Chapter 6. Return of the Angel
I turned back and looked at the whole package and shrugged mentally. There was nothing major wrong with the way I looked, and that was as far as I could go on that subject. I was done in the bathroom, and there didn't seem to be a robe anywhere. I wrapped a towel around myself and went out of the bathroom to see if there was a robe or some clothes or something out in the room.
So I came out of the bathroom wearing a towel, beginning to be hungry, and the door opened and in came my angel, pushing one of those hotel trolleys. She was dressed in a light blue t-shirt and a short khaki skirt and sandals, and when she saw me she smiled, a big grin. She had really nice legs, I noticed.
"How are you feeling?" she asked as she shut the door.
I thought about saying "Underdressed," but she could see that, and anyway I had been naked the night before—or what felt to me like the night before—and that hadn't seemed to bother her then, and the towel didn't seem to now.
"I'm not sure," I said, which was true. "Nothing hurts, and I'm kind of hungry."
"That's why I came," she said. "I brought you breakfast. And I haven't had mine yet, because I thought you might also have a lot of questions, and we could go over them while we eat." She pushed the trolley over to a table, and I looked around the room, which I hadn't really had a chance to do the night before—or however many nights it had been. My impression then had been of a hospital room, but either I hadn't been tracking on all channels or this was a different room.
The head of the bed was against the same wall that had the bathroom door in it. The bed was to my right as I came out of the bathroom, and the door to the corridor was in the left-hand wall. Across from the foot of the bed was a fireplace, no fire in it at the moment but evidence of use.
There were two windows in the right-hand wall beyond the bed, with a table between them onto which my angel was unloading a number of interesting covered dishes.
On either side of the fireplace was a small two-seater couch covered in what I think my mom calls chintz—anyhow, it had a pale background and big pastel flowers on it, mostly blue and green. The curtains and bedspread were the same stuff.
There was a desk to the left of the fireplace with a straight-backed chair in front of it and a couple of similar chairs here and there. The bed had posts; the table between the sofas was dark wood and so were the desk and the floor.
Sun was streaming in, that was obvious, but you couldn't see anything through the windows. It was just blank out there, but with sunshine. I was mildly bewildered by this, but anyhow it was a really nice room, sort of like my idea of a bedroom in a manor house in England.
"Bring a couple of chairs, will you?" she asked, so I did, putting one at each end of the table, where she had set places. She began uncovering dishes. There were scrambled eggs, not too dry, bacon and sausages, orange juice, a stack of buckwheat cakes with butter and syrup, English muffins, honey, three kinds of jam, and gallons of coffee. Plus hot and cold milk.
She sat down and I did too. I looked at the spread and then at her.
"Major problem," I said. "I have about a zillion questions, and I'm also starving."
"No problem. You eat—but not too fast, take it really easy at first. Start with some hot milk maybe—and I'll talk. I'll probably answer a bunch of your questions, and then when you're no longer starving, you can ask the rest." She poured herself a cup of coffee, added hot milk, and then began nibbling on an English muffin while she talked.
I found myself thinking that she probably wasn't an angel if she could really eat, which made me realize that I had thought she might actually not be a human being.
I poured myself a cup of hot milk and drank that very slowly, because she was right—even though I was hungry, my insides felt sort of strange and jangled, and I thought I'd better go gentle on them at first.
"First you probably want to know where you are," she began. "This is going to sound totally weird, but just try to accept it for right now, and we can see about actual proof later on. Will that work?"
I nodded, sipping my milk.
"So, where are you? Well, this place is actually a 'when,' not a 'where'—or actually, it's both. It's a temporo-spatial anomaly, outside of time in the real world. Duration here has no relation to duration there. You can be here for weeks and weeks, years even, and go back to exactly where, I mean when, you were, in your world."
She stopped and looked kind of anxiously at me. I basically had no idea whether she was telling the truth or had just demonstrated her deeply rooted psychological instability, so I just nodded again, reserving judgment.
"That's why your loving family aren't all here at your bedside," she went on after a moment. "Nobody's gotten in touch with them, because there's no need to get in touch with them, because they don't know you're here, they don't even know you're gone. In fact, as far as they're concerned, as far as the world is concerned, you're not gone, because when you go back, you won't have been gone, meaning time elapsed, from that world. Does that make sense?"
I nodded yet again. The nodding was getting kind of repetitious, but this time what she was saying actually did make sense, if you accepted the first part, that is.
"Good." She smiled. Apparently my nods were convincing. She went on, "And how did you get here? That's sort of harder to explain, so let's just say that I—with some help from friends—brought you here.
"Your friend—Shep is fine. You can't see him yet, but he really is going to be completely okay."
I'd finished the hot milk and was feeling relatively calm in the digestive area, so I started loading up a plate.
"Who are you, angel?" I asked as I piled on the bacon.
"Yes," she said. "How did you know?"
"Huh?" I replied, or words to that effect, and started in on the eggs.
"Oh, wow," she said and started to giggle. "I thought you knew my name." And at my continuing blank look, "That's my name—Angel. My mom, see, apparently she went all flaky when I was born. They put me in her arms, and she takes one look at me and goes, forget Anne Christine, which is what she and my dad had picked out ahead of time, her name is Angel Gabriel. Actually she said Archangel Gabriel, but my dad said whoa. He got rid of the 'Arch' and tried for Angela, or Angèle, or Angelique, or Angelica, or Angelina, but she wasn't having any of that. Angel Gabriel, that's me." Her cheeks were a little pink.
I thought it was kind of neat that I had guessed—no, known her name. But obviously she didn't want to go any deeper into that. I swallowed. "My mom did sort of the same thing when Cammie—my sister Cammie was born. She was going to be Constance Carole, but when my mom saw her, she said her skin was so smooth and beautiful it was like camellia petals, and she named her Constance Camellia. My dad was sort of surprised. Why are we here?"
"Oh." She flapped her hand a little, like she was embarrassed. "Totally my fault—I mean, I saw you, and I thought you were cute, and when you had the accident I was—"
"Singular or plural?" I interrupted.
"What?" She looked blank.
"You," I explained. "Which you?"
"What?" She looked even more bewildered, so I had to spell it out. Which I did, because all of a sudden it was really important to me. I definitely had to know whether she thought I was cute.
"Did you mean 'you,' singular, or 'you,' plural? Which—who did you think was cute? Or was it both of us?" I stuffed a large bite of muffin into my mouth, looked down, and got very busy chewing.
"Um, you're both very—attractive," she answered.
That's not what I asked, I wanted to say, but my mouth was still full, and anyway I wasn't quite brave enough to press the issue.
"And you've been—asleep for eight days, nine nights," she added. "So you could get better, heal without having to know about it."
I swallowed. "I was in here, asleep, for eight days and nine nights?" I asked.
"Well, here—no." She was pink again and smiling. "But as far as you're concerned, you were. Which is good.
And you don't really need to know the icky details, do you, about dressing changes and um catheters and stuff?"
"I guess not." I decided she was right, it was more comfortable not to think about all that, just to think that what it felt like was true, that I'd gone to sleep in the hospital-type room and waked up the next morning in this room, all healed. I'd finished eggs and bacon and an English muffin and was uncovering the pancakes, which she had covered again to keep warm.
"Does that take care of all your questions?" she asked.
"No!" I stopped loading my plate and looked at her. "Who discovered this place, and how? Who's here? How do they get here—are they picked, or is it random? What do people do here? Who are you—not your name, but—why are you here? Why were you really big when you came to—to rescue us, and now you're small? When will Shep be better—when can I see him? And where are my clothes?"
By the time I got that far she was laughing.
"Okay, okay," she said, lifting up her hands like "whoa." "Starting with the last one, your clothes, the clothes you had on, were kind of a mess. I'm not sure whether they're clean yet. Think about what you'd like to wear in the meantime."
"Jeans," I said. "T-shirt—"
"No," she interrupted. "Don't tell me—just think about it, everything you'll need for, oh, say a week. I'm pretty sure Shep will be ready before then, but just to be on the safe side. And you can see him when he wakes up, when they wake him up, which will probably be in less than a week, as I said.
"As for me being bigger when you first saw me." She stopped and looked past me with her head on one side. "I'm not sure—I think it would probably be to do with a maladjustment in the interface. Or maybe you were, you know, kind of groggy? Or maybe you needed to see me as bigger?" She shrugged. "That I can't tell you for sure.
"What else did you want to—oh, about the TSA. It was—"
"TSA?" My mouth was slightly full, but I interrupted her anyway, so it actually came out "TFA," but she understood.
"Sorry—temporo-spatial anomaly. We call it the TSA. Anyway, it was discovered by a man named Andrew Kirk, who happens to be my father, which is why I'm here." She grinned. "Exams are over and school's out—not that I'm only here when school's out, because it doesn't make any difference. In fact, it's really handy to duck into the TSA and do extra studying for exams. But I wanted more time off before my summer job starts, which it actually does the Monday after school lets out. So I'm hanging out here until I feel like going to work."
"Sweet," I said. "You're in high school? How old are you?"
"I just turned sixteen," she said. "In May."
I had just turned seventeen, in March. I grinned.
"You also wanted to know who's here," she went on quickly. "A lot of people—a hundred or so are here, on and off. They have access, I mean. My dad, obviously, and my mom, and me, and other than that, people my dad has picked, mostly scientist types, to figure out how the TSA works."
"How does it work?" I asked. "And how do you go from here to there?" I'd stopped halfway through the pancakes, a little afraid that I'd overdone it with the groceries, and was pouring myself some more coffee.
"Too hard!" She smiled. "I'm not a physicist, I don't understand it at all. If you really want to know, I suppose you could talk to somebody in one of the labs, or my dad."
I looked at her smiling, and something happened. I felt this weird surge of attraction toward her. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to squeeze her really tight. Actually I wanted to kiss her.
"I'm not a physicist either," I said. "And—you're really pretty."
"Thank you." She got pink again and looked down, but she was still smiling. Smiling even more, in fact.
Looking back, I'm not sure how I had the guts—in fact, I can hardly believe I actually did it—but I was in a weird place, not just the TSA but a weird place in my head, and the whole situation was kind of strange, and anyway, somehow I did. I got up and went over and knelt down next to her chair, which put my head a couple of inches lower than hers. I'm not sure what I actually had in mind at that moment. She sort of pulled back in surprise and started to ask, "What—"
"Would it be okay if I kissed you?" I asked. Holy wow, I thought—where did that come from? I heard myself and still couldn't believe I'd said it. She didn't say anything, just looked at me, so I leaned forward and did it.
We'd both just eaten, probably overeaten in my case, so there wasn't a lot of passion involved. It was just soft and sweet and lingering but not lengthy. Nonetheless it caused a situation, the situation being that I was, how shall I put it, in a state, and this state was not only embarrassing to me but also exceptionally obvious because of what I had on, which as you will recall was a towel.
Angel looked down and, from the look on her face, obviously became aware of my problem. This was embarrassing and confusing and not something I could do anything about, and the situation caused me to inhale with such sudden and violent force that it created a temporary vacuum or something inside my lungs and a mental overload, and I thought the top of my head was going to blow off.
"Oh," she said. She was now trying unsuccessfully not to smile but it was a pleased-enjoyment kind of smile rather than a laughing-at kind, so I decided I didn't mind. I sat back on my heels and tried to breathe normally, and she politely averted her eyes, looked vaguely around at the stuff on the table, and put another piece of bacon on her plate.
Pretty soon I could feel the tension ebbing away and the situation, personal-wise, returning to normal, so I could stand up without fear of poking her in the eye or something.
I sat back down, trying desperately to think of something witty, or even something not witty, to say, in order to avoid the inevitable awkward pause. But there wasn't one.
"Have you thought about what you'd like to wear?" she asked, breaking the bacon into pieces.
"What? Oh—sort of," I answered. When she asked the first time, I'd thought that I'd need a pair of jeans and some t-shirts or polo shirts, and a pair of shoes.
"Go look in the closet," she said, pointing to a door I hadn't noticed, on the other side of the bed from the bathroom door.
I went and looked. It was a small walk-in closet, with a rod for hanging and some shelves. There were a pair of really nice jeans hanging over a hanger, a pair of soft leather boat shoes on the floor, and three t-shirts and three polo shirts on one of the shelves.
I stood there for a moment and stared at the stuff. The jeans were more or less like the ones I'd been wearing, which were my favorite jeans, only these were new.
The shoes were identical to a pair of boat shoes I'd seen and meant to go try on because they looked so comfortable, and a picture of them had flashed into my mind when I'd thought "shoes."
The t-shirts and polo shirts were new. Some of them were colors I had and liked, and some were colors I'd like to have, and they were all what had popped into my mind when I'd thought "t-shirts and polo shirts."
There was one major problem. I glanced over my shoulder. Angel wasn't watching me, she was getting something out of a pocket in her skirt, so I dropped the towel and quickly pulled on the jeans. Maybe she wouldn't notice that I'd forgotten to think "underwear" and was going to have to go commando.
I stepped into the shoes, which fit perfectly, and pulled a hot-pink t-shirt over my head. I'd never owned a pink garment, but I'd seen other guys wearing them, and some guys looked really good in the color, so I'd sort of secretly wanted to try it. I picked up the towel and folded it as I walked around the bed, into the bathroom—the lights, which had gone out, came back on—and looked at myself in the mirror. The pink actually looked great, maybe partly because I was a little bit tan.
I hung up the towel and came out and found that Angel had moved to one of the couches and was again smiling at me. I grinned back.
"Yes," she said, nodding. "You look very nice. And you can fill in any—lacks, anything else you might need."
"Who put the stuff in the closet?" I wasn't going to go
into any lacks.
She shrugged. "That's just how it works here. You can have whatever you need. You can't take it back with you, though—you can only take out what you bring in.
"Would you mind if I ask you some questions now?" she asked. She held up a little device that looked sort of like a Palm Pilot or a BlackBerry.
"Sure," I said. "I mean, no, of course not. Ask away." I sat down opposite her.
"You and Shep are pretty good friends, right?" she asked.
I tensed. "Yeah, I guess."
"So could you maybe answer for both of you?" she went on. "Or tell me if there's something you can't answer for him."
"Sure." I relaxed again.
"Do you use drugs or alcohol?" She looked down at the little device in her hand, then back up at me.
"Well—we've both smoked a joint or two," I started. "In my case, only a couple or three times. Shep and I hang in different crowds, so I don't know if he's maybe gotten more into it this past year, but I haven't seen any indications. Anyway, I've never used anything stronger, and I kind of doubt he has.
"We drink a little—both our parents are okay with that, they let us drink at home, a beer now and then, sometimes wine with dinner. I've seen Shep drink Scotch once or twice. I don't like it, and I don't think he really does either. We've both indulged in the occasional gin and tonic. That's about it." I shrugged and watched her tick little boxes on her device with a stylus.
"You're both in high school?" she asked.
"Yeah, but different schools. Shep goes to a private school"—Friends Academy, which Aunt Jean thinks is superior to West Manning, where I go. "That's partly why we were up at the lake, to sort of reconnect"—I ran down. I really didn't want to go there.
"How are you doing?" and, at my blank look, "Your grades."
"Oh." I thought about it. "Okay, I guess. I'm not quite as smart as my older sister, but I'm far from flunking out—3.8 or .9 GPA. Shep about the same, maybe a little lower, but it's hard to compare schools. He's doing more social studies and history, thinking about maybe law or business school after college, and I'm—I was doing more bio and stuff, thinking of pre-med, but now I'm not sure." Probably more than she wanted to know.
She nodded in a serious kind of way, then asked, "Have you ever had any kind of psychic experiences? Like knowing who's calling before you pick up the phone, or dreaming something that's going to happen, and it does? Or knowing what someone else is thinking?"
I thought about it. "That with the phone—that happens to everybody," I said. "And sometimes you know who's calling, only when you actually answer the phone, it turns out you were wrong. I don't think I ever had any precognitive dreams"—I was showing off, that I knew the jargon—"and sometimes I know like what my mom's thinking, but that's not hard, given the situation and the look on her face."
"Anything else? Suspicious coincidences? Things that can't be explained naturally?"
I really wanted to be honest with her, but this was getting kind of personal. Then I figured that kissing her was kind of personal too, so I went ahead and told her the truth.
"Sometimes I feel like my prayers are being answered," I finally said. "Like, uh, God or something is looking out for me specially." I shrugged to sort of tone it down, but she didn't look surprised, just nodded.
After a moment she went on, "Got a girlfriend?" She looked at me in a neutral and nonchalant way, but her voice was a little different. I grinned inside but didn't let it show.
"Shep mostly plays the field," I said, starting with him to kind of keep her guessing. "He goes out with a lot of different girls. I don't think he has anybody special.
"I dated one girl kind of a lot last year. It wasn't heavy, though—not exclusive, no commitment or anything. She moved away. We e-mailed some at first, but it's really sort of over. I mostly hang with a crowd now, nobody special. I've had some dates, this past year, with different girls"—I realized how that might be beginning to sound and regrouped.
"I expect I'll get married someday. I haven't found a special someone yet, and I'm not looking, because I'm way too young. But the girls I date—they're mostly people I think I could be serious about. Not just people to have fun with, like Shep does. I—I haven't actually gone all—done—had sex yet, because I think that should be important"—A thought struck me and I shut up quick.
"Shep?" She looked up at me.
"I don't know," I answered, holding eye contact as best I could. "I—don't think so." Not really a lie, given the context. "If so, he hasn't told me."
"Thank you," she said, closing her little device and putting it away. "Now, you're going to need stuff to do while you wait for Shep to get well."
"Actually I'm wondering why all the questions," I said.
"Um, I'm doing some research for my dad," she said. I opened my mouth to ask why he wanted to know about my dating habits, and she went on quickly. "You'll probably meet him soon and he can explain. Now, about stuff to do, until Shep is better."
I guess I looked surprised, or maybe disappointed, because she got a little pink again. "I mean," she went on, "I have um stuff to do, so I'll show you around, get you oriented, introduce you to some people. This building, the building your room is in—oh, and when we leave, you be thinking about how you'd like to alter or improve your room, this room, what changes you'd like, what else you'd like in here.
"Anyway, in this building there's a gym and a pool—well, the pool is outside, sort of. There's a common room with a DVR and a bunch of DVDs. I'll show you where the library is, and the building with the labs and stuff. And it's neat, or I think it is, to just wander around the TSA."
"You know what I'd like?" It just came to me while she was talking, and once again I managed to actually express my thought. "As long as I'm—sort of stuck here for a while, not that I mind—anyway, there's some stuff I'd like to—kind of work on. You said I could talk to people in the labs. Do you maybe have a, well, a counselor, an adviser"—I took a deep breath and just went ahead and said it—"a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, somebody I could talk to?"
She was nodding, and she looked very matter-of-fact, like she thought it wasn't an abnormal request. I gave a mental sigh of relief that I hadn't weirded her out or anything.
"Sure," she said. "I think I know just the person."
I immediately started thinking of giving her a list of requirements—not a woman, not somebody old—then relaxed. She said she knew just the person, okay, maybe she did. And if not, no harm done—I didn't have to talk to whoever it was if I didn't want to.
She got out her little device again and did something to it, then put it up to her head. Maybe it was an iPhone.
"Hi, Simon?" she said. "Angel. Listen, do you have some time? – You know about my daring and unauthorized rescue mission, right?" There was a pause, and then she laughed. "Well, yes. Anyway, one of the rescuees, the one who's not—who's well now and conscious, he'd like somebody to talk to, and I thought you'd be a good person, if you—Oh, sure—that would be great. I'll bring him. Thanks, Simon." She closed the thing and put it away.
"All set," she said. "Let's go—I'll show you around, as I said, and then I'll take you to Simon. He's neat—you'll like him."