Earth Angel (3 page)

I looked at my watch. My dinner break wasn’t for another two hours. He knew that. Still, I smiled thinking of him sitting
at home, missing me. Maybe our recent misfortunes had brought us closer together, the way they always did in the movies. One
good sign: lately he’d been letting me win at gin rummy. We played for a penny a point and in the past couple of weeks I’d
whittled down my debt to him to less than two million dollars. “Helen, tell him I‘ll be out in a couple of minutes.”

“Will do,” she said and bustled off.

I went into the room with the sprained ankle. A twelve-year-old boy sat on the examining table. His foot was elevated and
wrapped in a blue Cold-Pak. His mother sat nervously in the chair.

“Up kinda late, aren’t you, Peter?” I said.

His mother stood up. “He fell a few hours ago. But he’s been complaining he can’t sleep. I thought maybe I should have it
checked.”

“You did the right thing, Ms. Edwards.” I removed the wrapping and pack, felt around. “Doesn’t appear to be broken. X rays
look good. Probably just a sprain. Keep him off it as much as possible, elevate it when possible. Wear an Ace bandage, but
don’t put it on too tight. Ice the area on and off for a couple days to keep the swelling down. Aspirin should help with any
pain.”

“When can I play on it again?” Peter asked.

“When it doesn’t hurt, I guess. Probably about the time your parents say you aren’t grounded anymore for skateboarding after
dark.”

His mother laughed. “You must have children, Doctor.”

I smiled, filled out the charge codes on the bill. I handed it to her. “Give this to Darlene at the front desk. She’ll set
up another appointment for me to check Peter’s ankle.”

“Thank you, Doct—”

A loud popping sound interrupted us. Then a scream. Three more popping sounds.

“What’s that?” Peter’s mom asked.

I looked toward the closed door. “I don’t know. A light fixture, I guess.”

Another scream, two pops. They were louder now, coming closer.

“Sounds like a gun,” Peter said matter-of-factly.

“Peter!” his mother scolded. She looked at me and shrugged. “Television.”

“It does,” he mumbled defiantly.

I started toward the door to investigate, when it suddenly burst open and Tim stood in the doorway gripping a pistol with
both hands. I’d never seen him even hold a gun before. He looked like a little boy imitating TV cops. His fingers were smudged
with grease from working on his Miata. I thought it was some sort of practical joke so I started to laugh. “Tim, what’s the
joke?” I said. Then I saw Helen lying on the floor behind him. The front of her uniform was covered with blood. Behind me,
Peter’s mom threw her arm around her son, shielding him with her back. “For God’s sake!” she screamed. “For God’s sake, he’s
a child! A child!”

Tim’s eyes were wide and frightened, his teeth clenched tight, like someone searching his house in the middle of the night
because he heard a noise. His eyes focused on me and he seemed surprised, as if he didn’t expect me to be here. He smiled
wearily. “I guess I’ve done it now, huh?”

I didn’t know what to say, what to do. Should I tend to Helen, who looked very dead, or stay here and protect
Peter and his mom. Or should I try to help Tim. I just stood there, useless. “Tim, where did you get the gun?”

He looked down at the gun and shook his head, confused. His body sagged as if something vital had left it. A tear dropped
from his eye. “I’m fucked now, baby. I am truly fucked.”

“Tim,” I said softly and took a step toward him. I was crying, though I didn’t know when I’d started. “Tim, please.” I reached
out to hold him, make things better.

That’s when shooting started again.

“I’
M HURRYING
,” I S
AID
.

That horrible cry again.

“I’m
hurrying
,” I repeated, stepping out of my underpants. I reached into the shower, turned on the hot water faucet, and quickly ducked
back out before getting splashed. The water took forever to heat up, which for some reason I always forgot after I’d stripped
down. I stood there waiting for hot water, watching my naked and shivering body in the mirror. I looked funny naked. Seeing
myself in the mirror gave me the creeps, as if I were seeing my head on top of someone else’s body. A bonier, paler someone
else. A corpse prepped for autopsy. I’d lost about ten pounds since the shootings, and the puffiness around my stomach that
appeared in my late twenties (and which I’d been unable to diet or jazzercize away for the last three years) was now gone.
My stomach curved in under my rib cage like a flat river basin that ran from my sternum all the way down to my dusty blond
pubic hairs. Just as I’d always wanted it to.

I opened the shower door, stuck my hand under the water. Not hot enough. “Almost ready,” I said, not looking at him. “Just
a couple more minutes.”

I ran my wet hand over my white skin, watching myself in the mirror. I touched my pubic hairs. They used to feel wispy and
soft, and touching them sometimes used to arouse me. Occasionally, I would masturbate. Now I felt nothing. The hairs seemed
scratchy and brittle, like toothbrush bristles. I patted my flat stomach. I missed my poochy stomach, what Tim had called
my little jewel pillow, like those tiny pillows they used to present jewels to royalty. That’s how he gave me my engagement
ring. We were flat on our backs, naked and sweaty after vigorous sex, and he reached under the mattress and pulled out the
ring, which he screwed into my navel. “A jewel for my little jewel pillow,” he grinned and kissed my stomach.

Now my body was perfect. Like a
Cosmo
cover girl. The jewel pillow, the jewel, and the jewel giver were all gone. My body didn’t know what to do except devour
itself.

When the fog spreading across the mirror began to eat away my image, I opened the shower door. Hot steam billowed into my
face and clung like plastic wrap. “It’s ready,” I said, looking down at the floor.

The small, black kitten nestled in my pile of discarded clothes wheezed pathetically with each breath. I scooped him up into
my arms and stepped into the shower. The nozzle was aimed against the tile wall so we wouldn’t be splashed by the scalding
water. I closed the shower door and laid a towel on the tile floor at the back and sat down. The kitten lay in my lap, exhausted,
struggling with each breath. He was six weeks old, and I’d had him for only three days, the last two of which he’d been sick.
I’d taken him to the vet twice already. They ruled out the usual feline distemper and other such diseases. They told me to
keep his nasal passage clear with Q-Tips. They gave me antibiotics, which I had to squirt down his throat with an eye-dropper.

He’d been a gift from Francine Becker, the doctor who owned the walk-in clinic where I worked. A couple of days
after the funeral, she’d dropped by with the kitten, thinking it might cheer me up. “I know this is a presumptuous gift, Season,”
she said. “Handing you a creature you’ll have to care for and everything. Feed, et cetera. I don’t know, it just seemed like
a good idea when I thought of it. Anyway, if you don’t want him, I can take him right back to the store where I got him. Cute
little bandit like him will be snatched up in no time.”

I named him Shaft and dug out my old soundtrack album from the movie. “ ‘Who’s the cat who won’t cop out, when there’s danger
all about,’ “ I sang to him, trying like crazy to cheer myself up, but feeling instead desperate and foolish. My fat cat Blue
just hunched up on top of the kitchen cupboards and watched disapprovingly. Since Shaft had arrived, Blue came down only to
eat and take horrendous dumps in the litter box.

The day after I received Shaft, his health suddenly collapsed. The first day he’d been peppy and playful, scratching the hell
out of my arms. Then this. The vet said he should pull out of it. I suggested they drain the lungs but she said that was premature.
She said it in a way that let me know I might be a medical doctor, but I was trespassing on her turf.

So every couple of hours I stripped down and climbed into the steamy shower with him, hoping the humidity might alleviate
the congestion, clear his nasal passages. The results of these continual steam baths was that my muddy-blond hair was as flat
as a soggy mophead from the steam, my skin was drying out faster than any moisturizer would help, and my lips were perpetually
chapped. Still, it seemed to help him breathe easier for a little while afterward.

Shaft shifted on my lap, but even that tiny movement caused his wheezing to worsen. He gasped for air as if he were drowning.
Uselessly, I waved steam toward his tiny face. The incident passed, but his breathing was still labored.
I looked down at his limp, heaving body. “For God’s sake, I’m a doctor, Shaft, not a veterinarian.” I forced a smile and scratched
his chin, but his blank expression didn’t change. I sat there a few more minutes before I realized I was crying. What with
the steam and everything it was hard to tell. But when I tasted the tears on my chapped lips, I knew. I’d always been that
way about crying, never knowingly launching into it, but always having it sneak up on me like a mugger. I thought of it as
a variation of bedwetting. Statistically, up until the age of twelve, males and females cried with the same frequency; after
that, women cried five times as often as men. Were we just wimps, or did we have more to cry about?

Suddenly the shower door flew open. Cold air swept in and tightened my skin.

“You should lock your front door, you know. I could be a rapist or something.”

“Close the door, Carol,” I said.

She ignored me, noticing Shaft for the first time. “What are you doing sitting in the shower with a kitten? Are you having
some kind of breakdown?”

I yanked the shower door closed and the sound boomed around the shower tile. The noise startled Shaft but he didn’t have the
energy to do much more than widen his eyes and gasp.

I was a little annoyed that Carol was here. This shower ritual was as much for me as it was for Shaft. It was something to
do, a pattern to follow. Since Tim’s death I had no pattern, no routine. No place to go, nothing to do. And no one to talk
to, not the intimate way Tim and I had talked—or so I’d thought. Carol was a good friend, a better friend to me than I was
to her, but she was someone I could laugh with—not cry with. When Tim had gasped his last breath in my arms, he’d sucked my
life right out of my body, the way superstition has always accused cats of stealing children’s air. Since that day, each breath
I took
seemed labored, something I had to force myself to do, monitor the air going in and the air going out like a respirator at
the hospital.

The first three days after Tim’s funeral, I’d taken to not answering the phone or the doorbell. I wore only white: T-shirts,
shorts, underpants, a cotton shift. I took five baths a day with twenty lighted white candles around the tub. It took a good
ten minutes to light those candles, which I did with excruciating precision. I don’t know what I thought I was doing, probably
being spiritual or something. In the end, all I had to show for it was lots of laundry and some stubborn melted wax I had
to chip from the tub ledge with a butter knife.

“What’s the deal with the kitten?” Carol asked. I heard a match strike, smelled smoke. “Should I be reserving a padded room
in your name?”

“No smoking in the house.”

“Oh, shit, I didn’t even know I lit up.” I could see her wavy figure through the smoked shower door turning on the faucet,
sticking the cigarette under the water. She looked around for the wastecan, finally just dropped the soggy butt back into
her purse.

I shut off the shower. Shaft had had enough. Carol handed me a fresh towel from the counter. I patted Shaft’s fur and carried
him into the bedroom. I set him on my pillow.

“So, what’s the story?” Carol asked.

“Francine’s idea of something to cheer me up.”

Carol snorted. “She brought you a cat? That’s her response to what happened? Christ, she’s more demented than I thought. She’d
probably just gotten around to reading some four-year-old issue of
JAMA
where they talked about that hospital that gave patients cats because it helped them recover faster. God, no wonder her kids
are so screwed up.” Francine’s druggie daughter and gigolo son were constant sources of office gossip.

I looked down at Shaft, whose wheezing seemed to have lessened. “He’s been dying from the moment I got him.”

“Really? Dying?”

Suddenly Shaft sneezed three times, and his wheezing was worse.

“Whoa, that’s some wheeze she’s got. They should drain her lungs.”

“It’s a he. Shaft.”

“Oh, yeah, like in the movie, uh, that guy…”

“Richard Roundtree.”

“Right! And the song by that bald black guy. Isaac Haines.”

“Hayes.”

“Yeah.” She sat on the edge of the bed and watched me towel-dry Shaft. “You’d better start eating, girl. Looking at your naked
body is making me hungry for ribs.”

I went over to the wicker chest and pulled out some sweats, which I quickly put on. “Better?”

Carol didn’t say anything. She looked at her purse as if to take out a cigarette, remembered she couldn’t, sighed.

“How’s Lolita?”

“Fine. The name
du jour
has been Axel for the past week. Her hubby loves it. I see some lumpy roads ahead for young Axel.”

The clinic had reopened a week ago, after the blood had been washed away and the bullet holes plastered and painted over.
Francine made it clear I was welcome back as soon as I felt like working, but both of us knew that was an empty offer. I couldn’t
go back there even if I wanted to. And she sure didn’t want me to.

“How’s business?” I asked.

“Slow. No one wants to walk in if they think they might not walk out again. But it’ll pick up. People forget.” She started
for her purse, caught herself. “Christ, I‘ll give you twenty bucks if you let me smoke a cigarette.”