The Miracles of Ordinary Men (10 page)

“Timmy.” She crouches beside him and rests her hands against the sidewalk. “Timmy, come home.”

“That's not my name,” he says. “You know
that's not my name, Lilah.”

“I don't understand,” she says. “Tim — I don't know what to do.”

She watches uncertainty flash across his face. “You're not supposed to know. It's not your life.”

“But what about
my life?” Israel Riviera, above her, and blue-white energy in her hands. “What if it's just . . . too big?”

He sucks his chocolate and stares at her for so long she feels the world recede. “We're all small, Lilah,” he says. He takes another bite of chocolate and lets it melt, dribble down his chin. Her sweet maniac. “You have to know that, if you don't know anything else.” He offers a bite of the bar and she takes it, hurt.

“I know plenty of things,” she says. “Don't take that tone with me.”

He hiccups, laughs. “Don't take that tone with
me
.” Then he stares at the ground. He wipes the chocolate against his sleeve. “I'm just trying to keep you safe. You and Mom both.”

“We're not the ones who need to be kept safe!” She's said this too many times. She grabs his arms and steels her heart against the sudden rush of panic in his eyes, the despair. “Tim. There are people who can help you.”

He screams. “Don't touch me!” Then he hits her.
Smack
,
once more in the mouth. She rocks back on her heels just as he scrambles to his feet — a slender young man made huge by the gathered shadows at his back. “No one can help me but God, Delilah. No one.” Then he runs down the street like a terrified rat, quick and small.

—

Tonight, in another dream, she stands before the ocean, on a cliff that sits several hundred feet above the sea. Her palms are filled with grass and sand. Her dream-feet are bare and the shirt she wears belongs — belonged — to her mother.
Reclaim the Night!
A relic from Roberta's frog-marching days, when she was filled with rage and estrogen and Lilah was her unwilling partner in crime. The shirt disappeared years ago but tonight, as she stares out over the water, it is threadbare and soft on her shoulders. In some places the material is so thin you can almost see through it.

A man stands in front of her on the cliff. A slender man, taller than she is, who faces into the sun so that he is a silhouette, his arms stark against the sky. His shoulders remind her of Timothy. Were he to turn his head his eyes would be deepest blue.

“Timothy,” she says. The wind blows her hair into her mouth and the words come out clogged.

The man does not turn around. Instead, he raises his hands until they touch, palms inward, over the top of his head. All Lilah can hear is the ocean, and she watches as the waters rise up to her feet. The man pushes his arms out and the water begins to recede. Lilah stands behind him until the tide is far away and there are rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. Now she hears the air, the faint rustle of wings. She opens her own hands and lets the grass and the sand blow away until they are nothing. Would that she could break and blow away this easily — but even in this dream, she remembers that she's made of sterner stuff
.
She is the rock below that breaks the water.

She wakes weeping, and she can't remember why.

—

On Monday, she wills herself invisible behind the desk, and buries her head in spreadsheets. She steadies her hands as they shake over the keyboard, and counts her times tables, slowly, as one minute moves into the next. Not sure quite what to think, what to feel. Is it fear, that twist in her stomach every time the door opens? Excitement? The flu?

“What's
with
you?” Debbie asks, exasperated, as Lilah blinks into focus for the eighteenth time that morning. “Hello?”

“I'm sorry,” she says, quickly. Statistics. Figures. Absence reports. A moment on a mattress, the certainty that her life was about to explode with power. Or a daydream, and more words lost on her keyboard. That's all. “What did you say?”

Debbie has green eyes, young but shrewd; they have looked through Lilah more than once. “I said — how was your weekend?”

“Fine,” Lilah says. “And yours?”

“
Fine
,” Debbie mimics. “That's all?”

“That's all.”

“How was the date?”

“It was fine, Debbie.”

“You know you'll have to tell me about it eventually.”

“Maybe,” Lilah says. She doesn't look up. “Does Penny have any errands for me today?”

Debbie's snort echoes through the front office. “Not that I know of.”

“I'm sure she'll think of something,” Lilah mutters.

“She wouldn't be Penny if she didn't,” Debbie says, absentmindedly. She flicks her chin at Lilah and frowns. “Why is your neck all red?”

“It's nothing,” Lilah pulls her scarf tight around her neck. “I'm cold. Have I told you how much I hate winter?”

“Multiple times.” Debbie pinches her lips together in a gesture that reminds her of Roberta. Lilah stifles a giggle and turns back to her computer. Spreadsheets. Numbers and lines.

At a quarter to ten, Debbie gets her notepad and goes into the inner office, ready for the morning minutes. But no sooner has the door closed than she's out again, looking both perplexed and highly amused.

“Mr. Riviera wants you to take the minutes,” she says. “That must have been some date.”

“What?”

“He wants you to take the minutes,” Debbie says patiently. “Do you need my steno pad?”

“I can't take minutes,” Lilah stammers. “My shorthand is crap.”

“Really?” Debbie's voice is pointed, still amused. “I thought it was okay.”

Lilah shakes her head. “I don't want special treatment, Debbie. Just — tell them that I'll fuck it up. Screw it up. Whatever.”

“You want me to disobey a direct order from the boss?”

“He won't be mad at you. If he gets angry about anything, he'll be angry at me.”

“Right. And that's supposed to make me feel better.”

“I don't want to be in there. With him. In front of everyone else.”

Debbie does not move. “He can't very well ream you out in front of the entire senior management team.”

“It's not that,” Lilah says wearily. “Could you please just do this for me, Debbie?” She looks up into the other girl's troubled face. “Everything's fine — just tell him I don't see why anything has to change.”

“All right.” Debbie does not look convinced. “And if Penny says anything?”

“Oh.” Right. Penny. “Well, I'll survive.”

Another snort from Debbie's corner. “I'm sure.” Then she goes back into the office. She doesn't come out for two hours.

Mondays are usually quiet, and today is no different. No one calls, and because Penny is in the meeting, Lilah passes the time between her spreadsheets and the Internet. For two hours, she is once more administrative sludge — unremarkable, unimportant. The kind of woman who does her time and counts down the minutes to her break. The employee who doesn't think beyond the weekend.

But it is pretending, only that. As she types she listens for the rise and fall of his voice — there's an entire wall between them and yet she can see him, clear as clear, sitting calm at the head of the table. Talking figures, talking power. The cadence of his accent holding everyone in rapt attention. If she closes her eyes she can smell him, feel his hand around her throat. He's so close that when the door opens, two hours later, and she turns to it like a flower following the sun, she isn't the least bit surprised to see his face. He marches over to her desk and stares down at her.

“Are you avoiding me?” he says.

“No.” She hates the sound of her small voice. “Good morning, Mr. Riviera.”

Israel laughs. “Delilah, I should think we are past that by now.”

Behind him, in the doorway, Penny stands murderous. “We're at work,” Lilah says, her voice low. “I don't want to lose my job.”

“No?” His own voice dips. “Because it is such a wonderful job?” Then he leans against the top corner of her desk and takes her hand. His palm is rough and warm. “Your mother. How is she?”

Lilah blinks, surprised. What is there to say about Roberta? “She's fine. As fine as she could be, I guess.” Her hair grown back now, her thin hands poking holes in Victoria dirt.

“Ah.” His eyes are also shrewd; dark eyes, eyes that have no bottom. “Fine, but not well.”

“She's fine,” Lilah says again. She's confused. Where has this come from? “We're all fine.”

“‘We,'” he says. “You, and your mother. And Timothy.”

“Yes.” She sneaks a glance at Penny, still waiting. “And — Timothy.”

“You are loyal, even though you're angry. Even though they frighten you.”

Lilah scoffs. Debbie, who has come back to her desk, is typing furiously into her computer, her eyes cast low. “They don't
frighten
me.”

“You would do anything for them,” he says softly. “Even now, you are trying to protect them, to keep them happy. That is a very rare thing.”

“It's not. Anyone with a family would do the same.” She wants to yank her hand away. This is so much worse than taking minutes.

Israel shakes his head. “If you did not have them,” he says, “you would be nothing.”

She stands abruptly and pulls him with her, out through the front door. They walk a few paces away from the office windows, and she turns to face him. “What is it with you and these stupid statements?”

He laughs, clearly delighted. “It's been so long since someone has spoken to me the way you do, Delilah. I am — I am utterly enchanted.”

“Well, that's just fantastic,” she snaps. “And I'm mortified. What the fuck are you talking about? My family isn't gone.”

“Not yet. But if they were? You would need something else. You would fight for it the same way, protect it just like you try to protect your brother.” He touches her cheek. “Even if it threatened to break your heart. Even then.”

She's suddenly dizzy — she stumbles on the sidewalk and braces herself against his arm. “I'm going back inside now,” she says. Does Penny sit inside, waiting? “Let's not make a habit of this.”

“A habit of little displays in the office?” he says. Has she ever heard a more beautiful voice, ever? “Or a habit of strange conversation?”

“How about both?”

He chuckles. “Are you going to avoid me?”

“Is that what this is about? One date and I'm supposed to be your office lap dog? One date and it's okay to ask me personal questions in front of the entire office?” She stares into his face and does not blink. “Well, I won't. I won't be that girl.”

“I wouldn't expect you to.” Now he is smooth, and just the tiniest bit smug. “It was merely a test.”

She opens her mouth, and nothing comes out. She wants his face beneath her hand, the skin of his ear between her teeth. Blue-white energy pulsing swift between her fingers.

“I thought so.” He nods once. “So if I say we're going to have dinner, again, this Friday night, you won't say no.”

“Ah . . . no.” Could she avoid this man, even if she wanted to? Even if she tried?

“Friday night,” he says, again. “I will cook for you this time.”

He cooks. “Friday night,” she repeats slowly. “At yours.”

“Yes.”

She has bruises like a necklace along her collarbone. Of course she should say no. But the air around them is sharp, heightened. Everything around her is sharpened when he's around. She pauses for a moment and summons her will. “Should I bring anything?”

“No.” Again, the uneven smile. How does a man this sure have a smile this crooked? “Just yourself.”

“All right.”

Israel nods. “Good. I will see you then.” He walks back into the office. She does not see him for the rest of the day, or the day after that, or the next one. By the end of the week, if it weren't for the bruises still fading from her skin, she'd be tempted to say it was all just a dream.

Seven

When they got home, everything was different. And nothing was different. There were fifteen messages on the machine. Seven of them were from Julie.

“Sam. Sam — Doug just told me.”
Doug?
“I'm so sorry. Just —call me.”

“Sam? I don't know if you got my last message, but — call me. Please. I — if there's anything I can do.”

“Sam. I'll understand if you don't want to talk — ” this one was structured, slightly, her therapist voice
“
—
but I just spoke to Bryan and he hasn't heard from you, either. He didn't even know. Are you all right? Please let us know that you're okay.”

Julie had spoken to Bryan. That was interesting. He flipped through the next four messages — Julie, starting to get angry, and Bryan's hesitant, awkward voice — and then laughed as Stacey's voice came into the air.

“Sam.” Cautious, unsure. “I'm not sure if you're there, but . . . I . . . we
. . .
we're all thinking about you. Our prayers are with you.”

Prayers. That was funny. They didn't allow prayers at the school anymore.

“Did you tell anyone you were going away?” Father Jim. Sam started, then turned and of course, yes, the priest was there. In the hallway, the cat still in his arms. Chickenhead, who did not like being held by anyone but Sam. Her eyes were narrowed with calm, her limbs relaxed. She yawned.

“A few,” he said. Doug. Janet. Not enough.

“People seem to be worried about you.”

“Yes,” he said, not quite sure how to take that. “They do.”

Father Jim put the cat down. “Sam,” he said. “Sam, what's happened to you?”

He blinked, did not understand. “I have wings.” The deep, green stillness of the trees. “Didn't we go over this already?”

“Sam.”

He laughed. A few hours ago he'd been a madman. Dirt. Stoop and throw. “I'm fine. As fine as one could be, I suppose.” They would not discuss this now. Not now — Julie and Bryan and the great gaping hole where his life used to be. Instead he picked up the phone and dialed Janet's number. Kenneth answered the phone.

“Sam,” he said. The wonders of call display. “I'm so sorry. Janet's up at the house. With Doug.”

“I figured,” Sam said. “I just wanted to check. We'll go up now. Do they need anything?”

“Naw.” He spoke like that, Kenneth. He probably sounded different in the suit, when he spoke legalese, but every time Sam talked to him it was the same.
Naw. Nothin
'
.
“Janet took up some food. How was the drive?”

“Fine.” He thought of the deer, broken bones on the road.

“Janet said something about arrangements next week,” Kenneth said. “Did you find your priest?”

“Yes. I'll talk to Janet when we go up.”

“Sure.” Pause. “You take care now, Sam.”

“Yeah. You too, Ken.” He hung up the phone just as Father Jim emerged from the hall, his face damp from a wash.

“On to North Van?” said the priest.

“Sure,” he said, echoing Ken without realizing it. He opened the front door and let the priest walk through, the cat once more in his arms. “You can leave her in the house, if you want. She likes having time by herself.”

Father Jim shook his head. “It's too cold.”

“Cold?” Sam asked. “But it's not cold.”

Father Jim gave him another strange look. “It's freezing. It's colder here than it is outside.”

“What?” And then it clicked — the wings, the constant rush of blood through his veins. That fire inside him. “Oh.”

“Yes,” said the priest. “Oh.”

—

He hated funerals, almost more than he hated weddings. So did Doug. Mindful of this, and mindful of the fact that the body had already been cremated, explicitly according to Carol's wishes and explicitly against the dictates of the Church, the plan for the day was to keep everything short. A few words in the church, and sandwiches back at the house. Janet, as it happened, had sailed in to take care of everything after all.

Sam spent the next few days alternating between his house and his mother's, watering plants, making sure that Doug got out of bed. The air was cold but he was always hot. He would have gone shirtless in the house if not for Janet, who could have had any of the guest rooms but was sleeping downstairs on the couch. He ignored her as best he could, sat on Carol and Doug's back deck and smelled the earth, the dirt. That was his mother's garden, right there. She'd been thinning out the perennials, clearing away everything that had gone grey and brown. That was her trowel, stuck in the dirt. The fake grave for Dodger was lost now, somewhere back in the trees. He sat outside for hours and listened as the wind whistled through his feathers. He spoke only to the priest, and the cat, and the air.

On the day of the funeral, he wore black and wondered if anyone would think it odd that he had a trench coat on in church. He'd mended his shirt early the night before, had stitched an even hem on either side of each slash in the fabric. If asked, he would say something about grief.
Inconsolable. Ravaged.
The tearing of clothes.

At the church, he kept to the walls and concentrated on keeping the wings folded low against his back, as inconspicuous as possible beneath the fabric of his coat. Most of the people there were friends of Doug and Carol. A few church parishioners, from what he could remember, and other faces he didn't recognize, couldn't place. But there was Julie, second row in. Bryan, in another pew, looking as out of place as ever. And then, surprisingly, the flash of Emma's hair at the back.

He stayed by the wall and left the family pew to Doug and Janet. Father Jim was so calm, so warm. Sam felt a rush of gratitude toward this man who had so easily dropped his life to come with him, this man so steady in the face of death. Yet even as the priest spoke, Sam felt his mother shrink down to nothing, a woman now dead like so many others. Weren't there more things to say? Or did this happen to everyone, an entire life summed up in a three-minute speech?

Father Jim motioned toward the back and called him forward. “Sam. Would you like to say a few words?”

No. And yet his feet brought him up to the altar, his pace slow, inexorable. For a moment he wondered what he looked like — the grieving son, bundled in a trench coat in a church that was too warm — and then he remembered Emma, and Father Mario, and wondered what they saw.

He opened his mouth, and nothing came. He wanted to tell them about Dodger, about what his mother would have said if she could see him now. About the turnips that she'd planted in the garden, turnips that always failed to grow. About how she'd loved Julie. How she'd wept, when they told her of the child.

He cleared his throat. “A lesson to all of us, I suppose. You can't stop death from coming.” He paused. There had to be something else; there wasn't. He stepped down from the pulpit, then walked down the aisle and through the doors and there was the Jetta, waiting. He climbed in. Turned the key. Joni came on the stereo, and he drove back up to the house.

—

He was a dutiful son, and had everything ready when the guests came traipsing back to Carol's house. Juice. Booze. Egg salad sandwiches for Doug, tuna salad sandwiches for everyone else. He scooped the tuna from two sandwiches onto a plate and took it to Chickenhead, who had been banished to one of the guest suites upstairs. She had her claws in the couch when he walked in the door.

“Don't do that,” he said, not meaning it. “What will Doug say?” He put the tuna on the floor and watched the cat pad over and sniff it. The recent episode with the tuna juice — perhaps, even, the episode with the truck,
that
episode — had reinvigorated her appetite. She ate the tuna and left the celery. When she finished, she jumped onto the couch and settled in his lap, her customary purr a dark rumble against his stomach. He ruffled her fur and pictured Father Jim, ushering everyone back to the house. Priestly platitudes ready at hand. Janet would be angry, perhaps even Doug. He did not care.

He closed his eyes and dreamed strange things of light and shadow, dreams that flickered on the edges of his mind and then disappeared, like old letters, fading away with age.

—

“Sam.”

He opened his eyes. Julie, in the bedroom. She'd been crying. She wore the dress that Carol had given her three years ago as an engagement present. Red and white, a white lily in the dark twist of her hair.

He sat up. Chickenhead jumped off his lap and onto the floor. “I didn't hear you come in.”

“You were sleeping.” She sat at the opposite end of the couch. “You looked tired. Up there, I mean.”

Up there, for the eulogy-that-wasn't. “I am tired.” He rubbed a hand over his face. The wings stirred, ruffled, were still. “Is Derek here?”

She blinked. “Derek? He's at work.”

“Not at Buddhism class.”

Julie bit her lip. “Sam.”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” He stood and rolled his shoulders, heard something pop in his back. “Thank you for coming.”

“Don't thank
me,” she said, irritated. “As if I wouldn't come.”

“I don't know,” he said. “I didn't think so.”

She opened her mouth, closed it. He'd hurt her, again. “Fine. I came for her,
then. Look at it that way.”

He sighed. Chickenhead wound around his feet and then, surprisingly, stepped over and rubbed her head against Julie's ankle. She stooped and scratched the cat's ears, casual, an afterthought. He noticed again the cut of the dress, the luster of her skin against the red.

The words came almost without thought. “Are you pregnant?”

“What? No.
No
.”
She flushed, turned her head.

He pressed on, did not know why. “But you want to be.”

“And?” Julie turned back to him, her face sharp. “So what if I want to be? We're engaged,
Sam. I am allowed to want a baby.” Her voice louder, dancing on that shrill edge he knew so well. Then, “I shouldn't have come. I thought it would be good, you know, to say goodbye. I loved her. And you were up there and you said those things, and I thought — someone needs to come back for him.” Deep breath. “I guess I was wrong.”

He laughed. He thought of two running steps, a break through the window glass, of soaring away from the house. Chickenhead, as if on cue, marched back to him and snaked a claw through his feathers. The sudden shock made him gasp, which he covered with more laughter. Then he raised the wings and passed them to and fro in front of his face, watched as Julie's eyes grew dark. Yes, that was fuzz, a slight lessening of focus. He closed his eyes, raised his hands to his head. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Forgive me.”

A long pause. “You should come downstairs,” Julie said. She stepped forward and put a hand on his arm. “Everyone wants to know where you are.”

He opened his eyes, and she was so close he could see the mole on the underside of her chin.

“Sam,” she said. Now she looked worried. “Your hair. It's falling out.”

He pulled his hands away from his head, and indeed, there was hair lying flat against his palms. He thought back to that day just over a week ago, when he had stood in front of the mirror and stared at the skin beneath his scalp.

“It's stress,” he said. He ran his hand over his head again and more hair flaked through his fingers. “I think. I don't know. I don't know what's happening to me.”

Someone knocked at the door. Julie shot him a puzzled look and then crossed the floor and opened it. Bryan, disheveled and timid and looking intensely uncomfortable.

“Julie,” he said. He shuffled into the room and then looked at the floor. “Hi.”

“Hi Bryan,” she said softly. The door closed. It was quite possible, Sam thought suddenly, that the two of them hadn't seen each other in over two years. What was that his students would have said?
This is awkward. So awkward.

“Dude,” and Bryan looked up, over at Sam. “You okay? You beat it out of that church like a bat out of hell.”

Sam laughed. The slight frown on Julie's brow made him laugh even harder. “Yeah, well,” when he could speak. “You know what I'm like at a funeral.”

“Are you gonna eat?” Bryan had a napkin in his hand. “Those sandwiches are disappearing fast. Not that they're all that great.” Then he looked at Julie again, and blushed. So much for his bravado of before.
You're humping a fucking rock.

“They're funeral sandwiches,” Julie said, already annoyed. “Obviously they're no good for the chef, but I think the rest of us will muddle along okay.”

“It's fine, Julie,” Sam said.

“Of course it's fine,” she snapped. Then she saw the plate with the leftover celery. “Don't tell me you fed a sandwich to the cat.”

“It's his cat. Can't he feed her whatever the hell he wants?”

Julie stopped, closed her eyes. “I didn't
say
tha — ”

“Easy, kids,” Sam said softly. “And here I thought this was going to be such a joyful reunion.”

“Times change,” said Bryan, bolder now. He looked at Julie. “Don't they.”

Now it was her turn to blush. “Look — we're not getting into a fight. Any of us.”

“Who said anything about fighting? We're all as happy as can be. In fact, Sam and I were out just a little while ago, living it up with some nice young ladies from — ”

“Bryan,” he said. The room was suddenly so hot. “We don't need to go there.”

“Why not? I say we kill two birds here,” and even Bryan winced at the choice of words, “and hash it out. You need to move on, the two of you.”

“We've moved on,” Julie protested.

“Sure.
You
have, with the professor. What about him?” and he jerked a thumb at Sam.