Love Letters of the Angels of Death (14 page)

There are professional duties to be done, so the doctor starts trying to talk to our injured little boy. Benny knows not to trust him and sits stonily gripping his Popsicle while it melts into streams of indelible purple ink, dripping down his fist and onto your arm.

There's nothing at all left in either your or the doctor's voices to suggest what you must have meant to each other when you were both eighteen. He says, “That's no ordinary Popsicle. That's a special medical Popsicle. It cost the taxpayer about ten dollars.”

You snort.

“No really, we have people eat them when they have chest injuries. If they start coughing up purple dye afterwards we know they're aspirating their fluids. It means they're in big trouble.”

“Not like you, Benny.”

“No, no. Not like Benny.”

Benny's cut does need a stitch – but just one. Dr. Dan the prom date explains that we have a tricky parenting decision to make – one of those choices where no matter how we choose, everyone loses.

“If we try to anesthetise the area with a needle, it'll mean one more poke in the head – and it might not even work very well. Benny could end up feeling every bit of the stitching process anyway.” If we'll agree, Dr. Dan will go ahead and sew up the breach in Benny's scalp without bothering to try to numb the skin first.

You sigh. “Okay then. Luckily for all of us, Benny here is one extremely tough little kid. Aren't you, Benny?”

The nurse wheels in a shiny steel tray full of equipment before the four of us – you, me, the doctor, and the nurse – start closing in on Benny. In your arms, he squirms and yells and throws his head back into your sternum, transferring a new smear of blood onto you and hurting his tender scalp. He's loud but so small there isn't room for all of us to grapple with him at once. I look at you over the top of his head.

“I've got this one, okay?”

You nod as you pass the little boy to me and step away. “I'll go check on the other kids.”

The older boys are sitting mesmerized in a corner of the hospital foyer set up like a forest of fake rubber trees. They're slouched on chairs arranged around a television tuned to the all-cartoons-all-the-time station that we refuse to subscribe to on our TV at home.

Before the emergency room curtain drifts closed, you look back at Benny and the rest of us. You look back to see me and your prom date – me with my arms closed around Benny and your date bearing down on the child with a thin, curved needle like the one Nanny used to use for quilting. In the doctor's powdery, latex-gloved fingers, the needle is totally sterile, right up until it passes through Benny's hair. By the time we're all near enough to get the stitch into Benny's scalp, my own head is so close to the doctor's it would have been nothing for me to tip forward and kiss him, right on his face.

Benny yelps – once, twice – and drops the mushy medical Popsicle onto the clean floor. The stitch is in – blue nylon thread tied in a knot on the back of Benny's head. The nurse swoops up the Popsicle in a paper towel and pitches it in the trash right away, but it leaves a long purple stain on the white floor tiles anyway.

“I've got a few minutes before the ambulance gets here with a rogue diabetic who needs fluids and scolding,” Dr. Dan says as we walk out of the empty emergency ward together. By now, I'm pretty sure he's a dork, like you and me. But he's a nice guy – nice enough for Benny to have already forgiven him and taken him by the hand as we go to find you and the rest of the boys. “Your boy's got his Mom's hair, hasn't he?”

“Yeah, they all do at this age. But they seem to outgrow it pretty quickly.”

Dr. Dan hums. “She let me cut her hair once – at least, I'm almost sure that was her. It's a long time ago now, eh? That would have been during our first year at university. She'd run out of money and it ended up growing way out of control – nearly all the way down her back. But I was too freaked out to cut off any more than just a little bit.”

I grin and kind of laugh – because there's nothing to say. And what is funny is that I know I'm not jealous of Dr. Dan, the prom date. I don't know how it's possible, but I know it's true.

“Not that it would have mattered much,” he goes on. “Whatever hair I cut off has probably grown back a hundred times over since then. Right?”

“A thousand times over. Right.”

I'm actually smiling when I look at him. He still has most of his hair but it's got a lot of grey in it. In a minute, you'll go ahead and tell him so – because you know that's the kind of awkward teenaged candour he'll still be expecting from you. And even then I won't be jealous. The prom, the scissors in your hair, all the letters, the fact that you already know what his hand would feel like if it were to touch you – none of it matters.

Maybe you're like Benny, who will always have a small scar on his scalp, underneath his thick blond hair, carved by the hand of Dr. Dan himself. In all this time, I still haven't lifted up every single hair on your head to examine all the skin underneath every one of them. Maybe if I did, I'd find that you have the same kind of scar. Only it wouldn't be all red and inflamed and puckered around a suture like Benny's is today. It would be smooth and flat and white – a little dead around the edges.

Fifteen

I'm still finishing university when I learn to tell by the way the phone rings before eight o'clock in the morning that someone we know has had a dream that freaked them out.

It's happening again this morning, just as I'm closing the door behind me to leave for school. You wave goodbye to me as you plant our second-born son, baby Aaron, on your left hip and walk toward the telephone. The call will be a dream report from one of your girlfriends – or maybe Janae.

The dream could be anything.

“I'm at this barbecue, all normal and everything, but then I realize I've got a fiddler crab hidden inside my stomach. And I know if I move it's going to spaz out and slice me up.”

It sounds weird but it's no mystery to you. The dream means the girl still hasn't come to terms with the miscarriage she had, years ago.

Then there are these ones:

“There's this shallow pond with a really thin layer of ice on its surface. And there's a big, red octopus lying at the bottom of it, like it's asleep or something.”

And you know this girl needs a date.

That, you say, is how women usually dream – all in relationships and internal organs and fresh blood.

Men are different. We dream in phalluses. You say it's getting really, really boring – turning into the kind of thing any hack with one semester of undergraduate psychology or a copy of that
1001 Dreams Revealed
manual from the bookstore can unravel for himself.

Usually, all you have to say to the phallus dreamers is something like, “You're harpooning red octopuses? Really? Come on, dude, don't make me say it.”

But you say what's really sick is how much men dream about money.

“I dream my Dad's dragged me out golfing with him. But I can't find the first tee so I have to start at the second one. So he's flipping out at me because we know there's no way we'll ever finish the round before it gets too dark.”

So, someone's suspecting maybe he shouldn't have taken a whole decade to goof off before going back to school.

Sometimes, when the phone rings in the morning like this, it couldn't be any easier for you to show them what they're trying to tell themselves. All you have to do is repeat word-for-word what they just said to you.

“We're on this big hike through the jungle together, like a safari or something, and I'm carrying everything – ”

“You're carrying everything.”

“Yeah. Do you know what it means already? Because I'm not done –”

“
YOU'RE CARRYING EVERYTHING
.”

“Oh.”

But some people don't like it when girls like you – little student wives from the crummy walk-up apartments off Whyte Avenue – come storming into their dream worlds, kicking over all the cardboard set decorations. It's embarrassing. Your Dad knows it. He's become something like your dream interpreting agent – not that anyone would ever pay you for what you do. And maybe if you started accepting money to interpret dreams, you wouldn't be able to tell anyone anything anymore.

Anyways, your Dad gets all kinds of men to tell him their phallus-money dreams – the dude who works on his furnace, the other government guys at work, strangers on airplanes, it doesn't matter. Of course, he doesn't get them on the phone to talk to you themselves. Your squeaky white girl voice on the other end of the line, the sounds of our kids' cartoon videos playing on the TV in the background – that'd obliterate whatever mystique any of this might have. And, since you can't make money at it, your Dad is left with just the mystique to appreciate – that and being in on the secrets.

There are plenty of secrets here. When they tell you their dreams, they always tell you way too much – and it's dang awkward sometimes. The girl with the fiddler-crab-miscarriage dream? She told you about the dream over the dinner table at your parents' house.

“Did you hear that, Brigs?” you demanded in the car on the way home. “What was I supposed to say to her?”

I squinted down the road, trying to remember exactly what she'd said. “Tell me again.”

When you repeat the dream yourself, I can tell what it means too. There's something about hearing it told in your language and voice that makes it perfectly clear to me.

“So if you didn't call her on the miscarriage, what did you end up saying to her?”

You throw your hands up. “Well, I panicked and just made up something stupid and generic about body image before I got the heck out of there.”

The dreams always tell the truth. But sometimes you need to lie – and I'm always glad when you do. “You shouldn't tell people you can interpret dreams unless they're going to stay strangers to us forever,” I'll say as we slink out of another nearly ruined dinner party where you stopped just short of telling someone her dream about running a struggling roadside produce stand actually means she doesn't trust her husband anymore.

“I know, I know.”

Maybe your Dad's way of handling the dream interpretation business is smarter. When your Dad's got a big dream from a big man that needs interpreting, he'll have them type it out in an email and then he forwards the whole thing to our address. You'll tease it out, fire it back, and wait – always so smugly – to get the reply about how you were right on. It's funny – when the big men write back to your Dad about what you've told them, they always refer to you, the unknown interpreter, as “he.” And the last thing your Dad would ever do is correct them. I guess he figures it shouldn't matter to us if the phallus-money-dreamers are happier picturing you all skinny and shorn and flat, sitting in a lotus position on top of a mountain somewhere.

As far as your Dad is concerned, the highlight of your dream interpreter career came when you analyzed that dream his boss had about losing all his teeth. Your first reply in the email thread was just one line: “Ask him how long it's been since his braces came off.”

That blew their minds. You knew it would. You did it on purpose because showmanship is important in an endeavor like this one. It doesn't actually matter to you when his braces were removed. But it seems like all orthodontia survivors have nightmares about their teeth – even you. You'll be deep in it, dreaming you're bent over a stainless steel sink, spitting out blood and saliva and pretty white teeth. When the psychic parachute finally opens, you wake up, feeling around inside your mouth with your tongue, so relieved you could cry. If anyone knows what the tooth dreams mean, it's you. They're about dreading the inevitability of other people finding out what you really are – finding out you're a sham.

It's time for you to pick up that ringing, early morning phone. It is Janae – just like I said it would be.

“Okay, so I dreamed there's this ghost in my house. First it takes over my cat, then my oven, then my computer.”

You're laughing.

“It's not funny. It was a ghost and it was wrecking everything. It was scary.”

“Sorry, Janae. But – well –congratulations. You're starting to be ready to get pregnant again.”

“Yuck.”

“I didn't say you were happy about it – just preparing for it. It's okay. Go ahead.”

“Do you really think I am?”

You sigh loudly enough for her to hear you through the phone. “This has got nothing to do with what I think. It never does. I'm only telling you what
you
think.”

The phone call veers off somewhere else and doesn't end until about an hour after I've left the apartment. Scottie has finished eating breakfast but you leave the milky cereal bowls on the table and lie down in bed again. It's been another rough night, bouncing the bad baby in the dark.

Your head touches the pillow and it all comes back to you. There's something in the smell and feel of your own side of the bed that resurrects the dream you were having, just hours ago. It's another variation on an old theme – not quite a tooth dream, but close. It's the one you say you hate more than any other dream in your entire repertoire.

Your dream is not clever or artistic or mysterious or – anything. It's just literal and lame and – if you ask me – as unlikely as heck. It's just me, leaving you.

“Stop dreaming that,” I say, shaking you back and forth where you lie on your back in our bed, later that night. I won't stop shaking until you start to laugh at me. “What have I ever done,” I say as I climb on top of you, “to make you think I'm going to leave you? Aren't I nice to you?”

“Yes.”

“And good to the babies?”

“Yes. But it's not like I can help what I dream, Brigs.”

“No?”

“No – and you can't help what I dream either.” We look at each other, quiet for a moment, just inches away from each other's faces. “Hey Brigs, if you weigh almost twice what I do, how come I'm not squished flat every time you lie on top of me?”

I smirk. “Because when I'm on top of you I'm always supporting most of my own weight with my arms and legs.”

“What? No, you're not.”

“Sure I am.”

“Show me,” you say.

I shake my head. “I'm actually really heavy. You won't like it.”

“It doesn't matter if I like it. You have to show me. It bothers me to think I might not really know how heavy you are. I mean, what if you were to drop dead someday, right on top of me?”

I laugh. “That could definitely happen.”

“Right. And I need to know I can escape – if it ever does happen.”

I sigh and all your hair blows back against the pillow. “Alright then. Are you ready?”

You nod, and I feel you tense your muscles underneath me, bracing yourself. And that's when I collapse, every ounce of my body from the neck down crushing down onto yours.

Your eyes get wide and your breath hisses out as your ribs compact beneath me. “Brigs,” you gasp with an extra-long S.

“See what I mean?”

You cough. “Yeah. Okay. Get off me.”

I don't move at all. “But I'm dead, remember? You have to figure out how to escape without my help.”

You start to struggle, pulling your arms free, pushing my shoulders away. It jostles me from side to side but the bulk of me stays right where I dropped it in the first place. “Dude, I can't even scream,” you rasp.

“Yeah?” I let myself settle even further, resting my forehead against the pillow, beside your head. “This was a great idea. Imagine if we hadn't practiced this before it really became an emergency.”

You try to thrash yourself free. It lasts until you pant out a little laugh and drop your arms so your palms are upturned in a surrender pose. “You're too heavy. I can't get away.”

“Sure you can.” I say it languidly. “You have to. I'm still dead.”

Your breath is getting fast and shallow. “Brigs – I'm going to have a panic attack. I'm not kidding.”

“Yes, you are. Come on. Use your legs. They're way stronger than your arms.”

You're panting and making weak little Kung Fu sounds underneath me. I don't admit out loud that it's all very enjoyable. I don't have to admit it.

“Hey,” you snap, “knock it off. This is not sexual.”

I laugh. “Sure it is. It always is.”

“No. It isn't.” You're trying to be stern.

“Come on,” I drawl, “you've got to get away. How are you ever going to manage to mutilate my dead hand and cut a bone out of it the way you've always wanted to if you're trapped underneath me until the end of time?”

“Ha!” you yell as you throw one of your legs free.

“There ya go,” I cheer. “Now all you have to do is roll away from me.”

You're twisting and writhing. “I can't.”

“That's right,” I say, still deadweight on top of you. “You can't get away.”

Underneath me, you're popping P sounds. “P-patriarchal violence.”

I shake my forehead against the pillow. “Nope. It's not me. It's got nothing to do with my own force. It's just gravity. You know – the earth and space and everything. All of nature pulls me down right here.”

“I can't.”

“Neither can I. You and I – this is not something we can ever get out of. Okay? Do you believe me yet?”

Your only answer is to start fighting again. Your effort is stronger but its effects are weaker as your muscles burn off their oxygen – the air your lungs can't expand to replace anymore.

“Now,” I say, moving toward the ending. “Will you please stop dreaming that I'm trying to leave you?”

You still don't say anything. But you stomp your free foot into the mattress, yelling as best you can without any breath. You rock back and forth until you create enough momentum to pry yourself out from underneath me. All free and triumphant, you sit up, laughing, panting, smacking me on the back with one hand.