Falling Angels (3 page)

What if it had been Sandy? On the way back from Uncle Eugene and Aunt Betty’s, Norma had this thought and pulled her little sister over to her and held her until they were home.

Another thought that kept crossing Norma’s mind was their brother’s age: twelve. Twelve in February if he had lived. She figured it out from the date of the newspaper and how old the story said he was when he fell. He would have played with her—catch, football, road hockey. The two of them would have played games girls don’t play and boys don’t play with her. Twelve. A twelve-year-old brother is what she’d have had now, if their mother hadn’t dropped him by accident.

Lou didn’t think it was an accident, but she also let their mother off the hook, because who wouldn’t have thrown that damn baby? which Lou now envisioned as their father. A baby
him
—the brush cut, the shot nerves. Always bawling. At the same time she was furious with their father for not having saved it. Why didn’t he? When he was in the war, he ran from cover and saved a man being shot at. In Mary Jane’s bedroom she tried to whack him one with the hammer, but before she could, he got it away from her, threw her over his knee and spanked her. Then he dragged her down the hall and ordered her to tell Uncle Eugene and Aunt Betty she was sorry. But by then she was thinking,“I’m a doll” (she had turned herself into a doll), so how could she cry or speak or be bad, let alone be sorry? He spanked her again. He kept spanking her until Uncle Eugene hauled him off into the kitchen, where in a low voice that they nevertheless heard out in the hall, he explained about the newspaper cutting downstairs. Their father said,“Jesus fucking Christ”—on Christmas Day. When he came back out
of the kitchen, he stalked over to the closet and began throwing out their coats and mittens and hats. Their mother’s pillbox hat rolled down the three stairs into the living room. “Get dressed,” he said.

“What about dinner?” Aunt Betty screamed.

In the car Lou tugged the back of their mother’s fur collar. She wanted their mother to speak, even if it was only to whisper “Don’t,” but their mother pretended not to feel anything, and her face in the rearview mirror was dreamy. Lou fell back against the seat. Beside her, Norma and Sandy whispered. Lou looked out her window and let her eyes fill at the unfairness of the spanking and of being the daughter of their father. His tantrums. His yelling and complaining. All his rules. The minute he came back from work, she and Norma and Sandy had better be lined up in the front hall for inspection, or else, and if they didn’t pass muster, he ordered them to wash or change on the double. What other father did this? After inspection he went outside and looked up and down the street for something to get in an uproar about: the neighbours’ dandelions, their dirty cars, their unshovelled driveways, their noisy kids.

She was glad that the baby of him died. She knew that their mother threw it. But for some reason she kept her mouth shut the rest of the day, kept it shut even now, talking about it with Norma.

Sandy climbed into Norma’s bed, under the covers. She made a slow, unfurling motion with her arms. “Mommy
threw
our brother over Niagara Falls,” she said wistfully.

“Dropped
him over,” Norma said.

“It was a tragic accident,” Lou snapped from the next bed. She didn’t want the damn kid to start crying and get them in trouble.

“Can you tell us a story?” Sandy asked her.

“What about?”

“About David.”

Lou sighed. “Oh, okay.” She waited until her sisters had climbed into her bed, one on either side of her. “It came to pass,” she said in her quiet, expressive storytelling voice,“that a woman had a boy child that she wanted to save from being murdered by the king, so she covered him with slime and put him in a basket amongst the bulrushes.”

“No, that’s Moses,” Sandy said.

“Yeah,” Lou said, realizing it was. “I know.”

Sandy woke up first. She was curled into Norma’s stomach and looking straight at Lou’s face, which had a peaceful aspect that Sandy had never seen when Lou was awake. Eight years later, lying on a vibrating bed in the middle of twin brothers, Sandy would open her eyes from a dream that she wasn’t sleeping between those brothers but between her sisters. “It’s not nymphomania!” she would declare and then cry her heart out with relief and for old times.

Now, very gently, she braided a lock of Lou’s long dark hair around her own wrist. She made a Lou-hair bracelet. She was very quiet and gentle, but Lou woke up anyway and said,“The
TV’S
not on.” Sandy shook off the bracelet. “Something’s the matter,” Lou said, jumping out of bed and running down the hall to their parents’ bedroom.

Their father was standing at the window, reading the thermometer. “Well, your mother’s gone and gotten herself the flu,” he said, as if that didn’t take the cake.

Norma and Sandy came into the room and went over to stand beside Lou, who was feeling their mother’s forehead. Their mother was asleep on her back, all the blankets thrown off.

“She’s burning up,” Lou whispered.

“Even her hand,” Norma whispered, stroking it.

Sandy felt the other hand, the tapered fingers that were smooth and ladylike from no work. “We’re sorry,” she
whispered. She assumed that their mother’s fever was caused by them finding out about their brother.

The rest of the day, although he was home, their father had them doing the checking-up on her. “When you’re straight commission, you can’t afford to get sick,” he said. She never really woke up. They didn’t think about taking her to the bathroom, and sometime after lunch she wet the bed. Then their father was forced to come in and carry her out into the hall, where he changed her nightgown while Norma and Lou changed the sheets. That night he slept on the chesterfield.

The next morning she was awake when they went in to see her. She didn’t speak, but she looked at each of them in turn as if she had something important to say. “What?” they urged her. They brought her a bowl of Frosted Flakes and tried to feed her, but she wouldn’t chew or even swallow until Lou got the idea of putting a plastic Flav-R straw in her mouth. After she had sipped up all the milk in the bowl, they walked her to the bathroom, Lou supporting her on one side and Norma on the other. Lou and Norma rubbed deodorant under her arms on top of her nightgown and brushed her teeth as she sat on the toilet, and Sandy combed her long, wavy hair that was as golden as her own, that she twined with her own to enjoy the likeness. All the while they asked her if she was all right and begged her to answer, but she could hardly keep her eyes open.

“Shovel those liquids into her,” their father ordered when he phoned from work. He suggested soup, Postum, evaporated milk, juice. Any liquid in the house except for her “coffee.”

For six days she was the same. Sleeping most of the time, feverish, thrashing, incoherent. Obviously upset. “I wonder what she’s dreaming about?” Norma said.

“Television shows,” Lou decided. “All mixed up together. Hoss and Lassie and the Beaver.”

“Yeah,” Norma said. “And they’re all fighting, and the show never ends.”

It didn’t occur to the girls that their mother should have a visit from a doctor. Nobody who wasn’t related to them ever visited. Aunt Betty phoned once, to see if everyone had recovered from Christmas, and Norma told her that their mother had the flu, but she never thought to ask for help. She and Lou did everything around the house anyway. The only job Sandy did was the mending. That started one day when, without being asked, she sewed patches on the worn-through elbows of their father’s red flannel shirt. It turned out that she could darn, too. She had their mother’s talent that way. The fact that she was a miniature of their mother meant that this was no big marvel. It also meant that nobody pressed other chores on her—nobody imagined that she might be good for anything else.

“How’s the food situation?” Aunt Betty asked.

“We’re running out of stuff for Mommy to drink,” Norma admitted.

“Well,
there’s
a blessing in disguise!” Aunt Betty screamed.

In fact, it wasn’t just juice and soup and milk that they were out of, it was almost everything. Lou phoned their father to tell him, and he dropped by on his lunch hour with some grocery money.

Usually Lou didn’t mind doing the shopping. It got her out of the house, and she always picked up a few chocolate bars for herself. But she minded today. She was worried about being away in case their mother died or had to go to the bathroom. And there had been a snowstorm and then freezing rain, so that coming home, it took all her strength to pull the loaded wagon across the shopping-centre parking lot, over bumps where tire tracks had frozen in the snow. Halfway across she had to stop and rest on the running board of a truck.

“I’ve got too many jobs,” she said to herself. “I’m carrying too much on my shoulders.”

She decided that she didn’t give a damn what was happening at home, she was going to sit here for a few minutes. She took
out one of her Mars bars, and as she was ripping off the wrapper, she noticed a boy who was crossing the road, walking right out into traffic and holding up his hand for the cars to brake. He started coming toward her, and then she recognized him. Lance Nipper. The boy with the metal plate in his head.

She watched him closely. He was as unpredictable as a police dog. The plate was supposed to make him normal after he got a head injury in a car accident, but instead it made him different, a loner without fear, and it left him crazy for other metal things—nails and screws that he carried in his pockets; even knives and guns, somebody said.

When he was only a few feet away, he gave her a glance. He would have kept walking.

But she had a compulsion to stop him. His dangerous glance struck her as a dare, and she was in no mood right at that minute to back down.

“Hi,” she said.

He halted, looked at her. “Gimme a bite,” he said.

“You can have a whole one,” she said, standing up and pulling another chocolate bar out of a shopping bag.

He took it and tore the wrapper off with his teeth. There were bits of black hair on his upper lip and chin, like how you’d draw them on a jailbird. He
was
a jailbird; he’d been to reform school for stealing a car and driving it to the airport.

“You’re Field or something,” he said.

“Yeah, Lou Field.” How did he know her? she wondered, thrilling. He was in grade seven, three years ahead of her. He’d failed twice anyway. “You’re Lance Nipper,” she said. She watched him eat, surprised at how handsome his head was close up. She couldn’t see any scars or lumps. She’d expected him to have a bit of a ridge where the plate went in. The only noticeable side effect was how his black hair shone blue, like black comic-book hair.

“What’d you buy?” he asked.

“Oh, just groceries.” Out of habit, forgetting it was true, she added,“My mother’s sick.”

He crumpled up his wrapper and shoved it in the truck’s tailpipe. “Maybe I’ll come to your house,” he said.

“No!” she said quickly. “You can’t because of my mother.” What she meant was because of their father. Their father knew about Lance, said he was the garbage you got in the subdivision when you let apartments go up. If their father found out that Lance had even stepped on their property, he’d call the police.

“No big deal,” Lance said. “You come to my place.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“But my groceries.”

“Bring ‘em along.”

She looked at the bulky paper bags leaning against each other in her old red wagon. She was more inclined to ditch them, along with every other dissuasion.

It was as if she were hypnotized. Magnetized. Trying to keep up with him, pulling along the wagon after all, she imagined she felt his metal plate tugging at the zipper on her jacket and the buckles on her boots. He jingled the screws and nails in his pockets. From the back he looked like a short man.

In the lobby of his apartment building he lifted the intercom phone and punched one of the buttons. “Lemme in,” he said.

There was a loud buzzing. As he opened the door, he told her to leave the wagon, but she worried about her groceries being stolen. He motioned her over, and while she held the door ajar, he drew a couple of nails out of his jeans pocket and stuck them through the tops of two bags. “Nobody’ll take your groceries now,” he said. Nails and screws in unlikely places were his calling card.

She hesitated. “Not everyone knows what they mean,” she said.

“Anybody who’d steal your groceries knows,” he said.

His mother was in curlers, lying on the chesterfield and watching t?. She didn’t look up at them coming into the apartment. They went down the hall to a closed door with a Keep Out sign beneath a drawing of a skull and crossbones that Lou thought she could have drawn way better. When they were both in the room, he reached his arm around her back, and she thought dizzily,“He’s going to kiss me,” but he was shutting the door, locking it. There was a hook lock above the handle.

She sat on the edge of his bed. The bedspread had a brick pattern. Brown and red bricks with white mortar oozing out. On the dresser were five big jars with his nails and screws in them, sorted by size.

“How old are ya, anyway?” he asked, leaning against the dresser and unsnapping his jacket.

“Ten,” she lied.

“Ya look around eight.” He slipped his hand down the back of his blue jeans and pulled out a cigarette that had already been half smoked. From his other back pocket he withdrew a stick match and struck it on his jeans zipper.

“I’m hooked on the damn things,” Lou said.

He glanced at her, that glance like the sign on his door, then devoted himself to smoking. He inhaled the way their father did, sucking as if the smoke were stuck halfway down the cigarette. On the t? in the living room a man said,“The wife most likely to be kissed always puts beer on her list.”

She was afraid. Not of him, standing there smoking, but of something else, something she couldn’t put her finger on. The clock beside the bed said ten after four. Their mother would have needed to go to the bathroom by now. “How about a drag?” she asked.