The Miracles of Ordinary Men (4 page)

Today, just before she leaves, the Hass Avocado comes to her desk. Debbie flies out of his office and waves Lilah to attention, just in time, and then Israel Riviera marches through the door and up to her.

“Delilah,” he says. It's the first time he's ever said her name. “Penny tells me you're the one to get my coffee. I wanted to say thank you. It has not gone unnoticed.”

“Oh.” Debbie is waving frantically behind Israel's back — a warning? What? Penny probably pointed the finger in the hope that Lilah would get in trouble. She shrugs. “It's no big deal, really. I like the walk.”

Israel traces his fingers across her desk. His smile is, surprisingly, somewhat endearing. “That may be — but I am appreciative, all the same. I am not so foolish as to think that a person who requires an expensive drink such as that one might not be seen as a . . . a
diva
.”

She would snicker if he wasn't so serious. “I think divas are usually women. So, um, no. I don't see you as a diva at all.”

Unexpectedly, he laughs. Apparently the Hass Avocado has a sense of humour. “I see. That's good, then. I will be sure to remember that in the future.” He runs his hand across the desk again and back. And then once more. Lilah doesn't know what to do.

He nods. “Yes.” Lilah raises an eyebrow. “I would like to take you for dinner, Delilah. To show my appreciation.”

She blinks. Across from her, Debbie coughs. “Lilah. Call me Lilah.”

“But it is such a beautiful name,” he says. “Delilah Greene.” He has shining, crooked teeth. One front tooth is slightly discoloured, which gives the smile a flawed, off-kilter charm. “Yes. Delilah. I would like to take you to dinner, to thank you for my coffee.”

It is not a question. “Um.” Debbie, at her desk, is trying not to smile. Penny — Penny is nowhere to be found, thank fuck. “Um. Okay. That would be lovely.”

“Very well,” he says. “Shall we say Friday? I will pick you up at seven.”

“I have plans on Friday.” This is a lie, a very bad one, and for no reason other than that it irks her, being told what to do. Debbie covers another cough with her hand.

“Ah,” Israel says. “Then I will pick you up on Saturday at seven.”

“I can meet you.”
Saturday. Seven. I will drive.

“That's silly,” and his voice is smooth, even jovial, but she can hear the thread of steel that has the office in thrall. It turns her on, just a little. “I have a driver — he will take us anywhere we wish to go.”

“I like walking.” Because she is stubborn. Because Roberta would definitely say yes to the car.

For a moment he stands immobile on the other side of the desk, a frown at the edges of his mouth. Then he laughs. “Fine. North American women — you are all so bold. So silly. But all right. You can meet me, and I will drive you home.” This time, he does not wait for her to answer. He turns and strides back into the inner office, and then the door shuts, and the air around them is charged with the scent of man and spice.

“Well,” says Debbie. “That was interesting.”

“Yes,” Lilah says. She draws the word slowly over her tongue, like a kiss. She can't say anything else. The room shimmers with energy. She stares across the desk at Debbie, and remembers out of nowhere nights in Thailand, dancing small beneath the stars, the ocean loud in her ears and the air hard with possibility.
Everything starts now
, says a voice in her head. It is Timothy, so loud and so clear that she turns her head to face him, even though she knows he isn't there.

Nine

Two days after the resurrection of Chickenhead, Sam's mother died. His stepfather called him at the school, his voice sounding detached and bewildered.
Collapsed. Just like that.
The paramedics had come and taken them to emergency, but Carol was gone long before they got to the hospital. There was nothing they could do.

Sam stood with his fingers locked around the phone and pictured this: a stretcher, his mother inert under a starched white sheet. They would have stepped carefully through the house, manoeuvered the stretcher around each plant, each precariously balanced vase. The house would have been disheveled and unready,
as it always was in the morning.
Too bad
,
he could almost hear his mother say. Too bad it hadn't happened in the afternoon, when the house would have been washed in sunlight and gracious to visitors. Even those of the unexpected, paramedic variety.

Too bad it hadn't happened on Sunday, in front of a guilty mother and her wide-eyed kid, when miracles had rung through the air.

“Sam?” His stepfather sounded impossibly old.

“Sorry, Doug. What?”

“I have to make more calls.”

“Oh. Of course.” His mother, the stretcher,
nothing they could do.
Of course. They were, after all, only paramedics. They did not have wings, they couldn't bring cats back from the dead. “Do you want me to come over?”

“There's nothing to do.”

He'd wanted to visit them this morning. Had thought of dropping in for tea, then decided against it. Running late, not enough time. “Is anyone there with you?”

“What? Oh. Janet.” Doug's sister. Janet and his mother didn't get along. Hadn't,
Sam realized. Hadn't gotten along. The floor shivered under his feet and he steadied himself against a desk.

“All right,” Sam said. “I'll call you later — ” but Doug had already hung up. Sam fell into a chair and ran a hand across his face. He looked blankly at Lisa, the new student teacher, until she blushed and crept out of the room. The wings draped softly over either side of the chair — heavy, white, useless.
This
, said the voice in his mind.
This is what happens now.

After a long while, during which there were whispers and the shuffle of shoes, the opening and closing of the staff room door, someone put a hand on his arm. He drew his fingers away and followed the curve of a shoulder up to a worried face, blue eyes. Stacey, the vice-principal.

“Sam,” she said. She smelled of lavender, like Julie.
Close your eyes. Swallow.
“Go home. It isn't good for you to be here.”

“I have a class.” But he let his head fall forward, almost into her chest — Stacey was fond of low-cut blouses. The skin above her breasts was freckled, as though someone had flicked a brush of light brown paint against her flesh, one final flourish.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” He wanted to laugh, it sounded so awful. “My stepfather will have called everyone. There's no need.” He pulled himself out of the chair and reached for his jacket.

“I'm so sorry,” Stacey said. “Had she been ill?”

Now he did laugh. “No. She wasn't. Not that I knew, anyway.”

“Oh.” Another stumbled apology. He stared at her and felt the world contract to this room, this floor, the jacket he held in his hands. He wanted to draw the wings over his face and let her words bounce off muscle and blood and feather.

“No,” he said again, his voice soft. Then he opened the door and stepped into the hall. He saw the flash of Emma's hair at the end of the corridor and turned into the stairwell before she could spot him.

Stacey followed him outside, her hand never far from his elbow. She stood patiently by his car as he crawled in and nestled the wings against his seat.

“Will you call us at the school when you get home?”

“Of course,” he said, although this was silly. What was he going to do — drive the car in front of a truck? The next few kilometres would probably be the safest of his life.

“All right.” She closed the car door very carefully, as though afraid that it would shatter under anything less than a delicate hand.

He bent over the wheel and started the engine, his left wing obscuring Stacey's face. He backed out of his cramped spot a little too fast, shifted into gear, and pulled out of the lot. A hundred feet past the school, he reached for the radio — something, anything to fill the silence.

A silty breeze ruffled the wings as he drove over the Fraser River. He wondered what kind of son he was, that his cat — eating more than she should be now and looking remarkably well after her return from the dead — waited to welcome him while his mother lay cold in the morgue.

—

When he was twelve, he'd had a dog.

Dodger, the incontinent beagle, had barked into all hours of the night and remained happily oblivious to housetraining. Sam had come home from school one afternoon to find Dodger gone and his mother weeping. A garbage truck, she'd said. The grave was a fresh pile of dirt by the back garden.

Years later, his mother got tipsy at a New Year's party and confessed that there had never been a garbage truck. She couldn't stand the barking, the smell of stale pee in the house. That long ago morning, after discovering dog shit on the couch, she loaded Dodger into the car and drove thirty kilometres out of town. She dropped him off at the side of a green country road.

“There was a farmhouse,” she'd said, remembering. “A grey farmhouse with maple trees out front. It looked like a nice place.” As though nice people lived there, as though they might have taken him in. As though it mattered, now.

“I was fine for a while,” she said. “And then I felt terrible.”

“
You
felt terrible?” he said.

“So I went back,” she said, ignoring him, “and I walked up and down the road for an hour, calling his name. I went back the next day too. And the day after that.”

“What if you'd found him?” he'd asked. “What would you have said?”

“I don't know,” she admitted, her smile sheepish, strangely shy. “I never got that far.”

Now, driving home, he found himself wondering what had become of Dodger, all those years ago. The first and last dog he'd ever had. Maybe the nice people in the grey house took him in. Or maybe he froze in the ditch — that was a cold autumn. The grave marker wouldn't stick in the dirt because the ground had frozen over.

That was the first lie she'd put in the ground. Flowers, turnips, falsehoods — his mother had planted all manner of things.

Had she known about the wings, she would have marched Sam into the church and done one of two things: prayed for deliverance or given thanks to God. A hunch told him it would have been the latter —
all my hard work paid off!
Either way, it would have been seen as an event, a signal, a forerunner of change. Maybe that's why he hadn't called her.

“This is a sign, Sam,” she might have said. Perhaps she too would have patted the nearest wing, or run her hand along it, once more the mother, smoothing away his worry.

A sign for whom?

“You,” she might have replied. “The rest of the world. Does it matter?”

He should have called.

—

When he opened his front door, he heard a thump in the kitchen. Chickenhead, jumping off the counter. He took off his shoes, put on his most menacing face, and stretched his wings as far as they would go.

“What have you been doing?”

She came into the room at the sound of his voice, all purrs and delicate paws. He curled his right wing in and brushed the lower feathers against her fur, over her eyes. She batted the feathers away and wound herself around his ankles, then followed him back into the kitchen. He opened the bottle of Scotch and poured himself a glass. Drank it straight down. He thought of Doug, blank-faced and making calls from the quiet of his mother's house, and poured himself another. And Father Jim. Father Jim would need to know about this. He hadn't the faintest idea how to get in contact — but perhaps Father Mario would know.

He trudged to the bedroom, shedding clothes as he went. Naked except for his boxers, he pulled his black dress pants out of the closet. A black button-down shirt to finish — this would impress Janet, this image of sober, sorrowful son. No doubt she'd be more impressed if she could see the wings, of course, the starkness of white against black. But Janet did not believe in God. (
Neither do you
,
said that tiny voice in his head.
And look what happened
.)

Back in the kitchen, Chickenhead was mewing for water. He splashed some into her bowl and briefly considered bringing her along. But Janet, like Julie, was not a cat person. Janet wasn't an animal person at all. Doug once joked that even her plants were bound to die. She was tall and thin and Sam couldn't think of her as anything other than a shrivelled spinster in an empty apartment, husband notwithstanding.

The drive to his mother's house wasn't long, but that night he caught the tail end of rush hour. He pulled up to the gabled North Vancouver house as the sun set over the Pacific. Emma — too poetic for journalism, though he hadn't yet had the heart to tell her — would make something of that sunset. All purple and red and gold reflected off the ocean.

Carol had purchased the house for the view, back when money could buy a view in North Vancouver. Nowadays views were hereditary, passed down from parent to favourite child, new husband, whomever. The house would probably go to Doug. His mother's mind had been fixed on dahlias and the northeast trellis — he doubted there was a will. He doubted a lot of things today. Like the fact that forty-eight hours ago he'd been standing on his own curb, a resurrected cat fresh in his arms. And now he was here, with his wings and his empty hands, his mother's husband grieving on the other side of the door. Even Janet the Atheist would judge him now, if she knew all the facts.

Inside, the first thing he noticed was the light. Someone had pulled back the curtains in every room and rays from the setting sun were a shifting mass of red-gold-white over the furniture, against the hardwood floor. He could feel the wings shift, stretch, and lengthen into the golden glow of the house.

Doug sat in the kitchen, at the bar. Janet had brought Chinese food and the containers sat open on the table. She looked up as Sam entered and then back down at Doug, who was locked around a mug of tea. There. No double take, no slam of shock on her face, not that he'd expected anything less.

He said, “Traffic,” as though it mattered. The water in the kettle was still hot, so he took out a mug and made himself tea. He turned to face them, the mug steady in his hands, and waited.

Doug was five years older than Sam — a musician, a composer of ridiculous radio jingles whom Sam's mother had met two years ago, on New Year's Eve. The same New Year's Eve as the dog story, in fact. The joke used to be that Doug had an instrument for every flower in the house, although he wasn't good with plants, except perhaps to sing them into growing. Usually he looked younger than Sam but today something old seeped from his skin.

“She wasn't feeling well,” he said, the words directed at the counter space between his hands. “She'd had a headache the last few days, but we thought it was the weather. You know how she gets when it rains,” and yes, Carol had suffered migraines since Sam was a child. “But when she came out of the shower she had this look on her face. She blinked, and she put a hand to her head,” and Doug's own hand went up, remembering the story, “and she just slid down the wall until she hit the floor.” He took another deep breath. “I thought she'd fainted and I went over and shook her. Then I dialed. I should have been faster.”

“It wasn't your fault.” Janet, quick to jump in.

“It was so quick,” Doug continued, as though he hadn't heard her. “It was over before the paramedics even got here.” His voice cracked, stumbled to a halt. “I don't know what to do.”

“I'll take care of everything,” said Janet. She rubbed a hand up and down Doug's back.

“Actually,
I'll
take care of everything.” Sam ignored Janet's narrowed eyes, her pursed lips. Instead he stood, and he stretched the wings out, then pulled them in. He was so tired. “I have to find Father Jim and let him know.”

“She didn't want a big funeral,” Doug said. “We only talked about it once. You know — just in case.” Then he looked up. “Father Jim? I thought Father Mario served at the church.”

“He does,” Sam said, not wanting to elaborate. “Father Jim was there while I was growing up. He should know, at least.”

Doug nodded. “Where will you start?”

“I'll go to the church tomorrow.” He looked over at Janet. “Will you take him back with you tonight?”

She nodded. Her face had relaxed and she looked, surprisingly, somewhat pretty, somewhat sad.

“Good.” The irritation went as quickly as it had come, leaving behind the sour taste of guilt. He
could
have been here, this morning. He could have stretched time for tea, a chat, the chance to extend his hands and push Death away.

But God, it would seem, had thought Shakespeare more important.

—

When he got there the next morning, the church was empty save for Mrs. Glastonbury, who knelt in the front pew and whispered loudly into her hands. Mrs. Glastonbury, who had come to the church to pray for her dead husband every morning since Sam was a child. The husband (officially, according to the Church) had died while investigating a domestic dispute in the city, but (unofficially, according to Father Jim) had actually died of heart failure while screwing a whore in a seedy East Hastings hotel. At eleven the story had been thrilling, all the more because Sam had heard it via the eavesdropper's window. Stooped in the vestment closet, forgotten while putting his robes away, he heard Father Jim say the word and had to stifle a yell of delight. Whore.
Whore.