Angels of Destruction by Keith Donohue Page A

scores all around, an anomaly that puzzled the teacher well after her second cocktail that evening. A spelling bee dragged on past its appointed hour with no child left out, not even the recalcitrant boys who usually could not accommodate the spelling of their own names correctly. When Mrs. Patterson asked for volunteers for a dramatic reading, a surplus of eager hands shot up. The teacher took note of it all, the swift change in mood since the girl's arrival, the tonal difference between the dregs of post-Christmas school and the unexpected froth before spring. Sworn enemies buried their slingshots. There were no acts of violence, no bullying of the meek, no random or wanton vituperation of the ruling clique. A kind of harmony descended, and the other children recognized the changes brought by the new girl, who astonished them all by her simple and earnest desire to learn. Her crooked smile bestowed a spark of glee to January, as if she were lit within and could cast off gloom. She made fast friends with Sharon Hopper, Gail Watts, and Dori Tilghman, and brought them small treats of peanut butter cups or extra oatmeal raisin cookies or, once, old doll clothes rescued from the Quinns’ hidden troves. During indoor gym, she was the only third grader who could shoot a basketball through a hoop hung ten feet high, and the force of her throw in dodgeball made every boy wary. And yet everyone could sense an innate gentleness in Norah, a lack of malice in word and deed, and more than any other quality, this they regarded as true virtue and were drawn to, even against their own selfish natures.
    Mrs. Quinn, too, fell for her. Charmed by the girl and glad for her company, she felt at ease around Norah at once, as if the child embodied a second chance at being the mother she had always intended to be. The very sight of the girl's ragged hair or fogged glasses gave Margaret a thrill, and when the boy began coming around, she felt blessed beyond what she deserved. Unnerving at first, the sound of their two voices quavered in the house, the murmur about homework and classes and other third-grade girls and boys, the edgy debates over play the squeals and shouts and laughter. The shock of the television or radio at four in the afternoon. What was it that Erica used to rush home for at that age? The vampire soap opera? Dark Shadows? The signs of their presence littered the ordinary complacency—coats on the hooks, boots puddling by the door, newspaper comics read and discarded. Two plates of crumbs, glasses filmed with milk. Skin of banana, bright coils of tangerine, core of apple, skeleton of grapes. Margaret was forever picking up their detritus, reordering her custom.
    And yet, when Norah was off at school, the absence of commotion unsettled the new equilibrium. She wandered from room to room hearing the echo of childish laughter, anticipating a thump through the ceiling, a flash on the stairs, the front door yawning open and banging against the wall, heralding their arrival, and she welcomed them home each day with quiet relief, the joy in her heart bound by the briefest of smiles. As often as she wished them out from underfoot, Margaret also ached for them when they were gone.
    Following the hot chocolate or an apple cored and quartered, they attacked their homework. Sean knew, by some gyroscope of the left brain, every mathematics answer, the difference at once among igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks, the dates and places of every Pennsylvania battle in the French and Indian War. Norah knew the magic of vanishing-point perspective, where the shadows fell in art by placement of the sun, how to draw without hesitation the confluence of the three rivers—Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela—and to distinguish in illustration what Sean would have drawn as identical flowers or birds. They helped each other through suggestion, competitive questioning, and cajolery.
    Work completed, play began. Ever since the smoke rings and his