Angelaboutme — Updated

Margo still showed up, though not every day. Sometimes she appeared on the fire escape outside Lena’s new apartment, eating cheese puffs and watching the stars. Sometimes she appeared in dreams—quiet dreams, the kind where you sit on a park bench and watch the leaves fall and feel, for once, that everything might be okay.

She was seven years old, sitting on the cold linoleum floor of a county hospital hallway, watching a social worker’s lips move without hearing a single word. Her father had left three months earlier—just walked out of their cramped apartment with a duffel bag and a promise to “get some milk.” The milk never came. The angels her grandmother used to sing about, the ones who “watched over little girls with golden hair,” never came either. By the time Lena turned eight, she had decided that angels were just a bedtime story for children too fragile to face the truth: you are alone, and no one is coming to save you.

The rain stopped. The hospital room grew quiet, filled only with the soft beep of machines and the sound of two people breathing in sync. Lena didn’t say thank you. She couldn’t. But she held on to Margo’s hand and didn’t let go. angelaboutme

Lena closed her eyes. “I’m hallucinating. Head trauma. Great.”

“Margo who?”

“Why are you telling me this now?” she whispered.

She woke up in a hospital bed, which was ironic enough to make her want to laugh. Her body was broken in three places: a fractured pelvis, two cracked ribs, a concussion that would give her migraines for months. But that wasn’t the strangest part. The strangest part was the woman sitting in the plastic chair beside her bed. Margo still showed up, though not every day

The cement worked. For a decade, it worked beautifully.