Earth Angel (4 page)

I tucked another pillow around Shaft and gestured for
Carol to follow me. I could hear his labored breathing behind me as I led Carol out onto the patio off the kitchen. She lit
up and took a deep drag. I sat on the wicker chair and slid the ashtray across the wicker table. “Use this,” I said. “We keep
it for Tim’s father, when he comes to visit.”

She looked at me as if to correct my verb tense, but took another drag on her cigarette instead. “I talked to his folks at
the funeral,” she said. “I thought they might hang around a little longer.”

“They offered. I didn’t want them to. They need to get on with their lives, not nursemaid me.”

Carol didn’t say anything. It was not like her to be so circumspect. Usually she just blurted whatever she was thinking. It
made me nervous and a little angry to be treated like a patient.

“So Lolita’s okay?” I asked. “No trauma to the fetus?”

“You wouldn’t believe that girl. She has the resilience of rubber. She’s sad and all, but otherwise it’s as if nothing had
happened. I don’t think she comprehends how close she came.”

From what the cops had been able to piece together—which was reenacted on
Hard Copy
with “Dramatization” flashing at the bottom of the screen—Tim had started by shooting Helen, who’d come out to give him my
message. No one knows whether or not he’d shot her before or after she’d told him I’d be a few minutes. Naturally, I spent
a lot of time wondering if she had given him my message and if there was something in the way I’d phrased it that had set
him off. The three Japanese businessmen were next. Ironically, the cops discovered they weren’t even patients. According to
Lolita, who’d talked to one of them before the shooting, they had been discussing some business strategy in the elevator near
their office, and when they passed our waiting room they stopped in to sketch out their ideas before they forgot. Their bodies
were all found slumped onto the glass table they’d been leaning
over. Tim had shot each once in the head. Helen, however, hadn’t fallen immediately. She’d staggered backward and managed
to stumble down the hall and hit the silent alarm. But Tim calmly followed, shot her again in the chest, and she died. Darlene
started screaming and Tim shot her in the face, the back of her head spraying across dozens of incomplete insurance forms.

Then he turned the gun on five-month-pregnant Lolita. He’d looked at her little hump of a stomach, then at the N
AME DU JOUR
sign on her desk. “I like
Evan
,” he said. “
Evan’s
good.”

He turned from her and burst into my examination room. I saw Helen dead behind him. I stepped toward him, opening my arms.
One shot echoed and Tim lunged forward into my arms. A uniformed cop appeared around the corner, gun aimed, eyes wide with
adrenaline and terror. He’d been in the parking lot taking a report on a stolen car stereo when he’d heard the shots. The
cop’s bullet punctured Tim’s heart. Carol, who had been locked in the bathroom the whole time, came out, confirmed Darlene
and Helen were dead, then returned to help me work on Tim. But he was dead within ten minutes.

The man with the cold who’d wanted to skip work had left a few seconds before Tim had fired his first shot. Peter and his
mom were treated for shock. The amphetamine woman, Lisa Demme, had hid behind the table in a closed examination room and saw
nothing. She told the police she was there to be treated for an upset stomach.

“So what are your plans?” Carol asked, grinding out her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Run for president. Cure cancer. Become the next Miss America.”

She nodded, lit another cigarette. “I read somewhere that the number one cause of death on the job for women is murder. Isn’t
that weird. If you’re a working woman your greatest risk on the job is someone else killing you.”

“What’s the difference? It beats having a massive coronary or a tractor rolling over on you.”

Blue waddled out onto the patio, her fat body on spindly legs like a watermelon on toothpicks. She sat at my feet and chirped
for me to pet her.

“Oh, so you’ve finally decided to quit sulking, huh? Going to treat Shaft like a little brother?” I scratched her ears and
she chirped repeatedly. Then a sudden cold spot in my stomach bloomed and I leaped up and raced up the stairs to my bedroom.
Carol jumped up and followed. “What’s wrong?” she pleaded. “Season, for Christ’s sake!”

Once in the bedroom I ran over to the bed. Shaft lay limp on my pillow. I began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it didn’t
work. I lay him back on the pillow. Carol came around and examined him, tried to massage his heart. Nothing. She put her arm
around me and said, “Jesus, Season, what exactly did you do to piss God off so much?”

M
OM WAS ANNOYED
. “H
ow MUCH LONGER
?”

“Soon,” I assured her.

She checked her watch, a Little Mermaid watch we’d picked up at Disneyland. It was the one with the bloated bitch-queen octopus
on it, two of her fat jewel-braceletted tentacles keeping time. My mother said the octopus reminded her of herself and gleefully
snapped it up. I knew she couldn’t wait to show it to her customers back home, have them laugh and shake their heads and say
what a nut she was.

“I thought we were VIP’s,” she said, pointing to her plastic VIP badge.

“Be patient.”

“Either we’re VIP’s or we’re not. It’s that simple. Everybody can’t be a VIP. If everybody here’s a VIP, who are the regular
people?”

“Regular people are at work, not wearing cheesy VIP badges on their boobs.”

She made a face. “Okay, I‘ll shut up. I’m sorry. I’m nervous, that’s all. I talk when I’m nervous. You know me.”
She sniffed her blouse. “This smells funny. Does this smell like urine to you?”

I put my arm around her shoulder. “Relax, we’ll see
Roseanne,
don’t worry.”

She stepped away from me, that famous insulted look stiffening her face. “You think that’s why I’m nervous? A goddamn television
show? Do I look like I give a shit? Do I look like some celebrity hound? Screw Roseanne.”

“Sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean anything. I’m sorry, okay?”

She was crying now. No tears, just dry raspy gasps, not unlike Shaft’s. The other people milling around the fenced-in courtyard,
where we’d all been herded to await the live taping of
Roseanne,
either looked toward us or quickly shuffled away from us. It was like a prison movie and all the other inmates knew a rival
gang was about to slip sharpened spoons between our ribs.

“Mom,” I said, softly putting my arm around her again. “It’s okay. I’m sorry.”

She pushed me away and began speaking in German.
“I’m the sorry one. I come out here to comfort and support you. I end up acting like a brat. You should just shoot me and
put me out of your misery.”
Realizing what she’d just said, a horrified expression gripped her face and she clamped her hand over her mouth. We just
stared at each other for a long moment and then we both laughed, though there was no humor in either of our laughs. She slipped
her arm through mine and pulled me close, speaking softly in German.
“What will we do with you now, my treasure. What will we do?”

It was a rhetorical question, but she’d already asked me several variations of it since arriving two days ago, which was two
days after the death of Shaft. She’d wanted to come out earlier, but I’d told her not to. My mom was 5′ 1″, sixty-two years
old, a German war bride who’d married my father, an American Jewish soldier, after he’d already slept with her two older sisters.
She was seventeen
at the time, he was thirty-one. He’d brought her to America, first New York City, then a small town in Pennsylvania where
they’d opened a Jewish delicatessen and had a son. They both worked hard from five in the morning until eight in the evening,
Dad in the back baking bagels and bread and strudel, Mom out front waiting on the customers, joking and flirting with them
in a harmless way. Their little boy, Karl, helped out, sweeping or washing dishes or delivering sandwiches to the office building
across the street. Karl spoke German and English and played basketball on the synagogue’s team in the church league. He led
the league in rebounds and was third in scoring. Then one Saturday twelve-year-old Karl didn’t wait for the light to cross
the street because he wanted to get off work early to go see a matinee of
Mysterious Island
. A car pulled out of an alley and killed him. Three years later my parents had me. My mom was thirty-two, my dad was forty-six.
I always felt a little like a replacement model for something that broke; therefore, it was my special responsibility to stay
healthy and keep safe, for my parents’ sake.

While my mom dragged me to Disneyland and
Roseanne
in an effort to cheer me up, my dad was back home in Pennsylvania baking. He was 5 feet tall, 76 years old. During World
War II he hadn’t bothered to get the deferment because he thought he was too short for the army. When they took him anyway,
he’d actually wet his pants right there. They pressured him into being a belly-gunner, the riskiest job in the service, because
he was so small and would fit snugly in those little bubbles under the planes. On the day he was to be shipped out to join
his flight crew, a colonel asked if anyone spoke German and he raised his hand. Actually, he spoke only a little Yiddish,
which he’d picked up from his Polish father, but it was close enough to fool the colonel and they reassigned him to army intelligence
to translate captured German mail.

Now Dad rose every morning at three o‘clock and drove
into town to begin the baking for the day. Then Mom would drive into town and open the store for the customers. By then the
first batch of donuts and sweet rolls would be done and her regulars would pour in for breakfast and a chat. Mom would make
them laugh and they’d be on their way, full and happy. Mom was definitely the star attraction there, the one-woman show that
had been running for forty years.

I hadn’t wanted Mom to come out here because I knew my father wouldn’t come with her. A few years ago he’d had a triple bypass
and since then he’d been terrified of flying. Two years ago they’d gotten on a plane to visit me for a vacation and he’d gotten
right off again. They’d taken a train instead. This year his health had not been good and he wasn’t up to even a train ride.
He depended on my mother, not so much physically—he was still a strong man hard at work every day—but emotionally. Without
her around he would probably end up doing the same thing every night: wander the local mall, eat Chinese food, and go to the
cineplex to watch movies he’d already seen. For Mom to come see me would cause more family pain than healing. At least that’s
what I’d told her.

But here she was. And here we were, waiting to see
Roseanne
. Francine had gotten me the tickets. Her husband was an entertainment attorney who represented the comedian doing the warm-up
of the audience. Once Francine heard about Shaft, she called to apologize. “My God, I had no idea, Season. I swear. He looked
healthy in the store. He was beating the crap out of the other kittens. I feel awful. Look, I want to make it up to you. You
like
Roseanne?”

“There,” Mom pointed. A woman with a clipboard was talking to people, checking her list. “She’ll know.” Before I could stop
her, Mom scooted over to the woman and flashed her VIP badge as if she were the Sheriff of Tombstone. The woman checked her
list, smiled, waved her
through. Mom turned toward me with a big grin and gestured for me to follow.

Inside the building we were ushered to our seats. We sat on long bleachers. Many of the seats had masking tape stuck to the
backrests with names on them. Our seats had Francine’s last name. The warm-up comic came over and introduced himself to Mom
and me, chatted about Francine. Mom exchanged jokes and wisecracks with him and he seemed genuinely amused. He even kissed
her hand. Then, midway through his routine with the studio audience, he introduced my mother to the crowd and he and Mom started
in doing the same bit as if they’d been rehearsing for years and planned this. The audience thought it was hysterical. She
was pretty funny, I had to admit. At the end, Mom bowed to the audience and they gave her a big hand.

After that, the show itself was a bit anticlimactic. Halfway through the taping Roseanne and John Goodman came out and joked
with the audience about how their diets were making them crazy. Then she pretended to fire him and he put her in a headlock
and gave her scalp nuggies.

On the drive home Mom said, “They seem like nice people. Very
real
, don’t you think?”

The next day we were watching Jenny Jones. We’d already watched Sally, Geraldo, and Jerry Springer. Jenny had people on who
had been bullied as children and were so traumatized that they’d never gotten over it. Today Jenny was giving them the opportunity
to confront and tell off those former childhood bullies.

Mom was munching on a huge tin of popcorn one of my patients had recently sent me, I guess as a consolation gift. I’d gotten
a lot of gifts since Tim had died, and frankly I’d never known that gift-giving was a part of the protocol if someone died.
Maybe the idea was to shove as much stuff as quickly as possible into the void the dead person
created, like stopping up a hole in a dam. Sometimes I laughed when I thought about people discussing what to buy me. What
do you get for someone whose fiancé blew away five people before being gunned down by the police? A kitten? Tickets to
Roseanne?
Popcorn?

“You like these shows?” Mom asked.

I sensed a trap, so I just shrugged. I didn’t want to admit to liking them, though I did. Sometimes Tim and I would watch
them together and try to guess which of the four most typical comments the outraged audience member would say: (a) “What about
the children? The children come first”; (b) “Communication is the most important thing”; (c) “You people just have no morals”;
or (d) “If he were my man, I’d kick his sorry butt right out the door.”