Heart of an Angel

Even in death the girl could find life: that was what everyone said about her. “Oh that smiling girl, the one who’s always happy to help,” they would say.

The girl frequented the library, to help the librarian shelve books or just to pass the time reading. She went to the coffee shop to hold the door for customers and get snacks. The stray cats in Franklin Alley were indebted to her kindness, for it was to them she would give her extra food and pour the rest of her water in a little bowl they could drink from. The girl would sit with them for nearly an hour, petting their shaggy matted coats before moving on to her next endeavor. She took a cashier’s job at the grocery store and would always be the most pleasant of workers, making small talk and giving out smiles, or staying quiet when she knew the person had nothing they wanted to say. In school she greeted the man who handed out breakfasts, saying good morning because she knew the other students didn’t. The man had always seemed a little rough around the edges, tired and older, but he always gave her a big grin when she came around. On the third Saturday of every month she volunteered at the church’s food drive, passing out packages of canned foods, loafs of bread, jars of peanut butter, packaged fruit, beans, rice, and pasta, among other things. Though many people wanted to hand out the boxes to the families, she didn’t care what station she was at as long as she was there. She understood that some volunteers enjoyed being the ones to greet the people: it was more gratifying for them to see the people they were helping. But to the girl it didn’t matter: as long as she was helping in some way, it was enough for her. She never forgot birthdays and always said please and thank you. Everyone was a “ma’am” or a “sir” to her and she was always making sure her classmates were included.

At times the townspeople wondered where she came from. She had never been seen with parents or walking into a house. No one to hug her when she cried or drape a blanket over her when she was asleep. She drifted between friend groups of girls and boys, staying long enough to know people but never long enough for them to know her. She attended the town high school just like so many others, but did not play sports or join clubs. Anyone who mentioned her would call her a different name, to the point where no one could remember which one was correct. With everyone too buried in their own lives, it was easy for her to slip through the cracks of seen and unseen. Askings of who she was died down as soon as she would leave the room.

After school one winter evening in February, the girl sat on the rough short steps leading up to the public library. Bundled in a black winter coat she leaned back under the overhang at the doorstep, and watched the snow fall in a dreamy haze to the ground. The flakes fell light and fluffy to blanket the ground and send the dimly lit street into something of a story book. She brushed the hair out of her face and scooted down a few steps, until she was sitting in the snowfall and could feel the flakes against her face. She sat as still as the branches under the grey clouds and appreciated the sting of cold air in her lungs.

Several minutes passed and the library door opened behind her. Calvin Meyers, the librarian, bustled out holding his lunchbox and two or three books stacked in his arms. He was a tall and lanky man well into his 50s, brown hair slightly lighter than the girl’s and eyes that glittered clover green. He was startled when he saw the girl sitting there.

“Oh, miss! What are you doing out in the snow? You’ll catch a cold! Do you need something?” He said.

She craned her head to look at his face. “No, sir. I apologize if I frightened you. I can go somewhere else if you wish?”

“No, no,” he shook his head and hesitated for a moment before taking a seat behind her, under the overhang. “It’s not a problem, dear, but what are you doing here?”

Turning back around, the girl sighed. She had waited for a flash of recognition from him because she had met him before, but no, he did not remember the girl who came here so often. At that moment she decided that it was okay that he did not remember her. She would forgive him, and begin anew. Just like all the others, until one day, maybe they would remember.

“I was admiring the atmosphere Mr. Meyers. The snow, the icicles off your library’s roof, the warm lamp lights against the salted sidewalks and the snow piling on fence posts. It’s beautiful,” the girl tipped her head to the sky again. “How could I not stop and appreciate it for a while?”

Mr. Meyers pulled on his gloves behind her, and noticed that she didn’t have any. He thought he knew her, he was sure he did, but he could not place her. Her eyes, so light they looked grey, searched the clouds, as if looking for the stars with a look he could only best describe as longing.

“What is your name dear?”

The girl didn’t miss a beat. “Emily,” she decided. “My name is Emily.”

“Emily,” he repeated. “What makes you seem so lost, Emily?”

Her silence was loud, stretching across the street. After a minute, he patted his knees and rose from the stone steps. He gathered his things and said, “Well, Emily, I’ll leave you to it. Do please get somewhere warm soon, you shouldn’t be out in the cold like this.”

He started off down the path to the sidewalk, and the girl felt a sudden urge to say something, for once. She closed her eyes and listened to the muffled sound of wheels across snow from a street over. “Greed, I think.” Mr. Meyers was stunned enough to stop with his back still towards her, waiting for her to continue. Silence closed the two of them in again, snow circling as if someone had shaken a snow globe. “It is rooted in me, in my classmates and teachers, in everyone who has ever experienced the feeling of accomplishment or pleasure. I give and give, and for what? I love making others happy, I love brightening peoples’ days, but what happens when there is nothing left? What happens when they don’t remember the face that they take and take from until there is nothing more left of me to give?

“I’ll tell you something,” the girl let out a dry laugh. “If I knew my own worth, you would never see me again.”

Mr. Meyers was stunned. He stood in the snow for a moment, and then something clicked. “Wait, Emily, you’re that girl who’s always helping out around town, the one who’s always happ—” he began, but when he turned to face the girl, she was already gone.

After that, she never went back to the library again.

One afternoon in May, several months after her encounter with Calvin Meyers, the girl sat in her school’s art room. Her canvas was propped up in front of her with paints neatly poured on her palette. She usually never stayed after hours, but her teacher had let her stay to finish up her project. Ms. Genevieve, or Gene Gene, as everyone in town called the art teacher, washed paint-crusted brushes in the sink below the giant windows of the classroom. Drawings and paintings covered the walls of the art room. The running water and her slight humming were soothing sounds as the girl dabbed a muted blue onto her canvas.

When Gene Gene finished her tasks around the room she stopped to look over the girl’s shoulder. “Whoa, this is beautiful… um…” she trailed off, and the girl suppressed another sigh. Gene Gene didn’t know her name, but the girl would forgive her, and begin anew.

“Vivian,” the girl decided. “My name is Vivian.”

Gene Gene smiled at her appreciatively. “Vivian, this is incredible! The colors and the blending is just marvelous! How long did this take you?”

“I’ve been working on it for about three months. Thank you very much, ma’am.” The girl replied as she outlined the three figures in her picture once more.

“It truly is a haunting piece. Care to share what inspired it?” Gene Gene pulled up a stool just behind the girl to observe as she continued working.

The girl thought for a moment. How could she explain?

“In my history class there’s a girl who never stops tapping her pen. She taps and taps right up until the lunch bell and then she is always the last one out the door,” the girl began. “And there is another girl in that same class who only ever wears pants. And in my math class, there is a boy who constantly checks the time, minute by minute. And in my English class, a boy whose clothes are so worn and altered you would think he's had them since he was a child. I used to think they were odd, but I know it’s all for a reason.

“The tapping girl is anxious to go to lunch because she has no friends to sit with. The girl who always wears pants has marks on her legs that she thinks no one will want to see. The boy who checks the time is waiting for the bell to ring, waiting for when he has to drive away in his mother’s BMW back to the shouts and fists of his home. And the last boy has clothes like that because restitching seams is much cheaper than buying new clothes, and it makes his mother happy to do something for her son.”

The girl gathered a mossy green paint onto her brush. “Too much war occurs in our own minds that we don’t realize the bloodshed happening in the lives of those around us. As a whole people, we are consumed by ourselves, and therefore have no way to step away and truly understand other people. Too many people are beaten but no one wants to admit that it hurts. Too many people are forgotten but no one wants to admit that it’s devastating. No one will ever be truly happy until we can tell each other the truth: that we are broken and cold, and yet we still stand here doing our best to ‘act normal.’ We hurt and then we cry and then we heal, and then a small part of us dies because we know if it gets hurt again then there will be no one to help us through, so we are left haunted by the ghost of it.”

Finally, the girl was finished. She laid down her palette and her brush and admired her work. Outside, thunder boomed in the distance, a warning for the onslaught of storms that the night would bring.

“Those are… ghosts?” Gene Gene ventured cautiously, as if she was unsure what to say to the girl.

The girl gave a small, yet affectionate smile to the painting. “In a way, yes.”

Long moments passed and neither of them said a word. When Gene Gene finally did figure out something to say, the girl cut her off.

“Thank you, ma’am, for letting me stay in your room. I must be going before the rain begins.” She abruptly stood with her backpack and practically ran out of the room.

“Wait! V–Vi…Victoria? Vanessa? Come back!” Gene Gene’s face brow scrunched in a frown as she stared down the haunting painting.

Gene Gene gently picked up the painting and brought it to a spot in front of the windows to dry. As she carried it across the room, she noticed something written on the back. Gripping it by the edges so as not to touch the wet paint, she flipped the canvas and read what was written. She had no clue what it meant, whether it was a title or a dedication, it was only one line:

Cate and Cate and Cate

And that night as rain pelted the roads and beautiful lightning cleaved the sky, the girl took a stroll down the roads of the town. Rain soaked her clothes and dripped off her eyelashes, rolling down her face to mingle with her tears. Loose rocks dug into the bare soles of her feet. She felt as if she was an island in the sea, waves and waves of sadness and misery never ceasing to crash on her shore. The girl stopped and leaned on the guardrail by the road. In the rain, her long brown hair turned black and she could barely see what she had done to her arms under the light of the moon. The girl tipped her head and let the soothing rain fall against her face. She thought of her painting. She had spent three months working on it, her final painting to shape the end of her story.

“I am lost,” she said to no one. “I have nothing left to give. I am empty and my heart has run dry, and there is no light in me left to live. And what good am I when that is my only reason for being here? What do I do when they have nothing left to take? Throw myself under a blade for them? Cut off a limb just because they needed a hand? I am no one to them unless there is something I can give. They don’t even remember the face that loves them so much, because I do. I love them all, yet I am starting to wish I didn’t. I am no one and nothing to them, and yet I continue to give and give myself up, piece by piece until there is not even a spark, until my light burns out and yet another part of me is sentenced to being a ghost..”

The girl stepped forward and pushed away from the guardrail. Blood ran down her arms and dripped off her hands to mingle with the water on the cement, but she didn’t feel her pain anymore. She felt heavy and tired, and so she let herself be beckoned out into the center of the road. When she finally fell to her knees, she thought of her painting. Set on a rather large canvas with mostly colors of green and blue and black, the painting was of three girls. The main girl had a clear and solid figure in the middle ground of the piece with long black hair, and was sitting on the edge of a road barefoot. Her arms were wrapped around her knees as she stared just a little off from the eye of the viewer. The other two were ghostly and vague, not quite fully formed: she had pushed the paint just enough to create outlines of the girls, with no features. The silhouette in the background of the picture stood slightly to the left of the sitting girl, and was just off the edge of the road. She was draping a blanket over the girl’s shoulders. The second silhouette was in the foreground of the painting and to the right of the others. This silhouette was even more faded than the other, and she was stepping into the road as the other two watched her. She held a tinted red hand outstretched behind her, beckoning frantically for the other two to join her.

The girl wished so badly at that moment for a blanket. The rain had chilled her to her bones and she felt as if she were an anchor dragging through sand. She knew how the next several days would go. She would be absent from classes and few would take notice. Only when people started to miss her kindness and her help would they realize that she was really gone.

Only in my dreams am I loved the way I deserve, the girl thought as her eyelids grew heavier and heavier. I wake and I am half a person, half a wish, half the truth, a “maybe” that never becomes a “yes.” I am neck deep in water trying to keep them up, and they are ankle deep in the same water using me as a stepping stone.

The girl’s hands pressed against the pavement, and in the light of the moon on the water her reflection stared back up at her.

Once the townspeople realized she was gone, they would all say the same thing. “Oh that smiling girl, that happy girl…” But what was her name? They would not know. They would ask their neighbors over fences and gossip in the coffee shop and the kids would tell stories of where they thought she came from, and where she was now.

The girl’s cheek pressed against the ground, and she twisted to lay on her back and look at the sky. Standing around her were all the ghosts of the things she once had, all there to remind her who she was, and to watch her as she joined them. She thought that the rain was beautiful. The water on the leaves, the boom and clap of thunder in mysterious dark clouds. She thought of her town and she decided it was beautiful too, as was everyone there. She was still so full of love for all of them. And so the girl spent these moments in the rain still believing that she was love. She was life even in the face of death.

I am Cate, I am Cate, I am Cate…