“I know,” Azra said, relenting to the tug of her hands. He trembled.
“You’re going to be okay.” Clinging to each other, they walked back toward the dark house. Its open window spilled heat into the night. “I’ll call the station house, the fire department – there’ll be twenty volunteers here soon. We’d better get dressed.”
“I’m hungry,” Azra blurted.
“I’ll heat water for cocoa-”
“I’m hungry.”
“We’ll have cinnamon bagels, too.”
“He wasn’t supposed to die.”
“I know-”
“No, I mean he really wasn’t supposed to die. I should have been there sooner. I should have been able to stop it.” Fat flakes of snow shambled down all around him. In the white robe, he seemed a paladin of old, or a priest of some ancient and very good god.
“You’re only human. You did everything you could.”
“But not everything I should-”
“You saved my life. Whatever you did with that tree, you saved my life.”
“You weren’t supposed to die tonight, either.” His hands and arms were strong, framed in the flashes of fire and spark.
“Thanks to you, I didn’t-”
“That tree shouldn’t have fallen. That truck shouldn’t have struck it. That man shouldn’t have died.” A hurt light shone in his eyes.
“Let’s get inside. I’m cold.” They stood before the window. Radiator air, as warm and as wet as blood, gushed out over them. Donna leaned toward Azra and gave him a quick kiss on one cheek. “I’ll go first, clear away the books so you can crawl through.” She stopped, assessing him. His eyes were far away. “No, you go first. Push the books out of the way. You go first.”
He bent obediently into the dark window and climbed through. Crime books cascaded before him. They slapped the floor. He left piles of snow on the arm of the love seat as he crawled across it. Wet feet crushed the books. He stepped from them and stood, waiting for Donna to come after him.
She followed, fitting more easily through the space, and turned to close the storm window. Her fingers were frigid in the aluminum slots. The glass grated downward. She closed the sash, too, panting in the darkness. Azra stood beside her, stony.
“How about some light – if the accident hasn’t taken out our power?” Donna said. She switched on the floor lamp that curved over the love seat. Comforting gold illumination spilled across the pillows. “We can hope the phone lines are good, too.”
Azra looked diminished, now, standing in a woman’s robe, puddles forming around his feet. The snow that haloed his hair was quickly melting into it.
“Sit down, Azra.” She kicked the crime books aside. Her feet trailed water on the floor. “I have to call the station. Sit here.” She guided him to sit. He did. A resigned whuff of breath escaped him. She blinked into his staring face. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Everything’s coming apart.”
“You’re going to be okay.”
“Yes.”
She turned on the TV. It crackled and set up a highpitched keen. The screen glowed to life. WGN was showing a movie version of Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment. Two men stood on a porch, snow spitting fiercely down outside their cave of light. Donna had retreated to the kitchen. She stood at the phone, speaking quietly and urgently into it. “Yes. Just five minutes ago. The driver’s dead. Nobody else in the truck. It’s on fire. We’ve got a downed tree, too. Yeah. There’ll be power outages. On Fish Hatchery Road. Yes, just across from the conservancy. Yeah, they get going pretty fast down the hill. I’ll stay on the line. Yes.”
She drew the mouthpiece away from her lips, snatched a white-enameled kettle from the stove, flipped the faucet on, and began filling it. In moments, blue flames licked the drops of water inching down the outside of the kettle. “Something to eat,” she murmured, wanting comfort. Cradling the phone between shoulder and jaw, she pulled out a pair of plates, a bag of raisin bagels, a tub of spread, and her jar of cinnamon and sugar. She waited for the water to boil, waited for the operator to respond.
Steam coiled above the chipped ceramic mugs. Floating mounds of cocoa powder sank and dissolved in the dark water. Donna glanced at the man sitting, small and crouched and silent, in the spot where Kerry used to sit.
“Hello? Operator? Yes. I’m still here. I won’t hang up, but I’ve got kind of a crisis I need to take care of. Yes, shout if you need me.”
Donna slipped the phone into her bathrobe pocket, unfolded a TV tray, and arrayed the food and drinks before Azra. She sat down beside him.
“Here. You’ll feel better. Have some cocoa.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Have a cinnamon bagel.”
“Thanks.”
They both drew halves of a warm, buttered bagel from the tray and watched the TV flickering in front of them. The men in the show were inside now, in a living room decked for Christmas but devoid of any cheer except the drinks they held in their hands.
“You’re going to be okay,” Donna said to Azra.
“You’re just shaken up. Me, too. The volunteers will be here soon.”
“Everything is falling apart,” Azra said. His hand trembled as he held the half-eaten bagel. Donna leaned in toward him and took his hand. “No. Everything is coming together.”
He turned to her. At last, the distant focus had gone from his eyes. “Did you ever have one of those times when you feel like you’ve suddenly changed, and you don’t know when or why, but you know that what you were isn’t what you are anymore, like you’ve been given somebody else’s memories and somebody else has taken yours?”
“Sweetheart, it’s just this one crazy night. Just this one night-”
“It’s enough to make you crazy. You can’t rub two thoughts together. All the words you know don’t apply any longer and you have to learn a whole new language before you can even think.”
She sipped her cocoa. It was still too hot, and the liquid drew a scalding line along the curve of her tongue.
“No, I’ve never felt like that.” She blinked sadly. “I knew someone who felt like that, though.” Someone with the same mother, the same birthday. “You’re going to be okay, Azra.” She patted his knee. “I’ll make sure you’re okay.”
A deep breath filled his lungs, and he returned the last hunk of his bagel to the plate. “What are we doing?
There’s a body burning outside. The fire department will be here any moment. What are we doing?” He struggled to stand, but Donna pulled him back down beside her.
“Sit down. We’re doing what we need to do. Sit down.”
He relented, allowing her to pull him to the love seat.
The TV showed a bedroom, where a woman sat, weeping, at a vanity, and her husband hovered above her, trying to comfort her. In the other room, another couple reflected on how awful and frightening it was when two people, two worlds, tried to live together. Donna kissed Azra. His lips tasted like cinnamon. On the television, the man said, “The human heart would never pass the drunk test. If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn’t do it. It could never pass the drunk test.”
She kissed him again. Donna kissed him. His face was streaming with tears. She kissed him. “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”
Union between angels and humans always brings abomination. I had known that. I had known my work was slipping. But the truck accident outside Donna’s window – that was a true abomination.
Kevin Brown, a devoted father and honest worker, was returning home from the night shift at Nestle. He had driven cautiously all the way, had used his low beams in the blinding blizzard, had even shut off the radio so he could focus completely on the road. He had worn his seat belt. Just by the conservancy, Fish Hatchery Road turns a sharp corner and plunges down a steep hill. As Kevin rounded the bend and began his descent, a family of deer ventured across the road. His brakes locked. He fishtailed. He missed the doe by inches. The truck gained speed. He pumped the brakes. Tobogganing across unseen ice, the truck smashed into an elm. Sheet metal severed his seat belt. There was no airbag. He was stopped only when his left ankle caught and broke in the steering wheel. It didn’t matter. Kevin Brown was dead the moment his head burst through the windshield. He was not supposed to die. I would have been able to save him had I not been so locked in humanity. I could have run time backward. I could have dulled the edge of the sheet metal. I could have shattered the windshield before his head struck it. But not that night. Drowsy, naked, human, I could barely save Donna.