Solar Storms

Angel dreams that her mother is dead; Tulik says that Angel will have to go to Hannah. A man called Mikky will take Angel there in his two-seater plane. 

When the wheels touch down, “there [is] an overpowering silence,” and Angel struggles to get her bearings and find Hannah’s place as she follows Mikky’s map (241). Hannah’s house is “shabby […] unpainted, with tar paper over some of the walls” (242). A young man opens the door and tells Angel that she looks like her mother. Another man offers her refreshments. Angel notices the cyanide smell. 

As she watches an ailing Hannah in bed, Angel wants to have compassion “but even now [Angel] felt the pain of betrayal, abandonment: [Hannah] was leaving so soon after [Angel] found her” (243). In the room, Angel hears a cry; in a wooden box, there is a seven-month-old baby girl. On her deathbed, Hannah struggles with maligned spirits as “more than one of those [spirits] who dwelled inside [Hannah] feared [death]” (244). A woman at Hannah’s bedside tells Angel that Hannah was stabbed, at Hannah’s request, by her partner, Eron. Eron felt that Hannah was a tortured spirit, rather than a real woman.