California Angel Read online

  He held his breath and listened, trying to figure out what it was that was different. Then he heard it. His heart would strike a beat and then instantly, another identical beat would follow, as if someone was walking directly behind him on a cobblestone street, following in his footsteps. Raymond became alarmed, finding the sensation uncomfortable.

  No one could enter his world, he told himself. It wasn't possible. It had never been possible. But Raymond's instinctive urge to retreat vanished as he dived into the vibrant red of the woman's hair, fascinated by the way the strands twisted into shiny loose curls, so airy and light that they seemed to float weightless around her head. As his concentration intensified, his pupils expanded and he saw a montage of brilliant, dancing colors. The woman's head was turned asa but he could see her face looking directly at him. feel the green oi her eyes wash over him. Somehow he knew. He knew it wasn't her physical face he was seeing, but the visage of her soul. He wanted to drink it, touch it, smell it, preserve it. The image was SO pun perfect. His lips trembled. His mouth opened and then shut. The beating in his chest was stronger now, and he could no longer hear

  the secondary heartbeat. He had never felt this way, never seen this way, never heard this way. His joy became a gurgling, pulsating sensation in the pit of his stomach, an enormous humming engine that was pushing him to speak, act, be. .

  His eyes jerked to the ceiling, but he didn't see the water spots, or the dirty glass of the light fixture, the graveyard of dead flies trapped inside. He saw magnificent images and enthralling scenes, wanting to stare at them forever, study them, add new images to the existing ones. But his vision suddenly strained and the images became fainter, the colors dull and fading. Something wasn't right, he thought sadly, as a solitary tear escaped and made its way down one side of his cheek. He saw jagged cracks, thinking the images were withering and dying right before his eyes. Heavy strokes had been layered over delicate strokes, trapping microscopic particles of dust and dirt between them and distorting the once flawless images. Many of the colors were now too bright, too harsh, so much so that they burned into his eyes and caused him to look away.

  Near the part in the story that related how Jonah is swallowed by the whale, Mildred Robinson observed the woman on the floor with Raymond. To her surprise, she thought she heard them speaking to one another. Raymond was making no eye contact with the strange woman but his lips were moving, and what appeared to be words were coming out of his mouth. Mildred leaped from her seat, abandoning the story and the children, and immediately crossed the floor to the woman and child. She shoved her eyeglasses tight on her nose, wondering if her eyes had deceived her. She knew Raymond Gonzales was autistic. The only sounds she'd ever heard the boy make were grunts and groans. He didn't speak, he didn't make eye contact, and from all appearances, he didn't hear when people spoke to him.

  "He's talking," she said, as if God had come down and performed a miracle. "I heard him. Wasn't he talking? What did he say?"

  The redheaded woman ignored the teacher, mesmerized by the child. She stretched out on the floor, grabbing a handful of crayons and a sheet of paper. As the stunned teacher watched, she began to draw images on the paper with the crayons. Raymond's head drifted to the left and then to the right, but never did he focus on his new playmate, and no sound now came out of his mouth.

  "Please," the teacher pleaded, "talk to him some more. He said something, didn't he? He's never spoken."

  Like a child herself, the woman gazed up at the teacher and then dropped her eyes, proceeding to draw more images on the paper,

  California Angel ( )

  filling them in with bright colors. The teacher's chest fell. She must have been mistaken. The woman was obviously an escapee from a mental institution or deranged in some way, and the child was the same as always.

  She returned to the now unruly and rambunctious crowd of children she had previously abandoned, vowing to have both her eyes and her hearing checked next week.

  With her back turned, Mildred heard the same sounds again and instantly spun around. This time there was no mistake. Not only did she hear a voice that had to be the boy's, he was staring directly into the woman's eyes, only inches from her face. Returning quickly to the two, the teacher knelt down on her hands and knees. What she heard completely amazed her.

  "My name is Michelangelo," the boy told the woman in a clear, distinct voice. He snatched the crayons out of her hands and started drawing circles within circles. A few seconds later, he handed the woman a crayon, and she filled in the circles with red, then blue, then green, each time receiving the color in her outstretched hand from the boy, like a surgeon accepting a scalpel. The teacher was awestruck. She didn't speak, too fearful to disrupt the magic that was happening right before her eyes. She'd known other autistic children during her long career as a schoolteacher. She was all too aware of Raymond's handicap and resulting limitations.

  "Here," he said to the woman, removing an orange plastic ring shaped like a pumpkin from his little finger.

  The woman acted like this was a common occurrence and promptly removed a ring from her own finger and placed it on Raymond's. Just as casually she slipped on the pumpkin ring and continued coloring. Raymond immediately flashed a smile like no other, a smile that released small bubbles of saliva from his mouth, i love you," he said through the bubbles.

  "I love you, too," the woman said, briefly letting her eyes drift up to his in exquisite gentleness and then dropping them again to the paper. "But I have to go." While the teacher watched, still kneeling on the floor beside them, the woman stood, dusted off her pants, and walked out of the Sunday school class.

  The teacher's eyes darted from the woman to Raymond. The children were running around in circles on the other side of the room, chasing one another and screaming. ■"Raymond/" she said. "Can you hear me? Do you understand? You spoke. Praise God. You did speak, didn't you?"

  "Yes," he said calmly, staring deep into her eyes.

  "Oh, Raymond!" the teacher exclaimed. "You can talk. You can hear." Few, if any autistics, would look a person directly in the eye. This was a major breakthrough, Mildred decided, a spectacular act of divine intervention. It had to be nothing short of a miracle, particularly as it had occurred in a church, in God's house, in her own Sunday school class.

  She suddenly saw Raymond's hand and the ring. On his little finger was what appeared to be a genuine piece of jewelry: a tiny ruby ring surrounded by diamonds. The teacher's heart fluttered. No matter what had happened, she couldn't let the boy keep something so valuable. She stood and went to look for the woman, carefully slipping the ring off Raymond's finger. "I'll be right back," she told him. "Keep coloring. I'm going to get your parents."

  The woman was gone. The teacher searched the entire building and she was nowhere to be found. The ring pressed in her hand, she found Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales, the pastor, and several deacons in the church, insisting that they follow her to the classroom and observe the miracle.

  Over the next six months, Raymond made remarkable progress. He spoke: first in disjointed sentences consisting of a few words, then in more sophisticated sentences involving verbs and adjectives. And he drew. Circles became scenes of life: trees, clouds, grass, flowers. From crayons he graduated to pastels, donated by a member of the church. With these, he drew lovely images of pastoral scenes with delicately shaded hues. The scenes were almost surreal and possessed of an unnatural breathtaking beauty. The church, the school, the Gonzaleses, and their friends and family were astounded.

  Having no way to find the woman and return her ring, everyone decided it belonged to Raymond. She had given it to Raymond; it had to remain with him. In the beginning there was some discussion that the ring should be sold, the money used for Raymond's education and future treatment. Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales refused. Like a visit from the Virgin Mary, they began to think of the strange woman as a messenger from God, the ring physical proof of the existence of the divine.

  The church and its
members, even Mildred Robinson, although overjoyed at Raymond's progress and recovery, quickly delegated the entire incident to the unknown and uncharted nature of autism itself. Raymond had simply snapped out of it.

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  He wore the ring every day. He went to school in it, bathed in it, slept with it on his finger. To make certain that he didn't lose it, the family wrapped the back with masking tape so it tit snugly. Like a person possessed, Raymond drew, colored, and painted almost incessantly.

  At the end of two years, he was reading and writing almost at his grade level. Placed in the public school, his progress was remarkable. But his progress in speech and language, as well as subjects such as mathematics, was minor compared to his rapid growth as an artist.

  Raymond was acclaimed, even if on a small basis. Many of his fantastical images hung on the school walls and in various classrooms, framed and covered with glass, his distinctive scrawl at the bottom.

  At age eighteen, Raymond was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Willard Art Institute. The ruby-and-diamond ring had been enlarged to fit his growing fingers, and Raymond still never removed it. In the beginning he claimed he didn't remember the woman at all, nor the orange pumpkin ring he had given her. But a few years later her image began to appear in his paintings.

  Raymond was no longer painting landscapes, he was painting human beings. And the human being he painted again and again was the redheaded woman wearing the California Angels T-shirt.

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  nothing more than a simple young woman, one you would sec but soon forget.

  "No guns today," Toy said cheerfully as she passed through the double doors with her friend and fellow teacher, Sylvia Goldstein. People around the school sometimes joked about the close friendship between the two women, for they were so drastically different in appearance. While Toy was tall and willowy, her skin fair and her voice soft and lyrical, Goldstein was short and dark, never hesitant to speak her mind, her opinions uttered in a loud, grating New York accent. Toy dressed in simple cotton dresses that fell below her knees, dresses he had heard she made herself, while her friend favored more contemporary apparel: tailored jackets, pants, platform shoes, an occasional suit with a designer label. They were just so mismatched that seeing them together all the time struck a lot of people as comical. Terms like "Mutt and Jeff and the "Sledge Sisters" abounded.

  "Nope, no guns today," Adam answered, returning Toy's smile. "Tomorrow's another day, though."

  "Yeah," Sylvia replied quickly. "Were you here the time some kid almost took a shot at us from the apartment complex across the street?" She stopped and pointed. "He was standing right there, on the second floor of that apartment complex. You know, on the little balcony. The police said he had an AR-15 assault rifle pointed at the front door to the school."

  The security guard shook his head and proceeded to link a heavy steel chain through the door handles, then secured it with a padlock. "I've only been here six months. Guess I missed that one. I was here when we had the stabbing in the boys' bathroom, though."

  "See you tomorrow, Adam," Toy said abruptly, suddenly yanking her friend's arm to get her to leave.

  "Why do you do that?" she said as they continued on to the parking lot.

  "Do what?" Sylvia said.

  "You know," Toy said, stopping and shielding her eyes from the sun, "talk about negative things all the time."

  Sylvia carried far too much weight for her height, most of it bunched unattractively around her midsection. She wore her straight dark hair in a short bob that made her face appear even fuller than it was, and in the last year or two a faint mustache had appeared above her lip. "Well, it's not like it didn't happen." she said, scrunching up her fleshy face. "What are you trying to say?"

  "Just that talking about it solves nothing," Toy said earnestly. "All it does is create negative energy. I think when you talk about bad things all the time, it's almost as if you will them to happen."

  Sylvia tossed her hands out to her side and then let them slap back against her thighs. "Negative energy, huh?" she said sarcastically. "And pointing an assault rifle at someone isn't negative? Give me a break, Toy. You live in la-la land. This is a war zone here."

  "These are kids," Toy said firmly. "They're just children, Sylvia. Kids learn from their surroundings, have to adapt to whatever environment they find themselves in or they can't survive."

  "Well," Sylvia answered, "what do you want us to do? Give them all guns or something so they can shoot at us?" She stopped and smacked her lips. "Most of them have them anyway."

  "That's not true," Toy said, refusing to allow the other woman's remarks to upset her. She'd known Sylvia Goldstein since they'd attended UCLA together, Sylvia's family having migrated to the West Coast when she was in high school. Toy had finally talked her into transferring to Jefferson from a squeaky-clean school in the suburbs two years ago. She knew her friend was a good person and a dedicated teacher, but she had failed to see beneath the surface as Toy had. Too many dark faces stared back at her from the classroom, many of which were hostile and troubled.

  "We have to give them love," Toy said, "show them we care about them, accept them on their own terms. The boy they arrested across the street was one of my students, remember. I know him. I know what he's been through, what kind of life he leads. All he did was pick up a gun that belonged to his father. He was only goofing around, and now he's caught up in the system, serving time in juvenile hall." She stopped and took a deep breath. "His father is the one they should punish for bringing that gun into the house, but he's probably out robbing someone while his kid pays the price."

  "Goofing around," Sylvia said, appalled. "Well, excuse me, but I don't consider pointing an assault rifle at someone's head goofing around."

  "See," Toy said quickly, "that's just what I'm trying to say. Kids play with whatever they find in their home. These kids grow up with guns, live with guns, so they—"

  Sylvia interrupted, her expression grim, "You can save the speech, Toy. I've already put in a request for a transfer."

  Toy's eyes dropped and she fell silent. A sudden breeze brushed past her, picking up the hem of her cotton print dress, but she didn't

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  notice. Her knees were scraped where a group of students had accidentally knocked her down on the sidewalk earlier in the week.

  "There you go," Sylvia whined, her lace Hushing with frustration. "I knew you'd make me feel guilty." Then her voice elevated several octaves. "I can't handle it here, okay? I tried, but I just can't. I want to teach, Toy. I want to teach normal children from normal homes who have the ability to learn. I don't want to be a prison guard. I don't want to lock myself in my classroom during recess, fearful some thug will rape me or shoot me." Seeing the disappointed look still on her friend's face, she added more fuel. "I don't want to listen to foreign languages all day either. This is America, you know. Half the kids here don't even speak English. They're Hispanic, Vietnamese, Haitian, whatever."

  "You have to do what makes you happy," Toy said softly, shrugging her shoulders as she slowly raised her eyes. "But the kids like you, Sylvia, even though they don't always show it. You're good with them. You could make a difference here."

  Sylvia laced her fingers through her hair and pulled. When she removed them, strands of hair were wrapped around her fingers. "See this," she shouted, waving her hands in front of Toy's face, "Tin not only ready to pull my hair out, it's falling out on its own. If I stay at this stink hole another month, I'm going to be bald. It's bad enough to be fat and divorced, but I'll never get a man if I'm bald."

  Toy laughed at the thought of her friend without hair, breaking the tension, and soon Sylvia was laughing as well. "I have to go," she said a few moments later. "I want to see Margie this afternoon.'*

  Sylvia fell serious. "How is she?"

  Toy made a wavy motion with her hand. "You know, she's in remission, but she's so weak from the chemotherapy
that she can't come back to school. And let me tell you, if the leukemia comes back before she's had a chance to recover from this last round of treatment, I'm not sure she'll make it."

  "Are you still giving money to the family?"

  Toy blanched and started back-stepping toward her Volkswagen a few feet away. "Sort of," she said self-consciously, uncomfortable with where the conversation was heading.

  ""Does Stephen know?"

  Toy made it to her car, unlocked it and ducked inside. -See you tomorrow," she said out the window.

  ""So, he doesn't know." Sylvia said, frowning.

  Toy cranked the engine and waved at her friend, trying to get her to move away from the car window so she could leave.

  "You're making a mistake," Sylvia cautioned, shaking a finger at her as though she were one of her .students. "He's going to find out, Toy. If I was married to a handsome doctor, I wouldn't do anything to jeopardize my relationship."

  "Look," Toy said, her voice louder than normal, about as close to shouting as she ever got, "you have to do what you have to do, and I have to do what I feel in my heart." As soon as she finished the sentence, she started backing up the car, forcing the other woman to step away.

  "It's not fun being divorced," Sylvia yelled out as Toy drove off. "Believe me, you're not going to like it."

  Toy steered the Volkswagen a few blocks away to Dorado Street and parked at the curb in front of a modest stucco residence. The paint was cracked and peeling, and the yard consisted of a mass of unruly weeds. A small Hispanic woman pushing a baby carriage loaded down with groceries passed her, and several low-riders were making their way down the street, rap music blasting out of the windows.