The Belief in Angels

THE
BELIEF
IN
Angels

Copyright © 2014 by J. Dylan Yates

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, as well as business establishments, events, or locales, is coincidental.

Published 2014
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-938314-64-3
eISBN: 978-1-938314-65-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013957198

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

This book is
dedicated to my grandparents.

All of them, whoever they are.

“When I am dead, and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain drenched hair …”

—Sara Teasdale

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as
to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them
and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”

—Teilhard de Chardin

“Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.
We could breathe and talk to one another.
We rowed past schools of fish
and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”

—Jules Finn

THIS STORY IS ABOUT surviving truth. It’s about surviving our connection to truth. Truth is so much stranger than fiction that, for it to be believed, you sometimes have to tell the truth selectively. Truth is gray, and there are two hundred and fifty-six shades of gray, although the human eye can only detect thirty-two.

Also, truth has a curve—a bell curve. Somewhere along that curve is my truth, and somewhere else along that curve is another’s. The truth does bend. This makes truth frightening.

And so it is that we live in a curved world and struggle to get to one point of truth, which is really nothing but a personal approximation.

Consider the theory of relativity. The shortest distance between two points in a curved world is a curve. We are all curving toward one another to find our truths together—into infinity. It is in this way that our search for truth drives our connections and, ultimately, our survival.

This story has several versions of endings. There are as many as there are dreams and nightmares in the universe. Each version depends on where along the bend of truth each of us is. All we can see is our own truth and maybe a bit further ahead and a bit further behind. The past that sits behind the bend is truth, although it’s not within our sight lines anymore. That is belief.

Belief has substance and matter. It has to, or the entire curve would disintegrate.

Physics proves that the part ahead, the part of the truth that you can’t see, doesn’t end with one truth. We curve truth toward another point. That is hope.

Maybe we all live in fractured prisms like kaleidoscopes, in encased and private worlds, yearning for light but tumbling in shadows. When we hold our worlds to the light and turn them, one truth is revealed. Turn it again, and the first disappears but another manifests.

Ultimately we connect and survive, even in death.

We do this consciously and unconsciously.

We do this infinitely and unbound.

It is in this way that truth sets us free.

—San Diego, California, November 2013

Jules Finn, 18 years | August, 1979

WITHENSEA, MASSACHUSETTS

SOMETIMES IN ORDER to tell a story well, so it’s truly understood, you have to tell it out of order. My story tells like this. It unravels … and ravels up again.

My name is Julianne, but everybody calls me Jules. I was named after my Great-Uncle Jules on my father’s side. That’s what my father, Howard, told me. My mother, Wendy, told me I’m named after a dead racehorse trainer.

It’s hard to know what to believe.

For now, I live here in Withensea, a seacoast town north of Cape Cod, an island that thrives on summer tourism. In two weeks I will leave for college and never come back.

Many people I went to school with will stay, however. A kind of Withensea tradition. They’ll move down the road with their high school sweethearts, who’ll become their spouses, and settle close to the homes they were raised in.

Sometimes a place can be as much a part of you as the people you grew up with. I won’t miss most of the people here, but I’ll miss this place. The ocean, for me, holds the power to turn a moment mystical. Accompanying my memories of childhood there are always ocean sounds—sometimes faint, sometimes louder, the waves crashing and beating their own score. When I picture the breathtaking beauty of our cliff, the ocean, it almost masks the memories of the things that were not picturesque. I’ve spent eighteen years soaking up every beautiful part of Withensea, hoping to crowd out the memories of the painful parts of my life—of
guns, of violence, and of loss. A kind of glass-housed chaos, tolerated by the community in order to feed the starving brains bred in small towns.

My life, so far, has also been an existence filled with secrets. Two kinds of secrets. First: the kind that need lies to keep them hidden. Second: the kind our brains create to cope with sorrow.

Still, perspective offers me solace enough to not measure my own sorrow against another. What I understand now about survival is that something in you dies. You don’t become a survivor intact. Survival’s cost is always loss. This is my mourning book.

What follows is a collection of memories I’ve saved. I’ve learned memories are lost more often than objects. I will keep whole parts intact in my telling, where I feel it’s important. In a way, I think it will keep me intact to tell the truth of it this way. It’s my evidence—a way of documenting to keep the truth in my sight line. There are parts of my life I’ve been absent from. These I will tell from where I am now along the bend of truth. I will call these parts belief.

It’s all left me with this weird love for the moments after something good happens. I call it
delayed joy.
I hear an achingly beautiful song, and when it’s over I enjoy the immediate moment, the quiet, more than I did the sounds of the song playing. I taste a buttery lick of Butter Crunch ice cream, and after the flavor is gone I savor the loss of the deliciousness in my mouth.

It’s like I’m wired backwards inside my head.

Withensea harbors a scrabble of townies who live in salt-beaten homes scattered among swanky summer estates. Winters on this island are brutal to homes, cars, skin—anything exposed to the elements. But in the spring, after the last of the gray-brown clumps of snow have melted, and before the tourists hit town, everything enjoys a fresh coat of paint and not much more. Rather than shoulder the emotional and physical cost and energy of upkeep, all things considered non-essential are left to deteriorate or grow wild. Deferred maintenance is a practice applied to most everything in the town, including the people.

My brothers, David and Moses, and I are kind of like the town. We started out sturdy, with a semblance of familial structure to support us and a new coat every September when we started school. But, eventually, with neglect, we were left as straggly as those other non-essential elements.

In the long run, this may turn out to have been a blessing.

From the turn of the century until about twenty years ago, Withensea was gorgeous. It used to be a summer vacation destination for Rose Kennedy’s family. But the Kennedy family seems to have forgotten about their ancestral home, which
sits, in its dilapidated glory, across from a seawall by the ocean, close to where I live.

Townies call the people who come to live in the estates along the beach “
the summer people”
and have a general disdain for those who can’t or don’t have to brave the winter by our ocean. The ones who can, the ones who stay, manage to eke out a living working a year-round business, make their money off summer tourists, or travel inland toward Boston—sometimes by ferry—to find work.

Many of them take a nine-month detour to the bottom of a bottle. Alcoholism in this mostly Irish/Italian Catholic town is more a winter industry than an embarrassment.

When I was six, my father—a short, Irish, orange-haired, pink, and doughy-faced man—owned a bar called the Little Corporal. It did a booming business in the summer months, and the winter industry provided enough support to warrant staying open year-round.

From outside, in the summer months, the Little Corporal’s vivid green doors separated long, tall panels of clear glass windows through which you could see several pool tables. The glass panels continued on the south side of the building, turning two sides of the bar into a pool table terrarium. The tables floated, lily pad-green felted over a gray concrete pond. In winter, all the windows were covered in cheap, shamrock green-painted plywood to protect the glass.

The building squatted at the intersection of a small interstate highway and the boulevard that flows into Withensea’s one main avenue. The boulevard flows in the other direction onto a land bridge that grips it to the mainland, tight as a choke hold. This intersection is the only way to enter or exit Withensea without a boat. All the cars slow to a crawl to navigate the sharply curved, signage-laden rotary, which spits them out again in either direction, going in or coming out.

In the summertime, pedestrians paraded from the surrounding parking lots down the wide sidewalk with their whiny, strollered babies and cotton-candied children, headed for the public beaches or Aragon, the amusement park anchoring the southern tip of the town. The day trippers and the townies who worked the other bars, restaurants, and amusement park arcades, all pushed in or passed by the wide doors and terrarium windows of the Little Corporal.

In the winter, people parked their cars right on the snowy sidewalks that wound around the Little Corporal to avoid the icy winds that whipped up over the seawall and across the avenue.

Inside the bar, a long expanse of intricately carved dark oak ran the length of the back of the room; an ornate gold-leaf mirror hung on the wall behind it. Above the mirror, a late-eighteenth-century, crudely-carved, wooden ship figurehead thrust herself from the wall, her peacock-blue robe draped under the curve of
her bare breasts. Serene and anachronistic in the space, she gazed with detachment out beyond the walls of the bar, beyond the cars, beyond the imprisoned stroller babies and the laddered heights of the roller coaster to the sea.

To the landlocked fishermen, the career drunks in their thiamine-deficient stupors, solitary and stranded on the stools at closing, she was a familiar meditation. For me, she served as promise of another, better, life out there, beyond Withensea. A beginning to a life that had, thus far, been mostly about endings.