The Miracles of Ordinary Men (9 page)

As it turned out, though, the car started fine. A hardy little thing, his Volkswagen. He backed it up slowly and then moved it out of the path of the deer. Father Jim opened the passenger door and climbed in, and Chickenhead jumped forward into his arms. Aside from the rickety sound of the hood, the rumble of the car beneath Sam's feet was steady and strong.

“It's a pretty clean kill,” said the ranger. He was young, and tall beside the tow truck driver — they looked like a sketch team, a wilderness comic duo. “Eat venison?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “We'll handle this, here on in. Odd bit of luck, that,” and he nodded to the car. “It shouldn't be driveable, what it did to the deer.” Then he laughed — Father Jim had turned to face them and a sudden shaft of light from the sun illuminated his collar. “Or maybe not.”

All Sam could manage was a watery grin. “No,” he echoed. “Maybe not.” Then they pulled onto the road, and in a scant few seconds they crossed the bend and left the deer behind.

They didn't speak again until the ferry terminal came into view. Sam pulled into the wait line and turned to face the priest, who sat serene, his hands buried in Chickenhead's fur.

“Do you have any idea?” he asked.

Father Jim shook his head, and Sam had the sudden impression that he'd heard the question before, too many times to count. “Everyone wants to know why,”
the priest admitted. “Even me.”

VIII

The first time Lilah swore, she was fourteen. This was the year before mascara, that last year when she still thought nothing of wearing sweat pants to school. Roberta was still a year or so away from the Fernwood house, and Carl had left. They had moved, the three of them, into the basement apartment of an old house in Oak Bay. There were spiders. Lilah shared a room with Roberta and pretended not to notice the muffled sobs, the shaking that came from the other bed. Usually, Timothy would crawl into bed with her at some point in the night. He burned as he slept — a human furnace that smelled of snow and dirt and air.

That day, she walked home from school to the rhythm of her times tables. Eight times eight is sixty-four. Eight times nine is seventy-two. She'd always had trouble with these, and she was concentrating so hard that she missed the curb. Her foot buckled
and down went the rest of her. Her face smacked against the stone.

She lay still for a moment, and then stumbled to her feet, the copper taste of shock warm in her mouth. Raised a hand and felt it, warm beneath her nose.

“Say fuck,”
said a voice. She turned — slowly, still unsure of the world — and saw a boy. He was breathing hard; he'd been running. Later, Lilah would realize that he'd run to her. It had been a spectacular fall.

“Are you all right?” he said. Sixteen? Seventeen? She couldn't tell.

“I think so.” Her words were slurred.

“Say fuck,”
he said again. “It will make you feel better, I promise.”

“
Fuck
,”
she whispered into the air. The word took shape and danced. Not good, a word brought to life with dirt and blood. But she didn't know that then. She wouldn't know
until years later. Fuck and blood,
linked forever.

—

She dreams of light that isn't warm.

“This doesn't hurt.” He hits her again.

She squirms underneath him, and uses her fingernails to scratch a white furrow in his arm. “Fuck you.”

“Delilah,”
he says. He makes her name a benediction, a prayer. “It doesn't hurt you. It
can't
hurt you. How can I show you that you are so much more than your body?”

I don't want you to show me
. It would be so easy just to say it. But she doesn't say it, because it isn't true.
Get off
. She doesn't say that, either.

“I won't.” He kisses her, a lovely kiss that makes her think, for a moment, that none of this has happened. “Tell me. This doesn't hurt, no?”

She weeps. “Please, Israel.” Or has she said anything at all? Maybe all of this is a dream, one small dream of a man with hands that could crush her. If he wanted, he could snap her arm, her neck. She is nothing but an extra layer of silk against the mattress.

“Let me go,” she whispers. “Please.”

He pulls his hands away from her wrists and sits back, then watches her in the dark. “You can go,” he says. “Emmanuel will drive you home.”

Her breath comes in short bursts — even her lungs hurt. Israel shifts so that he sits completely apart from her, dark at the end of the bed. Lilah doesn't move.

“Well?” Even as he says it Lilah knows what her answer will be. She raises her arms above her head and rests them against the headboard. She looks at him, and says nothing.

“I thought so,” he says. She can hear the smile in his voice. He moves toward her, bringing darkness over her head like an angel, come to end the world.

And then she balls her fist and hits him, so fast it surprises them both. Her hand meets the hard curve of his cheek and keeps going, so that as Israel falls back her fist thuds into the bed. Her knuckles hit the mattress, crack. She breathes in and hunches, still. She can't see. The room is so dark she can't see.

Silence. Now —
now —
Lilah's hands start to shake. Blue-white energy shoots through her arms, through her fingers. She throws her head back and sucks in air, opens her eyes and there he is, against the bed. She imagines that she can see the imprint of her hand on his cheek, the energy from her palm glowing soft against his skin. Were she to walk outside, right now, that same hand would write her name across the sky. She's never been more certain of anything.

Israel laughs. “I
thought
so,” he says again. All of a sudden his hand is around her throat, solid and strong. She closes her eyes and thinks of nothing. Everything that she is has shrunk to this bed, and she is incandescent, suddenly, with the knowledge that she could die here, in this apartment, and no one would ever know.

—

Another dream, this one of death. A darkened road that glistens with new fallen rain, and Lilah, running across. Headlights. A flash of light greater than anything she's ever known, and then she's on the ground, and her ribs poke through her skin and she can't breathe, she can't breathe.

A man swims in front of her eyes. In the shadows his face is hollow and long. It is a kind face, creased with sorrow and some twitchy, unnamed fear. She reaches out to touch his cheek but nothing moves.

He shines. She is not imagining this. He is iridescent, shimmering with some uneven power. She tries again to reach his face, but the hand that stretches up is not hers. It is not even a hand. It is a
hoof
,
broken and bleeding. She screams. The man reaches out to touch her and through his fingers she sees the sky splinter into countless shards. Behind them, oblivion. Death. Hers.

She wakes with icy fingers and an abdomen that aches. In her own bed, her own home, the ride back through Vancouver a silent memory, Emmanuel at the wheel. She climbs out of bed and into her bathroom, pees and then crawls back into bed. She snuggles deep into the duvet. Then she does the unthinkable, and calls her mother.

“Delilah,” Roberta says, before Lilah has even said hello. “It's Timothy, isn't it? Is he in the hospital? Have you found him? Is he sick?”

“Mom.” Impossible that her heart could break any more but it does. “No. I don't know where he is. I was calling . . . about me.”

“You?”
You. What is there to say about you?

“I mean — I need.”

“
What
,
Delilah? What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says, finally. “Never mind. It's okay, I'll deal with it.”

“Are you sure?” Now she's suspicious. When Lilah calls Roberta expects disaster, as easily as she might expect absolution from her priest. But Lilah can't tell her about Israel, this man who took her for dinner last night and then beat her in his bed. This will terrify her. And then it will terrify Lilah, and who knows what happens then.

“I'm sure,” she says. She hangs up, and she looks at herself in the mirror. Her mouth is swollen and her eyes are red, wounds that will fade by tomorrow.

—

In the afternoon, she pulls herself out of bed and heads to the diner on Nicola. She has a lunch date with Joel. An apology. She wants to cancel, but instead she washes away the smell of Israel and counts her bruises in the mirror. She
wants
to be normal. To have a normal day, to remember what exactly it is that other people do. She spends as much time dressing today as she did the night before. She does her hair. She wears long sleeves. She picks a blue scarf that hides the bruises on her neck, and a hat to match. And as she walks to the diner Lilah imagines that, yes, she could love the haphazard, messy, charmingly idiotic Joe-with-an-L. Done. She could say it. She could make it true.

But even as she thinks this, she remembers the energy in her hands, that wild sense of freedom on the mattress. Her fingers, writing a name across the stars. And the fact that she did not die in that bed after all. So instead they dance for space in her head, the two of them. Joel, who finds her Catholic schoolgirl background a huge turn-on and thinks that the George Sand volumes on her bookshelf were written by a “homo.”
Joe-with-an-L
, who manages despite all of this to be charming, to make her laugh. And Israel. Israel Riviera, the boss, who has yet to say anything funny, who took her for dinner and then held her life like a seed in his hand.

Joel is late. He is also hungover, and quite possibly high. He squeezes half a bottle of ketchup onto his burger and massages the inside of Lilah's thigh as if he thinks it's her vagina. His hands feel small and girlish. In the harsh light of the diner he looks — not unfit, exactly, but softer than a man really has any right to be.

“I really like you,” he says. He talks with his mouth full and sprays hamburger onto the table.

Lilah thinks of Timothy, who had a seizure two days before he left home and vomited his dinner over Roberta's best china. “Thanks.”

“I should move in,” Joel says. “Don't you think so?”

“You don't call me enough.”

“But if we lived together, I wouldn't have to call you.”

“Maybe.” She eats the rest of her salad in silence, and wonders what Israel is doing. Graphing management charts? Drinking wine? Reading in his apartment, intellectual and harmless?

“I don't love you.” She blurts the words with her mouth half full. Now it is her turn — milk sprays across the table and sprinkles Joel's lap.

“Love?” he says. He is surprised. “Who said anything about love?”
He wipes his mouth and misses a piece of lettuce that sticks in his stubble. For some reason, Lilah thinks of Timothy again and fights back tears. “Love is a farce, Lilah,” Joel says, suddenly serious. “All you can do is find someone to hold on to — that's it.”

“I don't want to hold on to you,” she says. Because she's a bitch, because this is what she was meant for. Hearts broken around her like glass.

Joel is unfazed. Not for the first time, she realizes how much she's underestimated this man. “You will,” he says. “I might have to wait a few years, but you will.”

“Why the fuck would you think that?”

He shrugs. “You've got no one else, Lilah. Don't tell me you can't feel your life falling away. Sooner or later you'll want to do something with it. And I'll be here when you do.”

“That's pathetic,” she snaps, and she's up from the table fast enough to make it shake. She opens her mouth to tell him about The Actor — no one else,
fuck you — and then remembers that The Actor is gone, that she sent him away.

“It's not,” Joel says. “It's not pathetic at all.” He wipes his face again and gets the lettuce. “You think I can't tell how much you hurt?”

“Fuck you.”

He shrugs. “Fine, then. If that's what you want.” He shakes his head as she reaches for the bill. “Never mind that. I'll get it.”

Lilah stays bent over the bill for a moment — frozen, seething with rage. Then she straightens, and as she stalks away the clack of her shoes on the hardwood floor gives the only kind of comfort she can find.

She walks down Hastings before she goes home, as always. It is an oddly empty day — air damp, first fall leaves on the ground. She shoves her hands into too-small pockets. Main, Gore, Columbia, Abbott. Eyes open for a tousled head, a ragged heap rocking on the ground.

At one point, she sees a figure crouched in an alleyway; a flutter stays in her abdomen even after seeing a face she doesn't recognize. A man bent on his knees, his hands pressed against the wall and his forehead touching the brick. He mumbles into the wall. He might be praying. He might be mad.

She stops staring and turns. This time the sound of her shoes on the pavement is hollow, and the echoes follow her as she hurries away.

—

All great men are terrified — this is what Timothy told her, all those days ago. He'd been reading
The Inferno
in the months before he'd left their mother's house.

“Dante was frightened,” he told her, once. “He was really frightened.”

“Of what?” The two of them, a nice coffee shop in Victoria. Time away from the office job. She watched a couple at the patio table across from them laugh.

“Of failure.
It seemed to me that I had undertaken too lofty a theme for my powers
,
so much so that I was afraid to enter upon it
,
and so I remained for several days desiring to write and afraid to begin
. Even he felt it.”

“But you're not failing,” she said. Careful, suddenly terrified. “You're not failing at anything, Tim.”

“Aren't I?” He rocked back and forth in his chair and wouldn't look at her. “I think I'm failing all the time.”

“At what? We've talked about school — you can go back when you're ready — ”

“School,” and there it was, just for a moment, a flash of the Timothy she remembered. “I'm not talking about school.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

He stared at the table and smoothed his napkin down against the wood. “But you shouldn't be afraid, Lilah. You shouldn't be afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” she said, exasperated and so cold all at once. The couple looked over at their table, then away. “I don't know what you're talking about, Timmy. I don't understand.”

“Don't call me that. I'm not ten years old anymore.”

“Timothy.” Deep breath. “I shouldn't be afraid. Of what?”

“Me,” he said, and this time he did look at her. “You shouldn't be afraid, Lilah. I won't hurt you, ever.”

“Of course you won't,” she said. She held his hand and marvelled at how warm he was, how hot. “I know. I know that.”

Two weeks later he left, and hurt her anyway.

—

When she does find him, later that day after leaving Joel, he's sitting at the western edge of Georgia, bedraggled and alone. She brings him water, and chocolate, and another goddamned hat. He lets her pull the flaps of the hat over his ears. She ties the hat strings beneath his chin, just as she did when he was a child.

“I don't have a fever,” he says. He breaks the chocolate and sucks a large piece into his mouth, and speaks as though the flight from her house hasn't happened. “I'm fine.”