The Miracles of Ordinary Men (5 page)

Mrs. Glastonbury, he remembered, had given out toothpaste for Halloween. Today she muttered her rosary in a low, fanatical tone that made perfect sense — only a person who thought candy came from the Devil could sound like that.

Father Mario was behind the altar, fiddling with the tabernacle. He closed the door of the little silver box and then turned to face the entrance. He saw Sam immediately, smiled, and gestured to a pew. Sam, once more in black, the wings hunched on either side of him like extra, flashy limbs, slid into a seat.

“Samuel,” said the priest. “I heard about your mother — I am so very sorry.”

Had he introduced himself before? He couldn't remember. “Yes. Me too.”

“How can I help you?”

Sam coughed into the left wing and felt strangely embarrassed, as though he were turning down a lover. “Can you tell me where Father Jim practises?”

“Father Jim? I believe he's on the Island now.” If the other priest was surprised, he didn't show it. “In Tofino. He is teaching and writing a book.”

Sam nodded. “Is there a phone number I can call?”

“Of course,” said the priest. He stood and motioned to the rectory. Sam followed, the wings trailing softly in his wake.

The rectory smelled the way it had when he was eleven — incense and dust and fresh linen from the vestment closet, all resting on the weathered scent of old wood. The white cupboard in the corner had held Father Jim's supply of Scotch, once upon a time. Scotch and vodka, for those difficult pre-Easter days. He had an urge to open the cupboard and check to see what currently graced the shelves — Father Mario probably kept candles, or extra glasses for the holy wine.

The priest, oblivious, copied a name onto a small red notepad and then scribbled a number. His hands were small and square, the nails blunt-edged. “Brother Thomas receives the visitors, I believe.”

“Thank you.” Sam's own fingernails were dangerously short now. A childhood habit, that, come to taunt him. He took the paper and folded it once, then once again.

“Have you thought of going to see them?” Father Mario asked. “The drive is not so long.”

An hour to the ferry, then the ride across the water and another three hours or so to the coast. Sam opened his mouth to disagree and then remembered: his cat, his car, Joni Mitchell on the open road. It wouldn't be Mecca or Memphis, but Cathedral Grove, that wonderful forest of ancient trees, was part of the drive. His mother had loved the green.

“Your mother and I were great friends,” the priest continued. “She was a wonderful woman.”

“Yes.” The wings rustled with sudden energy. “I'd like,” Sam cleared his throat, “to see if Father Jim could perform the service. You understand?”

“Of course.” Father Mario nodded. “I will be happy to attend.”

He was still so tired. He followed Father Mario back to the entrance and allowed the priest to open the door and make way for the wings. Sam blinked against the sudden sunshine and stepped across the threshold, then turned back, one hand shielding his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said again.

The priest nodded. “My best for your journey.” He raised a hand and made a small sign of blessing over the wings. Sam braced himself for more priestly wisdom, but Father Mario gave him a sad smile and turned back to the church, so he went quickly down the steps to hide his surprise.

—

The phone at the retreat house rang eleven times before someone picked up.

“Barnabite Fathers,” said the voice. An oddly business-like, almost military voice.

“Hello,” said Sam. “I was told that I could find Father Jim at this number. Father Jim McDougal?”

“Yes.” The speaker cleared his throat. “One moment. May I tell him who's calling?”

“It's Sam. Sam Connor.”

“Sam,” said Father Jim when he came on the phone, his voice warm and familiar. “What a nice surprise.”

“Hello, Father.” He was at once five years old, eleven, thirty-five and about to be a jilted man. Somehow, the air smelled of incense. “I'm sorry to bother you.”

“It's no bother,” said the priest. “Is everything all right?”

“Mom died yesterday,” he said, hating the boldness of the words. “I thought you should know.”

Silence on the other end of the line. “Sam. I'm so sorry.”

“Yes,” he said. “I was wondering if you would mind doing the service. I know I haven't been in touch — ”

“Of course,” said Father Jim. “Are you still in Vancouver? Shall I leave tonight?”

And suddenly the pilgrimage coalesced, took shape. “No,” he said. “The service isn't until next Tuesday — I could come and get you.”

“From the ferry?”

“The retreat. I'd like the drive, if that's all right.”

—

Stacey was very understanding when he made the call into work — maybe too much so. She greeted the news of his road trip with an odd enthusiasm, her voice both respectful and envious.

“I'm sure the drive will be lovely,” she said. “And it will be good for you to have the time alone, no doubt.”

Time alone,
he wanted to tell her, was not the problem. Then he wondered if she harboured dreams of coming along. “Yes,” was all he said. They'd found a supply. He could take as much time as he needed.

He called Doug at Janet's apartment. Doug's voice was low and detached — where Stacey had had too much concern, he seemed to have none at all.

“Father Jim's class finishes on Friday,” Sam told him. “So we'll be back on Saturday, in the afternoon.”

He paused. Doug said nothing. “Could you put Janet on the phone?”

The switch to Janet was accompanied by footsteps; she'd taken the phone into another room.

“How is he?”

“Tired,” she said, her voice muffled. “I don't think he slept at all last night — I could hear him pacing.”

“Hmm,” he said. His turn for the non-committal grunt. They were conspirators, suddenly, he and Janet — careful and polite in the face of death. “Well, let me know if anything happens.”

“I will,” she said. “Have a safe journey.”

Safe
.
He gulped down an urge to paint a picture for Janet right there on the phone: his hands locked around the wheel as he navigated hairpin turns and precarious mountain highways, the wings shining white and blocking his rear-view mirror. “Sure.”

Once more in boxers he padded into the kitchen, the tiles cool against his feet. An offhand glance at the thermostat told him it was ten degrees in the house, which had to be a mistake. It felt like summertime. When he got back from Tofino, he'd have to get the heating fixed.

—

The next morning, he was up before the sun. He crept out into the parking lot and loaded the Jetta with water bottles, granola bars, and cat treats to keep Chickenhead calm.

A map of the Island to help with the hairpin turns, two cases of
CD
s to help with the quiet, and he was almost ready to go. Just before pulling Chickenhead out the door, he put on the black shirt and the black dress pants. He slid the shirt over his shoulders and started with the bottom buttons, but his fingers began to shake. He stopped and looked in the mirror.

His reflection was pale, his fingers locked and white-knuckled. His hairline was receding. The wings rose and fell behind him, in tune to his breath and yet not quite, as though sucking air on their own. He put a hand to his head and clumps of hair came away in his fingers, leaving slivers of shiny white scalp. He took a breath and reached for the buttons again but his fingers were slippery with sweat and he fumbled. The wings waited behind and on either side of him like malevolent ghosts.

Suddenly, he felt hands reach out and cover his own. His skin surged with power and his fingers moved slowly, deliberately through each button. He watched in the mirror as these hands that were not his hands finished the shirt up to the collar. The dryness in his throat wouldn't go away.

Now his reflection showed a man in a crisp black shirt, the wings white and stiff and still. One more breath, and this time the wings moved with him, up and down, and settled behind his shoulders as though they'd been there all his life.

Chickenhead mewed in the hallway, and he went to find her, and from there to find the priest.

IX

In those years before — before the street, before the office — Lilah spent her time moving, and flying, and sleeping on strange floors all over the world. A basement floor in Dublin, a cold beach in Edinburgh, littered with seaweed and trash. A whirlwind few weeks in Madrid, where men touched her hair as though each strand were made of magic. She called home once a month, if at all. Aidan, the boy from New Zealand she met on a dance floor in Cork, thought this was hilarious.

“I've never met anyone who hates their own family so much,” he said. He grew orchids back in Wellington, and had come to Europe just because.

“I don't hate
all of them,” she said. Careful, even then, to make the distinction. There was Roberta, and then there was Timothy. “I just — I'm just tired.”

He laughed again. Aidan from New Zealand was always laughing. “You're not tired,” he said. “If you were tired you wouldn't have the energy to run away.”

“Maybe.” She thought of Timothy, alone in his room. When Roberta wasn't yelling she spoke of doctors, psychiatrists, and disapproving parishioners. Timothy wouldn't come to the phone — he never came to the phone — but when Lilah stayed in one spot long enough he sent postcards. One found her in Amsterdam, weeks after her time in Ireland, when she was staying with Sabastian the artist. Sabastian was tall and thin and clumsy in bed, like an overgrown child. He collected plaster busts and sat them around his kitchen table, as though they were family that wouldn't go away.

“You have mail,” he said. He passed the postcard across the table. Somewhere over the Atlantic it had gotten wet; the ink was smudged on the left-hand side of the card, the writing small and blurred.
Lilah
,
it ran.
I miss you. I hope your well. Mom thinks we might get a dog
,
maybe. I told her it could sleep in my room
,
but she wants to put it in yours. See you when you come home. Love
,
Timmy.

“I didn't know you had a brother,” Sabastian said. The busts around his table were replicas, cast from the bronze torso of a woman who had drowned herself in the Seine in
1889
. The night Lilah arrived, he'd told her the story in his garret bedroom and said that her body reminded him of the woman they'd pulled from the river.

“You hold teardrops in your shoulders,” he said. “As though you are so sad, you have nowhere else to put them.”

Now, thinking of this, she looked at the postcard and shrugged. “I have a brother, yes.” She put the postcard in her backpack and carried it around like a talisman, or a child. And three weeks later she left, early in the morning after a sleepy goodbye, like something from a film.

There were other men, other artists. Halfway through that first year away she stopped paying attention. She poured drinks in a greasy pub to make money, posed for a photographer in Oslo, and played volleyball for cash on an Anzio beach. She kept the postcard in her bag, and as she moved through Greece and Turkey it was joined by another, and another. Some of the postcards had Roberta's name dashed across the bottom beside Timothy's — a jumble of letters, an
x
,
an
o.

Sometimes the postcards came after she'd gone. Sabastian, who had left her his number, and whom she called now and again because she liked the sound of his voice, kept her last postcard on the dinner table, next to the bust he'd painted red.

“They have not gotten a dog,” he said. His voice was gravelly, all angles and bones. “He says your mother has decided not to have one.”

“That's because she's a bitch,” Lilah said. She shivered in the phone booth and stared out across a busy Dhaka street blanketed in rain. Monsoon season in Bangladesh, and she had only one pair of shoes. “Does he say anything else? Is he okay?”

“Come home,” Sabastian said.

“What?”

“No. ‘Come home.'
That's what he says.”

“Oh.” She tapped a finger against the receiver and the sound echoed through the booth.

“You're not going to go home.”

“What are you, my father?”

Sabastian snorted. “No. But you're not going to go home.”

“Not yet,” she admitted. “Maybe never.”

Now he laughed. “‘Never'
is a big word.”

“Look. It's not — I shouldn't have
to stay there. To live my life.”

He was quietly, gently amused. “Did I say that?”

She closed her eyes and saw the postcard, Timothy's words haphazard and crooked over the page. “Well, whatever. Can we talk about something else now?”

“Of course,” Sabastian said. “We can always talk about something else.”

—

In Chiang Mai, she met a man who had left his wife for an opium den in the hills. His name was Rainer. His wife lived in Berlin, with their children, and when Lilah met him he hadn't seen his son or daughter in almost five years.

“Do you miss them?” she asked. They were sprawled on the floor of a hut that smelled of grass and mould, dark paste between them in a little earthen dish.

“All of the time,” he said. “But there are more important things.”

“More important things?” Even there, stoned and as far from Timothy as she could possibly be, she couldn't quite believe it.

“God,”
and he breathed out as he said it so that the word became silver smoke. “I have God here. Everything else is just an illusion.”

She laughed. She couldn't help it. Did Roberta's arm stretch this far, this hard? Was the bad-daughter guilt going to catch up with her now, more than halfway across the world? “You're not serious.”

“Of course I am.” He shifted so that he was on his side, looking directly at her, drawing circles in the dirt. “You have to let go, Lilah. So much can change in a minute, or an hour, or a day. You can't let anything tie you down. God goes beyond
the world.”

“But,” she said, not quite understanding, “it's your
family
.”

“This
is my family,” and he spread an arm, took in the hut, the smoke, the pitter patter of mountain rain. “Only this.”

She watched him, silent, and then took a turn with the pipe. “I think that's a load of shit.”

“You're a child. Children don't know anything.”

“Fuck off,” but her words were sleepy and slow. “My mother believes in God and she's a crackpot.”

“Your mother believes in fairy tales,” he said. “That's different.” He pushed the opium pot off to the side and rolled so that he was on top of her, grinding her into the dirt. He tasted of smoke and burning leaves. “Only idiots believe in happy endings.”

In the morning, she went back to the city. She left Rainer in the hut, a week's worth of opium still beside him on the ground. God around him, in the mountains and the tress. She met a group of American tourists back at her hostel and they spent the winter months trawling the beaches on Koh Samui, fucking and sleeping and wondering where to go next.

But as that second year drew to a close she found herself thinking of them both, Timothy and Roberta, all the time. Timothy's twelfth birthday came and went — she was dancing on a beach in Pattaya and paused, just for a moment, to stare across the water. Little brother, growing up so far away.

The last postcard came to her in Bangkok, the edges soft and worn.
Lilah
,
it ran.
Lilah
,
I'm lonely. I love you. Timmy.

Running to them, running away from them, always away. She flew back like a boomerang, gathering strength for her next curve into the world even as she drew near to home.

—

Today, she finds Timothy singing. A dirty, scuffled youth, rocking away and singing nonsense to himself on the beach. Beach strollers mark a wide path around him.

“You look like a lunatic,” she says, by way of hello. “You're going to scare all the children away.”

“Let the little children come to me,” he says, and laughs. “It's just a song, Lilah.”

“I know it's just a song.” Whatever that means. Lilah sits beside him and pulls food from her bag — sandwiches, apples, a hunk of sharp cheese. “Eat.”

Timothy makes a face, but he doesn't run away. He reaches for the first sandwich but Lilah stops him and puts a bottle of sanitizer in his hands instead. “Wash your hands with this, first.”

He rolls his eyes and opens the bottle. The sanitizer cuts lines through the dirt at the bottom of his wrists.

“When was the last time you had a shower?”

He shrugs, and this time gets the sandwich. “I don't remember. Two weeks ago?”

“Yeah, well — you smell like it.”

“Thanks,” he says, his mouth full of tuna. “You're always so tactful.”

“It's true.” She pushes another sandwich across the wood, and he takes it. “Why don't you come home with me for the night and get cleaned up? I won't tell Roberta,” she adds hastily, as his face clenches in panic. “You can sleep in my room. I'll take the couch — you won't even have to talk if you don't want.”

He hesitates, and she lets her heart expand with hope. “What if I want to leave halfway through the night? What if I want to go at three in the morning?”

“Then you can go.” She doesn't breathe. “I'm not taking you to a fucking prison, Tim.”

“Don't swear,” he says. He finishes the sandwich. “You won't have company, or anything? The boyfriend won't be there?”

“He's not my boyfriend,” she says instantly.

“Mom thinks he is.” Timothy reaches into her bag without asking, grabs another bun. “You're lucky Mom can even keep track. The Actor. Your Montreal men. And
Joel.
You know, that's a stupid name.”

She blinks, and then remembers. Of course. They are talking about Joel, the somewhat-boyfriend, because Timothy does not know about dates with the boss at the office. “It is not.”

“Sure it is. It's one of those names that people always think is so cool, so different. And then they realize — it's just
Joe.
With an
l
.” Third sandwich done, he goes for an apple and bites. His hand is hard and white around the fruit.

“Well — whatever,” she says. She could laugh. It would be so easy to laugh. Also easy to tell him how many times she's heard the joke before. “Are you going to come or not?”

“You can't follow me if I decide to leave.”

“I won't.”

“You can have showers at the Y, you know. That's where I went the last time.”

“I thought you said you couldn't remember the last time.”

Timothy wipes apple juice on his filthy jeans. “I just remembered.” He stands. It's almost dark, and Lilah's stomach has begun to rumble. Guilt flickers over Timothy's face. “Were those for you?”

“No.” She stands too. As always, she is surprised to see how much he now towers over her — how he can be so large and so small all at once. “Do you want to go now?”

“Fine.” He falls in step beside her.

They don't talk. Lilah concentrates on the sidewalk in front of her and the soft
pat-pat
of Timothy's feet as he follows her along the streets. She thinks of Roberta, worrying in her house across the water, and of Joe-with-an-L, who has indeed been scheduled to make an appearance tonight. She will text him when Timothy is in the shower and tell him that she's busy.

They drift, not talking, to the other side of the city. The landlord, a skinny grey woman with yellow fingers, is there, waiting, when they enter the building.

“Good evening,” the landlord says. Her name is Jemima, and she doesn't trust anybody. She sits on the couch in the front foyer with a magazine across her knees. She's probably been there for hours.

“Hello,” Lilah says brightly. She thinks of Debbie and smiles with all her teeth. Then she grabs Timothy's wrist and pulls him into the elevator, jams a finger against the number
4
. The doors shudder closed.

The elevator is noisy and old. Timothy wiggles out of her grasp and stares at the floor. “I hate elevators,” he mumbles.

“Since when?”

“Since forever.”

“You never said anything about that to me,” she says, hurt. “Why didn't you tell me before?”

“Idiots are afraid of elevators,” he says. When the elevator stops, he is the first one out into the hall. She's not sure if he'll remember — he's only been here once in the entire two years that she's been living in the place — but he stops directly in front of her door. When she opens it, he walks in, his shoulders stooped and his head down, like a misbehaved dog.

She shuts the door and points to the bathroom right away. “Get in.” The closet to the left of the bathroom holds towels and soap — she pulls them out, folds them into his outstretched hands. “I have some of your old clothes here, if you want them.” Roberta had sent them for moments such as these, but Lilah keeps her mouth shut, says nothing. “Throw those clothes outside of the door and I'll wash them now.”

He nods. Once upon a time he'd been ten years old, slipping milk into her hot chocolate. Her co-conspirator in life.

He shuts the door, and she walks into the kitchen and lights a cigarette to calm her nerves. The water starts running. A moment later the bathroom door opens and closes again — when she comes back into the hall, Timothy's clothes lie in a pile on the floor. She finishes the cigarette and scoops up the clothes, then slides out of the apartment as quietly as she can and takes them down to the laundry, where she feeds coins and powder to the washing machine and then sits on one of the grubby chairs. She watches a beetle scuttle across the linoleum. The lights flicker, go out, come back on again. Timothy's clothes tumble through the quick cycle — when they are finished, she shoves them into a dryer and lights another cigarette.