The Miracles of Ordinary Men (20 page)

“I'm glad you found me,” Timothy said. He did not look back, and the words disappeared so quickly into the howl of the wind that for a moment Sam wasn't sure he'd spoken at all. Then, “It makes me feel better.”

“I'm glad too,” Sam said.

“What happens now?” the boy asked. “What do we do?”

“I think we just watch,” he said. He remembered Father Jim. “We watch, and we wait.”

“For what
?”

“For God,” he said. Finally. “I think that's what we're waiting for.”

IV

More research will tell her that pain causes changes to the brain, to one's physical chemistry. That the dopamine receptors in the brain are equally responsible for the increase in and relief of pain, that prolonged exposure to hurt will, literally, make someone into a different person. People who are in pain think differently, act differently. They build a world that operates around hurt and solace; they create nightmares, and lift themselves above in any way they can because when you hurt, freedom from it brings a release better than that of any drug. The highs of lacerated skin, the throb of a bruised and bloody mouth. The dark moments of stillness in between. Teresa of Avila beat herself and saw God; so too might Lilah's own penance bring with it visions of something else. A better world? A life where she is stronger, more than equal to her sins?

Or perhaps Israel is making her into a different person altogether now, with every slap of his hand. Remoulding her flesh. Rewiring her brain. Perhaps she will emerge from his hands like a newborn, her guilt burned away, ready to conquer that space between her brother and her story and that name across the stars. She doesn't have to travel far to cross it — all she has to do is lie still, and let him bring it to her.

—

“Do you ever have the same dream more than once?” This to Debbie, over pasta and baguettes. Lilah moves noodles around on her plate and watches Debbie eat — linguine, more lesbian tea.

“Like, nightmares?”

She shrugs. “Sure. Or just dreams, whatever.”

“Sometimes. I dream about high school. But everyone has those. Why?”

Lilah pokes at her food. On the way to dinner, she kept her head down and ducked into the alley every time a black car passed down the street. And now she can't eat. Every time a plate's put in front of her she thinks of Roberta, chained to an
IV
in her starchy hospital bed. Every time someone passes by the window she expects to see her brother, cowering and helpless under Israel's hand. “I've been having some strange dreams lately.”

“What are they about?”

“My brother.” Debbie doesn't look satisfied with this, so Lilah continues. “Sometimes it's my brother, and sometimes it's another man. I think. He's thin. And we're in a stone hallway.” A spear. “Or sometimes on a cliff, looking out over the sea.” Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. “And I think — I'm not sure, but sometimes he has wings.”

“Wings? You mean, like, an angel?”

“Um . . . yes.” Is it, though? This man that shines, that makes entire oceans rise and fall under his hand — is this an angel? Are those really wings that flicker behind him, or just more tricks of the light?

Debbie dips a finger into her tea and then sucks it. This would drive Roberta wild. “You know you can get dream books from the library, right?”

“I know what the dreams mean,” Lilah says. Her brother is lost, and she is looking for anything to save him, even God. Even a terrible, unfathomable God with a spear. It's not rocket science. “I just want to know why I'm having them all the time.”

Debbie shakes her head. “I don't know. I can ask Jo, if you want.” Jo, Debbie's partner, is a psychologist-in-training. Apparently she is all about dreams. No doubt she would shit her pants if she sat down with Lilah for an hour.

“It's not really important. I'm just curious.”

“Hmm,” Debbie says. “My dreams are so boring. I mean, showing up naked in science class is about as stressful as they get. Obviously, I need more excitement in my life.”

Lilah laughs. “Maybe. But weird dreams and lost brothers are hardly excitement.”

“You haven't heard from him, then?” Debbie asks.

“I hear
from him,” Lilah says. “But it's not the same. He can be right in front of me and miles away all at the same time.”

Debbie nods. But she doesn't understand, either. “Maybe it's a phase, Lilah. I know it sounds ridiculous, but maybe he's just . . . I don't know . . . working through something.”

“Maybe,” she echoes. She pushes more noodles around. The waiter comes by a few minutes later and takes her half-finished meal away.

“It will get better,” Debbie says softly. “You're a good person, Lilah. Good things will come to you. I'm sure of it.”

A good person. A
nice
person. Is it true? Or is this just what people say? Three weeks ago she might have believed this — now, her life has splintered into so many pieces she finds it hard to call herself a person
at all. Perhaps she is just energy, a blue-white pulse of power waiting for a moment to ignite. The days of her life losing focus, becoming one headlong rush to salvation, or damnation, or both. Timothy. Israel. Roberta. So much can change, Delilah, in a minute, an hour, a day. “I don't know, Debbie. I don't know anything, anymore.”

—

In the morning she finds Timothy in front of the bakery, eating cupcakes. He licks icing from his fingers and grins up at her. His smile is so dazzling that she wonders, for a moment, if he's high.

“I love cupcakes,” he says. “Don't you just love cupcakes, Lilah?”

“Yes.” She sits beside him, on the ground, and sticks a finger in one of the cupcakes on his lap. The icing is chocolate buttercream. She licks her finger clean, and then runs it over the cupcake again. “You're in a good mood.”

“You're going back to the hospital today,” he says. He puts the cupcake on her knee. “That's what you've come to tell me.”

“I am going to the hospital. Yes.” She bites into the cupcake. How absurdly nice, to sit here with him in the cold December air and eat chocolate frosting. “You don't have to come. I won't force you. I just wanted to see you before I go.”

“Now you see me. And then you won't. It's just that simple.”

She stops mid-bite and looks at him, at how calmly he picks the crumbs from his jeans. “Timmy. Are you okay?”

“I'm
fine
,” he says. Then he looks at her, at the scarf around her neck. “You're the one covered in scarves.”

Suddenly the cupcake tastes like Styrofoam. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm not dumb,” he says, hurt. “You keep talking to me like you think I'm some kind of idiot.”

Lilah swallows with difficulty. How many times have people said things like this? “It's not what you think.”

“Let me guess. You fell down the stairs.”

She pulls a tissue out of her purse and wipes her fingers. Slowly, carefully. “I've met someone.”

“Someone who makes you fall down the stairs? That's nice.”

“Tim. It's not like that.”

“I don't believe you,” he says. “You have bruises on your
neck
.”

“I had hickeys on my neck all the time when we lived at home. You never said anything.”

“I was a kid!”

“Anyway,” she says, “it's fine. Don't worry about it.”

“But I always worry about you.”

She laughs. “Right. Because — clearly — I'm in worse shape than you.”

“You wouldn't understand,” he says. “That's why I don't tell you. Mom doesn't understand, either.”

Lilah pulls her scarf tighter and shivers. “Is this going to go on forever, Timmy? I'm right here, and you won't talk to me. What do you want me to do?”

“It's a bruise,” he says. “It's not a hickey. And you won't tell me anything else. So we're even, then.”

“Even,” she echoes. A woman steps out of the bakery and casts a quick glance over the two of them, huddled on the ground. She walks away quickly, without looking back.

“Mom took her rosary into the hospital,” Lilah says. “I bet she's driving the nurses crazy.”

Timothy snorts and looks at the ground. “Maybe. Or maybe they like it. Maybe it's comforting.” He seems so far removed from tears today.

“If I was a nurse,” she says, “it would drive me nuts.”

“I think,” says Timothy, “that when you're around death all the time, you can't help but believe. You'd go nuts otherwise.”

Lilah remembers the crucifix in Roberta's bedroom, and her silent, hurried words. Not a prayer, though. Not quite. “People always want to pray when they're down. It's the easiest thing in the world.”

“I don't think so. I think it's the hardest thing anyone can do. Because there's a part of you that always knows nothing might happen, that you might just be speaking words into air. And people do it anyway.”

“Do you?”

“All the time,” he says. He sounds so old. “Whether I want to or not.”

She watches him, sprawled out on the concrete. Her little brother, fading bit by bit into the street. “And what happens?”

“Nothing,” he says. “And at the same time, everything.”

—

Roberta is thinner, weaker, confined to the bed. She's been puking so much that they've taken her off food altogether, and now there's an
IV
in each hand. One for the drugs, one for the food. It hurts her to use the
TV
remote.

“He didn't come,” she says, as soon as Lilah walks through the door. “Did he.”

“No.” Someone has sent Roberta flowers, orange chrysanthemums that clash against the wall. Lilah drapes her coat over the couch and looks at the flowers, at the card. Church friends.
Get well soon
,
Roberta!
as though she's in bed with a cold. “But he sends his love.”

Roberta laughs, or sobs — Lilah's not quite sure. “Yes. Yes, I thought he would.”

“He's okay.” Lilah sits in the chair beside the bed. “I saw him earlier today, and he's fine.”

“I've been here,” Roberta says, “all this time. Lying here, in bed, all day. And I think about Timothy, and I think about you, and I can't do anything. Do you know what that feels like?”

Lilah reaches over and takes Roberta's shrunken, withered hand. Her skin is crinkled, like tissue paper. “It's okay,” she says. “Mom — it will be okay.”

“You really think so?” Roberta doesn't look at her. “I can't see anything else, Delilah. I can't see a way out.”

Lilah doesn't answer. She sits and she holds her mother's hand. Eventually Roberta falls asleep. Lilah sits there still, silent, until the nurses come in and ask her to leave.

—

She walks down to the harbour and sits by the water. She lights a cigarette and draws her feet up so that she is cross-legged on the bench. When the cigarette is finished, she lights another, and another.

After a while, she shifts so that she's lying on her back, exhaling smoke straight up into the air. The bench is cold beneath her head. The stars shine above her, seeming larger here than they are in Vancouver. She lies still and at some point she falls asleep. She dreams fitfully, anxiously — of her brother, Israel — and wakes shivering on the stone. But instead of getting up to walk home she turns over, brings her legs in, and stays curled on the bench.

Eventually she falls asleep again. The dreams are much the same. She wakes just before dawn, just as the sun is beginning to lighten the sky. She can't tell the difference between the bench and her own frozen skin. She stands, painfully, and walks back to Roberta's house, where she showers, eats oatmeal, and then makes her way back to the hospital.

—

She buys Roberta magazines and flicks the remote for her, all through that long afternoon. They do not talk about Timothy. When she is hungry, Lilah eats alone in the cafeteria. Otherwise, she sits in the room and reads
Cosmo
and
Vogue
while Roberta watches daytime
TV
.

“I can't believe people do this.” Roberta waves her hand at the screen.
It's not his baby.
The talk show host is a young woman barely able to contain her glee. “Can you believe people do this?”

“People sink to all kinds of lows.”

Roberta picks at her bedsheet. “I always thought you'd end up on one of those.”

“A talk show?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. I also thought you'd end up in court.”

“Thanks.”

Roberta doesn't laugh. “You surprised me.”

Lilah flips the pages of her magazine. “Oh.”

“I thought your boyfriend was going to come,” Roberta says then. “Didn't he say he'd come back this weekend?”

“Something came up. He had somewhere else to be.”

“Oh.” Roberta nods. “Well — it was nice to meet him, last week. He's very — ”

“Striking
.” They say it together. Roberta laughs.

“Yes. Well. He looks like he's good in bed. Is he?”

“
Mother.”

Roberta shrugs. “What? Don't tell me I can't say these things
now
.”

“I'm sure your church friends would love to hear it.”

“Church friends, my darling, know a good fuck just like everyone else.”

Is this the drugs talking? Lilah puts her magazine down slowly and stares at her mother. Roberta stares back.

“He wants to have a baby,” she finds herself saying.

Roberta nods, as though this is the least unexpected thing in the world. “And you don't.”

“What if the baby ends up like Timothy?” she whispers. “What if — what if I'm not good enough?”

“No one thinks they're good enough.” Now it's Roberta's turn to grasp Lilah's hand. Her fingers are hot and dry. She stares at the bed, at the tubes poking into her arms. “But you'll have time to figure it out. He's a nice man. I'm sure he'll understand.”

A nice man. Is that what other people see? Lilah nods and stares at their fingers, woven together. Roberta's knuckles are ivory beneath her skin, the
IV
bruise on the back of her hand an ugly greenish-brown. “There's so much sadness in the world,” Lilah says. For some reason she thinks of Sabastian, and his stories from that other part of her life. The unnamed woman who drowned in the river. “That's not — I don't think it would be fair to a child.”