Just as she had told herself, there was nothing inside the closet except the clothes she’d hung up this afternoon.
On the floor were her three pairs of shoes.
On the shelves were some boxes filled with stuff she hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw away.
And nothing else, except for a strange odor.
The odor of something burning…
“Angel?” Myra Sullivan said as her daughter came into the kitchen the next morning. “Are you all right?”
“I guess I didn’t sleep very well,” Angel replied, rubbing her eyes with the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I had a bad dream—”
“Well, that’s hardly a good sign, is it? You should have had wonderful dreams on your first night in our new house. What was it?”
As Angel tried to recall and relate the strange dream she’d had, Myra found the box she’d packed especially for this morning — buried, of course, under half a dozen other boxes, all of them heavier than the one she was after — opened it, and began taking out cereal bowls, glasses, and plates. “Rinse these for me while we talk,” she told Angel, stacking them on the counter next to the sink. “Everything gets so dirty when you pack it up.”
Angel ran the hot water and began rinsing and drying the dishes and silverware as she began once more to reconstruct the strange dream she’d had the night before, but already some of the details were starting to slip away.
“But the weirdest thing was that when I finally woke up, the whole thing still seemed so real that I got up and looked in the closet.”
Her mother smiled thinly. “Just like when you were little, remember? You always made me open the closet door in your room to prove that there were no monsters inside.” She looked up from the oatmeal she was stirring. “And you didn’t find anything, did you?” she asked, her voice taking on an edge. “It was just a nightmare then, and it was just a nightmare last night. You didn’t actually hear anything, or see anything, did you?” Angel shook her head. Yet the look on her face told Myra there was something her daughter hadn’t yet told her. “What is it?” she pressed. “There’s something you’re holding back.”
“I–I don’t know,” Angel stammered. “It’s just — well, it sounds sort of crazy… ”
Myra stopped stirring the oatmeal. “I think I can be the judge of that. Why don’t you just tell me what you think happened, and maybe I can figure it out.”
Angel hesitated, and then blurted it out: “I smelled smoke.”
Myra frowned. “Smoke? You mean like wood smoke?”
Again Angel hesitated. “Well, sort of, but not really — I mean, it sort of smelled like burning wood, but there was something else too.”
“Something else?” Myra prodded when Angel fell silent. “Am I supposed to figure it out myself, or are you going to tell me?”
“Well, it was weird,” Angel said. “Remember when you burned yourself with the iron?”
Myra winced at the memory, and her eyes went to the scar that still showed clearly on the back of her left hand. It had happened five years ago, when she’d been talking to Angel while pressing Father Raphaello’s vestments and accidentally placed the scorching steam iron on her own hand.
“It smelled like that,” Angel said. “And like the time I scorched my hair trying to blow out the candles on my birthday cake.”
“Good heavens! I thought you would have forgotten about that years ago. You were only two.”
“Forget it?” Angel echoed. “I’ll never forget it — I thought I was going to burn up!”
“Well, there you are, then,” Myra told her. “That’s probably where the dream came from — maybe moving into our own house made your subconscious decide to start clearing out a bunch of old memories. And if lighting your head on fire scared you as much as it scared me, I’m amazed you haven’t had nightmares about it for years.” She moved the oatmeal off the stove and started scooping it into the three bowls Angel had rinsed and dried. “But if it scared you that much, how come you never told me? We could have talked about it.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was a baby.”
Myra laughed out loud. “But you were a baby! And I don’t know why I didn’t understand that you must have been even more scared than I was.” Abandoning the oatmeal, she put her arms around Angel. “I’m sorry, honey. Really I am.”
“Come on, Mom,” Angel groaned, pulling away from the embrace. “I hardly even remember it. Maybe I don’t — maybe I only remember Daddy talking about it on every birthday I’ve ever had, and I just feel like I remember.”
“If you didn’t really remember, I don’t think you would have had that nightmare. And if you thought you smelled smoke, why didn’t you wake me up? Or wake your father up?”
At the mention of her father, the memory of him walking in on her when she’d been changing her clothes yesterday rose in her mind.
Walking in on her and looking at her and—
The image of her father framed in the doorway of her room was abruptly replaced by the reality of his figure framed in the kitchen door.
“Wake me up?” he asked. “I’m awake — what’s going on?”
“It’s Angel,” Myra explained. “She had a nightmare last night.”
“About me?” Marty Sullivan asked, his eyes fixing on Angel with an intensity that made her pull the bathrobe more tightly around her. “Why would she have a nightmare about me?” he asked, speaking to his wife, but his eyes remaining fastened on Angel.
“It wasn’t about you,” Myra said, barely glancing at her husband as she put the dishes of oatmeal on the table. “She had a nightmare about a fire, and when she woke up, she thought she still smelled smoke.”
“In the house?”
“Well, of course in the house,” Myra replied. “She wasn’t sleeping in the backyard, was she?” She glanced at her watch, then shifted her gaze to her husband and daughter. “You’ve got half an hour before we have to leave for church.”
“Today?” Marty groaned. “You gotta be kiddin’ me! We got all this stuff to unpack, and there’s a game on, and I haven’t even got the TV hooked up yet. How about you go, and me and Angel’ll stay here and take care of some of this mess?”
Feeling the same strange knot in her stomach that she’d felt a moment ago, Angel shook her head. “I–I want to go to church,” she said. “And I better go up and get dressed.” She started toward the door and the stairwell beyond, but her father blocked her way.
“Hey,” he said. “Doesn’t daddy still get a kiss from his little Angel?”
Angel froze, but rather than run the risk of getting into a fight with him, she gave her father a quick peck on the cheek.
“I’ve just got to take a shower and get dressed, Mom,” she said as she slipped through the door and started up the stairs. “I’ll be as fast as I can.”
“All right,” her mother called back. “But be quick — if you take too long, I’ll have to leave you here.”
Hurrying upstairs, Angel turned on the hot water in the combination shower and bathtub, took off her bathrobe and hung it on the hook on the door, and started to step into the tub.
But before she did, she locked the bathroom door.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Myra asked as she and Angel left the house twenty minutes later.
“I–I guess,” Angel stammered.
The note of uncertainty in her daughter’s voice made Myra turn to look at her. “Angel, it was only a nightmare. Nothing to worry about.”
What about Daddy? Angel thought. Should I worry about him?
“Is there something else?” Myra asked. “Did something happen that you haven’t told me about?”