Love Letters of the Angels of Death (9 page)

The misshapen disc fell into the white flesh of your hand and you yelped. “It's hot.”

He faked a scoff. “Of course it's hot. That's what you get with a kinetic energy transfer.”

You shrugged one shoulder. “I never took physics.”

He shook his head, but he closed an arm around your waist, pulling you against him, pressing the hammer still throttled in his hand into the small of your back, speaking down into your face. “Well, it means that the motion of the hammer transforms into heat energy when the floor forces it to stop moving. And that makes the copper not only smashed flat, but hot.”

You swayed in his hold. “Seriously? That is amazing.”

“Not really,” he murmured, bending his face toward your neck. “You know, up close like this, you're not all that smart – ”

“Nice.” You jerked away.

“ – and nobody knows it but me.”

You twisted, bending as his mouth moved closer to your neck. He pushed your hair aside with his nose and chin. You felt his breath on your skin and couldn't help but utter a little scream as you made a pretense of dodging. You were still cackling and struggling with him when you saw a new shadow on the cement floor. Someone else was standing in the open garage doorway. He let go of you so quickly you nearly fell to the ground.

The long shadow belonged to a little girl – his youngest sister, a three-year-old in a frilly, homemade dress that made her look like a mangled wedding cake. “Dad made me stop playing and said you guys have to take care of me now,” she told him.

The boy hummed. “It's the old baby-chaperone trick, is it? Well played, Dad.”

You smoothed your hair with your hands. “Don't tell me your parents think I'm your girlfriend or something like that.”

He pulled another round, perfect penny out of his pocket. “Kinetic energy transfer – you want to try it?”

“I try it,” said the little wedding cake.

“Just stay back, okay?” he told her as he laid out the penny on the concrete.

“Well?” you persisted. “What do your parents know about me?”

He was the one shrugging now. “I don't know. We haven't talked about it. Does it matter?”

“Probably.”

But he was clever too. “So what do your parents know about me?” he countered.

You flinched, walking backwards, starting to move out of the shadow of the burnt-up garage. “Look, we both know this whole thing is stupid,” you said. “That's why neither of us ever talks to anyone about it.”

“Wait,” he said, folding your fingers down over the copper that had cooled but was still cupped in your palm. “Keep the penny.”

“It is no longer a penny. Look what you did.”

And you know this has to be the last time you'll turn and leave him standing there, with the hammer and the pennies and – everything.

Ten

I'll admit it freaks me out a bit when I pick up the phone and hear a voice almost exactly like my dead mother's talking out of it. “Hi. Brigham?”

“Yes, that's me.”

“Hi. It's your aunt – Aunt Deb.”

Of course, the voice really belongs to my mother's younger sister. She's still alive, but I don't think I've seen her since Mom's funeral.

“Oh, sorry,” she's saying. “I forgot you don't go by ‘Brigham' anymore, do you?”

It doesn't feel like she's sorry. It feels like she's stalling. “It's okay,” I tell the lady with my mother's voice, “You can call me whatever you want.”

The more my aunt speaks, the less she sounds like Mom. Aunt Deb's voice is pitched a bit lower than Mom's and it moves faster – like she's actually aware people might have something else to do besides sit right where they are and listen to her all day. “Well, I'm calling with news. I'm calling to let you know Grandma died.”

It's one of those announcements that's supposed to come as a relief. We're all supposed to pack up our loss in talk about how Grandma was old and sick and ready to move on, or whatever. It is true that, by the end, she couldn't form any new short-term memories. It meant she honestly believed none of us had visited her, there in her nursing home, for years and years. It got so bad Aunt Deb left a Polaroid camera in Grandma's room and had everyone who came to visit take a photo with her and sign their names on a calendar just so they wouldn't have to argue about whether anyone had been there. But then Grandma started coming up with all those conspiracy theories about faked photos and forged signatures. That crazy, crushing loneliness – at least that's over for her, I guess.

The round of phone calls Aunt Deb is making today is different from the one I had to make the night we found Mom face down on her living room carpet. With Grandma, we'd all been able to telegraph this announcement from a long way off. It doesn't come crashing in from the blind side like it did with Mom – but that doesn't mean my grandmother's death is not a shock.

I still have the presence of mind to thank Aunt Deb for handling the funeral arrangements. “It's a lot of work,” I say.

“You don't even know,” is her answer, even though I do know. And I'm not angry that she's forgotten – not at all, not right now.

Aunt Deb will be on the phone for days, so she wants me to call my brother and sisters to tell them what's happened. She gives me the details of the funeral arrangements. It will be held on Wednesday, in the middle of the workday, in a city where none of my parents' kids live. It's nothing like a convenient time or place, but it's not out of driving range either. Each one of my siblings could make a day trip to get there. Aunt Deb invites me to say a prayer out loud, into a microphone, at the end of the funeral service. I haven't quite finished writing all the funeral particulars down when she tells me goodbye.

I'm sitting down at the kitchen table with the cordless phone in my hand when you come to kiss the top of my head. “I'm sorry, Brigs,” you say. “I loved her too.”

In a moment, you hand me the address book, knowing there's no way I'll have all my siblings' phone numbers memorized. “Take a few minutes – before you start,” you say when I begin flipping through the thumb-tabs of the battered coil-bound book right away. “It's alright if you're not okay.”

I nod and let out a long breath through my mouth. But it doesn't help. “I gotta make these calls.”

I contact my siblings in their birth order, for some reason. My first sister sighs and sounds properly grave. “Well,” she says after a pause. “Grandma led a good, long life. I, for one, am happy for her to be released from mortality.”

I think I understand why some people feel it's alright to say stuff like that. But it still makes me want to punch something.

I'm part of the way through telling my sister about the funeral plans when she interrupts. “You're going to be driving down there for it, right, Brigham?”

“Yeah.”

“So – if one person comes to represent our side of the family, we're not
all
expected to be there, are we?”

For a second, I can't say anything. It's like I don't even understand what she's said.

“Expected.”

I repeat the word once before I default to carrying out Aunt Deb's instructions. I'm like an automated message service meting out the rest of the funeral schedule and quietly hanging up the phone. You're standing beside me again, alarmed by my robotic voice. I repeat what my sister told me and bow my head as you act out my own disgust for me.

“What is the matter with that girl?”

It's easier that way.

The next call is to my other sister, the one who responds to just about every kind of stress by getting mad. I know by now not to take it personally, but it's still hard to face sometimes. I'm not sure if I've called her on the phone since the night after we found Mom dead. It's bad, but maybe my sister is starting to identify my telephone voice as the trump of death, or something like that. I can sense her bristling even before we've finished with our hard, dry hellos.

Naturally, she's angry right away when I tell her about Grandma. “Dangit, Brigham.”

“Yeah, I'll miss her too,” I try to agree.

“Well, I'd like to go to the funeral. But not everyone can afford to drop everything and fork over a load of money for the gas to get down there.”

“Can I give you some money for the gas? I'd like to help.”

She yells out a laugh that sounds distinctly insulted though she won't be reckless enough to try to start a fight – not today. Instead she says, “I'll get back to you on that.” But I know she won't.

“Let me guess: she's mad,” you say when the call is over.

I shrug. “It could have been worse.”

The final call is to the brother I only lived with for eight years before I grew up and left for the Philippines, never to live at home with him again. He's the one I can't help feeling like I abandoned – a little brown boy left to himself in the wasteland of our parents' disintegrating marriage. In some ways, he's like a long lost relative of mine, almost a stranger. And then in other ways, he's so close he's like the unofficial fifth son of my marriage to you, even now that he's grown up.

If death is my province of the family, then love is my brother's – voracious, child-like love. Maybe that's why I've never seen in-laws take to each other as easily as he took to you. Even though he was almost as tall as you already, he was still just a kid the first time I brought you home to my family. I can still see him, capering around the car in the bright prairie sunlight as I rolled to a stop under the hollow poplar trees in my parents' front yard. As an adult, my brother looks like me only toasted brown and buffed up for skilled manual labour. But as the child you met that afternoon, he was all knees and elbows and no personal space at all. He darted around you like a Cupid celebrating an emerging Venus – my own mildly heat-exhausted Venus, stepping out of the car and onto the grass.

For the first time in all of today's death knelling, you come and stand still, right there at my side – all pain and tension – as I dial my brother's number into the phone. The only contact information we have for him is a cell phone number that hardly ever connects.

“It'll be a miracle if you can get him to pick it up,” you say.

And maybe that's just what it is. My brother answers his phone. He answers it even though he's at work. I can hear the air compressors that power his pneumatic tools pounding up the pressure in the background. It doesn't matter. He keeps still while I tell him what's happened to our grandmother and then he starts to bawl – right on the jobsite, right into the phone. It's awful. It's even worse than when I called to tell him about Mom melting into the floor of her trailer. There was never any ambivalence in my brother's love for our grandmother. She never hurt him, disappointed him, left him – not like Mom. This death of Grandma's – there's no relief in it for him, no vindication, just grief. On the other end of the phone, our Cupid is crashing in a heap of feathers and arrows.

I'm pinching the bridge of my nose, the pads of my fingers dammed against the tear ducts in the corners of my eyes. “I'm so sorry,” I tell him.

He can't speak but I hear him struggling – all breath and tears – miles and miles away. And somehow, you know it all even though you can't hear any of it. You're leaning over me at the kitchen table while I've still got the phone held to my ear. Everyone knows angels lost their wings ages ago – back in the Renaissance, I'm pretty sure. We've outgrown the need for them ourselves and we're each left with two arms in their place. You fold yours around my shoulders. They draw me against you. And you're whispering my little brother's name like a warm, wet prayer, your face pressed into the side of my neck.

Eleven

You're sitting with your father, looking out at the winter darkness from inside the frosted windows of his car. The heater is roaring in the dash, and you're parked in a vast, empty, snow-drifted parking lot outside a closed-up shopping mall. The two of you are eating cheeseburgers out of foil paper and drinking diet cola through straws by the light of the neon signs overhead – because as far as either of you know, that's love.

It's been days and days since you've last talked to your father like this – not since before he bundled your splotchy, teary mother onto an airplane and took her to her father's funeral, far away, in New Brunswick, on the east coast of this huge, frozen country. It was the funeral of your last surviving grandfather – the one you were raised to call “Grampy” – the one who died shovelling heavy, wet, Maritime snow off the roof of his little red brick house. They're still not sure if he fell off the roof and then had a heart attack or had a heart attack and then fell off the roof. I guess it never really mattered.

At age nineteen, you were left at home with your strange little heap of grief and your mob of younger brothers while both your parents were gone across the continent. It wasn't an easy assignment, but you thought you were coping well. That was before your sweetie-pie German professor stopped you in the doorway as you left her classroom to ask if everything was alright. She told you to stay behind and offered you a cup of peppermint tea and the chance to talk to someone about your Opa. All that German tenderness – your Grampy wasn't the kind of old World War II soldier who would have still found it ironic. He understood about duty and reconciliation and how the universe needs to operate.

“So the funeral service was nice, eh?” you ask your Dad in the cold car.

He nods into the paper wrapped around his hamburger. “It was fine,” he agrees. “At the luncheon afterwards, your grandmother's cousin called me fat right to my face – but she meant no harm. They never do. It's just what I've learned to expect when I go among people like your mother's – people ‘in whom there is no guile.'”

It makes you smile.

“Really,” he continues. “Did you know they call their town's cemetery site ‘Butcher Hill'?”

You laugh. “No, I was not aware of that.”

Your dad shakes his head. “They don't mean to be morbid, and I'm sure they have some perfectly innocent explanation for it. They always do.”

You nod. “No one out there's trying to make it sound ghoulish on purpose.”

“Yeah, your mother's family are good people.” He's nodding too. He means what he says. Even when his in-laws don't seem very good, he knows by now to give them the benefit of the doubt. “Yes, the indoor parts of the funeral were all fine. But the weather outside – the weather was – awful.”

“Mom was saying the same thing. But that's February in the Maritimes for ya, right?”

“No.” His voice is low and grave. “It wasn't just the season. It was –
awful
.”

“Awful.” You hold tightly to your paper cup and you wait.

Your Dad begins to tell you how freezing rain was falling all over the region for days before and after your grandfather's funeral. Ice coated all the cars until buckets of hot water had to be carried out and poured over their doors to melt the ice sheets long enough to get them open. And all of Butcher Hill, right up to your grandfather's graveside, was coated in thick, glossy hummocks of slick, new ice. It was constantly washed in cold water from the rain still driving at the land, coming in sideways from the Atlantic Ocean to the east.

“Wet ice,” he says. “There's nothing slipperier than that – not even in the Maritimes.”

He tells you how even with all the road-salt caked over everything, the tires of the funeral cortege abandoned their usual solemnity and screamed against the icy hillside – the long black cars swaying back and forth, all the way up Butcher Hill on the narrow cemetery road.

He pauses to comfort himself with a sip from his straw before he tells you about the procession of pallbearers. They came forward in their raincoats, sliding over the wet ice toward the grave, the casket pitching between them like a badly made boat as they lost and found their footing, over and over again.

“They're all slipping around in leather-soled fancy dress shoes – no traction at all.”

And your Dad waited with your mother under the umbrellas the funeral home lent them, standing near the lip of the open grave. Everyone watched – gasping, frowning, praying – as the pallbearers made the slow, tortured trek over the ice.

“Everyone was looking at the pall bearers. And maybe that's why no one noticed – not a single one of them noticed – that the bottom of the grave itself was full of ice-water. No one noticed besides me, I mean.”

Your grandfather's grave was a meat locker machine-cut out of the frozen mud of Butcher Hill. And in the bottom of the hole, a full foot of brown water lay pocked with the ever-falling ice rain while your father, helpless, waited for something unspeakable to happen.

In the car, the two of you are staring out the windshield, straight ahead, as if your grandfather's burial scene is playing where you can't help but see it on the dirty glass in front of your faces.

“So they're coming across the ice with the casket – holding onto those pretty metal bars with both hands, their feet slipping and tripping all over the place. And I keep going from gaping at the funeral director to the minister they borrowed from the local United Church and then back into the grave-water. I have no idea what to do.”

“No, of course not.”

“So I didn't do anything.”

“That's fine, Daddy. It's fine.” But you're already choking.

“Inside that box was my wife's father, all freshly washed and dressed and – clean. I'd just seen him for myself in the church at the foot of the hill. And we'd all whispered and acted like he was something holy and then – then –
don't put him in the water
.”

“Just – just try to think of it as a burial at sea,” you offer.

Your Dad coughs, nodding. “Yeah. Anyway, the pallbearers made it to the grave – though I had to grab your Uncle Ray by his coattails to keep him from sliding into the hole as he set his corner of the coffin down on the straps.”

“Poor Uncle Ray.”

“Yes, poor Uncle Ray,” he sighs.

Then it's quiet in the car. The scene on the windshield isn't moving anymore. The coffin stands in the ice-rain over the grave. It's right at the back of the cemetery where the avenue of dwarf blue spruces standing against the barbed wire fence is so laden in ice it looks like every needle has been crafted out of glass. The waterlogged grave is open, waiting.

You hear your father swallow. “And then, as if it was a perfect spring morning, they lowered it – flipped a switch and the machinery hummed away and the eight thousand dollar glossy, golden oak casket sank into the water, with him still inside it. Just when he must have thought he couldn't get any colder...”

And the scene on the windshield changes from a rainy hillside to darkness – just darkness with the rush of cold, cold water through the hinges and clasps and tiny breaches in the heavily lacquered wood and the white satin upholstery.

You close your eyes but the image stays with you until you shake your head. You're mouthing words to yourself. “Burial at sea.”

When you speak out loud, your throat is dry and tight. “Mom didn't see – did she?”

Your Dad shakes his head. “Honestly, I don't know. And how can I ever ask her about it now?”

You shrug against the stiff vinyl of the car's passenger seat. The cold air has crept into your nose and you sniff against it. Your Dad hears and turns to see you.

“I'm sorry, honey,” he says, crumpling his handful of greasy foil paper and jamming it into a waste-bag on the floor at your feet. “Maybe I was wrong to make you hear all that.”

“No, no. Not if it makes you feel any better to talk about it.”

“It doesn't. I should know that already. It never does.”

And it's true, what they told you in your classes at the university – in the vast lecture theatres full of young adult hubris and lingering teen-aged angst. When it comes to human happiness, catharsis, they taught you, is one of the oldest lies we have.

“No.” Your Dad knows. “No, telling doesn't help a dang.”

It doesn't make any difference that you agree with him. In the dark of the parking lot, inside the cold glass and steel of the car, you close your eyes. You let your hands rest on the tops of your thighs, upturned, your fingers relaxed into curves like rows of crescent moons. And you breathe in through your nose, so deeply that your head tips back against the seat of the car. You draw in the same air your father moved with the sound of his story – sucking it into yourself. You pull it so far into your own body that your ribs strain and your throat aches around it, crushing from the inside with the pressure of it all. And then – you let it go.