Chapter Seventeen
OCTOBER 2, AGE 16
“No foxes?” became a standard, cautious greeting between my mother and me.
Lisbeth Thorson, pillar of the community, wife, mother, pious, suspicious, anxious woman that she was, would say it before our bedtime prayers. She’d ask it before we entered church. She’d reiterate it as we brushed our teeth together, looking at each other in the mirror, like twins born twenty years apart. She was agelessly beautiful, her bright, blond hair dripping with evidence of Scandinavia, while mine favored my father’s coloration, growing muddier as the years went on. Everyone from gas station clerks to babysitters told me we looked like sisters, which I’d always taken as a high compliment, even if my platinum locks hadn’t stretched beyond early childhood.
For more than a decade, I’d dutifully respond, “No foxes.”
I hadn’t made the mistake of telling the truth again.
The memory was as painful now as the leather belt had been on my bare skin. Even as a teenager, I remembered her sobbing that the spanking hurt her more than it hurt me as I screamed, leather cracking again and again and again until the welts made it too hard to sit. She had to do it because she loved me, she cared about my soul, and she wanted me to go to Heaven. That was when I learned to lie. Never again would I mention the fox.
We left the trailer park within six months after the first incident.
Maybe it was the sort of thing I should try to let go, but I couldn’t forget.
She’d convinced my father that there were outside influences battling for my soul and that getting a fresh start in the woods would be good for me. It had been the first time I’d looked at my mother with a question in my eyes, as I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was wrong about the fox.
The fox was good.
But we moved. My father’s commute to work was substantially longer, and my two-hour bus ride to school began at six thirty each morning, but a trailer in the forest was cheaper than one in the city. And so, for more than ten years, I lived with the flowers and trees. No streetlights interrupted my view of the stars. If I walked far enough into the woods and ducked under a farmer’s fence, I could get to a small, babbling brook and play barefoot for hours. The birds, the snakes, the wild hares became my friends. My imagination flourished while I caught crayfish with my fingers and read tattered novels I’d smuggled from the school library in the crooked boughs of oak trees.
We remained too poor to live in anything beyond a trailer, but our new lot in the woods was quite the upgrade. It was still only two bedrooms, but over the years, we acquired a new couch and a television that played the VHS tapes my mom would borrow from the church or check out from the library. My mother had picked an eclectic antique theme of thrifted items to decorate the space, and my dad kept the grass short and the bushes trimmed. I’d always thought our excessive use of candles was a pretty choice until I was old enough to understand we were saving on electricity rather than living for aesthetics. Still, my parents were adamant that you didn’t have to have a lot in order to be proud of what you had.
My clothes were never new, but they were always wrinkle-free. Our house was cheap, but it was quaint. My mother cleaned obsessively, scrubbing every inch, vacuuming, dusting, mopping, bleaching as if proving her worthiness.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she’d say.
“That’s not actually in the Bible,” I’d reply. It always gained a smile of approval from her. She liked that I was well read and could argue my verses. While other teenagers were getting boyfriends and going to parties, I was excelling as a student of the church, glowing each time I earned her approval. Her praise was like the sun after winter, cutting through the freeze-outs, the silent treatments, the punishments that frosted my misdeeds. But my mother went on washing as if she swept and sterilized and spruced to prove her worthiness, should anyone step into our home and witness our poverty.
No one ever did.
When I wasn’t at school, I was in the woods.
For over a decade, I’d wait at my window until I saw a flash of white fur. If I didn’t see it first, it would usually find me while I played with sticks, creating tiny corrals for boxelder bugs as I pretended to be a giant rancher, as I jumped from rock to rock in the creek, as I scraped my knees and palms on tree bark or read in the shade as I got older.
I was old enough to know that arctic foxes didn’t live in the American Midwest, but it was as real as anything to me. Whether it was wild pet or imaginary friend, I loved it more than life.
If I was on a walk through the woods and I didn’t spy it right away, it would chirp, wave its paw, or leap to get my attention. There was no feeling like the sun that bloomed within my chest, lighting me from the inside out when I finally saw it. Sometimes it followed me, listening to me as I babbled about my day or homework, or church. Sometimes it would lead me to a pretty flower, or I’d follow it to a bushel of wild strawberries. Other times, it would flick its tail in greeting. Then when I turned my head, it would be gone.
My mom couldn’t know about my imaginary friend. She wouldn’t understand. And I was no longer a child. Teenagers didn’t conjure woodland creatures to keep them company. The fox would be a guarded secret. It made me happy. That’s what mattered.
Very few students talked to me at school, though it was no mystery why. As I grew older, the librarian was one of the only friendly faces I saw at the school. She always had a smile for me and often set aside new or interesting books before other children could snag them. By age eleven, I’d read every fantasy novel within my reading level, and even those far beyond my grade. I loved history, poetry, and animals. I had my mom, the wilderness, the fox, Kirby, a library of books, and the Bible. I didn’t need other friends. After all, she’d said, Jesus was the only friend I needed.
Jesus and her, of course.
She called what we had “friendship.” We were best friends, she’d said, and I believed her, though sometimes I wasn’t sure how much of our companionship was by choice. It was a solemn vow she’d say before singing haunting, beautiful songs with terrifying theology to lull me to sleep, each melody reinforcing fear over my soul and its eternal destination. It was a promise she made before coaxing my secrets from me. It was something she’d repeat before something I said or did ignited her rage. That was the pattern for years and years, and it worked. At least, it worked for her.
Everything was fine, until it wasn’t.
In the weeks leading up to my sixteenth birthday, I stopped seeing the fox.
It was just as well. I was ready to stop seeing everything. The hot and cold desperation to please my parents, the unrelenting torment at school, the despair that no matter how I tried, I was always one imperfection, one sin, one shortcoming away from crossing through the Pearly Gates. I broke God’s heart time and time again, so my mother said, and He wasn’t the only one. Anguishing waves of disappointment from the way my mother looked at me, the sneers at school, and the disgust in the faces of the church elders—men who’d once rebuked a frightened little girl for seeing unclean spirits in the form of a white fox—made me feel like I was suffocating day in and day out. I wasn’t happy, nor would I ever be.
I’d been crying so hard I nearly threw my back out. My nose was stuffed. My eyes were bleary. My ears rang. I’d kept my sobs as quiet as I could as I made my way from the bathroom to my bedroom. But I still heard a voice as clear as a bell when I reached for the bottle of painkillers I’d taken from the medicine cabinet.
Two male words came from the shadows.
“Drop it.”
I choked on my final cry. Sorrow evaporated as fear took hold, shattering my bubble of isolation. The pill bottle clattered to the floor with thirty-odd tablets scattering across the carpet. I tore out of bed and grabbed the door the moment I saw movement in the shadows. Horrible words clanged through me as I tripped over my sheets and lunged for the door. Crime. Murder. Abduction. It was four long bounds from my bedroom through the living room to the kitchen. My mom was still awake, balancing the checkbook, paying bills.
“There’s someone in the house,” I gasped.
She jumped up from the table so hard that the chair clattered to the floor. She threw on the lights, checked under the bed, looked behind doors, and secured every nook and cranny in the rectangular tin can we called home. She didn’t even notice I’d been crying. The woman had no sympathy. Worry turned to impatience as she informed me in no uncertain terms that our eyes played tricks on us in the dark, and I was almost an adult. I was too old to let my eyes play tricks on me.
“It wasn’t a trick,” I insisted, panic-stricken that there’d been a break-in and my mother wasn’t taking me seriously.
“Then pray for protection,” she replied, still irritated.
So I returned to bed with my covers over my head, struggling to breathe through stuffy clouds of carbon dioxide as I tried to outlast the quiet certainty that there was someone in my room. She was right. I was too old to be afraid of my imagination.
But I knelt and collected each of the pills that night from where they’d stuck between the fibers, then watched them swirl as I flushed them down the toilet.
Seven days passed before I saw the silhouette in my room. This time, I wasn’t afraid.
“You were here the other night.” I sat up in bed and held my knees against my chest as I watched the shape move from the corner.
“I was,” replied the voice. It was a young man’s voice, and it was decidedly gentle. I searched within myself for wariness, for a sliver of fear, for anything that told me to keep my guard up, but none existed. “I couldn’t let you do it.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I lied.
His answering silence hung heavy between us.
“Are you real?” I asked. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark in time to see a beautiful face, pale hair, and a lithe shape. Gone were the thoughts of a serial killer lurking in the shadows. My cheeks heated at the taboo of having a boy in my room. The warmth crept down my neck, flushing my chest and seeping into every part of me as my eyes traveled over his sharp jaw, over the broad shoulders, the ripple of muscle, the musical purr to the way he’d spoken.
“I am,” he said quietly. “Though this wasn’t how, or when, I wanted to meet.”
“When?”
But the beautiful phantom did not elaborate.
For weeks that bled into months, my forest walks were not graced by a fox. I recognized the white hair and silver eyes as he moved in the ethereal form that could only belong to an angel. Instead, I’d wait up at night to see if the marble-hewn vision would step from the shadows and join me. Sometimes I’d fall into a disappointed sleep only to have my dreams allow me permission and bravery to touch him, to breathe him in, to run my hands through his hair. On the nights he did appear, he remained on the far side of the room, leaving contact to my imagination. The beautiful anomaly usually asked me about my day, about friends, about life and thoughts and feelings, though he never stayed long after ensuring I was okay.
“Wait,” I said as he began to shift his weight toward the shadow as he always did before departing. “Do you only visit at night?”
“I’m not sure if it’s wise for me to visit when the sun’s out,” he replied cautiously.
“Why?” I asked.
He paused for a moment before saying, “I know you can see me now in the shadows, but it might alarm you in the light of day.”
“Is that why you appeared as a fox?”
The question had been a risk, but I asked it anyway. I knew from the way his jaw ticked that I was right.
“Be not afraid,” I responded quietly, thinking of the angels who’d appeared to the shepherds on the hill. I asked him if he was the guardian angel that God had sent, and he made an unforgettable smirk as he said he was there to make sure I had a good life. I thought of the first time my heart had shattered as I’d clutched a soapy sponge and the fox had kept me from breaking, and I knew he was telling the truth. He’d appeared to keep me whole, to keep me sane. I asked if everyone had a guardian angel, and his words rang through me.
“I can’t speak for what everyone has, but I’m only yours.”
It was one of the first times in sixteen years I’d felt special. I clutched the words as if he’d handed me a beautiful diamond necklace and slipped it around my neck, holding this secret close to my heart forever.
I asked him his name, and he said what I called him didn’t matter.
“Gabriel is an angel’s name,” I offered, “If you’re a guardian angel, would that be a good name for you?”
He made a face like eating blanched vegetables. It felt decidedly childish, but so was having an unseen friend. I giggled, and he said, “That name’s taken. Can you think of anything you like that fits me better?”
I looked to the books on my piles from sophomore year and drifted to Shakespeare.
“Do you like Caliban?”
He smiled a lovely, perfect smile. It was prettier than the actors’ in movies and far kinder than the plastered grins of the church pastor and greeters who forced me to shake their hand every time I entered the sanctuary. It was a little sad, the same way that my mom’s smiles were often blue around the edges—the same way that my smiles were often tinged with heaviness.
“Do you like Caliban?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Then that’s my name.”
“Caliban,” I repeated, his name a smile on both of our lips.
And so, I added him to my nightly prayers. I’d thank God for everything I had, I’d pray for protection, for salvation, for forgiveness. Then I’d pray for my parents, and without fail, night after night, I’d thank God for Caliban and ask the Lord to keep him safe. I’d fall asleep somewhere in the middle of my prayers, mumbling gratitude for my angel—the only friend I knew would never leave me.
That was when I made my next mistake.
“What do you think about guardian angels?” Months had gone by before I made a mistake. I asked my mother over a plate of overcooked spaghetti and red sauce straight from the jar. I swallowed a rubbery bite before vowing that I’d teach myself to cook.
My dad was either at work or at church. It was hard to tell, and neither of us cared. The modestly decorated home had no trace of a male presence. He was never home, and his absence was rarely felt. Besides, my mother was the intelligent one. She’d nearly finished her master’s in biblical studies before she’d met my father and had to choose between supporting his dreams or achieving her own. Though she’d left higher learning behind for life as a wife and mother, she’d never stopped studying. She’d read everything, from theology and literature to geography and history. She continued to teach literature and loved to talk to me about the sorts of things that made me even less popular at school than I already was, which was fine. As the years went on, our relationship changed. There were times I even felt like she looked at me as if I were a peer.
She was nearly as friendless as I was. Perhaps that’s why we clung to one another.
She swirled the spaghetti around her fork, chewing and swallowing her food as she called on a verse. “The book of Ephesians tells us that we’re not contending against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the powers, against the rulers of this present darkness. It talks about spiritual hosts of wickedness and heavenly places.”
“And?” I asked. It was risky, but there was no one else I could ask. “Do you see angels or demons?”
She stiffened. Her fork was halfway between her plate and her mouth, but her eyes did not leave mine. Slowly, she asked me, “Do you?”
I forced myself to remain casual as I said, “I see my angel sometimes.”
I was acutely aware of how shallow her breathing had become. I knew enough of her drastic mood swings, her intense temperaments, her bouts with depression and her quickness to anger to immediately back off. I’d been born into a house on fire, but through cautious steps, I’d learned to manage the source of the flames.
“I’m not a child. I know the difference between good and evil,” I quickly amended. “I would know if I were seeing something bad. I would know if it’s from God or Satan.”
She relaxed, but only slightly. She twirled the noodles on her fork with no intention of lifting it to her mouth, eyes fixed on the slow, intentional movement as red-stained pasta coiled more and more tightly. It took her a long time to say, “You might have your mother’s gift.”
I looked up at her mid-bite. I wasn’t sure what had possessed me to bring it up to her in the first place, but this certainly wasn’t where I’d thought the conversation would go.
Her utensil clattered to her plate as she looked at me. “The discernment of spirits can be a very powerful gift, Marlow. It also means you have a great responsibility.” She stood from the table and left the small kitchen, crossing into the shadows of our unlit living room. She fished a thick book from a high shelf and returned in several steps. She plopped it down on the surface next to me. “It’s fiction, but it’s about someone who can see angels and demons. They fight over our towns, our houses, our hearts as if each place is a territory. The angels are on the side of every believer. Demons want to drag us to Hell. I thought it would be too scary for you, but there aren’t a lot of books that talk about what I…what we have.”
I set my fork down, appetite evaporating. “You see demons? Like monsters?”
She made an interesting face I couldn’t quite understand before saying, “Did you know that Lucifer was the most beautiful angel?”
I blinked. I knew the verses backward and forward, and she knew that. She wasn’t asking because she expected an answer. Her question was heavy with some other implication as her eyes unfocused.
“He was a musician,” she nearly whispered. “He played beautiful music and was one of God’s favorite angels. A lot of people in the church translate his name to Morning Star, or Shining One. He was the dawn. A new day.”
Looking back on that day, I remember only how cold the room felt, how dim the bald lightbulb overhead looked as I searched her face. The hum of the outdated refrigerator was too loud, too robotic for the seriousness required of such a topic. “You talk about him like you know him.”
“He rebelled against God,” she said finally.
I shook my head, then finished, “To bring evil into the world.”
“No,” she corrected, “because he thought he was equal to God. He took a lot of angels with him who no longer wanted to be under God.”
I frowned and pushed the congealing pasta around my plate. The smell of cold food was beginning to make me nauseous. I couldn’t keep the confusion from my face as I pressed, “This just sounds like people not wanting to have slaves and masters but be equals.”
“Don’t say that,” she hissed, mood changing in a flash. She snatched my plate from me and crossed to the counter. It had yellowed over the years, the plastic peeling up from its corners. She found a stained Tupperware and dumped my spaghetti into it. She kept her back to me, shoulders tense as she began washing dishes.
“But”—I stood from the table, taking a step closer as I pushed—“it just sounds like the same people. If they were all angels, then they’re still all angels, just on two different sides of the line—like the Civil War. One side who wants to keep things the same, and one side who wants freedom. If demons are just beautiful angels on the other side of the line, why do people think they look ugly?”
“Beauty is a trick,” she said curtly, refusing to look at me. Every muscle remained flexed as if poised to fight.
I didn’t understand why this was getting her so emotional. I was nearly an adult, and this was an academic discussion. As a scholar and a zealous theologian, she should have loved this conversation.
“If fallen angels are so bad,” I continued, “why didn’t God just evaporate them? Why create Hell? Why—”
She turned with wet, soapy hands and snatched the book from where she’d left it before shoving the fictional novel on angels and demons into my hands. She returned to her chore before saying, “Go read the book. See if it resonates with you. Though, for your sake, I hope you did not inherit my gift.”
I set my jaw as I said through gritted teeth, “I see angels.”
She froze. The water continued to run for a long time, though her hands didn’t move. After a long time, she turned off the sink. Rather than turn to face me, her eyes remained screwed on the individual droplets that clung to the faucet, dripping with rhythmic insistency before she asked, “What angel do you see?”
The words poured out of me before I could stop them. “Only my guardian angel. I pray for him, I—”
“No.”
My mouth continued to move as if I were the sink faucet. “Mom, I pray to God. Just to keep him safe, to—”
“No!” she said, spinning with intensity. Her eyes, normally a bright shade of sky blue, were as dark as angry coal as she looked at me. “Nothing of God would ask you to pray to it.”
I winced but stood my ground. I lifted my hands to brace against impact as I insisted, “You aren’t listening. I don’t pray to him, Mom! I pray for—”
“It’s not a him!” she practically screamed. She stormed out of the kitchen and slammed the door to her bedroom so hard that the walls shook. I sank against the wall, pressing my ear to her door as I listened to her tearful prayers as she interceded on behalf of my soul. After that day I knew my angel, like my fox, would be something I’d never, ever mention again.