Angel Song by Sheila Walsh Page B

laugh or cry at the sight of it. At least she supposed it was a healthy way for Keith to work through his grief.
    The next drawing was the dark-haired Ann hugging Sarah, big blue tears falling from both of their faces, and the yellow glow that could only be an angel looking down on them. The last showed Sarah, a huge smile on her face, in the clouds with angels all around her. The sun had a smiley face in this particular picture, and even the clouds had happy faces. Keith had written, “Brokken made butiful.”
    This time the tears flowed unabated as Tammy closed her eyes. “Thank You, Lord, for giving him to me.”
    “Mama, Mama!” Keith’s panicked voice came from his room. “Mama!”
    Tammy ran down the hallway and into her son’s room. “I’m here, honey, what do you need?”
    “Sarah. Will the angels bring her back?”
    “No, darlin’. No, they won’t.”
    “Please, please. Make them bring her back.” A new wave of tears, a new wave of grief, another day in the life that was Tammy’s.
    She hugged her son close and once again whispered, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you.”
    Ann looked out the side window toward Tammy’s house. She didn’t know how she would have made it through the day without her help, yet something about Tammy made her uneasy. And Keith . . . well, he made her downright uncomfortable.
    His talk about angels and his pictures of angels, they fed into her hallucinations—her paracusias—until the song played over and over and over in her mind, making it all seem so real. Not something she wanted to reinforce.
    She walked over to the computer, typed in her account information, and found an e-mail from Margaret. She opened the photos of the last designs for Stinson, and her skin seemed to tighten around her body, squeezing against her face, her neck, her chest. It cranked tighter and tighter with each successive picture. The first room had two gray leather sofas—one twoarmed, the other one-armed—and a black rug against a black tile floor. A blue handblown glass vase added a touch of color and contrasted perfectly against the room’s structured geometry. Serene and sophisticated. These designs were amazing. How was she supposed to go two steps better than this?
    Ann enjoyed creating new ways to show off spaces, to spotlight the positive features of an area, but she never seemed to reach perfection. She remembered the James’s living room. How many times had she adjusted the side tables, rearranged the art, moved the chairs just an inch or two? She knew that, even now, if she walked back into that room, she’d find something to move. She looked at the photo on her screen and guessed that the designer who’d done this room never had to move anything a second time.
    Well, Ann needed to get busy, be prepared to do her very best work. She pulled out her sketch pad, prepared to rework the room. Her pencil remained poised, ready . . . and unmoving. The problem was, for Ann, creativity required heart. At this moment, she couldn’t even feel hers.
    At just after midnight, with her cursor hovering over the power button, the thought that had been nagging at the back of her mind turned into an insistent demand. Maybe it was because she was tired, or more likely the grief just caused her to slip from reality for a moment. Whatever the reason, she pulled up the Google screen and typed in “angels.”
    The first two links had to do with the baseball team in California. Ann laughed aloud. Only then did she realize how tense she’d been while waiting for the answer, as if she expected “People who lose their minds and hear angels singing” to be first and foremost on the list. Time to get a grip.
    She looked farther down and clicked on another link. The site offered a “personalized angel print.” After you filled out a form to indicate the physical traits you’d like your angel to have, an artist would paint it for you and send it to you, “all for the low price of $29.99.”
    Changing