Love Letters of the Angels of Death (5 page)

Five

Before you even know you're awake, your eyes are already open in the darkness – like maybe you were sleeping without closing them. What is this place? The light outside the window slants into the room from the wrong direction. There are no grey-brown pixels on the ceiling. Instead there's an orange glow coming from a street lamp outside. You can see it through the floor-length sheers drawn across a large, street-level window. The light outside keeps back the dimness almost well enough for you to be able to read the time marked on the face of the wooden sunburst clock hung on the wall at your feet.

But it's the smell of the room – the pungent, herbal smell seeping from underneath the bedroom door at the end of the hall, out of the mattress inside, like homemade root beer – that finally orients you. And you remember you're in a sleeping bag, on the floor, in the living room of your grandparents' house. You're waiting for the morning to come, when you'll play a role you still don't understand as one of the guests at your grandfather's funeral.

Of course, all of this happens long before our boys are born to teach you how to slam back into wakefulness at the smallest sound. It'll be years before you learn to sleep with your hearing primed and alert. You haven't yet reached the point you live at now, where you're never more than just half asleep. No matter how long I live or how many kids we have it will never be like that for me. There will always be some part of my unconscious mind that hears the little cries in the night and sleeps on and on – fat, loathsome, and fatherly in a way that's more reptile than it is human.

“Hear that crying, Dude?” ugly, unconscious, reptile-dad will always drawl into my sleep. “Sure you do. But it's got nothing to do with us.”

Something unusual must be happening in the house where you're staying on the night before your grandfather's funeral – something strange and loud enough to reach you through the tsunami depths of your adolescent sleep waves. You lie awake and listen while your brothers breathe noisily from where they sleep on the living room couches, wrapped in their sleeping bags like plump nylon caterpillars capped with dark, hairy heads. On the floor beside you, bent delicately into a shape like a pretty crescent moon, is your cousin Janae. She's your Uncle Ned's oldest daughter – the only one Aunt Tammy agreed to let him bring to the funeral.

In one sleepy instant, you've remembered all about the funeral. And you're left alert and waiting for the sound that woke you to come again. There it is, sounding from beneath the floorboards. You hear a thud and a kind of grating as something heavy rolls along a cement slab. The grating ends when whatever had been rolling comes to rest against a hollow steel shell with a muted clang. Somebody is in the basement.

You rustle out of the sleeping bag and onto your bare feet. The mucous-y racket of Uncle Ned's snoring blasts from underneath a closed bedroom door. It really is awful. No wonder Aunt Tammy was so quick to throw him out.

Through the kitchen, you can see that the basement door is standing barely ajar. No light shines through the spaces between the door and its jambs. You step onto the linoleum, moving toward the basement door on your bare feet. Isn't that where they said it happened – in the basement? Isn't that where your grandfather started pulling away from the rest of you, beginning the slow drama of his death?

You reach out your hand toward the door, expecting it to creak when it moves, like a prop in a scary movie. But it swivels smoothly on its hinges, opening a black mouth with an oily silence that might be even more horrible than a creak. You imagine that the air the basement breathes up into your face smells like a newly dug grave – though you won't know for sure what that smells like until you go to the cemetery tomorrow. The earthy mustiness is really just the smell of last season's potatoes. They're stored underneath the basement stairs, spread in a single layer like starchy raisins withering and sprouting with white towers toward where sunlight sometimes breaks through the cracks between the treads and the risers.

You stand on the edge of the basement maw, your skin prickling all over, because you know you're a doomed heroine from a Gothic novel. If your grandfather has a ghost, it is in the basement – right now – grinding its bones against the concrete floor in the darkness.

“Hello?” you whisper-call down the stairs.

There's another thud and a roll. You're too scared now to keep from flicking on the light switch inside the basement door. Through your squinting, you see a rumpled sleeping bag lying at the foot of the stairs. A pile of shiny tin cylinders – the oversized cans from your grandparents' emergency food storage – still rock gently into one another at the base of the washing machine.

“Granddad?”

There's no voice to answer you. Holding onto the wall, you duck your head in case you've grown tall enough to bang it on the overhang as you step heavily onto the wooden stairs. Below the groaning of the planks under your cold feet, you hear a human sound – panting and a gasp.

“Granddad?”

Opposite the basement machines – the washer, the dryer, the workbench with a power saw under-mounted in its middle – something is collapsed on the floor. It's slumped against the wall of empty shelves that should be stacked with canned food. Whatever it is, you know it's not your grandfather. It sits on the concrete floor holding its right arm in its left hand and rocking back and forth, hissing with shallow breaths.

And then you know it. His ghost – it's your grandmother.

You hurry down the rest of the stairs to crouch beside her. Somehow, you understand it's desperately important to keep quiet. You're young enough to know not to make any vain exclamations or start fussing or demanding an explanation of what she's been doing, alone and hurt in the dark.

Instead, you begin with the whisper of the always inadequate question: “Are you alright?”

Your grandmother can't quite speak but she glances up into your face. At other times, she's noted that your face has always been like your mother's. Only your face is wide open and scared. Your grandmother's own face is shocked pale and slicked with a salty sheet of cold sweat. And if you were a bit older, maybe you wouldn't be able to recognize the specific strain of pain in your grandmother's look. But every kid knows shame when she sees it.

“Grammie?”

Your grandmother doesn't stop rocking herself but she does manage to add voice to the air moving through her teeth. “My arm,” she pants. “I fell on it.”

You look up to the top of the stairs where the doorway stands dark and gaping. “All the way down the stairs?” you ask.

She shakes her head and jerks it toward the wall of machines. “No. From there.”

You follow her gesture with your eyes. Again, you see the khaki army surplus sleeping bag lying as empty as a newly shed snake skin across the feet of the workbench. The table saw is unplugged from the wall outlet, and the saw blade on top of the workbench has been lowered far enough to disappear into the steel surface. A small cushion still rests at one end of the workbench like a pillow lain neatly on a bed. All at once, every bit of the picture becomes clear.

She does sleep, after all. She sleeps there – underground, over the blade, on the narrow, steel deck of the saw table. This is the hard bedrock of her sacrifice.

There's nothing for you to do but to bend over to look at the arm your grandmother clasps against her stomach. You don't remember enough about how her arm usually looks to be able to know if it seems damaged now. “Is it broken?” you ask.

“Don't know.”

“I – think you need to go to the hospital,” you whisper.

But she doesn't quite hear you. “Hm?”

“The hospital.”

She lowers her head over her arm. “Dammit.”

From the basement, you creep back up the stairs and go right into the room where Uncle Ned sleeps. Your grandmother has sent you to try to find something for her to wear outside the house. Maybe this night is the first time you've ever moved inside a dark, sleeping house in this particularly feminine state of quiet. It's not new to your grandmother. She knew to promise you that Uncle Ned's snores would cover any noise you make. Your Dad always said it was a shame Ned never got his tonsils out when he was a kid. Now, they say, it's too late.

When you return to the basement, you find your grandmother unmoved from where she'd been sitting on the concrete floor. Her good hand is still clamped around her busted arm, and she makes no move to take the clothing you bring. The pair of you is stalled – waiting for something. Maybe it's for your parents, sleeping in the travel trailer outside in the backyard. There must be some sort of social adaptor that can show you the secret place where you and your grandmother can become properly connected. Even in the fit of this emergency, it still doesn't seem possible that you could have anything truly helpful to offer her. Rescuing her seems incomprehensible – profane, like that Bible story about reaching out a hand to steady a holy relic and being struck dead for it.

Upstairs, Uncle Ned heaves out a massive snore you can both hear from the basement. In unison, you look up at the underside of the floor.

Your grandmother shakes her head, as if she's waking. “Up off the ground,” she says.

You wrap an arm around her back. She pulls her feet underneath herself and each of you straightens at the knees, standing up together.

“Over to the stairs,” she tells you, inhaling instead of exhaling as she speaks.

You keep hold of her shoulders as she sits down on the grey wood. When you help her slide her nightdress away from her tender arm, the air caught inside the fabric drifts away from her body and into your face. Its smell fills your nose – familiar. It's something like your own smell – musty and feminine – only her scent is shot through with traces of men and work. It smells like the earth of a backyard garden, early in the morning – a garden that's bountiful and beloved but badly tended.

Your grandmother is dressed, and you're waiting in your pyjama bottoms and T-shirt for her to name the adult relative you'll wake up to drive her to the hospital.

But she doesn't give anyone's name. “Got your Learner's Licence?” she asks you, referring to the permit your libertarian, wild-west government issued to you so you could start practising driving when you were just fourteen years old.

You're nodding. “Yeah.”

She lets out a long, heavy breath. “Good enough.”

You guide her into your grandfather's titanic steel car with doors that are more like airplane wings – heavy and nearly impossible for you to swing closed. You drive slowly and painfully while you grandmother directs you through the wide, empty streets.

“Left – left – right – that was a stop sign.”

She's leading you to where the brown brick box of a hospital is lit up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. You've pulled the driver's seat up as far as it will go, and you still have to sit perched on the outermost edge of the maroon velour so your toe can reach the pedals on the floor. Every time you try to use the turn signal lights you end up switching on the windshield wipers instead.

“Sorry – sorry,” you keep saying – to your grandmother, to the car, to yourself, it really doesn't matter.

The night triage nurse at the hospital glances up as you tear a numbered ticket from the fire-alarm-red dispenser bolted to the wall of the nearly empty emergency room. The nurse has already looked back down at her paperwork by the time she begins to speak.

“Over here, dear.”

“I've come with my grandmother,” you begin with even more than the usual meekness you had back in those days. “She fell – off the – the –”

“How old?” The nurse looks up over the counter.

“I'm fifteen. But I have my Learner's Licence so – ”

“No. Not you, dear. How old is your grandmother?”

“Oh. Uh, seventy-something – I'm pretty sure,” you stammer. “She fell and hurt her arm. Badly, I think.”

“Have you got her health care card?”

“Oh, sure.” You fumble through the bulky wallet you've taken from your grandmother's purse until you find a green and white, dog-eared scrap of paper.

The nurse takes it and lifts her eyebrows, raising rows of parallel wrinkles across her forehead. “Okay. Something's not right here. It says your grandmother's first name is ‘Elijah?'”

You've accidentally given the nurse your grandfather's old health care card and, for some reason, the mistake seems grave enough to make you gasp and snatch it out of her hand. You do a lot of sighing as you look for the right one, further back in the wallet, behind a stack of senior's discount cards.

The nurse jabs at her keyboard, probably unaware she's frowning again. She looks like she's about the same age as your mother so you're trying to get yourself to think of her as someone benevolent.

Her chair squeals as she rises and leaves the high-walled, melamine fortress of the admissions desk. She takes hold of one of the wheelchairs folded up and lined along the wall behind her. With a quick jerk of her thick, bare arms she throws the chair open and kicks it locked with the soft sole of her shoe.