A Better Angel Read online

  But what Molly showed me, after we had gone down about thirty feet into the bushes and she had knelt near the arrow-shaped gravestone of our English sheepdog, Gulliver, and after she dug briefly in the dry dirt, was a dagger. It was about a foot long, and ornate, encrusted with what looked like real emeralds and rubies, with a great blue stone set in the pommel, and a rose etched on the upper part of the blade.

  “Do you like it?” she asked me. “My father gave it to me. It used to belong to a medieval princess.” I did like it. I reached out for it, but she drew it back to her chest and said, “No! You may not touch it.” She ran off down the ravine, toward the river, and I didn’t follow. I sat on Gulliver’s stone and thought about all the little dead animals, and I knew—even a little mind could make the connection—that Molly Pitcher had been murdering them. But I didn’t give much thought to it, besides a brief reflection on how sharp the blade must be to make such clean wounds. I went back to my house and went down to the basement to watch The Bionic Woman, my new favorite.

  After Colm’s death I got into the habit of staring, sometimes for hours at a time, at my image in the mirror. My parents thought it was just another one of my new autistic tendencies, and they both discouraged it, even going so far as to remove the mirror in my bedroom. What they didn’t know was that the image I was looking at was not really my own; it was Colm’s. When I looked in the mirror I saw the face we had shared. We were mirror twins. People who knew our faces well enough could tell that together they made a perfectly symmetrical pair, the gold flecks in my left eye perfectly mirrored in Colm’s right, a small flaw at the right edge of his lips mirrored by one at the left edge of mine. So when I looked into a mirror, even the small things that made my face my own made my face into his, and if I waited long enough he would begin to speak to me. He would tell me about heaven, about all sorts of little details, like that nobody ever had to go to the bathroom there. We had both considered that necessity to be a great inconvenience and a bore. He said he was watching me all the time.

  There was a connection between us, he always said, even when he was alive, that the surgeons had not broken when we were separated. It was something unseen. We did not quite have two souls between us; it was more that we had one and a half. Sometimes he would hide from me, somewhere in our great big house, and insist that I find him using a special “twin sense.” Usually I couldn’t find him, but he always walked right to my hiding place when he was it. I could not hide from him anywhere in the house, or, I suspected, anywhere on earth.

  After he died I found him, not just in mirrors, but in every reflecting surface. Ponds and puddles or the backs of spoons, anything would do. And always the last thing he said to me was, “When are you going to come and be with me again?”

  Molly Pitcher appeared that night at my window. I was still awake when she came. At first I thought she was Colm. She stood in the open window, and it was not until a flash of heat lightning illuminated her that I saw who she was. When I saw the dagger flash in her hand I was certain she had come to kill me, but when she came over to my bed, she only said, “Do you want to come out with me?” Another flash of lightning lit up the room. The lightning was the reason I had been awake when she came. On hot summer nights Colm and I would stay up for hours, watching it flash over the river. Sometimes our parents would let us sleep on the porch, where the view was even better.

  She sat down on my bed. “I like your room,” she said, looking around. There was light from the hall, enough to make out the general lay of the room. Our father had built it up for Colm and me, making it look like a ship, complete with sea-blue carpeting and a raised wooden deck with railings and a ship’s wheel. Above one bed was an authentic-looking sign that said captain’s bunk, while the other belonged to the first mate. While he lived we had switched beds every night, in the interests of absolute equality, unless one of us was feeling afraid, in which case we shared the same bed. The last time he slept in the room he had been in the captain’s bed, and because the cycle could not go on any longer I had been in the first mate’s bed ever since.

  Molly pulled my sheets back and while I dressed she looked around the room for my shoes. When she found them she brought them to me and said, “Come on.”

  I followed her, out the window, over the roof, and down the blue spruce that grew close to the house near my room. She went down our road, to the golf course around which part of our community was built. The place where we lived had once been a Baptist girl’s camp, but had in the century since its founding turned into a place where well-to-do white people lived in rustic pseudo-isolation. It was called Severna Forest. You couldn’t live there if you were Jewish or Italian, and in the summer they made you lock up your dog in a communal kennel. The golf course had only nine holes. It was a very hilly course, bordered by ravines in some places, and in others by the Severn River. The part of it that Molly took me to was a wide piece of rough on the fourth hole, only about half a mile from our houses. Though the moon was down, I could see under the starlight that rabbits had gathered in the tall grass and the dandelions. I bent at my knees and picked one of the flowers. I was about to puff on it and scatter the seeds when Molly held my arm and said, “Don’t, you’ll frighten them.”

  For a little while we stood there, she with one hand on my arm, the other on her knife, and we watched the rabbits sitting placidly in the grass, and we waited for them to get used to us. “Aren’t they lovely?” she said, letting go of my arm. She began to move, very slowly, toward the rabbit closest to where we stood. She moved as slow as the moon does across the sky; I couldn’t tell she was getting any closer to the rabbit unless I looked away for a few minutes. When I looked back she was closer, and the rabbit had not moved. When she was about five feet away she turned and looked at me. It was too dark for me to see her face. I couldn’t tell if she smiled. Then she leapt, knife first, at the little creature, and I saw her pierce its body. It thrashed once and was suddenly dead. I realized I was holding my breath, and still holding the dandelion in front of my lips. I blew into it and watched the seeds float toward her where she was stabbing the body again and again and again.

  In school the next Monday, Molly Pitcher studiously ignored me. The whole morning long I stared at her, thinking she must give some sign that a special thing had taken place between us, but she never did. I didn’t really care, one way or the other, if she never spoke to me again. I was used to people experimenting with me as a friend. Children, inspired briefly to kindness, would befriend and forget me like a puppy. I let them come and go.

  I had given up on her by the time she finally spoke to me. After lunch, when we were all settling down again into our desks, in the silence after Mrs. Wallaby, our teacher, had offered up a post-luncheon prayer for the pope, who had just that day gone on a groundbreaking trip to his native Poland, Molly passed me a note. I opened it up, thinking, for some reason, that it might say, “I love you,” because once a popular girl named Iris had passed me such a note, and when I blushed she and her friends had laughed cruelly. But Molly’s note said simply, “You’d better not tell.” I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever read. I supposed she meant I had better not write a letter to the police. She did not really know me at all, I thought to myself. She couldn’t know I wouldn’t tell.

  “What’s that you’ve got there, Calvin?” Mrs. Wallaby asked. She strode over to me and squinted at me through her glasses. Before she arrived I slipped the piece of paper into my mouth and began to chew.

  “What was that?” I swallowed. She brought her face so close to mine I could read the signature on her designer-frame glasses: Oscar de la Renta.

  “What was that?” she asked again. Of course I said nothing. She heaved a great sigh and told me to go sit in “the Judas chair,” which was actually just a desk set aside from the others, facing a corner. She was not a bad woman, but sometimes I brought out the worst in people. Once she saved me at recess from a crowd of girls who were pinching me, trying to make
me cry out. She brought me inside and put cold cream from her purse on my welts, but then, after she spoke for a while about how I couldn’t go on like this, I just couldn’t, she gave me a long grave look and gave me a pinch herself. It was not so hard as what the girls were giving me, and it was under my shirt, where no one would see. She looked deep into my eyes as she did it, but I didn’t cry out. I didn’t even blink.

  Molly came back a few nights later. At school, after the incident with the note, she continued to ignore me, except for flashing me an occasional cryptic smile. On the night of the first day of summer vacation, she came and got me again from my bed. She said nothing, aside from commands telling me to get dressed and follow her, until we passed the golf course and I started off to where the rabbits were. She grabbed my collar and pulled me back.

  “No,” she said. “It’s time to move on.” We spent the night hunting cats. It wasn’t easy. We exhausted ourselves chasing them through the dark. Always they outran us or vanished up a tree.

  “We need a plan,” she said at last, and quickly came up with one. We went back closer to our houses and found a neighbor’s cat by the name of Mr. Charlemagne who had run off before when we chased him, into a cat door that led into a garage. Molly positioned me in a bush by that door, then chased after Mr. Charlemagne, who up until that point had been eyeing us placidly. When she came at him he took off for his door, but I jumped in front of it. For some reason he jumped right up into my arms, looked up in my face, then turned to look at my companion. She had her knife out. He snuggled deeper into my arms, expecting, I think, that I would bring him inside to safety, but I threw him down hard on the ground. Molly fell on him and stabbed him through the throat.

  Mr. Charlemagne’s death did not go unnoticed. Not that the previous deaths had gone unnoticed, but the authorities of Severna Forest—the sheriff and the chairman of the Community Association and the president of the Country Club—dismissed the squirrel and rabbit deaths as the gruesome pranks of bored teenagers. When Mr. Charlemagne was discovered, draped along a straight-growing bough of a birch tree, a mildly urgent sense of alarm spread over the community. A crime had been committed. “Sick!” people muttered to each other while they bought vodka and Yoo-Hoo at the general store. Not one bit of suspicion fell on Molly or me. Everyone considered me strange and tragic, but utterly harmless. Molly Pitcher was equally tragic, but widely admired. With her blond hair and her big brown eyes, she was the picture of innocence, and she acted perfectly the part of an utterly good little girl. Sometimes I thought it was only because she stabbed that she could play the part of her sweet, decent self so well.

  A few days passed before she came for me again, in the early evening after a lacrosse game. Every Saturday afternoon the Severna Forest pee-wee team had their practice. I was one of their best players, because I had absolutely no fear of the ball. I did not try to get away from it when it came flying toward me like a little cannon shot. Others still ducked, or knocked it away with their stick, instead of catching it. If it hit me, I didn’t care. I scooped it up and ran with it, often all the way down the field because it rarely occurred to me to pass the ball. My cradling technique, made fine by hours of tutelage by the junior coach, a college boy named Sam Corkle, was the envy of every other player. I don’t think I cared much for the game then (I didn’t understand why it was so important for the ball to get from one side of the field to the other), though I kept playing, and many years later my father would be able to point me out in televised college games. But I liked to run, and to be exhausted, and I thought one day the ball might fly at me with such force it would burst my head like a rotten pumpkin.

  That day I got hit in the eye with the ball. Sam Corkle hurled it at me with all his adult strength, thinking I was looking at him and paying attention. But I was daydreaming. When it struck my eye I saw a great white flash and saw a pale afterimage of Colm’s face, which quickly faded. The blow knocked me down. I looked up at the sky and saw a passing plane, and wondered, like I always did when I saw a plane in flight, if my mother was on board, even though I knew she was at home today. Sam Corkle came up with the other coach and they asked me all sorts of questions, trying to see if I was disoriented and might have a concussion. Of course I didn’t answer. Someone said I would throw up if I had a concussion, so they sat me on a bench and one of them watched me to see if that would happen. When it didn’t, they let me back into the game. I went eagerly, though my eyeball was aching and starting to swell, hoping to get hit again and catch another glimpse of my brother.

  “What happened to you?” my mother asked when Sam Corkle brought me home. She was sitting at the dining room table, where my father held a package of frozen hamburger to his own swollen black eye. He had gotten into a fight at a gas line when someone tried to cut in front of him. It was a bad week for gas. Stations were closing early all over town, having sold their daily allowance before noon. “You too, sport?” he said. He examined my eye and said I would be fine. My mother was relieved to hear I hadn’t been beaten by bullies, and when Sam Corkle praised my fortitude in returning so eagerly to the game, she even smiled at me. While she held hamburger against my eye there was a knock at the door. Sam answered it, and I heard Molly Pitcher’s voice ask very sweetly, “Can Calvin come out and play?” I jumped off my mother’s lap and ran toward the door. She ran after me, and caught me, and said, “Take your hamburger with you.” I stood at the door while she walked back to the dining room with Sam and I heard her ask my father, “When did your son get a little girlfriend?”

  Molly had an empty mayonnaise jar in her hands. “We’re going to catch fireflies,” she said, not asking about my eye. I followed her through the dusk to the golf course, dropping my hamburger in a holly bush along the way. I ran around with her, grabbing after bugs, delighted that she had come for me in the daylight, and thinking that must mean something. She slapped my hands a few times because I kept grabbing at her flying blond hair as much as I did the fireflies.

  I thought she was waiting for us to fill the jar so she could stick her hand in and crush them mercilessly, or bring them home and stick them with pins to a piece of cardboard, or distill their glowing parts into some powerful, fluorescent poison with which she could coat her knife. But when it was dark, when we had caught about thirty of them and they were thick in the jar, she took off the lid and went running down the hill, spilling a trail of bright motes that circled around her, then rose up and flew away down the hill to the river.

  Soon there weren’t any cats left for us. Not because we had killed them all, but because after the fourth one, a tabby named Vittles that lived with the Nottingham family at the bottom of the hill, was found stabbed twelve times on the front steps of the general store, people started keeping their cats inside at night. Our hunts were widely spaced, only about once every two weeks, but in between those nights Molly Pitcher would come to the door for me and take me out to play in the daylight. We did the normal things that children our age were supposed to do, during the day. We swam in the river and played with her dolls and watched television. By the time we had killed Vittles it was late in July, and after two nights of fruitless hunting for cats, she decided another change of prey would be in order. She took me through the woods, on an hour-long nighttime hike out to the kennels. I could hear the dogs barking through the darkness long before we got there. I thought they knew we were coming for them.

  The kennels were lit by a single streetlamp, stuck in the middle of a clearing in the woods. There was a little service road that ran under the light, out to the main road that led to Generals Highway and Annapolis. I watched Molly Pitcher stalk back and forth in front of the runs. The dogs were all howling and barking at her. It was two a.m. There was nobody around, and nobody lived within a mile and a half of the place. The whole point of the kennel was that the dogs be separated from the houses between June and September, so their barking wouldn’t disturb all the wealthy people who came to live in their cottages during the summer. It was
a stupid rule.

  Molly had stooped down in front of a poodle. I did not know it. It retreated to the back of its run and yipped at her.

  “Nice puppy,” she said to it, though it was full grown. She waved me over to her and, turning me around, took a piece of beef from the Holly Hobbie backpack she had strapped on me at the beginning of our excursion. Then she took out my lacrosse gloves and told me to put them on.

  “Be ready to grab him,” she said. She bent down and held the meat up in the meager light. “Come on,” she said. “Come and get your treat, baby. It’s okay.” With one hand she held the meat and with the other tried to waft its aroma toward the dog, who continued to yip and snarl for a few moments, but then stepped up warily to sniff at the meat. She held on to one end while the poodle nibbled, and now with her free hand she scratched its head. She motioned for me to come up close beside her. It was the closest I had ever been to a poodle in my life. I tried to imagine the owner, probably a big fat rich lady with white hair, who wore diamonds around her throat while she slept in a giant canopy bed.

  “Just about . . . now!” said Molly. I reached through the bars of the cage with my thick lacrosse hands and grabbed the dog by a foreleg. Immediately it started to pull away. “Don’t let it get away!” she said, scrambling in the bag for her knife. When it tried to escape—at first just a gentle tug—and it gave me a “What are you doing?” look, I very nearly let it go. If she had not remonstrated me, I think I might have.