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, beginning to stroke the dog’s short, silky-soft fur.
“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…”
Madeline turned around in his grasp, gazing into his eyes.
“You’re an angel from the kingdom of Heaven,” she stressed. “Isn’t all this… with me… I don’t know… boring?”
Remy looked deep into her inquisitive stare as she waited for his answer. She would know whether or not he was lying; it was a gift that she had.
Slowly he lowered his face down toward her, his lips eventually meeting hers. They kissed softly at first, and more eagerly soon after that.
Before leaving the roof to descend the stairs to their new home, where they made love on an old down comforter they’d used as a makeshift drop cloth, Remy broke their passion to answer her question.
“All this… you… this is Heaven,” he told her.
This is Heaven.
He emerged from the void into a darkness of a different kind, this one illuminated by a multitude of stars, twinkling in the galaxy like jewels strewn upon a covering of velvet.
Hanging in space, he found his bearings, moving through the vacuum, at last, toward his destination.
He had no idea how long he’d been gone, feeling the heart within his chest swelling in size as he beheld the planet he had so come to love hanging there, as if waiting for his return.
The angelic nature was displeased, attempting to exert dominance, to suppress the humanity that had emerged from hiding as he’d traveled the void toward Earth, growing in size and strength at the joy he had found in the recollections of being human.
There was nothing the angelic essence would have loved more than to withdraw completely, leaving him frail and unprotected in the killing coldness of space, eager for him to beg to be something more.
Remy held the reins firmly, controlling the troublesome aspect of his being as he entered the Earth’s atmosphere, the sudden friction of oxygen upon his flesh causing it to heat, threatening to burn. His body beginning to glow white-hot with reentry, he gritted his teeth, spreading his wings wide to help slow his descent.
The angel dropped out of the night sky unnoticed by the city below, which was as he wished it to be.
Dropping through a thick bank of clouds, Remy emerged over the city of Boston. A smile appeared on his face and his naked flesh tingled. It had been scoured a bright red as a result of his journey. It would all heal eventually, he thought, flapping his wings furiously, pushing his speed to the maximum in order to return home. He had no idea how long he’d been gone, time moving differently in travels from one realm to the next.
He just hoped it hadn’t been too long. That he hadn’t been forgotten.
Remy soared above Faneuil Hall, Government Center, and then the golden dome of the State House on his way to Beacon Hill… to Pinckney Street.
To his home.
The rooftop of his building appeared below him, and he was suddenly overtaken with a feeling of absolute exhaustion. He swooped down from the night sky, aiming for the rooftop patio below.