Chapter 25
As I drove away from the prison, I wondered whether Angel had yet tired of the Farnsworth, before deciding that he almost certainly had not.
There was now a quietude to Angel that had not been present before his illness.
According to Louis, Angel could sometimes spend hours just staring at the sea, or watching the boats and ferries crisscrossing Casco Bay.
To Louis, who loved him more than anyone, Angel had never been more unknowable.
But it might have represented a kind of peace, in which case the Farnsworth could only have been good for his spirit.
“The fuck time do you call this?” said Angel, as he climbed into the car and slammed the door with more force than was necessary. “I nearly died of boredom in there.”
“I thought you might have liked some extra time to feed your soul.”
“I can feed my soul for an hour tops, and that includes restroom breaks and a turn around the gift shop. After that, my soul gets indigestion.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t leave a message.”
I’d checked my phone as soon as it was returned to me at MSP, and seen nothing from Angel.
“I would have, and it might have been a communication for the ages, except I left my phone back at the apartment.”
“Well,” I said, “let that be a lesson to you.”
So that he wouldn’t sulk all the way home, I offered to pay for an early dinner at Rustica on Main Street; if I couldn’t successfully feed Angel’s soul, I could do my best for his belly.
Over pasta rossa and pan-seared bistro steak, I shared the substance of my encounter with Ward Vose.
Angel listened without comment until the end, when he concluded that I was a soft touch, and someday I’d return home minus a cow but clutching a bag of magic beans.
I told him that was questionable, since I didn’t own a cow.
Because dinner was on me, Angel decided to try both the boca negra and the tiramisu for dessert.
I didn’t object, so he might have been right about that soft touch business.
Only over coffee did he return to what we had spoken of in the car on the way up to Rockland.
“What I said earlier,” he began, “about choices echoing themselves, and events repeating—”
He took in the figures walking along Main Street, rendered insubstantial by dusk.
“When Louis and I first met you, back when Susan and Jennifer were still alive, we felt like we could trust you, which made no sense, given that you were police and we were—”
“Not police,” I finished.
“Definitely not police. Louis was more hesitant, but then, he had more to be hesitant about. Over the years, that trust has never wavered. If anything, it’s grown stronger.”
“Likewise,” I said.
“I have no doubt that we knew one another before, we three,” said Angel.
“Louis and I were drawn to you more than thirty years ago, and you to us, but it wasn’t the first time; and I think we’ve died for you, more than once, and we’ll die for you again.
Don’t ask me how I can be sure of that, because the answer would be to do with feeling, not reason. But I know it to be true.”
“And Louis has had similar thoughts,” I said, “independent of you.”
“Not just similar thoughts. Jennifer came to him as well, the same night she visited me. Unless too many years of intimacy has led to us sharing dreams—and I sincerely hope that’s not the case, because I know how darkly Louis dreams—incidents are starting to come to the surface.
Call them hidden memories. But when I try to focus on them, they submerge: not all the way down, but deep enough that I can only catch flashes.
I think they need to rise in their own time.
They can’t be forced. If we push too hard, they’ll sink to the bottom and we may never be able to find them again. ”
Angel fixed his gaze on me. His eyes were very black. I could not recall them ever being so lightless, so old; and I thought that were I to be permitted to see my own eyes at the moment, they might have resembled his.
“Who are we?” he asked.