Resurrection Man (26 page)

And Dante did have his strong points, of course. His wit, his charm. There was nothing wrong with his mind, if he ever chose to use it on something. If he could just develop some kind of, of . . .structural integrity. A husband good enough for her would have to be capable of bearing more pressure than Dante could right now. He was too loose, too flimsy an aggregation of parts.

Although the materials were very promising. . . After all, he loved her, didn't he? And for that matter, as she had wryly admitted to herself, he was very good-looking—which a potential mate should try to be, if at all possible.

Chop, chop, chop: vengefully Laura hacked up the bits of her already mutilated cabbage. "In case he hasn't told you," (chop) "Dante is quite convinced he's about to" (chop!) "die," she snapped. "I imagine that would put a hitch in any wedding plans."

Aunt Sophie absorbed this information. "Oh. So that's what he thinks, is it?" She nodded slowly to herself. Keeping her cigarette in her mouth, she rinsed her hands and then turned to bring a cake out of the refrigerator. "Lemon," she said, setting it on the scarred kitchen table to warm up. "Gwen's favorite. I made it yesterday."

"Yesterday . . . ?" Once again Laura felt the weight of Aunt Sophie's old gray eyes. "You knew," she said slowly. "You knew what was going to happen to Dante's dad."

Aunt Sophie shrugged. "I guessed." She returned to the stove and flipped her schnitzel over.

"Your coins," Laura said, remembering the stories Dante had told about his fortune-telling Hungarian aunt.

Wait— Had the coins shown Aunt Sophie something about Dante? About Dante and herself getting married, for instance? "I remember I was here last New Year's Eve and you were telling fortunes with them"—Laura frowned—"but you said everything was going to be great. You said it would be a wonderful year."

Aunt Sophie grunted. "So I lied. What the hell am I going to say on New Year's Eve, eh? What's the point in ruining a nice party?" She shook her head, and absentmindedly tapped her cigarette ash into the kitchen sink.

"Couldn't you have done something? Sent him to the hospital for a checkup or something?"

"Well, I thought about it, but then decided, Nah, hey—let the little bastard die," Aunt Sophie snapped.

Laura swallowed. "Sorry." Of course Aunt Sophie would have done everything she could to save her brother. Laura flushed and returned to her cabbage, although she had already reduced it to wafer-thin filaments.

"It's not so damn easy as all that. Oh, sure, when I was younger I used to think: Hell, I know what this means. I'd better jump in and straighten out Mary Furillo before she marries Jackson, the toad; or, I'll just tell Dante to let Jet do the sawing, but you can never be certain what the coins mean, heh? And the more you know, the less it seems you can do anything about it. And the worse the news, the less anybody listens. . . ." Sophie trailed off into silence. "I asked Anton about it once," she said at last. "Not in so many words, of course. He was always so smart. 'The Cassandra effect,' he called it."

She stopped, and took another drag on the cigarette between her shaking fingers. "There was nothing I could do," she said at last.

Nothing she could do. Not just about her little brother, Laura guessed, from the weary way she spoke the words. Nothing she could do about Anton, and Pendleton, and Jet, and all the tragedies of her long life.

Aunt Sophie stood at the stove, looking back in time. "When I was a girl, there wasn't any of this," she said. "My father could push a coin through your ear and pull it out your nose, but it was all a trick. That's what made it fun. Because when the magic is real, then all the rules are gone. Nothing's safe anymore." She shook her head. "We're lost. ...Prophets and angels, charms and voodoo dolls and walk-aways and finger-spells: where the hell is it going to end, heh? Look at Columbus, or Magellan: looking back, historians call you an explorer, but at the time, you're just lost. We know so much, and we can do so little. We learn all these secrets and they don't help a damn."

"You know who you sound like?" Laura laid down her knife and met Aunt Sophie's eyes square on. "You sound just like Jet."

*   *   *

Well, that observation hadn't gone down too well, but Laura was still thinking about it an hour later, after lunch had been eaten and the dishes cleared away.

The whole family had this mythology about Jet, the Outsider. The Changeling. And yet, to her eyes, he was just as inextricably part of the family as Dante or Sarah or Aunt Sophie herself. He had a room on the first floor, just underneath Dante's. He had taken half the pictures now hanging on the parlor wall: Dante sculling on the river, Sarah at her graduation, the older Ratkays working in the garden.

Consider the photograph of Mrs. Ratkay's cherished Lombardy poplars. It was a black and white shot he must have taken lying on his back, looking straight up into their arms as they towered gracefully into a burnished sky, their leaves glinting, like coins. Obviously he had taken it to please Gwendolyn. What difference was there, really, between that photograph and the little clay pencil-holder on the mantelpiece (too shallow to hold pencils and so filled with mints left over from Halloween) that Sarah had made her mum in her Grade 1 art class?

Really, the whole business made Laura itchy and impatient. At this very moment, according to Dante, Jet was out in the City, looking for the Sending he thought had stolen his soul. Why he was doing such an absurd thing when he should be at home feeling wretched with the rest of his family, Laura couldn't fathom. She could have kicked him. A family, a real family with brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, old wars and stories and secrets: that was too precious a thing to abandon for the sake of a little personal growth.

Compounding her impatience was the uncomfortable feeling that she should really be at work. After finally deciding on a favorable orientation for Mr. Hudson's solarium, she had gone back to her initial plans and found to her dismay that there was something dead in them. Oh, the extension as she had sketched it was bright and airy and altogether attractive, but it seemed somehow. . . superficial.

The problem was, she didn't really know that much about Mr. Hudson. Here, now: essence of Ratkay was everywhere throughout this house. Jet's photographs and Dante's high-school baseball trophy; two posters advertising an old show of Sarah's rolled up and stashed behind a coat stand; the smell of borscht and fried onions; Gwendolyn's historical novels lying open on every other table; the imposing tallboy in the dining room filled with bottles of whisky and claret, gin and sherry and Tokay and good French wine. Like Scotch aging slowly in an oaken cask, Dante's family had aged together within these walls.

Dante's sister Sarah startled her, running down the stairs and into the parlor. Her face was white and she was crying. "I need your help," she said.

Coming into Sarah's room, the first thing Laura thought was: bad luck, to sleep in a room with no mirrors.

There was a vast flowered Magyar quilt on the bed and a set of red-checked curtains that seemed vaguely ironic. A beautiful collection of dolls sat atop Sarah's dresser: an English girl with blue eyes and a porcelain face, a Spanish senorita with a black dress and a crimson fan, and a sharp-featured doll with the most incredible fall of copper-colored hair. A small pile of neatly folded clothing lay beside each of them, along with a selection of miniature combs, bows, ribbons, and barrettes.

"I heard the thump, thump, thump, from downstairs," Sarah said quietly. "I couldn't think what it could be, so I came up to look. When I was just outside the door, the thumping was louder and I could hear the bedsprings squeaking. It stopped as soon as I opened the door. That's what I saw."

A pair of muddy shoes lay discarded on the floor at the foot of the bed. They were dingy white canvas sneakers that had seen a lot of action. They might have fit an eight-year-old girl.

"A niece?" Laura suggested. "Cousin? Someone visiting for the funeral?"

"My daughter," Sarah said.

"I didn't know you—"

"I don't." Sarah closed her eyes. "It's just that we don't know anything about ghosts, you see. Even Dante hasn't got a clue. We were brought up as atheists, on moral grounds. But I can't deal with it anymore. Every time I turn around these days, she's there."

"Now, hold on," Laura began uneasily. She really didn't want Sarah to confide in her. "I don't know anything about ghosts either."

"You know more than we do," Sarah said fiercely. "I've heard Dante talk about it. The Chinese know what to do with angels. He told me you burn charms to appease your ancestors every day."

"Now, wait a minute," Laura said indignantly. "You make me sound like I just dropped off the boat from Easter Island."

"I mean it's obvious what's going on. It's just like a minotaur, only instead of fear conjuring a monster, it's guilt; it's my guilt coming back, but I know that already. The lesson's over. Class dismissed!" Sarah cried fiercely.

Laura winced. Despite her best efforts, she hadn't managed to dodge Sarah's secret. "You're being haunted by a ghost," she said, resigning herself.

"Not. . . haunted exactly," Sarah said. She glanced back at the shoes. "More like pestered."

Laura laughed. "At least she took off her shoes before bouncing on your bed!"

"Yeah." Sarah tried to grin. "I don't know where she learned her manners."

"Not from the father, I assume."

Sarah snorted.

Laura reached out to touch the red-haired doll; paused; looked to Sarah for permission.

Sarah nodded. "The father was slime. He had incredibly low standards for women, though, which at the time I confused with love. His condoms were bright green and glowed in the dark. I'm not kidding. I figured there might be trouble when I read the small print at the bottom of the package: 'Novelty Only. Do Not Use During Intercourse.' "

Guiltily Laura laughed.

Sarah sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the sweep of poplars outside her window. "Technically it was a miscarriage, but it might as well have been an abortion. Pro-life people think women don't care, you know that? They think we just toddle down to the clinic on a lunch break, whistle gaily to ourselves, and then hustle off to our next date." She touched the cameo pinned to the front of her vest. "Well it isn't like that. You don't forget."

Laura held the doll in her arms. She was strangely heavy, much heavier than Laura had expected. Her arms and legs didn't have the roly-poly quality so many dolls did; they were the wiry, active limbs of a two-year-old. Her sharp nose tilted up at the end and there was mischief in her green glass eyes.

"It's not as if I'm stupid," Sarah pointed out. "I always knew what I was doing to myself. I kept track of how old she was. I worked out the day she would have been born—not just the due date, but a week later because the first child is usually late. I knew it was wrong to torment myself, but I had to do it. I deserved it. And every year when her birthday came around I always thought I should do something: put flowers on a grave, throw a party, get drunk. Something. Last year I had to do a show at Jokerz."

Laura looked at her.

Sarah almost smiled. "I was doing great, right up to the moment I spat on a guy in the front row."

Laura winced.

"And it's not as if it doesn't happen to ten thousand girls a year in this country. Or more," Sarah said restlessly. "God, that's the part that galls me. Who would have thought I'd be so bad at it? Me, of all people? I've always been tough, I've always been a fighter. And this wasn't even a real tragedy. I mean, it wasn't like Aunt Sophie, who lost her husband and her child when they were both real. There are women out there whose real flesh and blood children are hit by cars or kidnapped or, or whatever. They manage to go on. But I can't."

"You only see them from the outside," Laura said softly. She wondered what she had felt like, sitting in her mother's lap. "Even the most successful women have their ghosts."

"The whole idea of ghosts used to terrify me. Dante thought it was hilarious. He would tell ghost stories to me until Jet made him stop, and then I'd lie in bed at night with my eyes open and the light on for hours. Because it's what might have been, you see? It's unfinished business. It's death itself that scares Dante, but I figure if you go out with your accounts balanced, big deal. We're all going to buy it in the end. But to go out with something horribly wrong, to have that gnawing at you and gnawing at you . . ." Sarah closed her eyes.