destruction by Keith Donohue Page A

half hour later. Talk revolved around fatigue from the long drive north, snow at Somerset, but once through the tunnel smooth sailing; the terrible coldness of the winter, neither woman ever remembering temperatures so low for so many weeks in a row; the wretched state of the economy, Ronald Reagan, the collapse of the steel industry. To her astonishment, Norah was not the center of discussion. For the moment, she had ceased to exist. The sisters lingered at coffee, not yet willing to address the matter of the recent addition to the family.
    After dessert, she went upstairs to bathe, and over the rush of running water, Norah could not spy so easily, though she tried listening through a glass pressed against the floor. All she could hear was the ocean. Washed, and dressed for sleep, she swept downstairs to say goodnight, finding the two women relocated to the living room, sitting at right angles to each other under a single lamp which cast a pale halo fading to black in the far corners. Like conspirators hatching a plot, they dipped close to each other, their faces moving in and out of the light and shadows, their voices near whispers and dripping secrets.
    “Why, we were just talking about you, Norah,” Mrs. Quinn said. “Are you clean as a whistle and ready—”
    “Ready to blow?” her sister asked.
    Norah wolf-whistled, and the women laughed. Mrs. Quinn held out her arms, and Norah hugged her, kissed her cheek, and then hesitated before Diane, uncertain of the protocol.
    “I'm not going to bite you, child. At least not hard. Come here.” She smothered her with a bear hug and a wet kiss on the ear. “I could eat you up.” She held the child with one hand on her back and stroked her hair with the other. “We were talking about your mother, actually. Do you know neither one of us has seen her in nearly ten years? Just before you were born—”
    “She ran away from home.”
    “That's right, muppet. Do you know why she never came back?”
    “No, ma'am.”
    Dissatisfied by the answer, Diane held the moment, chewing her thoughts. “Well… her mother and her auntie miss her.”
    “I miss her too.”

22
    H UGE, read the first note. The postscript made him laugh and earned them both a twenty-minute detention. AND SCARY. When Sean unfolded the paper tossed his way, he knew that Norah was describing her great-aunt Diane. Caught sniggering by Mrs. Patterson, he was invited to share what he found so amusing with the rest of the class. He demurred, blushed, stammered into trouble. The teacher unfolded the message and misinterpreted the words as directed toward her.
    After the dismissal bells trilled, Sean and Norah remained behind, fixed at their desks, waiting out their punishment, while at the front of the room, Mrs. Patterson graded papers, glancing up every so often, a bemused stare tempering the gravity of the situation. The red second hand on the clock face— MADE IN THE USA, ALLEGHENY COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT —slowed, wavered, threatened to stop entirely. Norah could count almost to ten between the ticks, and bored into mischief, she tried to attract his attention by clearing her throat, tapping her fingers along the pencil well on the desktop, sighing. He dared look back once, panic in his eyes, and for the last five minutes simply bowed his head and tucked it into the cradle of his folded arms. Excuses for their tardiness in getting home played out in the recesses of his mind. Never before had he been punished by a teacher, never asked to stay one minute after school.
    Sentences served, they were dismissed with the admonishment to go and sin no more. Dragging their coats and bags behind them, the pair left the classroom to empty corridors stretching out to the front door. The school seemed alien and foreboding, and he pushed ahead, anxious to disassociate himself from the troublemaker. He pretended to be interested in the displays along the walls: the first graders’ crudely fashioned poems to winter; lopsided