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Remy tore off a piece of bagel and placed it in his mouth.
“But you’re not going to?” the detective asked. “Deny it.”
“Not to you,” he answered, chewing his breakfast. Remy picked up his napkin and wiped stray crumbs from his mouth. “Nope, I made my bed and now I have to lie in it.”
Mulvehill’s face screwed up. “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean, Plato?”
Remy laughed.
“Means that I’ve got to deal with what I’ve done. I showed you what I am, and now we both have to live with it.”
“You thought I was go
Remy shrugged, having some more of his coffee.
“How many others know… you’re like that?” the detective asked.
“My wife, my dog, some business associates, but they’ve got some interesting qualities of their own,” Remy answered. He’d finished his coffee and didn’t want any more of the bagel.
“Do you want the rest of this?” he asked Mulvehill.
The detective shook his head, turning the wheelchair slightly to look out over the city. They were both quiet, wrapped up in their own thoughts.
“They say I’ll probably be going home Friday,” Mulvehill said.
“That’s good, right?” Remy asked him. “You’re ready to go home, aren’t you?”
The man nodded once, looking back to the angel sitting across from him at the patio table.
“Yeah,” he said, and paused. Remy could see him reviewing his next words carefully. “But what happens after that?”
Remy leaned back in the chair, folding his hands on his stomach. “I guess it all depends on how long it takes for you to get back on your feet. After that, you’ll go back to work… light duty at first, slowly working your way back to where you were.”
Mulvehill leaned in closer to the table so that others wouldn’t hear.
“You don’t get what I’m talking about,” he said to the angel. “Knowing what I know now… that something like you actually exists… it changes everything.”
“I guess it does,” Remy agreed. “And for that I’m sorry. I just didn’t want you to be afraid.”
“I’m afraid now,” Mulvehill said, his gruffness suddenly pulled away like a curtain to reveal a man confronted with the reality of something so much bigger than himself.
“And here I was thinking I was doing you a favor. The next time you get mortally shot, remind me to look the other way.”
The detective at first appeared stu
The pull on Remy was stronger now, the current that he traveled through the void bringing him closer to his destination. He had no idea how much longer he still had on his journey, or even how long it had been thus far. All he knew was that it was a distance that must be traversed in order to return home.
Still swaddled within his wings, Remy floated through the void, the memories that continued to rise to the surface making him all the more hungry for the existence he had left behind.
Somewhere in the darkness the puppy whimpered.
Not really asleep, but in that weird resting state that he’d eventually learned to put himself in while Madeline slept, Remy rose from bed, careful not to wake his wife, and went in search of the animal.
It had been only a few days since Marlowe had come to live with them, and the young canine seemed to be adjusting quite well to his new environment.
Or at least that was what Remy believed.
He found the pup downstairs, in the corner of the shadowed living room, sitting in a patch of moonlight beneath the open window.
“What’s wrong?” Remy asked the animal, keeping his voice soft so that he did not awaken his wife.
“Miss them,” the puppy said, staring at him briefly with large, seemingly bottomless dark eyes, before he turned his snout back up to the breeze wafting in through the window.
“Who do you miss?” Remy asked him, sitting in the chair not too far from where the Labrador puppy sat. “Your pack brothers and sisters?”
“Yes.”
“As you have done, your brothers and sisters have gone to live in new places, Marlowe. With new families,” Remy started to explain. “We are your pack now.”
The dog looked at him with sad eyes, ears flat against his small, square head. “Not same. Miss them.”
Remy moved from the chair, and sat beside the animal on the floor beneath the window. “Yes, it’s sad,” he told the puppy. “But that’s the way it works. First there is the pack, and then the pack is broken up, each of you going off to find a new pack.”
Marlowe crawled up into Remy’s lap, plopping down with a heavy sigh.
“The way it works?” the Labrador pup asked.
“Afraid so,” Remy said, begi
“You leave pack?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Find new pack? Happy now… not sad?”
“No, not sad,” Remy told him, as he gently patted the young dog until he drifted off to sleep.
“Happy now.”
He was nearly there.
Remy could feel it in the sea of dark, just beyond his reach. It was the tug of the familiar, a promise of the warmth and love of companions.
They were not his kind, but still they had recognized and accepted what he was, and in turn he had made them his own.
Rousing himself from a sleeplike stasis, Remy spread his wings and listened to his senses, homing in on the place that called out to him.
The world that was his home.
They climbed the stairs to the rooftop.
Madeline carefully pushed the door at the top of the stairway open and stepped out onto what would soon become their rooftop patio.
She held his hand in hers, drawing him out onto the tar-paper surface for a view of the city beyond Beacon Hill.
“This will be fantastic,” she said, looking around at the space. A stack of empty and broken clay flowerpots sat in the corner, along with a punctured bag of potting soil. “We can put the table just about there, with the chairs around it… This is going to be great.”
She spun around and hugged him tightly.
“Are you happy?” she asked, her faced pressed to his chest.
This would be the first night in their new home on Pinckney Street. They had spent the entire day—since early that morning—painting and doing some fixing about the brownstone. The phone man had been there, as had the gas man.
Remy wrapped his arms around his wife and hugged her close.
Am I happy?
Since making this world his home, he’d slowly acclimated himself to the concept. He was a creature of Heaven; there was no time for happiness or the opposite. His existence had been to serve the Almighty.
He guessed there had been happiness in that, but now he couldn’t truly be sure. The war had taken so much from him, bleached away the colors of what had once been such a glorious rainbow.
But this world, this earth, had given him back some of the color.
In retrospect, he saw the happiness had grown. The more acclimated he became, the more human, his joy had increased.
And it had reached its zenith with the love of his wife.
“I’m happy,” he said, kissing the top of her head.
She looked up at him.
“Really? Are you really?”
He smiled at her. “What are you getting at?” he asked. “I can hear that sound in your voice. You’re fishing for something.”
She laughed as she broke away from his embrace, going to the edge of the roof. “I don’t know,” she said, leaning on the brick edging that bordered the roof space. “Sometimes I get to thinking about the reality of what you are, and where you came from.”
Remy came up from behind, wrapping his arms around her waist, and pressing against her. “I don’t understand what that has to do with…”