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It wasn't hard to understand why she failed ? the man who sat down next to her on the subway during the evening commute back home was just another man, another commuter, who sat down next to her in silence obeying the unspoken rule of never meeting her eyes, never saying anything beyond, perhaps, an inchoate grunt as he settled into the seat careful not to touch any part of himself to her. He was wearing a grubby leather jacket that looked as though it had seen better days, and underneath that a T-shirt with a half-obscured slogan tucked into a clean but faded pair of jeans. Essen, her own gaze kept decorously down, could not help but notice his shoes, a clean but worn pair of sneakers ? and that there was a piece of duct tape that appeared to be holding the left one together at a strategic point. She actually did glance up, when she noticed that, curious as to what manner of man walked the streets and the subways of the city with duct-taped shoes. It was just a quick look, still obeying the rules ? no eye contact, just a passing glance which, of course, was meant to go somewhere else altogether and just happened to snag his face in passing. The face it snagged was... vaguely arresting. Essen's mind remained filled with it as she returned her eyes to the hands folded over her purse in her lap. It was the face of a stylite saint, craggy to the point of being emaciated, dominated by high cheekbones and a prominent proboscis of a nose bracketing hollow cheeks; a wide broad forehead, a strong cleft chin, a mouth surprisingly full-lipped and almost sensual and at odds with almost everything else on his physiognomy; and above all the knowing, almost mocking, startlingly blue eyes which had caught her own and held them briefly as though they were fully aware of what she was doing and were sardonically laughing at her pathetic attempt to cover up her interest under the ragged webs of city subway etiquette. She kept on waiting for him to get off the subway, but he sat beside her, in silence, his long-fingered hands resting on his knees, until her own stop became imminent and she rose to stand by the door in expectation of having to shove her way through the throng of bodies so that she might be able to disembark. He rose with her, startling her and almost terrifying her; this time genuinely determined not to catch his eye, she tried to duck behind the nearest body by the door, a conveniently corpulent city pen-pusher who stood awkwardly, one hand clutching a thin briefcase, upholstered in an ill-fitting suit and glowing with thin sheen of sweat which reflected the car lights off his pale, almost bald head. Just before she managed to put this human shield between herself and the leather-jacketed, blue-eyed man who had made her so uncomfortable, Essen distinctly heard a low voice utter four words ? she heard it as clearly as though he had formed them directly into the shell of her ear. You can do it. Her head came up and she craned her neck briefly, involuntarily, to steal a glance behind the man whom she had picked to hide her but who had unexpectedly turned into an obstacle. She had no doubt whatsoever as to who had spoken ? but, eerily, he was gone. The car was crowded with evening commuters, to be sure, but the man in the leather jacket had been tall, she had been aware of that much when he had stood up beside her, and she should have at least been able to glimpse him above the heads of everyone else crowding around the door to make sure they made their exit at this station. He was gone, just like that, comprehensively gone. Essen made certain of it, wasting precious moments of her evening by lingering on the platform, surreptitiously monitoring it as it cleared of the commuters the train had disgorged. Not a single one of them was a tall man in faded jeans, a duct-taped shoe, and the piercing blue eyes that had seemed to look, however briefly, into her soul. She contemplated telling her mother about it, later, in the flat ? but Mama was more drifty than usual that night, and could not seem to manage conversation very well. Essen tucked her away into bed early, having said nothing at all about her encounter. She began to try and convince herself that she had imagined it all. She had had an imagination, once; she remembered that time, vaguely, as though her past had belonged to someone other than herself, as though she had been told about it as a story by some stranger. There had been a time when she was young, and in college, and full of dreams of impossible futures ? and life, at that time, had seemed inclined to grant them all. She'd had such plans for her life. She would graduate, and then take a year or so off and just travel, and then return to the city and get a nice flat and find a good job and maybe get married, later, and have children... But that was then. This was now. This, the two-bedroomed apartment she could barely afford even with her invalid mother's disability check contribution. The year of travel had evaporated when her mother began to slide into the long, slow loss of memory and self that had led them both here. There had been no great job, not one that paid well enough for Essen to have her mother taken care of in a home by professionals. Her father had died when she had been very young ? it had always been her mother and herself ? in some ways the thought of a home was unconscionable anyway. But Mrs. Bligh had quickly reached the point at which she could no longer live alone ? and hence this, the two of them back together again in a tiny apartment, the next-door neighbour keeping an eye on her while Essen was at work and then Essen's shift, the night shift, starting with a shared dinner which was distinguished by either Essen's own bright prattlings about the things (real or imagined) that had happened to her that day or by dark silences when Essen did not talk and her mother remained sunk in a wordless haze, an accusing one, as though something kept her physical body trapped there in the small living room and its tiny dinette table at which they ate while her unfettered mind battered against the closed windows like a trapped bird demanding to be allowed to fly free. You can do it. The words crept into Essen's dreams that night, vast and nebulous and pregnant with meaning although she had no idea what the meaning was ? and if the dream had told her, she had no memory of it the next morning as she woke in her narrow celibate bed, and sighed, and swung her feet down to the cold floor, and faced another day. She had almost managed to make herself forget about the man in the leather jacket as she commuted back and forth on the train every day ? but he was there again during her last commute of the week, a crowded Friday evening train full of cranky passengers eager to shed their working skins and face the somewhat more joyful prospect of a free weekend. There had been no seats and Essen clung precariously to a pole, swaying and staggering as the train rushed on its way. She had had an odd feeling of a weight of eyes on her back when she had boarded the train, but there were eyes enough in that carriage, and even with the rule that they should all be cast down or, if not, vacant with the drifting gaze of somebody who was less-than-present by virtue of iPod buds stuck into their ears and swaying to a different rhythm than the train's, the sheer number of souls in that train car almost guaranteed that somebody's eyes would catch something, sometime. But it was different. Weightier. Concentrated. The sense of a gaze that consciously rested on her, Essen, deliberately and with a dedicated interest. This was no accidental glance. This was appraisal, and she felt it physically, as though tiny insect feet were walking on her skin. Her own eyes leapt up, involuntarily, breaking the unspoken rule, to sweep the crowd in the train car... and her breath caught as she recognised him, caught that bright blue burning gaze, only a few feet away from her. You can do it. I can help. He could not possibly have spoken those words ? if he had, others would have heard, heads would have turned. But they were there, in her head, ringing and clear, and for a moment her sight hazed as she tried to process the idea. By the time she looked again, he was once more and even more inexplicably gone ? the train had not stopped, was still in hurtling motion, and there was nowhere in that packed compartment that he could have ducked away ? it was as though he had folded space around him, and had simply winked out. "You can help? How? Do what?" Two people turned their heads marginally and Essen realised she had whispered those words out loud. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and she tucked her head between her shoulders, wishing she too could disappear like her angel... her angel... where had that thought come from? It was suddenly there in her mind, a bright new-minted thing shining like a new penny. What else could he have been? A ghost? A hallucination? A figment of that long-lost imagination...? Just an ordinary man who happened to have a pair of extraordinary eyes? Essen knew better, somehow. She kept a look-out for him, after, for a week. For another. He never showed himself to her hungry gaze as she stepped onto the evening train every night, sweeping the crowd of commuters with a bold stare as she did so. He seemed to have come only to torment her, to make her uneasy, on edge, oddly breathless as though she was expecting that the train was hurtling on to the station at the end of the world ? the world as she had known it. You can do it. You can change the world. Your world. That was what he had meant, of course. That was what he had to have meant. But that night she came home to a more silent than usual mother, an apartment more empty of dreams and illusions than on most nights, a darkness that gathered both outside in the streets and within her. Heavy, heavier than she had ever felt it before. She was thirty eight years old ? or would be, soon, the number sharply and acidly reminding her of a birthday coming up in just over a week ? and this... this... this was all she had. The lost dreams, the duty, the love which warred with fury and frustration and pity every day and which was steadily losing ground, the empty shadows of her lonely room. There had been no travel. There would be no children. There was no future, no past, only the endless wretched now that stretched out before her like an eternity. That... and the angel on the train. You can do it. There was a flutter of wings deep inside her but hope had been broken a long time ago. Hope had not flown for many years. Hope could not be allowed to fly again. It hurt too much when it fell. Her birthday was a more trying day than most. It had been a one-step-forward-two-steps-back sort of day from the moment she had stepped into the office. Essen had been as productive as she always was but things had just built and built all day until it seemed that for every thing that she cleared off her desk she got two more in return. She had been startled to glance at the clock towards the end of the day and realise that she had twenty minutes left to tie up all the loose ends and run for the train station if she wanted to get her train home. The train that she needed to catch to take over as her mother's caregiver and supervisor. She had run late before; she tried to avoid it, certainly keep it to a minimum, but sometimes it was just inevitable. The neighbour lady was usually willing to extend her duty roster for a little while longer, so long as Essen didn't abuse the privilege. All she had to do was let her know. Essen had a choice ? she could phone home, tell the neighbour lady that tonight would be one of those nights, and ask for an extension. Or she could leave things where they were, and race for her train. It was her birthday. Neither alternative appealed. It was one duty over another. It was compromise, it was always compromise, and she indulged in a moment of pure incandescent resentment, a cold fury, that she could not even make this kind of choice before considering everyone else but herself. "You can do it. I can help." The voice was real, that time. It came from right next to her, right there in the office. Startled, her hand jerked, and a sheaf of papers fluttered untidily from her desk to the floor. The man with the leather jacket and the blue eyes sat across from her, his lips curled in a secret smile, his hands on his knees. "What are you doing here?" Essen demanded. And then, because that was a stupid question without a context, followed it with the context required. "Who are you anyway?" "Choice," he said calmly. "Choice?" "I am here for you to choose," he said. "All your life you have waited for a choice. Here it is, in front of you. You can do it. I can help." "I can do what?" "Change everything. Choose something different. Turn a different way." "What ? this? Finish this stuff or go home right now?" "That's one choice. There were others. Many others. You can choose." Her mind cracked open like a pomegranate and the choices spilled out like seeds. He was right, there were many. Finish the work or go home on time. Before that, take on her mother or plead insufficient means and allow a welfare state to take over as best it could. Before that, marry the man who had asked her instead of refusing him because she had felt that it had just not been... enough. Before that, choose a different major in college, leading to a different career, a different job, a different life. Before that... before that... choosing not to have the last words she had spoken to her father before he had ceased to be able to hear her being words that had been less than kind. Before that... It had always been about compromise. "You can do it. I can help. It is given to you to undo a single thing today, or to do a single thing that you think you have left undone. There are many paths ? any one of them could be yours. The Power that Controls your life desires that you be happy. You can change your life today and I can help you do it. What do you wish to change?" "Why today?" Essen whispered. "Why now? Who are you?" "I am the angel," he said, and yes, there was a glow about him, something muted and golden, something that she could only see if she was looking at him out of the corner of her eye and not directly. If she looked at him directly it might have been just a sense of something odd, something different ? but other than that he was just a man in a worn leather jacket and shoes held together with duct tape. Hardly the sort of man she had expected an angel to present himself as. "Wings," he said, as though responding to her unspoken thought, "would have been inconvenient in the subway train. That is where you are trapped. That is where I was sent to find you. That is always the choice, in the end ? whether to stay on some train, or to step off. Either is a destination. The choice is the journey." "How can you help?" "I can show you the path that would have been. Make a choice, and I will lay the new journey out before you. The life that you would have had." "But I can't..." she said, torn, the choices of her life spilled hopelessly before her, trying to gather them all up again, but it was hopeless, as if she were trying to stuff rice back into a spilled sack. "That one," he said, picking up a single grain of rice. She watched a life unfold, on fast-forward. Her college years; she remembered the campus of her small local college, nothing fancy, nothing Ivy League, but pleasant with trees and flower beds and fresh young faces. Herself, smiling at a young man walking beside her, the rich colours of fall all around them. Herself, pregnant, greeting him at the door of a small apartment. Herself, surrounded by three children during the day, working at her kitchen table at night to complete the credits for the degree she had never taken in order to drop out and have her children. Herself graduating nearly ten years after she had done in her other life, her real life, but graduating with a family beaming from the audience ? a husband, children. Herself, aged about the same as she was now, working at her old alma mater, the colours of fall still rich about her on the campus. "Where is my mother?" "She did not want you to marry, or to drop out. You walked out of your house with a single suitcase. You never spoke to your mother again." "Is she still alive...?" "In that life, you don't know." "Is she still alive?" Essen asked, suddenly choked with tears she could not hold back. The angel hesitated, for only a fraction of a second. "No," he said. "In that life, she dies alone. She gave no next of kin, and she is ashes, long gone. You never spoke to her again." Her father, and now her mother, also. That would have been the pattern of her life. Willfulness. Stubbornness. Obstinate pride. Would the degree, the nice job, the perfect family have been enough? "Only you can know that." "But I can't know that. Not without abandoning this reality. And you aren't showing me everything." "I am not permitted to show you everything." "Just enough to tempt me?" "Just enough," he said, "to make a choice." Almost, she reached for it. But the perfection was a surface gloss, with all the solidity of a photograph. She was not even to be allowed to turn the photograph over to see if anything had been written on the back. Her future would turn on a compromise, and she would have no guarantee that she would not, in grasping for more, lose all. Essen let her gaze slip off the angel's face, down to the untidy desk in front of her. With a trembling hand she closed a file, then another; then reached for her mouse, clicked on an icon, waited for her computer to start to shut down. "No," she said, staring at the screen of her monitor without taking her eyes off it until it finally became dark. "No. I made my choices. I made them long ago. I cannot allow my regrets to take me over. I am going home." When she looked out across her desk again, the chair on which the angel had been sitting was empty. The clock had moved forward precisely one minute. Essen gathered up her purse, her coat, a file folder that was coming home with her for the weekend, laid aside tidy and ready on the corner of the desk. She allowed her gaze to sweep the empty room one more time, just to make sure, and then she switched off the light and went out, closing the door beside her. It was raining outside. The train, when she made it, smelled of wet human and damp wool. The angel did not make an appearance on it. She did not expect to see him again. She herself smelled of rain and night when she stepped into her apartment, shaking off her hair. "Hello," said a voice from the armchair by the window ? a voice that was suddenly lucid and even serene. Rare, but sometimes it happened. "Ess, is that you?" Essen looked over to the chair and the eyes that met hers were, at least for the moment, her mother's eyes and not the suspicious eyes of a stranger or the empty ones of a doll whose mind was no more than a vast pale fog of oblivion. Her mother, her real mother, was back, at least for tonight, at least for a few hours. "Happy birthday, Ess," her mother said. Another memory reclaimed. Another gift. There had been something unfair about the choice that the angel had laid before Essen, something that nagged at her but that she had not been able to identify at the time ? not in the angel's presence, when he overwhelmed thought and sense, and not later, on the train, surrounded by people who did not know, could not understand, and would not care. The choice she had been offered had been the bright and beautiful family dream against the other thing, the daily thing, the fog of oblivion, the having to cope with the fact that her own mother barely knew her name these days. But it had been a false choice ? because it had only compared the best of one potential life with the worst of the other. The choice... had never been a choice. There were times that one could bend, that one could break, that one could compromise or bargain. Not this time. She tried to find a word for what welled up inside of her ? but it was not bitterness, or even resentment; it was not the maudlin ooze of pathos or the kind of helpless, frustrated, furious love that sometimes made her want to shake the empty-faced old woman back into some sort of a living being again. It was the choice that had not been a choice at all settling into the shape that had been made for it. She had made a bargain with the angel after all. Changing anything about her life would have meant... changing herself, changing who she was, changing what kind of person she was, or could be, or should be. And Essen suddenly realised that that had been the one compromise she had not been willing to make. A life was what one had been given to live. Anything else was illusion. Being anyone else would have been... false. And perhaps that... was what the angel had been sent to tell her, after all. It was raining outside, and cool. The apartment was warm, lit by a couple of ancient floor lamps that had come from her mother's house. The neighbour lady had left a plate of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies on the kitchen counter. Essen closed the door behind her, very gently, shutting out the world. Shutting out the angel, for good. "Hi Ma," she said, smiling. "I'm home." END
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The first time Essen Bligh met the angel, she did not recognise him.
Alma Alexander is a Pacific Northwest novelist who writes for both grown-up audiences ("The Hidden Queen", "Changer of Days", "The Secrets of Jin Shei") and YA audiences (the Worldweavers trilogy, "Gift of the Unmage", "Spellspam" and "Cybermage"). Her work has been translated into fourteen languages worldwide, including Hebrew, Turkish, and Catalan. She is currently at work on a new series of alternate history novels with roots in Eastern Europe. She lives in Bellingham, WA, with her husband, two cats, and assorted visiting wildlife. Visit her website at