Web of Angels (17 page)

“But it’s fantastic,” Cathy said, hoarse from crying. “It is so retro, it’s sick.”

“That good?” Sharon laughed. “Let’s make it over for you, then.”

“What for? If I take it home, they’ll put it in the bag for Goodwill.”

Sharon might have left it at that, for you have to respect other parents’ rules if you want to get along with your neighbours. But words were said inside, urgently, insistently and she was listening. “I have an idea. There’s lots of space in my basement closet. How about if I help you fix the jacket and we keep it there?”

“Okay.” Cathy smiled. She had a lot of smiles. The polite girl next door. The savage grin. The smirk. And this new one, hopeful. Had Sharon really never seen her smile this way before?

“Good. You girls need to clean up for lunch. Cathy, can you take them upstairs and help them?” As Cathy got up to
follow the younger kids, she stopped, turned and put her arms around Sharon, hugging her quickly, releasing her as soon as Sharon hugged back. Then she ran up the stairs after the girls while Sharon called, “Faces and hands everybody. With soap!”

Plugging in the griddle, Sharon listened to the clatter of feet overhead. She had real maple syrup—none of that sugar water dyed brown for her family. Pipes rattled upstairs as water flushed down, flowing into larger pipes laid underground a hundred years ago when Seaton Grove’s bylaws stipulated that no whole sheep or hogs or geese were allowed to run free in the streets on pain of a ten-cent fine. Before that the roots of a forest intertwined and Garrison Creek flowed between ferns. Now pipes connected the houses on either side, across the street, around the corner, their sewage led far away. That was how civilized people handled shit: pipe it; bury it. And they sacrificed the creeks, the streams, the living waters in order to do it, their land dry and quiet except for the sound of sprinklers.

Later Sharon took the silk jacket to the dining room to unstitch and unstaple it while Franky, black except for the white tip of his tail and two of his paws, stalked a dust bunny in the corner. Asking Cathy to stay still, Sharon pulled sleeves over her arms, pinning shoulders and cuffs, explaining that it was the fabric that mattered. No matter how misused or misshapen, it could be made again into something lovely.

“M
ama! Mama!”

“I’m here.”

Emmie was sitting up in the lower bunk, her older sister still asleep. “I saw Heather. Her hair falled off.”

“It was just a dream, kiddo.” Alec had come running when he heard his child scream, no memory of how he’d got to the girls’ room. He was in the kitchen, talking online. Then he was on the second floor. Nothing was out of place, nobody else there. His breathing slowed, eyes still scanning to be sure.

There was a doll on the floor. Before bed the girls had been playing, “Get the baby out,” re-enacting the Caesarean that had been done on Heather’s body. Brigitte had said that was a healthy way to process the tragedy, but she didn’t hear these kids scream at night.

“Everything’s okay,” Alec said. “I’ll sit here. Go back to sleep.”

Emmie rolled over in her nest of stuffed animals, clutching Lambie, eyes fluttering open occasionally to make sure
that her nighttime mommy was still sitting in one of the plastic chairs, legs stretched out. She still refused to eat lamb chops, though she’d eaten roast beef for dinner and asked for seconds, not realizing it was cow as Josh had been threatened with dire consequences if he told her. Grounding, loss of allowance, garbage duty.

The moon was full. Somebody inside had noticed it and knew the calendar, that Easter was coming and Good Friday. Holidays were always hard for them. There had been no refuge on days when school was out and adults home from work. Now the lils were hiding inside as if the walls of the house were penetrable, terror on its way through their skin. Alec got up to check doors and windows, make sure everything was locked. After he sat down again, he heard the sound of footsteps in the hallway, then the click of a light switch, the bathroom door closing. A train was squealing along the railroad tracks, starting and stopping. Warning whistles. A heavy load. The toilet flushed, rattle of pipes, door creaking. Bare feet slapped slapped on the wood floor, which squeaked just past the stairwell. Josh stood in the doorway, his shadow long and narrow in the girls’ dancing fairies night light. His hair stood on end like his dad’s. T-shirt and SpongeBob PJ bottoms, ancient and threadbare.

“What are you doing, Mom?”

“Shhh. Emmie was having bad dreams. Why are you still up?”

“I heard you when I went to the bathroom.” Josh sat down in the other small chair, his legs stretched out alongside his mom’s. He was a kid who took his sweet time figuring
things out for himself, keeping it to himself until long after the fact. When he was five, Dan had given him “medicine” for nightmares. A year later Josh had said that he knew the medicine was just molasses but it was funny that it worked anyway. Alec glanced over at the bunk beds. Emmie hadn’t stirred, not even at the sound of her brother’s voice, which, if she’d been the slightest bit alert would have had her up and jumping on him.

Alec’s stomach was rumbling. “I didn’t eat any supper. I’m going to fix a snack.”

“Can I have something, too?” Josh asked. If it was his daytime mom, she’d have directed him back to bed. And he’d have gone, sullenly, more or less obediently. But everything was different in the night. He might talk, his mom might say yes. Food tasted better.

“I’m thinking cocoa and sandwiches. You want to help?”

Alec made cocoa the way he’d learned from Uncle Frank. Half milk, half water, chocolate syrup, a glob of honey. Uncle Frank used to heat it in a coffee tin over a fire. They’d drink cocoa and watch meteor showers while Uncle Frank showed him the constellations. Ursa Major pointed down to the North Star, the tail end of Ursa Minor. Big bear and little bear, Callisto and Arcas.

Condensed milk made better cocoa, but there wasn’t any in the pantry, and Alec had to search way at the back to retrieve the syrup. Offering no advice and no instruction, he put the bread out on the board, telling Josh to slice it while he rummaged in the fridge for cold meat, mustard, pickles. The microwave hummed.
Beep beep beep
. The cocoa was ready.

“This is good, Mom,” Josh said. The bread was uneven and so was the meat. Slathers of mustard. Wedges of pickle. Standing at the counter, they chewed on their sandwiches. Slugged down cocoa.

“So what’s up?” Alec was trying not to look at the masking tape holding back his son’s ears, his gaze on the aloe and the ivy on the windowsill. Franky had appeared out of nowhere and was rubbing his head on Alec’s foot, clearly unaware that Alec didn’t go for small animals. Or perhaps it was. Cats were like that. Alec shoved the kitten aside with his foot, as gently as the little bugger deserved.

Josh took another bite, talking with his mouth full. “Cathy’s parents are sending her to a shrink.”

“Who?” The kitten was mewing pitifully, kneading Alec’s toes. He got a can of cat food from the cupboard, opened it, and dropped the food in the kitten’s dish, all the while wondering if the kid was being sent to see her father’s cousin and what he’d put her on.

“I don’t know. She doesn’t really want to go, but I told her you talk to someone and it’s okay. It is, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Sure. If you got someone you can trust.”

“Like you used to have headaches all the time and you don’t anymore.”

“True.” He didn’t know that Josh had noticed. He wondered what else Josh had noticed. Someone should ask the therapist if this was bad. If seeing their suffering could hurt their son.

“Mom, why don’t we ever see your parents?”

“Whoa …” Out of left field and he hadn’t seen it coming.
He made himself pick up his sandwich, take a bite, chew and swallow. “What brought that up?”

“Just thinking about it.”

“What you been thinking?”

But Josh wouldn’t hand over his thoughts that easy. “Why don’t we see them?” he asked again, waiting for his nighttime mom to answer his nighttime questions.

“They came here once. That was enough. Do you remember?”

“Just that you didn’t feel well so I got to watch a lot of TV. I thought it was fun and then I got bored. And …”

“And what?” On the inside folks were sharing information, passing the pieces of their memories back and forth, running through the visit in their head. Josh was three years old. Had they left him alone for an hour they didn’t remember? Had the father touched him. The mother. If so, if so …

“Your mom got me a big banana split when you were sleeping. She told me not to tell. I really wanted her to come back again and make me another one. She said that Dad should get you real jewellery. She had a shiny bracelet.”

Alec exhaled. “Nice lady.”

“How come, Mom? Is it because she didn’t think Dad was good enough? Is that why we don’t see them?”

“It’s late. You should get back to bed.”

“Oh, right.” Josh was looking at him with adolescent scorn. With hurt. Being treated as if he was stupid or as if he couldn’t be trusted with the truth. Was that how they’d raised him? To be unworthy of truth? This kid who carried an air of dignity around him, even when he forgot deodorant.

Alec put his plate in the sink. “Let’s go outside.” The nights were mild and spring had come though the birch tree was still bare. “If we’re going to talk about this, then I need to get some air.”

He slid open the glass doors, stepped outside on the deck, his son beside him, both of them in bare feet. Next door laundry was flapping in the wind. As he walked across the deck, lights went on, bright enough to read by. Alec would prefer not to have motion detectors. You could see better in the dark without lights blinding you to the shadows. He liked the cold wood of the deck under his feet, the crinkling grass, the square of mud that would be their garden, then the parking pad that made a bouncing surface for basketball, the hoop screwed into the side of the shed. “You want to know the real reason?”

“Yes.” It smelled of gas back here. They should get the car checked.

“That banana split was a trick. That’s how people get kids to trust them. One step at a time.” He picked up the basketball, threw it through the hoop. Passed it to Josh.

“So?” Josh threw the ball, his arm extending above his shoulder, elegant, confident. The ball fell neatly through the hoop.

“Nice shot. Josh, my parents look fine from the outside.”

“Uh huh,” Josh said, aiming again. You wouldn’t know from his voice that this conversation mattered, but the tips of his ears were red.

“People can put on a good act. Lots of people respected my parents. But the fact is that they were abusers.”

“Like they hit you?”

“That. And other stuff. There was no way we were going to let them get to our kids.” The
we
was a slip. But it could mean him and Dan. Nobody ever picked up on that kind of thing. “Your dad is a good guy. I’ve watched him in action. But given where I come from, I don’t even trust him a hundred percent. You can’t take anything at face value, not even your girlfriend or her folks. You don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors.”

“But Mom, we talk all the time. Like real talking. Deep stuff.”

“So you feel like you really know Cathy and everything about her?”

Josh nodded.

“And she never said anything about herself that you wouldn’t expect.” Alec dribbled the ball, jumped, made the shot. Dribbled again. Josh got the ball away from him.

Josh grinned. “I told her that you and Aunt Eleanor went to the shooting range. She thought that was cool and she asked me if you’d take her. That surprised me! Would you, Mom? Teach me?”

“You really want to?” He spoke casually, not wanting to expose his own astonishment: that he had anything of value to give this boy, that his son was eager for it. And so he became distracted from the matter at hand. The girl, her problems, her peculiarities, her family’s were all forgotten as Alec threw the ball through the hoop nailed to the shed, glancing sideways at Josh.

“Seriously,” Josh said.

“Okay, we’ll see.” They might even go hunting, him and his son. Camp overnight, get up before dawn. If it was clear, they’d look at the stars. He’d need to buy a rifle, but first he’d have to get a license for possession of a firearm and another for transporting it. “I’ll talk to Dad about it.”

They played for a while. Counted points, Josh relishing his twenty to his mom’s six. Seven. Eight. Alec was on a roll, but Josh got the ball away from him. “You going to throw or just hang onto that?”

“Mom?” He was standing there, hugging the ball. “Did they, you know, sexually abuse you?”

Alec paused, but there was no other answer. “Yeah,” he said.

Josh threw the ball wide. It slammed into the shed. “I wish I was there. To help you.”

“It’s my job to stand up for you, Josh. Not the other way around.”

“Not always, Mom. Not anymore.”

Alec looked at his son, a boy still and more than a boy, moving toward the wall of his mother’s protection, asking the bricks to open up and allow him to pass through. Not yet. Not yet. But soon. In the darkness, everything looked larger, merging with its own shadow. His son’s smooth cheek was roughened, his shoulder broadening in an outline of the honourable man he was becoming while the moon flew over the roof from east to west, the earth turning under their feet.