If Angels Fall

ONE

Danny saw the girl again.

As the subway train eased out of the Coliseum station, he looked up,captivated by her frozen smile, her vacant stare, and the fact that she neverspoke.

Never.

She was dead.

Her throat had been cut and her body stuffed into a plastic garbagebag hidden in Golden Gate Park.

She was two years old and her name was Tanita Marie Donner. Twoeleven-year-old girls from Lincoln Junior High found her during a science classfield trip.

“She looked like a little naked doll,” Natalie Jackson, one of thegirls, told a San Francisco TV station.

That was a year ago. The nightmares were now less frequent for theschoolgirls. For most San Franciscans, Tanita’s murder was fading from memoryalthough her face still stared from bus shelters, store windows, and bumperstickers, an image as familiar to the Bay Area as the Gold Gate or theTransamerica Pyramid. For a time, it embodied San Francisco’s anguish. Ablurred, grainy blow-up of a color snapshot, Tanita timidly showing her tinymilk-white teeth as Mommy coaxed a smile. Two pink butterfly barrettes heldback her brown hair. She was wearing a cotton dress with lace trim, and crushingher white teddy bear to her chest. Her dark eyes shining like falling stars.

REWARD screamed in bold, black letters above her head. Below weredetails of when and where Tanita was last seen alive. Twenty-five thousanddollars was offered for information leading to an arrest in her murder. Notakers.

Tanita Marie Donner’s killer was still out there.

As the train worked its way through the transbay tunnel of the BayArea Rapid Transit system, three-year-old Daniel Raphael Becker remainedtransfixed by a poster of Tanita Marie Donner.

“Who’s that, Dad?” he asked his father.

“Don’t point, Danny. She’s just a little girl. Now please sit still.We’ll be home soon.”

Nathan Becker settled back in the seat, opened the business sectionof Saturday’s San Francisco Star, hoping to finish a story he began athome that morning before he and Danny left for the game. Nathan was a systemsengineer who commuted by CalTrain to Mountain View. The article was about hisfirm which was on the brink of a revolutionary breakthrough. The game was ayawner, the A’s were embarrassing the Yankees. Danny was bored, so they leftthe Coliseum after the fifth. Just as well, because now they had to go all theway to Daly City to pick up some artist’s brushes for his wife, Maggie. Nathanhad promised. It was a long ride, and he wished he hadn’t let Danny talk himinto taking BART. He got his fill of trains during the week. They’d cab it homefrom the shop.

***

The day started like a typical summer Saturday for Nathan and Danny,with one of their weekend-buddy excursions.

“Want to go to Oakland and see the A’s game today, Dan?” Nathan wasmaking scrambled eggs while Maggie slept upstairs.

“Can we do the wave, Dad?”

“You betcha.”

Danny laughed.

Nathan buffed his son’s hair and watched him eat. Danny’s eyesradiated innocence. Blood of my blood. Miracle baby. How he loved him. But hispromotion to department head meant longer hours and rationing time with Dannyto weekends, leaving him to survive the week with glimpses of his son asleep,glimpses stolen after tiptoeing into his room at the end of anotherpressure-cooker day.

Jordan Park was a sedate neighborhood sheltered with stands offeather-duster palms, a community of Victorian houses with billiard-table-greenlawns. An oasis for young professionals that was not quite as pretentious asPacific Heights. Today Nathan got to prove how unpretentious he was. Dannywanted to take BART to Oakland.

“Let’s take the Beemer, Dan. We’ll put the top down?”

“I want to ride the train like you do, Dad. BART goes right underthe bay.”

“I know it goes right under the bay.” Nathan sighed. “Okay.”

Before they went, Nathan left a note on the fridge and, reluctantly,his BMW in the garage. He and Danny walked to California, hopped a bus, then acable car to Embarcadero Station, where an escalator delivered them at afuneral pace into the subway system winding through the Bay Area.

***

After she heard them leave, Maggie Becker rose from bed, showered,put on her robe, then made a pot of Earl Grey Tea. She curled up on the sofa inthe living room with the Arts section of the newspaper, savoring an emptyhouse. Later, she dressed in faded jeans and a Forty-Niners sweater, thenclimbed upstairs to her studio. It was a large, bright room with hardwoodfloors, and a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking their backyard rosegarden and the treetops, framing her view of a small park where trumpeter swansglided in a manmade pond.

This was Maggie’s sanctuary.

It was here she had mourned the miscarriage of her first child, lostafter she fell from a step ladder while wallpapering the nursery. Her uteruswas damaged, the doctors said. The chances of her carrying a baby to term werenow three in ten. They suggested adoption. A few months later, Nathan startedleaving her brochures from agencies. Maggie threw them into the trash. Sherefused to let a cruel, freak accident rob her of motherhood.

Nathan understood.

So it was here, while watching the swans, Maggie’s prayers wereanswered. It was here, when she became pregnant with Danny, she sat with herhands pressed to her stomach, begging God to let her keep this baby.

God had heard her.

Their healthy baby boy was delivered by caesarian section. Theynamed him Daniel after Nathan’s father, and Raphael for the Italian painter, whosework Maggie adored. Danny was her hope, her light, her angel. His birthreaffirmed the love between her and Nathan and resurrected the artistic dreamsshe had buried with the loss of their first baby. Here, in this refurbishedattic, Maggie produced a succession of inspired water colors, which soldregularly at a gallery down the peninsula.

Maggie pulled off the tarpaulin covering a landscape in progress,collected her brushes, and inhaled the fragrance of paints and freshly cutgrass wafting into her studio.

Her life was perfect now.

The train came to the next stop. The automatic doors opened. Dankair rushed into the car as Danny watched the people leaving jostle with thosegetting on. Then a short warning chime echoed. “Doors closing,” Danny said. Hehad picked up the routine. Three seconds later, the doors closed. The trainjolted forward, gathering speed, pulling them deeper into the tunnel system.

“How many more stops, Dad?”

“Uh-huh,” Nathan said, eyes locked onto his newspaper, oblivious tothe new passengers crowding the car. He had slipped comfortably into hiscommuter habit of losing himself in his newspaper.

Danny looked at his dad reading. He was bored, so he stared at hisown hand and counted his fingers. Remembering the hotdog he had at the game, helicked his lips and wished for another one. He yawned. He looked up across thecar at Tanita Marie Donner’s face, slid off of his seat, and stood next to it,facing the poster.

“I’m just going right here, Dad.”

“All right,” the newspaper said.

The train wavered. Danny steadied himself, noticing a tiny, silverchain dangling from the ear of a teenager down the aisle. It glintedrhythmically with the train’s rocking motion, like a hypnotist’s watch, biddingDanny closer. He stepped carefully around the outstretched, tanned legs of aboy studying a motorcycle magazine, head bobbing to music leaking from theheadset of his CD player. Suddenly a skateboard shot at Danny. He tensed beforeit was stopped by a scuffed Reebok worn by a girl in an oversized sweatshirt.Danny moved on, paying no attention to the other passengers until he stoodbefore the teenager wearing the chain. His face was ravaged by acne. Hisjet-black mohawk hair was greased into six-inch spikes frozen in coiffuredexplosion. He wore black boots, torn black pants, a black T-shirt with adeath’s head that was partially hidden by his silver-studded black leatherjacket.

Danny pointed at the chain. “What’s that?”

The teenager ceased chewing his bubble gum, left his mouth open, andgiggled as if he had just been tickled. His girlfriend giggled, too. Althoughher hair was fuchsia and her chains smaller, her appearance mirrored herboyfriend’s right down to the gum chewing. They were holding hands. The teenleaned toward Danny, turned his ear to him, and shook the chain.

“This is my lucky charm.” He grinned. “You should get one.”

The girl playfully grabbed her boyfriend’s groin, pouting and askingDanny, “And what’s this?”

It was called a PEE-nus. Danny knew because his motheranswered the same question for him one night when he was in the tub. He’dforgotten the word, but he clearly recalled the function.

“Do you have to pee?” Danny asked, triggering the couple’s laughteras they stood to leave.

The train was slowing. Danny was bumped from behind, nearly knockedoff his feet. He was trapped in a forest of legs. The automated public addressbarked the station’s name. Danny tried to return to his dad, but was blocked bya skateboard, shopping bags, a briefcase, a knapsack. People crushed together,inching him closer to the doors. He panicked, clenched his tiny hands intofists, and pounded on arms and legs, but couldn’t break free. The trainstopped. The doors whooshed open. Danny was pushed out of the car with thecrowd, crying out for his father as he tripped, falling hard onto the cold,grimy, concrete platform. People swirled around him, drowning him. A ghettoblaster throbbed with a menacing beat. No one could hear Danny crying. Frantic,he struggled to get to his feet. A cigarette butt stuck to his hand. Hepinballed from one grownup to the next. Disoriented, his only thought was toget back on the train. He heard the warning chime.

Get back on the train! Get back on the train! Get back!

Danny felt a pair of large, strong hands lift him.

Nathan heard the chime, lowered the newspaper, and turned to Dannybeside him. Gone. Damn that little- He threw the paper down, threading his wayfrom one end of the car to the next looking between seats for Danny. What thehell-? He can’t be gone.

He can’t be gone!

The driver’s whistle bleated again. Nathan’s pulse quickened. He ranto the end of the car again, pushing people from his path, searching underneathevery seat.

“Hey, asshole!”

“Christ, pal-“

“M-my son, Danny…I’m looking for my little boy, he’s …”

The doors closed and the train jerked forward.

“No! Wait!” Nathan yelled for the train to halt.

The train gained momentum.

Where’s my son?

Bile rushed up the back of his throat. Gooseflesh rose on his skin.Through the window, on the platform, he saw Danny in the arms of a strangerdisappearing into the crowd.

Nathan knocked an old woman out of his way and lunged for thetrain’s emergency brake.

“No! Please! No, No!”

Tanita Marie Donner stared down at Danny’s father.