ANGELS IN THE MOUNTAINS

For ages in a small New England town the locals have said that Angels came out at night when a loved one passed away.

Living in Vermont makes it easy to believe that story. Snow lingers in the sky. It drifts as slowly as time. Everything is white. Stars seem to move, even flicker. Mountains hunch in the cold. Shadows play tricks on nine-year old boys. And adults fib to them.

On the eve of Pop’s burial, Will stayed up late staring out a window at the mountains to search for angels. His Mom watched him from the doorway to his room.

Time for bed, she said.

I think it’s Peter Pan who comes at night, Will said.

It is never Peter Pan, Mom told him. It is angels that come. That’s what you see in your sleep. We all return to the earth.

Close your eyes tonight and you will see them, she said.

For three hours Will kept his eyes shut as if with Super Glue.

He saw nothing.

Meanwhile Mom, a maid, went off to work. She had no choice but to make ends meet. From his bed Will heard the familiar flimsy click of the lock. It meant he was alone in the dark little house.

In the morning, he woke feeling the tug of his pants up around his hips. Mom had already begun dressing him.

He had never dressed in black before. But that’s what Mom said to wear.

It’s not Pop’s favorite color, he said. He liked blue.

People don’t wear blue to funerals.

I want, too.

You’ll wear black. That’s what everyone will wear. Now brush your teeth.

Little white shirt, little black pants and jacket, little black tie. With drawn pale face, wet green eyes and dark hair, Will was ready to stand beside his first coffin. Ready to say goodbye to Pop.

In the kitchen he slowly ate a piece of waffle, a piece of egg left on a plate for him. Milk as white as the snow. At the counter Mom sipped coffee standing up. Her back was to him. He heard silence in the house. Silence has its own sound, he decided.

Growing boys need their strength, she said.

Will hadn’t slept a wink. Neither had she.

Snow drifted aimlessly across the fields and the distant woods. Several great pines, the pillars of the forest, were already draped in white shawls. For hundreds of feet snow looked like bedsheets pinned from tree to tree. The storm then argued with the windows, fighting to get in. Howled like a pack of wolves. It slapped the sky around them. Television meteorologists had ranted endlessly yesterday about the incoming storm, frothing at the mouth. It will last for days, they announced, making it sound like the world was coming to an end.

For Will, it truly was.

Pop had been his best friend. Losing him was tough. He had been sick a long time. Bed-ridden, the doctor called it. But he still tried hard to play board games with Will. He still talked to him to help him remember how to be a good man. Pop had been a veteran with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In his delusions, he took his own life.

Mom tried really hard not to wallow in self-pity. She’d been controlling that well lately. That was a big step for her. This isn’t about me, she told herself. It’s about helping my son to get through it.

She had always been protective of Will. Protective of what little they could give him. So other children wouldn’t steal Will’s things, she wrote his full name in Magic Marker, William Teller on the back of all of it. This ruined his Magic cards. He could no longer trade. Just another thing kids found weird about him.

Time to go, she told him.

The storm abruptly stopped. The yard, the fields, the roads, the forest, the mountains were all bright white. They trudged across the changed world, advancing gingerly from snow mound to snow drift, both in all black as if two crows jumping and leaping forward a little at a time.

At the car Mom hunched over as if with every step her bones were leaving her body.

She took Will’s hand as though he needed her touch. In truth, she needed his. Mom had been depressed for a long time. Might not hold up much longer. Will couldn’t grasp the idea that he could soon be alone. In foster care like many of his friends whose parents were irresponsible. They were drug addicts. Will’s were just poor. Bad health a product of poor nutrition and bad decisions like smoking.

Two hours later as four large men in black lowered Pop into a dark hole at the cemetery, Mom took Will’s hand again. They looked out over a vast cemetery surrounded by rolling hills of snow. Only two other people showed up. Three Marines fired guns in the air. Will heard the double thuds in the hills.

Will glanced around for Angels. Glanced with hope. He did not want Pop to be alone. But he saw none.

Mom thanked the two who came. Apparently, a grave digger knew Pop, too. Will heard the fellow whisper, The boy will turn out just like him. He ain’t right in the head either.

Will didn’t understand what the man meant. As Mom led him back to the car, he glanced back. The man now shoveled dirt. But he was staring at Will.

They returned home. No procession, all alone. He heard Mom on her cell phone in the kitchen.

Surely, we can get more than that for the house, she said. I owe more than that.

She nodded. Waited. Then said, I cannot make the car payment either.

Mom listened. No, she finally said. Half of Ted’s disability cannot pay all our bills.

The house seemed darker than before.

Will asked Mom what the grave digger meant by his comment.

She began to cry and closed the door to her room behind her.

Will didn’t grow up a Vermont kid. He was born in New York. Mom and Pop moved to this little town in this desolate farming area when Pop lost his fifth and final job. He wanted to start over again. He was fed up with the big city. At the time, Will was six with no siblings.

That was three years ago.

The move was a culture shock.

Will was the quiet type. He found it hard to make friends. Often, he tried too hard. Tried to impress. That led to trouble.

At first, Mom tried to help him. She had been born in the south and loved to cook. She invited prospective friends to the house for lunch. That was a big hit. Likely because it was food that could kill you; Southern Fried Chicken, Breaded Fried Okra, Country Green Beans, bowls of mixed Turnip Greens, Pinto Beans and diced country ham. Kids loved the Fried Apples. Especially when she smothered them in melted caramel.

Kids loved Mom’s quirks, too. She had all kinds of odd ideas about the medicinal value of vegetables, herbs and spices. She tended to burns with honey and garlic. Treated bruises with sliced potatoes to bring down the swelling.

They have to be fresh potatoes right out of the ground, she insisted. Wet and bright white when you cut them open.

The following morning those same potatoes would end up in Will’s breakfast.

She’d always lived in her own private fantasy land, too. While cleaning hotel rooms she often convinced herself she was a tourist from England or France or even Uganda and it was her room. Often napped on the beds. Even ate the little chocolate mints she had just placed on the pillows. Sometimes she would try on clothes she pulled from guest suitcases. Then folded them back in place. Never acknowledged the truth about her life. Denied her husband was ill. Denied her own mental health issues. Denied all their problems. Glossed them over like a wet moped floor.

For Will, things gradually worsened. At school he was considered an odd kid. He didn’t know why. He knew that every now and then he had lapses in memory. When that happened, the other boys looked at him cockeyed. He got into trouble for the comments he made. It was as if he could see the words he muttered hang in the air, but couldn’t stop them. And yet he didn’t know why he said them.

Mom soon got a text from the principal saying they needed to reconsider Will’s status. Perhaps Mainstreaming is not a good idea, the text said.

Days after the funeral and burial only two neighbors called upon Mom. Will thought the first one was a bill collector. The second was Mr. Robinson. Long time neighbor. Always at odds with Pop. Yelled at each other over the fence. Will thought he was sweet on Mom.

Some food was left on the front steps. Then the food sat uncovered for weeks on the kitchen table. It dried like prunes until Mom gained the strength to dump it all.

For months after the funeral, Will was a different boy than the different boy he had been before.

While Mom locked herself in her room he roamed around without supervision. He hid for hours in the brush, cried for hours down by a canyon. The neighborhood kids had recently re-hung tire swings over the canyon that the parents had cut down. Three long ropes were no longer bare like at a hangman’s gallows. Will listened to the twine stretch as wind nudged the tires, listened to the ice crackle in the canyon beneath the paws of squirrels. In the Spring, he heard water flow and gurgle over the rocky bottom. It was a place where Pop and Will had fished. They returned the fish to the water after they caught them.

As Will sat at the canyon’s edge he wondered if some of those fish were still in the water below. He wondered if he could find out now. He decided to climb down the side of the steep canyon to the water. He grabbed a lengthy anchored tree root to lower himself down. Swung his feet around the root to shimmy.

Mr. Robinson then ran out from the trees. William?... William? he shouted. Your Mom needs to go to the doctor. Come quick.

Will rushed home. The house was quiet and dark.

Mom’s door creaked open. Will saw empty pill capsules on the floor.

She had even piled capsules on a nightstand. Stood the short brown ones up like bowling pins.

She looked at Will through slits for eyes. Struggled to focus.

It’s my fault, she muttered in a drug-induced stupor. I should have been there.

Mr. Robinson lifted her up to take her to the car.

But once in the kitchen she fought against him, then ordered Mr. Robinson to go away.

You must see a doctor, he insisted.

No! Leave me be.

Mom struggled, but meandered back to her room.

Mom, Will said. Please go to the hospital.

She flopped onto the bed. Leave me alone, William, she muttered. I failed you. Let me die.

Then she passed out.

Mom, Will called out. Mom?

I’ll get help, Mr. Robinson said as he rushed out of the house.

Will stood for a while. Mom did not move. In frustration he noticed bottles of emptied scotch and Vodka on a nightstand. He poured the remaining drops from the bottles into a glass. The mix was disgusting but it made him feel like he was flying.

Will ran to the fields as if a plane speeding up a runway. He ran and ran, arms outstretched, hoping to fly. He ran until his home disappeared beyond the valley and the forest. Ran until his memories spun like tornadoes and the sky swirled around him, until he couldn’t tell the difference between the sky or ground and he fell in the wild grass peeking through the snow.

The canyon was just ahead. He wanted to crawl to it and climb down. To see the fish, he and Pop had caught.

He laid there, eyes glazed, struggling to move

Will missed Pop even more now. He missed him even though when he’d last seen him Pop was on an oxygen tank and his skin had lost all the meat, making him knobby and bone-like. Will laid in the field letting the alcohol fade and feeling the growth of the land all around him as if engulfing him in new life, as if pulling him in. Lucid moments were now fewer and farer between.

But for a few brief minutes he saw clearly. He remembered the rubber tires on the swings again. Remembered the afternoon two years ago when he swung far out over the canyon. While trying to impress other boys he let go of the tire and remembered his legs losing their grip and he fell, dropping for what seemed like an eternity until he struck the boulders in the stream hard and part of his head had cracked open like a watermelon tossed from a bridge. People said he would never be the same boy again. He was crazy like his Pop.

Early Spring flowers are tentative and infant-like when first they appear. Green leaves peek out before all else, as if fingers struggling to grasp the charitable donations of light and warmth. Under bleak sky, buds awaken. Plump buds with shy closed petals, unwilling to reveal themselves un-dressed. The buds stand tall, yet are meek, soundless, soft as feather, waiting for that moment. Throughout Spring, pockets of snow like spare change wallow in the mountains.

As Will laid there in the field in that moment of rare clarity, that moment of being William again, he understood that even when the flowers came snow might fall again. When these children of nature least expect it, it would fall. Snow does not ask, it demands. Yet it is a soft, returning visitor.

All around him he imagined red, yellow and lilac. New born flowers. Stems fragile. Everything, he knew, is fragile.

That night as he made his way home snow did fall softly. Flurries danced the wind across the fields as if in a ballet, a tango when blowing hard, a rock dance when battering against one another. It lay in wait in the pockets of the mountains, the big brothers of nature.

Will didn’t know that he was slowly dying. Doctors told Mom and Pop that he had five years.

I should have been there for him, Mom had cried. Kept him away from the swings.

Stop beating yourself up, Pop had said. You couldn’t have known.

Already ill, Pop took the bad news hard, smoked more, and deteriorated faster. Mom slumped into the abyss of fantasy that already consumed her. But as Will walked back toward home still filled with hope, the world was alive even beneath itself, freezing and melting, generously giving water to the life below, so that it may live.

In the morning some small bit of joy, perhaps a bit of Spring, returned to Mom. Like light over the mountains, she was suddenly bright and blinding.

For the first time in months, she cleaned up her bedroom, dumped all the bottles in a melody of cascading glass into an outdoor trash can. She showered, then afterward began cleaning the kitchen. Instead of closing the curtains to the sun, she opened them. The entire house came alive.

Heat pinged from the grates, the living room warmed, coffee steamed in her mug. As snow on the roof began to melt and gutters tinkled a song, early Spring blessed their property with new children.

But they were not hers. They would live and return again and again. The earth belongs to no one, she realized. We are the children of the earth. Even Pop. Even myself. Even my dear Will.

Months later Will stopped walking to the canyon. Stopped climbing trees to hide in the branches. Stopped running in the fields. He didn’t have the strength anymore. He couldn’t hide from his fate. The days he once played catch with Pop, accompanied him to the hardware store, or learned the difference between a Phillips screwdriver and a flat one, now seemed like distant memories. Still, he wished he could tell Pop how much he appreciated what he’d taught him.

He went to his room and saw his little black jacket, black pants and black tie on a hanger in the open closet.

Mom had written his name inside the collar of the jacket.

Will closed the bedroom door. He wanted to throw the outfit out. But he knew that now he needed it. Everyone will wear black, he remembered.

He kneeled in the jacket, pants and tie to gaze out the window. He remembered Mom’s words from long ago. We all return to the earth.

Angels would come tonight. He would watch the mountains for them and among them he would watch for his Pop. Mom said one day Angels would float over the peaks like wisps of clouds and fly to the ends of the earth for him. Pop would be one of them.

She then told Will he would feel no pain. And never grow old. Maybe there is Peter Pan after all, she said.

But she also kept a secret. She didn’t believe in Angels. Never had believed. Even in a deep sleep that night, when she saw an Angel float silently over the peaks of the mountains, she disbelieved.

In his dreams, Will strolled into the fields to see what Spring had brought them. He then took flight. Maybe he would see his Pop. If so, this time he would not let any part of him go.

John C. Weil’s short stories have appeared in NOVA, Chiron Review, Mystery Tribune, Adelaide, Suspense Magazine, Canary, Tuck, Wild Violet, Halfway Down the Stairs. He has been a finalist in the Screencraft Short Story Competition and twice a finalist in the Los Angeles International Film Festival Script writing Competition.