The Redemption of Marvin Fuster, Patrick Sean Lee [diy ebook reader .TXT] 📗

She eyed him for a second before turning quickly to scan the area behind her, then turned to face her patient once again.
“Wings?”
“Yeah! Christ Almighty! Ya’ missed it! It was there, I swear it…I saw that same thing this morning. Jesus Jones, what’s goin’ on?”
The doctor slipped her pen into the clip of her chart and walked to his bedside again. She squinted at him, turning her head sideways a bit, as if the valley on the left side of his nose was what needed to be observed.
“Mr. Fuster,” she said at last, “you’ve suffered a brain contusion, which means…”
“I know what it means. And a basilar fracture. I know all that. That don’t mean my eyes are playin’ tricks on me. I saw it!”
“It isn’t your eyes that are playing tricks on you. It’s your damaged brain. Your eyes are dilated…not badly, but enough. These distortions of vision are quite normal for someone who has…”
“That weren’t no distortion!”
“Certainly. Be that as it may, they’ll pass in time as your brain begins to heal itself. Now, I want you to try and get some rest. I’ll check in on you a little later. Try counting to a hundred after I leave.” She smiled and touched his bare arm gently before turning to leave.
“I saw it. I did.”
“Rest now, Mister Fuster. I’ll return a little later.”
“When do I get outta’ here?”
“In good time,” he heard her answer from beyond the curtain.
Marvin waited, glancing back and forth from the space at the end of the curtain to the bank of windows, positive that the doctor was as beautiful and desirable as he had seen her; equally positive that something else was in the room watching him, and that it would reappear. Neither image a trick of the mind.
“I ain’t nuts. I ain’t nuts. I ain’t nuts.”
And yet, he questioned that pronouncement over the ensuing days. The shadowy form continued its visitation, more often than the beautiful doctor. Where she spoke and listened to him try to describe it in inadequate words, the specter wandered in and out, silent. Always with the wings that sometimes moved like the shadow they were attached to, sometimes drawn closed and tucked tightly to its back.
Finally, at the end of Marvin’s fifth day, just when he was getting used to being insane, the creature approached his side in the darkness and whispered to him in a voice that woke him and brought chills to his soul.


Three

A

my Alionello woke when the little Mickey Mouse alarm clock on the nightstand beside her bed sprang to life, early that morning, while Marvin Fuster listened in a fog of disbelief to an angel in his room at Denver General Hospital. She threw her arm out from beneath the covers, found the button at the top of Mickey’s head, and pushed it down. It was six o’clock and a new day had begun. She rolled over, pulling the covers back over her bare shoulders, and lay quiet for a moment as the tailings of sleep drifted away.
The sun had poked over the horizon half an hour ago and illuminated the bedroom in a cool, dim glow, forcing soft shadows beneath all of the objects along its path. Atop the covers at the foot of the bed, her old friend, Mr. Pudge, sat half-upright and stared blankly at her with his two black glass-bead eyes. Had he not had the sturdy footboard at his back he would have long ago become a casualty of the night and wound up on his belly on the woven rug covering the polished wood floor. She raised her head slightly and saw him resting in his bent position.
“Good morning, Pudge. See anything unusual in here while I slept last night?” Reaching down, she grabbed the stuffed bear that her father had given to her long ago when she was just a little girl back in Chicago, and curled up with him again to enjoy a last moment of warmth before rising to begin the day.
Pudge had not seen a thing, of course, but a visitor had been there all the same, watching Amy throughout the night. He had scoured the mail sitting in neat stacks on her small desk in the living room, made note of the statuary she had gathered over the past two years after she had moved into the charming old building on Capitol Hill. He looked with interest at the framed photos of her and her family back home. An album of who this woman was beginning to emerge.
Pushing the light blanket to one side, she climbed out of bed and grabbed her robe from the chair-back a few feet away near the window. She pulled it casually around her bare shoulders and pushed the curtains aside to peek out at the new morning light, the lushly-leaved trees across the street, and the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains in the distance.
“June is the finest month in this city,” she remarked under breath. “I love you, Denver, all of you. You’re everything I imagine Heaven itself to be…” She let the curtains fall back and turned to leave the bedroom for the bath. “Everything except for that devil I work for.”
She had rented the apartment in a 70-year-old building a few months after John Sampson had hired her three years ago, but it was nothing at all like the place he had imagined in his fantasies. Hers had one bedroom, a comfortable old bath with the original ball and claw tub, fine, tall windows in every room, and much too much woodwork gracing it to suit John Sampson’s modern tastes. Had he seen it. The floors were hardwood, and creaked along the hallway leading from the bedroom at the front of the building to the entryway at the center of the small complex. She’d never minded that, though—in her eyes it simply added another dimension to her home’s character. She had immediately fallen in love with the place when she first had seen it, and scavenged enough furniture and knickknacks to fill all of its nooks and crannies to her liking after having signed the lease. It grew dearer and dearer to her with every passing day.
She turned on the radio and walked into the bathroom, tossing her robe onto a small ornate chair beneath the dressing table. She stopped abruptly at the edge of the sink and looked beyond it to the oval mirror. Her dark hair was strewn about on her head as though she had just climbed out of a boxing ring after twelve furious rounds, but her brown eyes were clear as crystal, and her skin was a soft bronze without a single blemish. She pushed her fingers through the tangled mess and remarked to the woman in the mirror.
“You’re a fright, Amy Alionello. Where in the daylights have you been?” Laughing under breath, she smiled at her reflection, and bared her teeth slightly.
“Hmm…you guys need a good cleaning and polishing.”
But they did not. As with the rest of her body, they were perfectly placed and perfectly in balance, and it should have been no wonder to her why every man she encountered would die for her attention. She had never quite understood that crazy fact, thinking she lacked so much in physical beauty, resenting the stares and dropped jaws in a crowd. It was not so much the crude nature of men reacting to her, but rather the rawness of her beauty that demanded some measure of a response by anyone in her presence. John Sampson might be a fool, but not when it came to recognizing a true beauty when he saw one. It was a wonder he had maintained his equilibrium for as long as he had, working beside her everyday for the last three years.
Stepping over the rim of the tub she sneered at the thought of him. The endless invitations to go for a drink after the workday was finished. To his apartment in the sleek Tremont Towers. The little innuendos; the calculating look in his eyes.
Twenty minutes later she left the bathroom, dressed in front of the mirror outside, and then walked down the creaking hall floor to the kitchen for a light breakfast of grapefruit and yogurt before leaving for the office. At least the presence of Delilah would make the day tolerable.


Four

T

he hospital room was dark that evening except for the glow of the monitors on the wall above Marvin’s head. Anselm had entered and stood beside him, not a fleeting vision colored light and dark, but solid, like a ship emerging from a thick fog bank. Not across the room by the windows, either, but close enough to reach down and touch the patient. The angel spoke.
“Who are you?”
The voice awakened Marvin, and when he saw Anselm his bleary eyes blew wide open.
“Ho-ly Shit!”
Grabbing the top of the sheet

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