Fallen Angels (Excerpt from The Loneliness of Angels)

Ruth

February 28, 2004, Port-au-Prince Hills

Ruth smoothes the plastic of the memory table as if she is trying to undo wrinkles in time. Below the plastic, the faces of her youth stare up at her along with those of her two brothers, their wives, their children, along with the faces of the young people she had taught for over three decades. All of them had inhabited this house that had been left to her by Maman and Papa in their will since she was the only one left by the time they passed away, the boys long gone and married with lives and houses of their own. The boys had left without looking back. They came around for the odd dinner, a family gathering, sometimes alone just to say hello and swap news over a strong cup of black coffee. She spent many years listening in the front room with its see-through lace curtains, passers-by peering through at her and her guests from the latticed steel of the front gates that interrupted the otherwise solid mass of brick wall encircling the property. These days, visitors are scarce.

Ruth thinks of how she started the memory table ten years ago, when the house had suddenly seemed to loom large all about her, when the rooms crammed with furniture but empty of human voices had suddenly filled her with gloom, with the thought of her life ending and having very little to show for her presence in the dusty bowl of the eastern half of the island she had refused to leave even as she watched her students grow up and depart, some never to return.

Her fingers pause on a row of faces—students she had considered to have the most potential. Among them is her niece, Catherine. Her awkward smile reveals that she had once worn a retainer to straighten a pronounced overbite. She had a dimple like a tear in her right cheek, extending itself below the lower sweep of her cheekbone and disappearing into the curvature of her smile. Ruth’s gaze pauses fondly on the photo. Catherine has changed since, of course. She can tell from her voice the odd times she calls. The girl has acquired the calm composure Ruth had wished for her in the moment that she saw her at the airport, thin and waif-like, clutching the padded handle of a small red valise, her eyes terrified at the chaos and smells inundating her from all sides. Catherine had been eleven when she had been sent to Haiti by Fritz. Rose had been gone three years already. A waif of a girl, Ruth thinks to herself, a waif of a girl.

She moves her fingers across the row and stops at the photograph of a young man she had introduced to her niece. She thought then they might make a good match despite a decade’s difference in age, that the one would serve to anchor the other, but she had misread Romulus, headstrong and ambitious, as afraid of his shadow as a mouse. But it had been there all along, this fear of his, the self-loathing. Perhaps she had misread Catherine as well, and Lucas, both of whom she had given and lost to the world.

Romulus had had a crush on her, as so many of the students did. She was well aware of their misplaced attentions but ignored those she had to. Romulus had fallen into that category. It may have been the reason she had introduced them to each other while Catherine was still a teenager and Romulus not yet the addict he would become. She couldn’t be sure of what she had been thinking at the time. She had been so much younger and unaware of all that she had come to understand in recent years. She peers at the photograph. It was there, buried in his large brown eyes that seemed to hunger for a world he might never have reason to see, a fleck of fear that gave him a startled expression. Over...