The Belief in Angels (29 page)

This is the part where I wake up and realize my brother didn’t drown.

As I walk up the porch steps I see schoolbooks stacked on the first step. They seem vaguely familiar. I pick up the one on top, an English textbook. My name is written, in what I recognize as my writing, on the inside of the cover. I pick up the rest of the books and notebooks that lay stacked underneath and bring them in. I can hear the sound of the TV in the den and I walk in that direction.

It still seems like I’ve been sleeping, but now I’ve begun to wake up in my mind and body.

I glance up at the clock when I pass through the kitchen and I can see it’s almost six o’clock. The ending theme song for
Lost in Space
plays on the TV in the
den. David’s hair, longer than I ever remember seeing it, curls around his head. He looks like an overgrown cherub.

David catches me peeking and asks me what’s for dinner. I walk back into the kitchen and open the refrigerator, which contains a plate of broiled chicken and sliced carrots in a saucepan dropped directly into the refrigerator from the stove. I have no idea how it got there, who made it, or where it came from.

I decide to see if Wendy’s upstairs. As I climb, I wonder why, if I’m stuck in a dream, I still feel all of my body and the railing on the stairs?

There are colors. I read that in dreams most people only see black and white. I remember a few where I saw spots of color, but not so many like this. I feel wide awake and everything seems particularly clear now.

At the top of the stairs I knock on Wendy’s closed door.

“What?” Wendy says.

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah.”

From inside the doorway her room looks the same, but it seems different. There’s no cigarette or pot stink embedded in the fabric of the room. It smells like sandalwood and roses. She lies on the bed reading. Her hair, cut shorter, poufs out in curls all around her head, exactly like David’s. They could be brother and sister.

I can’t think what to say.

“I didn’t know if you were here. Where’s Jack?”

Wendy stares at me and pauses before she responds.

“He’s still in California,” she says, like I should know already.

“Right,” I say, after a beat. I add, “I wanted to know, where in California?”

“He’s in Big Sur.”

“Where’s that?” I ask, like I want to know. “It’s northern California. Almost San Francisco.”

That’s where Rice-A-Roni comes from.

“I’m gonna make the chicken and vegetables in the refrigerator for us for dinner, if it’s all right?”

Wendy stares at me again.

“Yeah, go ahead. I figured we would have the leftovers from last night. You’ve got to quit making so much food when you cook dinner, Jules. It’s three until Jack comes back. You keep making too much food.”

“Okay,” I say, and I leave.

I stand at the top of the stairs. I can’t remember making dinner last night, or waking up this morning, or even where I was before I walked up onto our front porch a few minutes ago.

This keeps happening to me since Moses drowned.

Mostly I lose time for a few hours, which used to happen when I fall into my drawing and painting. This time it seems like it’s been much longer. I can’t remember anything that’s happened in the past few days. I start shaking.

I try to recall the last thing I remember.

Liver Lips.

The teacher I have a big crush on, who I called Liver Lips Louie, called me out into the school hallway to talk to me. Liver Lips just started his first year teaching contract at Withensea Middle School. His lips are the fullest, most sensuous lips I’ve ever seen on a man. When he moved them to speak I became instantly distracted until the content of his words drew me back to reality.

He wanted to talk because Wendy had called the school principal complaining that I’d asked her to purchase notebook paper for homework assignments. She was high, I’m certain, and yelled at the principal, saying we were “too poor to purchase school materials.” The principal instructed Liver Lips to provide writing paper for our homework.

It was all mortifying: the lie, the fact she was probably high, and that my favorite teacher got messed up with her ridiculousness. I’m nervous enough in the presence of his lips. To explain Wendy’s weirdness to this guy was more than I could take. I burst into tears and told him my mother acted “zany” sometimes, which I hoped sufficed as an explanation. He acted nice about it and told me to take as much paper as I needed for homework.

I can’t remember what happened the rest of the day or during the days following my Liver Lips encounter. I don’t remember Jack leaving for Big Sur. I can’t even remember what today is.

It’s a school day, I know, because my schoolbooks were on the porch and Lost in Space, which plays in weekday re-runs now, was on TV when I came in.

The calendar on my wall says April and the last day I’ve crossed is the fifteenth. This means it has only been a few days since it happened. As I stare out the window at the lilac bush, I see there are full blooms on the branches. Which means it’s not April. It’s close to my birthday. That’s when the lilacs bloom.

Terrified, I start trembling again. I can’t understand what’s happening to me.

I decide to go to the kitchen and check that calendar. I run down the stairs. The word May blares out at me from the top of the calendar on the kitchen cabinet wall.

I think for a minute before I poke my head around the corner to the den and ask David, “What day is it?”

David doesn’t look up from the TV. I ask again, “Hey, what day is it?”

“Friday.”

“No, what’s the date?”

David speaks like a robot. “May the tenth, nineteen seventy-four.”

“Duh,” I say in response, although I’m glad he added the year.

I walk back into the kitchen and start heating the food from the refrigerator. It’s like my head will explode, but it’s also like something else, something calming, as if I’ve stumbled on a big secret. If no one else knows I’ve been gone a long time, maybe I can time travel? Maybe this is what culture shock is?

I bring Wendy her plate in her room and leave. I tell David his dinner is ready and he walks up the stairs. I realize he’s enormous. About six feet tall. I stare. He gives me a mean stare back. I turn back to the stove and dish him out a plate. Then I sit with him and eat dinner.

The space between us at the kitchen bar used to be Moses’s seat. I’m aware of the space between us. I’m aware of everything. I notice all the details. The crumbs on the place mat. The stain on the kitchen wall in front of my stool. The scrubby texture of my wool sweater. The sounds David makes as he chews and drinks his milk. I taste my food and think I haven’t really tasted anything in a long time.

David asks, “Are you still mad at me?”

I don’t know what he means.

“I’m not mad at you. Why do you think that?”

He stops eating.

“Because you never talk to me anymore.”

David never acts like he cares about what I think. I wonder if I really haven’t talked to him or anyone for a month. How could this happen? I mean, how could I go for such a long time and not talk, or not talk much, or whatever I’ve been doing?

I’m also wild with curiosity and want to know exactly what’s been going on. I’m afraid of what might have happened while I’ve been checked out. Does everyone else know what happened to me? What have I been doing all this time? Did they put me in the loony bin? I can’t even remember how my schoolbooks got on the front porch or what I was doing wandering around up at Stillton. I’m in Withensea Middle School now, aren’t I? I haven’t gone backwards, right?

I try to breathe normally.

“Come on, I’ve talked to you a bit, right?” I ask.

“Yeah, a bit, but not much, and you’ve been acting … I don’t know …”

I wait for him to finish the sentence, but he doesn’t.

We continue eating dinner and not saying anything.

“Well, I’m not mad at you, and I think I’ve just been sad about Moses,” I finally say.

“Me too,” David says, and we finish our meal in silence.

After dinner I go straight to my room to think about everything. I decide I’ve gone off my rocker or something since Moses drowned. Maybe this is what people do when someone they love dies. They go away for a while. Still, I’m freaked out.

I wonder if Wendy slipped me another hit of LSD or something that makes you lose time.

They don’t make drugs that last that long, silly.

But maybe my brain got fried like that egg on the TV?

I scan the room. On my dresser, perfumes and knickknacks neatly line up exactly the way I remember them, but they’re covered with dust. Piles of papers are stacked against the walls. School papers, old drawings, and books. It seems as though I simply dumped things in piles. The walls are exactly the same. The same poems, paintings, and drawings I taped on them a long time ago.

Same crappy, soiled-white chenille bedspread on the bed.

Same old Persian rug on the floor.

In the corner I find a huge stack of library books. They’re stamped with return dates for May 20
^th,
next week. So I know I’ve gone to the library recently since you can only check out books for two weeks.

I jump up and run to the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, and study myself. Same pale face, same freckles, same everything else on my face, but my cheeks are hollow. My whole body seems thinner and longer than the last time I saw it.

I got even skinnier. Jeez. This is totally depressing.

Maybe I was abducted and returned by aliens? I make a plan to go to the library and check out books on aliens the next morning.

Wendy calls out from the landing that she’s going out to a friend’s. She needs to use the bathroom. I inhale a deep breath, step out, and slide by Wendy and into my room, where I wait.

When I hear her go downstairs I run to the stair landing window and watch as she climbs into the van parked in the driveway.

Her new car?

It resembles a big, brown, rectangular railroad car. Orange, red, and yellow paint accent a brown base, and the top has an accordion part that’s popped out. It definitely looks like it belongs next to the hearse. The psychedelic colors match. I wait until she drives away before going downstairs and finishing clearing the plates and cleaning up the kitchen.

David is back in the den, lounging, and I sit with him and watch TV. Everything is shaky and the TV programs help me calm down even though he wants to watch
The Brady Bunch,
which I hate. Luckily it isn’t one of the boring episodes. I go to sleep early.

When I wake up Wendy’s car isn’t in the driveway. I figure she slept over at her friend’s. I dress to go to the library.

I open my closet and see it still holds all of the same clothes I remember, but when I try them on most of them don’t fit anymore. Too big. The things still fitting are a few pairs of jeans and a few blouses. Lining the floor—my same shoes. I put on a pair of sneakers, but pull them off immediately because they hurt my toes. They’re all too small. The only pair of shoes that fit are the open-toed earth shoes I wore yesterday. Also, there isn’t any underwear in my drawer.

Maybe it’s all downstairs in the laundry room. Maybe I haven’t been wearing underwear for a while.

I pick up one of the library books from the pile on the floor.
Postern of Fate
by Agatha Christie. I can’t remember borrowing it, but pieces of my memory are coming back now. I remember walks to the library, down the hill, near where Leigh lives.

Leigh. I can’t remember talking with Leigh or hanging out with her lately. I go back to the memory of going to the library to see if I can remember her there. I remember talking with the librarian about the books I checked out, but I don’t remember Leigh being there. I remember carrying big stacks of books home from the library, but I can’t remember reading them.

This is scary.

I run downstairs. David sits in the den eating a huge bowl of Wheaties and watching cartoons. My stomach rumbles and I realize I’m really hungry. I pour myself an enormous bowl of Raisin Bran and sit in the kitchen by myself to eat.

David comes into the kitchen and asks, “Is Mom back yet?”

I stare at David, amazed at how much he’s grown.

“Nope, I don’t think so. I think she stayed out all night?”

“Probably.” He sounds annoyed.

David grabs more Wheaties and milk from the refrigerator. As he opens the refrigerator door a rancid smell wafts out I didn’t notice before. Something has turned. I’ll have to check that out later.

David sits down at the counter to eat with me.

I decide to pump him for information, but I know I need to be tricky so he doesn’t figure out anything.

“So, how long do you think Jack will be in Big Sur?”

“I don’t know. I hope forever.”

David’s never liked Jack, though Jack doesn’t bother me. I decide to agree with David so he’ll tell me more about what’s been happening.

“Yeah,” I say. “He’s a pain.”

“I don’t think it’s fair she buys him a big CB antenna. She bought him all that stuff—the van, the camera stuff, and a whole darkroom full of things downstairs. Meantime, we have nothing. She won’t even buy me a new tennis racket.”

David plays tennis now.

“She likes him better than us. I don’t even think she cares what we do or if we die.” He’s quiet again.

I don’t know what to say to him. I agree with what he’s saying, but I think it will make him more depressed if I tell him so, like agreeing will make it seem truer in a way or something.

“I wish they had let us go to the funeral,” I finally say.

David doesn’t answer. He pours out more Wheaties and examines the back of the box on the counter.