Love Letters of the Angels of Death (8 page)

No one seems to be looking at you – a small, teen-aged girl – standing pressed to the side of the closed coffin. Behind the screen of your body, you slide your hand along the brass bar bolted to the shiny wood. The metal is cold, and your fingers leave steamy clouds wherever you've touched it.

And you know you're not really the person you want to be yet. If you were, you would be beckoning Janae to come join you.

“I need to hold him,” your best self would have told your cousin. “Help me. We need to hold him for ourselves, or we might not feel good ever again.”

And both of you would have closed your hands around the yellow metal. The muscles inside your arms would have hardened as the mass of both your bodies shifted away from the coffin. You would have tipped and flexed until, very slightly, one edge of the coffin was lifted up, out of the chrome-plated bier, borne by your strength. And then your arms would loosen again, bending into soft, white curves, the raised edge of the coffin coming back to rest – back to where the pall-boys would be able to find it when the time came to take it all away.

Your Mom's hand is on you now. “Come sit down, honey. What a day you've had.”

You let go of the metal bar, walking sideways under your mother's arm, watching the clouds left from the moisture of your hands fading to vapour on the brass. And then your feet seem to lock and you won't be moved another step.

“No,” you say.

Your Mom is frowning. Both of her arms are around you now. The strength is still there – your mother's irresistible power summoned here from faraway in your early childhood. She's talking right into your ear, low and unequivocal. “Come on, now. Not today.”

And you're moving again, away from the coffin, back to the crowd waiting on padded folding chairs. How can they not know it when they look at you? All of this – the basement, the hospital curtains, the mirror, whatever's left of Elijah – maybe a part of this does belong to the pall-boys and your bossy cousin and your angry uncles and your broken grandmother. Yet somehow, at last, you know it's rightfully yours.

Eight

People – like my mother – are able to fall down and just die of heart attacks or dengue fever or kidney failure or any of the other millions of natural causes of human mortality. But the paperwork people leave behind is different. Nature has no interest in it at all. Instead, someone needs to round it all up, stand it in a line, and manually kill off the paperwork, one shred at a time.

Through some unspoken kind of collective consciousness, everyone in my family agreed that Mom would have wanted me – the oldest of her kids, the one who was already waist deep in her death – to be the one to finish winding up her estate. I think they may have thought it was my birthright as her firstborn or something stupid like that. It might be true that some people consider appointing a person as their executor to be an honour. Only, it's not an honour. It's one final, parting kick in the shins.

At least Mom's estate is simple and impoverished with no real property left in it. For a few thousand dollars, she'd turned over her portion of the house where I was raised to my Dad when she left him. He'd turned around and sold it as soon as my little brother wandered away from home for good. The people who own the house now keep a flock of chickens in the yard and park their cars all over the grass. It's not right.

Anyway, with no house, and with the police having already impounded her car for all those traffic tickets she never had any hope of paying, my lawyer friend assured me we could probably handle her estate business without ever needing to go to court. He rapid-fired a pep talk on our jurisdiction's estate laws at me, let me make a sheet of written notes from our conversation, and made me promise never to mention his name. And then, by degrees, unintentionally, I ended up letting you take over the whole mess yourself.

Mom's estate is completely your project by the time I stand behind you as you click away on our big desktop computer. Sloppy stacks of old receipts line both of your thighs as you sit cross-legged on a folding metal chair with your feet tucked under your knees. You hand me one of the stacks of receipts without taking your eyes off the screen.

“Shred these, if you please,” you instruct me.

The little squares of paper are mostly from the gas station convenience store in Mom's small town.

“You wouldn't think a diabetic would buy that much cola, would you?” you say when you sense that I've started squinting behind you, trying to read the fading print on the receipts.

“Sugar-free cola, right?” I ask.

“Nope.”

I smirk. There's nothing we can do to save her now. “Well, I'm sure Mom chased her sugar cola with big shots of insulin so all the math worked out when it was time to answer to her blood tests.”

No one knows how to cope with a big problem – diabetes, obesity, a rotten marriage, rotten kids – better than people who don't have to live with it themselves.

You hum back at the buzzing glass tube in front of you. “Yeah, it's too bad diabetes isn't really the numbers game some people like to think it is. Isn't that right, Benny?” you ask the baby I'm holding.

In the crook of my arm, I hold our littlest son turned outward so he can merrily kick and punch – baby-sparring with the open air as he watches you work. The whir and tear of the paper shredder charges his muscles with something and makes his movements even more animated.

As far as babies go, big Benny is fantastic. He's always been huge for his age – so big there was a sound from your skin like a leather couch getting ripped open at the moment he was born. The nurse actually looked up at me and said, “Did you
hear
that?”

All the typical terror and pain was supposed to be over by the time Benny's birth really started to scare me. It happened as the doctor was putting you back together and you lost your grip on – everything.

Your head fell back against the bed. “Goin' out,” was all you said.

They brought you back with a shot of blood coagulant and an oxygen mask.

Here at home, baby Benny needs to be fed an awful lot, and he still wakes you up in the night, but we both adore him anyway. Maybe it's not so much that Benny's fantastic. Maybe it's just that, now that we're raising a baby for the fourth time, we've finally learned not to be mad at him for all the things he can't deliver.

Benny is the baby who was with us – invisible, not quite created – the day we found Mom's body, almost a year ago. So I guess it's only fitting that he's here with us now, at the end of her story. At the funeral, Benny was a secret between just you and me. And we kept him a secret until you were almost six months into his gestation, like a couple of teenagers who couldn't deal with their unplanned pregnancy. It didn't matter how long or legal or stable our marriage was when I knocked you up with Benny. It was still a catastrophe.

That was last spring. Now, with Benny all perfect and whole in my arms, I look down to where the white plane of the computer screen in front of the three of us is split into a grid. You tell me it's a spreadsheet proving that my mother died completely bankrupt.

We'll make a dozen copies of it and mail it away, enclosed with terse letters explaining that no one is getting any of the money they're owed out of Mom's estate – nothing, never. There's no money for the ex-husbands, the credit card companies, the dentist she'd been threatening to sue, or even the federal tax office itself.

The pile of bills she left behind contains demand letters addressed to every different name she used – our name, her father's name, the names of each one of her husbands including the ones she didn't even like.

Her veterinarian landlord never wants to see us again, so he took his damage deposit a long time ago and accepted it was all he'd ever get to cover her back rent – not to mention the total annihilation of the Dead Lady Trailer.

The credit card companies came at us with false sympathy, offering to clear her debts if we'd agree to pay half of the amounts she owed. We were legally entitled to refuse to pay for anything, so we did. The most obnoxious creditor of all was the long-distance phone company bent against all decency on getting their final fifty-eight dollar bill paid. One of the call centre supervisors was on the other end of the line the day you finally cracked.

“She's dead, okay? Dead – D-E-A-D – otherwise known to you people as ‘the cost of doing business.'”

A stack of plain security-lined envelopes are already stamped and marked with just Mom's now-defunct post office box number as a return address. If anyone wants to find us to threaten or sue us, they'll have to work for it. They'll have to work their way past you – standing here in front of me, white and shining in the glare of the computer screen.

Nine

We've met him just once since he turned thirtyish and paunchy and his forehead spread all the way back to his mid-head. It was at the wedding reception of one of the hundreds of distant relatives I share with him – all of us the descendants of one of the original Abrahams of the dry farmlands barely north of the American border. I'm grinning and smug under all my perfectly preserved brown hair as we walk away from him.

You poke me with your elbow and tell me again how when he was yours, when you were both sixteen years old, he was beautiful – a lithe and gloomy Peter Pan, his dark bangs hanging all the way down over one eye, his thin shoulders draped in a long black coat bought from the only army surplus store for hundreds of kilometres. But I know you've got a generous and tolerant sense of physical beauty, so I'm still not convinced.

There's no need to argue it with you because you're already laughing, moving past it like it's all completely embarrassing. I don't have to say a word to get you to admit that you still don't know what it was that used to make you want to love him so badly. Maybe it was an effect of some kind of chemical intoxicant wafting up from the wet, broken pineapple weed he pulverized against the cracked sidewalks with every turn of the wheels of his glinting grey skateboard.

“You know, he never actually called me his girlfriend, in all that time. He preferred to say we were just ‘involved.' Sixteen-year-old kids – involved – isn't that hilarious, Brigs?”

Somehow, I'm not laughing. And I'm glad we're driving away from him, moving away from another one of those pink and yellow wedding receptions.

“Blush and butter-cream,” you correct me.

You don't mind the spin the bride's given the colours' names, but you are complaining about having to sit through a reading of that sappy poem with the forced, awkward rhyme for the third time this year. Our sweet, earnest relatives can't seem to stop themselves from sniffling through it at all the family weddings now.

“‘... a special dress, like very other few...'” you quote from the poem. The lines have got you shuddering behind the steering wheel. “Very other few.”

On the passenger side of the car I'm not really listening to this rant I've heard just as many times as I've heard the poem itself. Instead, I'm remembering the story you told me about a stupid fight you had with my distant cousin who used to kiss you right on the mouth. He picked the fight right there on the sidewalk outside your high school, in front of everyone. It started when he glided up beside you – unnaturally tall on his skateboard – with a wrinkled paper bag from the drug store crammed into his pocket. He pushed the bag into your hands – and that was when he asked you to dye his hair black.

I smirk again. “Didn't he totally lose it that time you told him his eyebrows wouldn't match his hair if he made you dye it black?”

Then you're laughing at me for still thinking about him. Maybe it is weird. It's too late to take back my prying now. You've already started re-telling the old legends about him – like it's been too long since you first told me these stories, and you're ready to repeat them.

Yes, he was mad about the hair dye. He didn't understand the caterpillar prominence of the thick, light brown brows over his eyes – knew nothing of the embarrassing drama in the way the stray hairs reached out for each other over the hard, white bridge of his nose. But he found satisfaction in anger, especially when it came to you. And it was with a tiny trace of pleasure that he nearly tore the paper bag as he snatched it out of your hands – glaring and rolling away, leaving the other kids on the lawn of the high school to gape at you.

For hours afterward, he ignored you – right up until he slid a note folded like a foolscap crane into the reveal of your locker door. I've seen the note myself, much later – flattened but still creased from his origami. I found it when we were moving house, and it fell onto the floor out of your old copy of
The Fountainhead
,
as I packed up the bookcase.

“On the coulee at sunset. Me.”

 You explain that there was going to be a planet visible in the sky that night: Jupiter. “Or maybe it was Mars,” you tell me.

He claimed that, for once, all you'd need to see way out to Jupiter was your naked eyes. Even though he said the word “naked” right to your face, you still agreed to ask your Mom if you could use the car to drive out past the light pollution of the town and into the countryside that night.

 Just before dark, there you were, sitting with him in the dry, needle-tipped prairie grass, wondering if dew ever fell there in the ancient valley that rolled up and away from the scrawny river below like a weathered green blanket. You leaned back, straight-armed, resting on your palms, with the folded cuffs of your jeans crossed at your ankles. That's how you sat, lazy and not quite bored, looking for Jupiter – or Mars. Beside you in the grass, he would have been glaring out into space, hunched over his bent legs, closing his arms around his knees. A shiny chip of rock hung in the sky, almost too far away to see.

 “He was so disgusted with me when I asked him to tell me again how we knew it wasn't just Venus.”

 And even though, from a distance, the scene on the sunset hillside could have been lifted right out of one of the novels on the small white bookcase in cousin Janae's bedroom, your first boy just gathered his army overcoat around his thin ribcage and pulled his eyebrows closer together. You watched his face – watched your own fingers passing lightly over the edge of his mouth where a faint constellation of tiny freckles faded into the pink of his lip. His fingers were closing around your hand, pulling it away from his face, dropping it into your lap.

 “Keep your irony to yourself,” he said.

 You still hadn't quite become yourself yet, so you just pulled your knees up and bowed your head into them. But you promise me you did manage to mutter, “Where'd you read that?”

 Riding on the plush seats of your mother's car, the bottom of your Doc Marten shoe pressed to the accelerator, you drove out of the dark, back toward the town. He was talking and talking by then – something about an apple rotting in the broken shell of a giant bug – until your foot pivoted sharply on its heel, coming down hard on the brake. In front of your mother's car, the headlights lit up a wreck glittering on the pavement. The front end of a car had crumpled against the stout, pressure-hardened post of a road sign. A splintered stump jutted out of the gravel on the roadside, but the rest of the sign was gone, launched into the oblivion of the broad black ditch between the highway and a hayfield.

 “It used to be a sign for the Report-A-Poacher hotline,” you tell me, shrugging. “I have no idea why I still know that. Memory is strange, eh Brigs?”

Broken glass and plastic and machinery spread like a burned out minefield across the asphalt. Two pairs of cloven-hoofed stick legs hung down over the windshield's empty gap. A bay-coloured body bled onto the roof of the car.

 You and the boy both opened your car doors and stood behind them as if they were great, steel shields. Music was playing loudly from within the wreck. A gloomy British bass line from a song we all had on our mixed tapes in those days droned over the dark fields.

 “It could be someone we know,” your boy said, squinting down the white columns burning from the headlights of your Mom's car.

 You squinted too. “Should we go look?”

His throat clicked but he actually said nothing.

You pushed the car door closed. “I'm going.”

 “Wait,” he called, terrified, maybe, at the sight of your wings beginning to unfurl. You're not in a basement this time – not hidden with your grandmother behind the curtains in the depths of a hospital. You're standing right out here on the road between miles and miles of open fields where anybody could see what you are.

The boy could hardly speak to you. “What – what are we supposed to do?”

 You shrugged one shoulder. “How should I know? You used to be the Boy Scout. Go try 'n' flag down some help, or something.”

 You started down the road, away from him. His voice behind you was saying something you couldn't understand over the sound of the music but you didn't turn back.

 The song grew louder near the wreck, where blood and hair and excrement smeared the car's glossy white paint. A deer carcass lay pinched in the crevice its impact had carved into the roof. The frame of the driver's window had flexed and squeezed its tempered glass out onto the highway where it was scattered at your feet, broken into little green jewels. It must have crunched under the soles of your shoes as you approached the car. But it's your English teacher's voice you're hearing, speaking inside your head – something about a ghost in the machine.

 You took a breath as if diving under water and stooped to the window.  

The driver was a stranger, but he was still just a little older than you were that night. The steering column had been thrust too far into the passenger compartment by the collision with the sign post – or maybe with the deer – and it rammed against his chest. His shoulders lurched as he breathed against the crush.

 “Are you okay?” you asked, even though you knew it was stupid.

 “Get m'out,” the driver said. Then he raised his fingers to keep you away. “No, don' touch.”

 “I won't,” you said. “It's okay. My friend's gone for help.”

 “Don' go,” he exhaled.

 “I won't,” you said again, squeezing your hands between your knees as you bent toward to the window. “I won't go.” There must have been a trace of a tremor in your voice even though you would have tried to keep its tone light as plastic – the same voice you use now when you're at the boys' parent-teacher interviews.

 The driver turned his eyelids to you. “Go's sake,” he gasped. “Turn'ff music.”

 Before you could say anything more, another voice was pronouncing curses just behind your head. It wasn't your boy. It was a man, standing in the beam of the headlights of your mother's car, walking toward you in silhouette like a cheap effect in a music video. Every time you tell it, I wish he was me. But he isn't. You still don't know who he is. And neither do I.

“Hey, I got a cell phone here,” the man said, waving a grey box. “I already dialled 9-1-1.”

 “Hey, did you hear that?” you sang to the driver. “Help's coming any minute now – an ambulance and everything.”  

“Hang in there, buddy,” the man bawled into the car from over your shoulder. He bent to look more closely, swearing his face off in deepest sympathy.

 The cassette deck had reached the end of the tape and was clicking in the dashboard as it automatically began rewinding the music. In the new quiet, the man with the phone straightened his back and craned his neck to look past the wreck, down the highway. You glanced at him long enough to notice the way his large, pale moustache hid his mouth. It made you want to drop your eyes to the broken glass gems at your feet. By then the man with the phone had leaned so close to you that you sprang back, covering the base of your throat with your hand.

“Hey, is that kid out there a friend of yours?” is all he said.

 “Oh no,” you answered, sputtering, sounding stupid and scared, “we weren't sure if we'd really found Jupiter or not but we gave up anyway and were driving back into town. And then we ran into this guy – well, we didn't run into him, literally, that must have been the deer. But we did stop and –”

 “No, I don't mean the poor fella in there,” man interrupted. He jerked his chin away from the wreck – away from you – motioning to the black length of highway beyond everything either of you could see. “I mean the tall kid in the long coat, walking right down the centre line in the dark. He's gonna get himself killed.”

We know from the wedding reception that he didn't die on the highway – your first boy, the one dressed all in black, letting his feet pace down the yellow centre line. After the ambulance came and went, both you and the boy made it home in perfect safety that night. You even stayed entangled with one another for a little longer, though the end was clearly imminent.

It wasn't long after he showed you Jupiter that you found him in a small garage that was once set on fire, but still stood – charred and sooty – at the back of his parents' yard. One side of it looked like it was cobbled together out of tiny coal tiles. He was inside the garage, in the dust and shade, pounding a small, one-handed sledge hammer against the concrete floor.

“He called the hammer a ‘maul,'” you tell me.

You knew he liked it when you pretended he was a monster so you asked, “What are you doing? Is it time to move the body you hid under the slab already?”

He stood up, almost smiling, letting the shaft of the hammer slide through his fist.

“Check it out.”

Something glinted in the dimness, and he flipped a flat copper oval into the palm of your hand. It was almost unrecognizable – all thin and oblong with the image of Queen Elizabeth II that's usually stamped on the metal beaten away. It had been, very recently, a penny.