Love Letters of the Angels of Death (6 page)

“Alrighty,” she addresses your grandmother, much too loudly even for her hearing. “Into the chair and we'll take you right over to X-ray.”

The nurse turns her head toward you as she wheels your grandmother away. “You wait here,” she calls. The wheelchair moves smoothly on its axles and hardly slows at all as a pair of doors with word “Restricted” stencilled across it in red letters parts in front of it.

There's a row of chairs lined up against a pink wall beside a rack of tattered magazines. You sit down in the chairs and read the scandal headlines off the magazine covers, but you don't actually touch any of them. Your mother always says reading the magazine in a medical waiting room is just like licking the spout of a public water fountain. In a moment, all you have left to read are the words on the seniors' discount cards in your grandmother's wallet. You raise them to your face and sniff. They smell like copper and leather and that stiff white lotion she calls cold cream.

And that's where you sit while the cranky babies cough against their croup and the drunks vomit onto the hard, white floor. Wind blasts into the hospital with every backward slide of the motion-sensing doors to the outside. It's nearly dawn and the hospital is starting to fill up with people who haven't slept all night. The wind they let inside helps to refresh the waiting room air a little, but you still raise the wallet to your face like a nosegay over and over again.

The restricted doors at the back of the waiting area spring open and a man dressed in a wrinkled green uniform with tufts of black hair showing through the V of fabric at the base of his throat comes walking out. His head is down, and he's walking right into the centre of the waiting room. You'd think he was a janitor if it weren't for the stethoscope draped around his neck like a spoiled cat. He announces your surname into the waiting room.

You're on your feet. “I'm her granddaughter.”

“Here all by yourself?”

You look over each of your shoulders. “Yes.”

He almost shrugs as he looks down at the notes scrawled on the chart in his hands. “So Grandma broke her arm, all right. That's not a surprise, really. She's about the right age to be having breakages.” He still isn't looking at you – still doesn't see your age or your fear. Maybe it's deliberate. It doesn't really matter. Now he's pointing to his own flesh to help describe how and where the ends of the broken bone lie unmoored inside your grandmother's arm. You wince and squirm, and he still doesn't see.

“So we've set the bone and casted up the arm,” the doctor goes on, “but we haven't released her yet because she's…” He stops and coughs – almost nervously like an ordinary human being. “Well, Grandma's a little overwrought. Crying a lot. Can't seem to get a hold of herself.”

That's all he needs to say to raise your anxiety to a level just below the threshold of panic. But he keeps talking.

“It may have to do with the shot we gave her – just a little something for the pain, nothing out of the ordinary. But there's a very small portion of people who don't handle that kind of drug very well – almost like an allergy.” He flicks his eyes down toward your face and you suspect he might still have grandparents of his own – distant and austere, and every bit as incapable of sleep or tears as your own. “I just thought you should know what to expect before we bring you back to see her,” he finishes.

“See her,” you repeat, ragged and slow. Then you know. The hospital people are about to take you through the restricted doors. They will present you to the distraught old stranger so you can comfort and calm her. The thing is not possible. The secret, private rescue your grandmother wanted from you is over. It's failed. You know you can't go any further on your own.

“I really – I should – ” you begin. “I need to make a phone call.”

Forgetful of the rule about the phone at the nursing station not being available for patient use, the hairy young doctor leads you back to the triage counter and hands you its telephone.

The phone rings and rings in the blue dawn of your grandmother's house. It's your brother Derek who finally answers.

“What are you doing on the phone? Where the heck are you?”

“I'm at the hospital – with Grammie. She fell and broke her arm. Go out to the camper and tell Dad.”

“Okay.”

“No, Derek. Go tell him right now.”

“Okay.”

“And Uncle Ned. You have to tell him too.”

“Fine.”

“Don't just go back to sleep – please.”

“I said, okay.”

The nurse is back, standing with one hand on the restricted doors. She sweeps her other hand toward you like she's Virgil trying to get started on your tour of the Underworld, or something. “Come on, now. Grandma's not herself and needs a familiar face to cheer her up. I'll take you back.”

You breathe in a chestful of hospital air. They keep saying your grandmother isn't herself. It's not true. She is finally herself – right out in the open where even her granddaughter will see it and know what it means.

You follow Nurse Virgil through the restricted doors to where three gurneys sit lined along a wall, separated from each other by long yellow curtains blowing open at their edges with the currents of the air conditioner. A curtain edge parts slightly as you come near, and you glimpse a boy who looks a little older than you, just about dead drunk, lying on his side with a blue kidney pan pushed against his face. Another nurse jabs at the top of his hand with an IV needle. He sings a moan into the pink sheets.

Nurse Virgil pulls back the curtain by the bed farthest from the entrance and holds it open while you step through the breach. On a narrow bed, a small, shaking figure lies tucked under a thermal blanket – the kind that's kept in a warming closet for people in shock.

“We've got your granddaughter here,” the nurse calls to the heap on the bed.

It sputters and shakes.

“Have a seat there, dear,” the nurse says without looking at either of you.

The curtain rattles to a close on its plastic hooks, and she is gone. You are left alone with your grandmother. “Looks like they've got you all fixed up, eh Grammie?” you chirp in a clinically light voice. “We can head home as soon as you're feeling a little better.”

Something turns under the blanket. There is nothing like recognition in the face looking out at you. The long pretense of intimacy between you and your grandmother crumbles. You are strangers now, as you have always been. She moves her hands to cover her face and seems startled at the stiff, white bandages swathed around her arm.

She begins speaking into her fingertips. “I will send you Elijah the prophet,” she quotes, “before the coming of the great and dreadful day–”

“It's okay, Grammie,” you croak, interrupting the Bible verse she's reciting – the one from the very end of the Old Testament. “It's okay. You fell on your arm in the basement. Remember? The saw bench? But – but it's alright now. We're at the hospital, and you're okay – mostly okay.”

It's a credit to your under-developed sense of compassion that you know to lean forward, taking hold of the small hand your grandmother uses to cover her face. Its fingers spring closed on your own hand, trap-like, pulling you into the hollow of her throat, between the tendons of her neck.

“I will send you Elijah,” she repeats, loudly and clearly between the drawn curtains, “lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”

You're glancing over both your shoulders again, but there's still no interpreter, no adaptor, no one else but you.

Your grandmother's eyes drift off to the right, and she speaks so softly you can't hear her. In a moment, her shaking subsides until it's almost stilled. She grows so quiet you're afraid. You're pulling your hand away – leaving to find Virgil, to get help – but her fingers are suddenly strong against your skin, pressing white, oval impressions of her fingertips into your flesh. You can't go anywhere.

And the poisoned boy is shedding green film from his stomach again, two curtains away.

Time passes in the emergency ward – in this tiny curtained block of space big enough for just the two of you and the clock spinning its hands over your grandmother's bed. Outside, there's a shuffling of feet and the hospital curtain clicks open behind you. Nurse Virgil flings it back far enough to make way for the substantial forms of both your parents. The small gurney is exposed to the rest of ward. The curtain won't close around all five of you, so Virgil leaves it hanging open.

“Well, will you take a look at this rescue party?” your Dad says. “It's our girl.”

At the sound of her son's voice, your grandmother opens her eyes, skittish and alarmed.

“Took a fall tonight, did you, Mom?” your mother says, moving forward to smooth the blanket over the end of the thin mattress.

Your grandmother pushes your hand back at you. Her eyes trace the length of your arm to the shoulder, up your neck, and into your face. And all at once, the creases etched into the woman's face seem to twist and crack. And you know you have betrayed her.

Six

Sometimes, usually when the weather is bad and the freeways are black with ice and the commute takes too long, you try it on – my death. You take it in – shallow but still very much beneath your skin. It's a tiny injection of grief and fear. It's meant to protect us, like an inoculation. You stand in our kitchen as the sky outside gets darker, and you let this contrived, imaginary tragedy immunize you against real sorrow. In your imagination, you marshal the possibility of my death into the small, controlled sphere – one you hope cannot coexist in the same world as a truly dead me. It's a bit like Halloween – playing dead, acting it out to keep real death away.

I'm late again tonight. You turn the lights on, pull the food out of the refrigerator, get the older boys to set the table, glance out at the weather, check the phones again, and wait.

When I finally come walking into the kitchen from the garage in my shiny black shoes, you look up at me from your cooking and our kids.

“Oh, there he is,” you begin, talking over the heads of the little boys who're chattering and hugging me by my knees and waist. You're nothing like gushing with relief at seeing me, but you're not quite acting normally either.

“Look boys, Daddy's come back to us. And here I've already gone to the trouble of picking out hymns to sing at your funeral, Brigs. Hey, do you think bringing a string quartet into the chapel would be over the top? I mean, as long as you're dead I should be able to afford it, what with all that life insurance blood money and everything.”

I drop my keys on the counter. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be late. Someone came into my office to talk to me right at five o'clock, and I couldn't get away.”

“And so you turned off your phone, naturally.”

You're standing over the countertop where a small, dead, raw chicken is dripping a thick, pink fluid onto a block of wood. There's a knife in your hand – one of those astoundingly expensive ones people only buy from salesmen-relatives who are down on their luck. You're using it to carve a leg off the chicken carcass. Everything you do in the kitchen looks so easy – the way you separate an egg or roll a meatball onto its raw side without having it crumble into bits in the frying pan. Even this precise mutilation of the chicken – where you take the animal apart as if it was never held together with anything more than tiny, invisible zippers – there's a kind of perfection to it. It's gorgeous. And it'd make you even madder than you already are if I mention it.

But that's not what I'm thinking as I pull my cell phone out of my pocket to prove you're wrong about me shutting it off. “See, I didn't – what? I did not turn it – ah, dang it. I must have forgotten to switch the ringer back on after my morning meeting. Sorry. But having your cell phone ring in the middle of a meeting like that is the worst. It's like openly passing gas or something.”

“Anyways,” you go on, flipping the chicken over to cut off its wings. “I thought each of your sisters could offer prayers at your memorial service. But I couldn't decide which one of your cousins I should ask to give the eulogy. I mean, ideally I'd do it myself, but since speaking at your mother's funeral was almost emotionally impossible for me, I decided I'd better assign it to someone else, right? Someone who's kind of close but kind of far away at the same time.”

That's when I cross the floor to hug you into the crackling down fill and nylon of my winter coat. You've still got the knife in your hand but I'll hold onto you anyway – at least until I feel you starting to straighten and strain away from me.

“Brigs – Brigs, my hands are covered in chicken gunk.”

When you say it, I can smell it. I let go and you step away to take hold of what's left of the chicken. There's a crack as its vertebrae come apart in your bare hands.

“By the way,” you go on, “you still haven't given me definitive permission to have all your loveliness cremated. I need something in writing in case anyone tries to get up in my face with their nonsense about ‘desecration.'”

To the snap and sting of static electricity, I slide my heavy coat off my arms. I'm kicking through the pile of winter boots and coats and mittens strewn in front of the hall closet. The floor is wet with melted snow, soaking through my socks. It looks like the boys came home from school and then just exploded inside the front door.

“Okay, okay. Enough with the funeral planning,” I say. “I made it home just fine.”

“And for floral tributes,” you continue as you break through the marrow of the chicken's sternum with the knife blade, “I guess we'll go with whatever's in season – and not too girlie. Only no lilies. Lilies have a terrible smell. There, I said it.”

I sniff. “You don't like lilies?”

“Hate 'em.”

I cock my head. “I must not remember what they smell like.”

“Well, it's one of those pricky smells that gets right up inside your cribriform plate.”

I snort. “All right. No funeral lilies. How about some fancy orchids then – something to go with the string quartet?”

“Yuck, no.”

“Come on. You can't hate all the over-priced flowers on principle.”

“It's got nothing to do with principles. It's just that orchids–” You pause to roll your eyes at yourself over the dismembered chicken. “I wouldn't have to explain this to you if you hadn't been too busy with all that math to ever take a zoology class in university.”

“Huh?”

“You've never dissected a rat, Brigs.”

I'm shaking my head as you step away from the tray of neatly arranged, butchered chicken pieces to wash your hands in the sink. “Are we still picking out my funeral flowers?” I ask.

“Yes. I'm sorry. But the fact is the look of certain kinds of orchids reminds me of – rat testes.”

I laugh so loudly the boys join in from the living room, even though they don't know why they're doing it. You lunge at me – clean, wet hands on my dress shirt – and push against my chest with both your palms.

“It's not funny. And it's not something I like about myself.”

I don't try very hard to straighten my face. “No, of course it's not.”

“Then stop laughing about it. It's awful. My zoology lab partner was some kind of crazy person, and she came back from the bin full of dead rats with the frickin' Alpha Male for us to dissect. He was so virile the lab instructor called the whole class over to marvel at his gonads after we finished skinning them. And then she made me stand there and point at every bit of his reproductive anatomy with a probe while I told everyone what everything was called and what he used to do with it. It was a nightmare. And they – the things – they looked almost exactly like pink lady slipper orchids.”

I'm still laughing a little but I'm trying to apologize for it at the same time.

You give me one more shove and I finally see the red glassiness in your eyes – like you're not that far from starting to cry. “Orchids look exactly like rat testes,” you say. “And after the dissection, the smell of the rat stayed with me for the rest of the day. It was in my hair, or in my brain, like another one of my stupid post-traumatic stress reactions. Stop – it's not funny. I've never been the same since.”

You let me hug you for a moment. When you lean away from me, you brace my head between your hands and pull my forehead down to yours. “So no orchids at our funerals, okay?”

“Right. Absolutely no orchids under any circumstances.”

You're stepping away from me, eager to move on.

I'm nodding, grinning. “So,” I say, catching your hand, kneading your palm with my thumb, “you didn't get around to planning a second marriage for yourself, did you?”

“Gross, Brigs. I'm standing here, staging my mourning for you, and you're asking me - ”

“Sorry. Sorry.” And I'm gathering you into me again, against my shoulder in that way I know I can't hold for very long before your hyper-flexed neck starts to hurt. “Anyway, I made it home just fine.”

“I know you made it this time. But it's scary when – I shouldn't even be here, I shouldn't even know you.”

“Don't start with that again–-”

You're holding my hand again, running the edge of one fingernail along the length of the bone below my forefinger. The pressure leaves a white line in my skin that disappears moments later. You're speaking again. “Here you are married to me when I'm not even good enough to have coffee with you.”

“We don't drink coffee.”

“Everyone knows I shouldn't be here. The waitress in the restaurant last weekend who asked if we wanted separate cheques because, clearly, there's no way you would actually be with me – even that girl knew it. Everyone knows it but you.”

None of this is anything I haven't heard you say over and over again. It always leaves me feeling strange – flattered and guilty, awed by the ridiculous proportions of your feelings but sad, like it might be my fault.

And that's when I bend my face all the way down to yours, low enough to kiss you. “Hey now,” I say as I pull away, “there's nothing that can take me away from here.”

You aren't looking at me. All I can see when I try to find your face is your hair. It's long and loose and I can barely discern half a dozen tiny keratin crescent moons – little slivers of our boys' freshly cut fingernails – tangled where they flew off the end of a pair of clippers and into the net of your hair. I raise my hand and start to work at removing them from the strands.

You swallow. “There is something that can take you away. There's what almost happened tonight. There's death.”

I scoff. “Come on. We're great with death. Death is our thing. Ask anyone in the family.”

“That's it exactly,” you say, quietly. “It's like death has been specially grooming us for something for years.”

“Nah. Death is grooming everybody. It's just that not everyone knows not to slink off somewhere and hate it.”

You're just shaking your head, moving back to the counter, spooning the runny red sauce you've made over the skin of the chicken pieces. You won't say anything more – as if you're afraid to make any kind of answer out loud.

And that's the end of it, even though the question of my funeral flowers is still far from settled, and I haven't told you which of my cousins to ask to speak for me when I'm gone. I haven't even given you the permission you wanted to cremate my body. But the boys are cantering around the kitchen telling you how good everything smells and how hungry they are. So this will be the end of it until the next time, when you manage to keep me alive a little longer, moving through this pantomime of my death, here in the house, after dark, without me.