Love Letters of the Angels of Death (20 page)

“Lead with the curved edge, not with the tip,” he says. “Don't stab. Slice.”

Twenty-Three

Remember that book we used to read to the kids – the one where it's promised that, in the end, no one is told any story but their own? After all I've said here, I guess it must not be true. Or maybe it's just that we lived our lives together well enough to make the story of me into the story of you. And then again, maybe there is only one great, inextricable story – the story of everyone the whole world over. As it turns out, it's all the same.

But even though everything's clear to me now – all the smirks and sighs, every word of every uncle and cousin, the insides of your teeth and bones – I can hardly see you as you are at this moment. I need to stop trying. I know that. You will arrive. And the wait won't be too long – not like it will seem to you.

Still, I stoop and strain to watch you through the mounting dimness of these fine new eyes. You are closed inside a house, sitting at a kitchen table, hemmed in by stacks and stacks of widow's paperwork. The federal government wants my social insurance card back – sealed in an envelope and mailed across the country to be officially obliterated. The address for the office is in New Brunswick, about an hour's drive from Butcher Hill.

I want to reach through everything in between and lift the hair falling down your back. I want to see if there's any trace of it – the clasp of a chain, the tied ends of a leather strap – anything to show if you got the token, the bone, you once asked me to give to you out of the top of my hand. There's nothing in the hand I have now to tell me.

You must know – in the end, I would have given it, freely, if I'd been able.

And there are other questions. I could still see long enough to know that the accident didn't leave my body mangled. It was a hard impact from one side – a steel bumper jammed into the door of my car as the truck driver of the apocalypse failed to yield to me at a stop sign, or something. It rocked me with a sideways whiplash, sending the sharp edge of my own vertebrae cutting through the nerves in my neck that keep me breathing and beating. My heart and lungs waited and waited between my ribs, beneath the breach – perfect and whole and suddenly and completely forgetful of everything they used to do and why they ever did it.

It's not like it was with my dead mother. The ambulance was there in minutes, even though the truck driver was standing shaking on the pavement and there was nothing they could do for me. I died instantly and beautifully. Everyone tells you so, over and over again. You could have buried me face up on a satin pillow, mouth pressed into a gentle smile at the head of a casket, a little swollen in the neck but completely unburnt. My body could have been made into a museum exhibit, enshrined in a cathedral – or simply filed underground if you'd changed your mind and decided you wanted it that way. I just don't know. Maybe after all the fussing, it was never very important how you got rid of what was left of me.

Whatever happened to the art of casting full facial death masks? I can remember the pictures I've seen of Napoleon's death mask – and Lincoln's and Joseph Smith's and Isaac Newton's. As far as I know, the closest thing there is to a death mask of me are those dental impressions they needed in order to make the mouthguard that was supposed to keep me from grinding my teeth away in my sleep. Maybe you remembered those plaster teeth and gums, wrapped in bubbled plastic on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. Maybe they satisfied your need for my body, and you didn't try to take a bone from my hand after all.

I look at the hand I have now and I still can't tell.

But I can see into your lowest point of this valley. I am watching, somehow, the night after the funeral as you stand in the backyard, out of the range of the square eye of yellow light coming through the kitchen window onto the lawn. And my brother's wife stands with her hand on your waist while he clamps you in arms so much like my own
they could almost wrap around you twice. And he bows his head over you and smothers your face into the front of himself as if your grief is a fire for him to crush into extinction. And your mouth is full of his black, hooded sweatshirt as you wail into him – unheard by our sons, or my last parent, or anyone else who could not abide the day.

“Carrie,” he rumbles, “I'm sorry. I'm not Brigs.”

“No,” you answer. “I am.”

Acknowledgements

It seems like most people who finish a book and sell the manuscript have either already raised a family or haven't started to raise one yet. The rest of us have very patient, understanding, and indulgent spouses and children. I must acknowledge these traits in Anders and in our sons, Jonah, Samuel, Nathan, Micah, and little James who was just three years old when I finished the first draft of this novel. Thanks, boys.

And thanks to my publisher, Linda Leith, for including me in her brave new venture. I must also acknowledge the memories of my nearest kindred dead: Bob McCarthy, Ralph and Thelma MacKenzie, and especially Bryan Quist. Thank you for cradling me in your lives and in your deaths.