Love Letters of the Angels of Death (13 page)

“Yeah. I'd jump into the dark left behind by the sun – all poignant and miserable. That's usually what people are going for when they commit suicide. So, if I came here all distraught in the evening, like this, I'd definitely go over the eastern side.” I curve my arm and arc it over the railing in a simulation of my swan dive. “But, if I stayed up all night and was coming here in the morning – which is more likely for me, I think – I'd go over the western side.”

“Easy.” You're nodding.

“I think about this stuff. Bridges are my thing,” I say.

“Really?”

“Yeah, naturally. My name is Brigham. It means ‘from the bridge town.'”

You laugh. “The bridge town? What's that supposed to mean? What kind of town doesn't have at least one bridge in it?”

I turn around and face the west. “A dry one, I guess. What can I say? That's what my name means.”

“You know, I'm glad this came up,” you say. “It is high time we talked about your name.”

We each take a deep breath. You let yours out to ask, “How can you go through life being called ‘Brigham' all the time?”

It's not the direction I thought we were headed. I blow out my own breath. “That's easy too. I've never been called anything else so I guess I can't imagine how much better life must be for the rest of you.” I lean sideways, toward you, nudging you firmly enough to jostle your chin out of your hands.

You're standing up straight now, turning your back to the frozen pipes, facing the headlights on the bridge's busy roadway. “Fine, but – I mean, how come no one ever shortens your name?”

I shift to stand in front of you, a barrier between you and the traffic that doesn't see us. “Shorten it? Why? It's only two syllables long to begin with. And the H is silent and everything.”

“Yeah, but they're such heavy syllables,” you're arguing. “It's just weird that no one has a nickname for you, not even your cousin. It's not normal. You know what I mean?”

I lay my gloved hands on the railing, one on either side of you, not quite like an embrace. Something's been in our minds for weeks now but it's never been in our hands like it is right now. My face is almost directly over the crown of your head. You've got to be able to feel my breath on your scalp as I say, “Actually, no, I don't know what you mean.”

You sigh as if you're frustrated with me. You're not looking up at me but you're talking and talking – still defensive because even as you stand between my arms, you're afraid this might not be what it seems. And, by now, that would be a catastrophe.

Your voice is transposed just slightly higher than usual as you say, “You see, Brigham, names don't really exist in the material world. They're just totally arbitrary social constructs. Like, your parents gave you your name when you were a newborn baby because they wanted you to belong to them. And naming you was the most obvious way of emphasizing their connection to you, right? But then no one else ever renamed you with a nickname or anything and that's not normal.”

I pull my head back so I can see you better. “Maybe it's just that my name doesn't lend itself to nicknames very well. Like, what would you even call someone with a ‘heavy' name like mine? Briggy? The Hamster?”

You laugh, leaning forward until your forehead touches my chest. But you jerk back almost on contact. “Brigs!” you announce. “You could be known as Brigs. Wouldn't that look great stamped on the back of a football jersey?”

“A football jersey? Since when do you care about football jerseys?” I say, slipping up again, speaking as if I've known you far longer than I have.

“Whatever. Brigs – I love it. Starting now,” you tap the end of my chin with your fingertip, “I am renaming you and calling you Brigs.”

“As a totally arbitrary social construct,” I lower my face toward you, so close my eyes can't focus anymore and I have to close them, “to show that I belong to you?”

You tilt your head and breathe the word, “Exactly,” right into my mouth.

Later, when I learn to love you, I tell you so.

“I believe you,” is what you say in return.

But when I tell you you're beautiful you call me a liar. You still do.

A little over ten months after Janae's wedding, I marry you. You're twenty-one years old, and I'm twenty-two. Your university friends think it's madness and oppression, but I can tell you're thriving on all the indignation.

“A short engagement,” you crow. “I think we've discovered a new, post-modern, Western relationship taboo. They all hate it. If I had French braids and a homemade calico dress they'd be able to understand it and denounce it. But as it is, there's nothing they can do but hate it.”

And then you make me give you a high five.

The morning before our wedding, I accidentally press and twist on my razor blade against my skin and cut a long, horizontal gash into my throat. The cut is red and scabby enough for it to be the first thing you notice when I meet you on our wedding day. You laugh right at me and accuse me of trying to decapitate myself rather than marry you. I still don't think it's funny.

There's no groom's cake at our wedding reception. Maybe that's a shame. I know you keep your own little list of bridal regrets – the dearth of pictures, the way the printers used a “y” instead of an “i” in the spelling of my mother's name on the invitations. Then there was the way Dad kept circulating around the reception hall telling everyone what he paid for and precisely how much it cost.

“It's no one's fault but my own,” you say, years and years later. “I couldn't hate myself more for caring about it. But I really, really did care.”

I think what I remember best about the parts of our wedding day we spent in other people's company was that old man who shook our hands in the receiving line and thanked us for having the reception the same evening as the ceremony itself. He said, “A wedding reception's nothing without a little sexual tension, eh kids?”

There was much more advice given than that. But if any of the guests knew to tell us that good husbands are like good anthropologists, none of them said so. An anthropologist: that's what you call me when you find me standing over your cluttered dresser top opening and closing some kind of contraption that's part scissors, part rubber stamp.

“Sheesh, Brigs, it's just an eyelash curler.”

I hold it above my face so light glints off its metal before I turn and point the artefact toward you. “I don't think I've ever seen you use this.”

“That's because I don't use it. Janae gave it to me ages ago when she was putting me through one of those beauty rehab sessions she calls makeovers.”

I stand there, still pointing the instrument toward you.

You sigh like it's all very tiresome, but you do take the eyelash curler from me anyway. Leaning into the mirror, you pull your eyelids apart before pinching your upper lashes between the contraption's black bumpers. I don't get too close as I study the ritual with pretended nonchalance, silently measuring the movements of your reflection in the mirror. I watch, calculating, and mentally composing my ongoing thesis on a micro-culture that doesn't really belong to anyone but you.

My attention here means something to you, and you turn and step closer as you finish the curling manoeuvre, coming to stand beneath me, your arm curving around my waist. You wink your single curled eyelash at me, slowly, so I can see it all.

Fourteen

We are back – back in the town where I'm not known as the kid with the highest grade point average in the graduating class of 1990. And I'm not known as the man who moved on to become one of the youngest-ever vice presidents of a major regional petroleum company either. Just like you said, I am indeed known here as “the one who found the body.”

It hasn't been too difficult for us to stay out of town since Mom died here a couple years ago. But my cousin, Aunt Marla's daughter, is getting married this weekend. And the reception is going to be in the same church hall where people once straggled in to congratulate the newly married you and me. So here we are, back in town – the boys all fussy and hot in their wrinkly, white dress shirts, and you flicking glances over your shoulders like you're trying to catch someone looking at us with anything even vaguely like morbid pity.

We've arrived too early for the reception and, with all the people milling around, Aunt Marla's house is small and sweltering. That's why we're dragging our droopy boys down the street to a park Mom used to take them to. I ask the boys if they remember being here with her. They try but I'm not sure they remember anything at all – until they see the merry-go-round.

“Oh,
this
place,” Scottie says.

The merry-go-round is one of those old, old ones installed in playgrounds the Lions Clubs and Rotarians built before you and I were born. I'm pretty sure most cities around here have banned them for safety reasons by now. But those kinds of hysterical cultural over-corrections take a long time to make it to little towns like this one. Maybe this merry-go-round was originally put here as part of some sort of attempt to recapitulate the 1960s space-flight training programs – like a beautiful token of hope in a generation of tiny, prospective astronauts. Who could have told the Rotarians we'd never really grow up to live in domed, glass space colonies full of classical music and bright white furniture?

The merry-go-round itself is a metal-clad disc with a radius equal to the height of our middle son – our Levi. The whole thing spins on a single, central pole that still glides freely, somehow, even though it's been standing out here in the wind and snow without being greased for thirty years. Out of the centre of the disc, steel bars spread out in rays. Each is flecked with a few remaining chips of primary-coloured paint. It doesn't make me happy to wonder how I can tell just by looking at them that these bars would taste like salt if I licked them – the panicky perspiration of the hundreds of desperate hands that have clung to them, braced against all the powers of centrifugal force.

Our boys are running ahead of us now, over the flat, un-irrigated grass to the playground. Maybe we would have been able to appreciate the dated equipment in a cool, retro sense if the imminent threat it posed to our kids wasn't quite so clear to us.

The sight of it all seems to have put space travel into your mind too. “Wow,” you say, stopping at the edge of the park to lean back and cross your arms over your middle. “Look at this junk. It must be pre-Star Wars.”

I shrug. “Probably. I know I can't remember the town without it.”

“I'm tellin' ya,” you're nodding. “Hey! Not so fast, you guys!”

And you're stomping over to the merry-go-round, catching it by one of the bars, pulling back with all your mass and strength to bring it to a stop. The boys lurch and stumble against the bars. “Let Benny get down,” you say, as our sheepish older sons scoot their two-year-old brother to the edge of the disc. “What the heck were you guys thinking? This thing is actually really dangerous. Benny is too little to play anywhere near it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Scottie takes Benny's hand and helps him up the ladder of the slide instead. It's not safe either, but at least it operates under the more familiar and predictable perils of friction and gravity.

There's a wooden picnic table someone's pulled into the shade of a spruce tree in a far corner of the park, and you and I head there together to stay out of the sun. We sit on top of the table, turned to watch the kids play.

“So do we want to drive past it on our way out of town?” you ask me.

“Drive past it?”

“Yeah. The Mountain View Mobile Home Community.”

I lie back on the tabletop, my arm bent beneath my head like a pillow, and I look up into the sky that's so blue it seems almost fake – like the blue screen that comes up on a television when there's no input. “Why would we want to drive past it?”

You're afraid you've upset me so you lie down beside me, resting your head on my elbow. “Just to see if her old trailer's still there. That's why they call them mobile homes, right? Because the whole thing could be gone by now. I hope it is.”

The last time I asked Aunt Marla about it, she said the trailer Mom died in was still sitting vacant in the trailer park. Even after the way the landlord made us rush all Mom's stuff out of it before we'd finished burying her, he hadn't managed to rent the place to anyone else. But I hadn't heard anything more about the Dead Lady Trailer in years. Maybe you're right. Maybe it's gone – moved to another aluminum and fibreboard slum in some other little town where no one ever heard what happened to my mother.

But we won't be driving through the trailer park today. I know it as soon as I hear Benny start to wail. We've been distracted and looked away from the children too long and everyone is about to pay for it.

Scottie and Aaron are standing stunned at the bottom of the slide. Levi is still spinning around on the merry-go-round, by himself. But he's inching along the bar, moving toward the edge like he's trying to look for something fallen underneath it. We can all hear Benny crying but none of us can see him.

I'm running and – even though I know it won't do any good – yelling. “Where's the baby?”

Levi is so scared he can barely answer me. “Benny – fell off.”

You've run to the merry-go-round from the other side so you're the first one to see Benny. From the neck down, his body has slid underneath the spinning disc. All you can see of him is his little blond head, awake but stunned, not crying anymore, lying with his face propped on one of his round, white cheeks in the sand. He's dusty and scared but he's safe where he is as long as he doesn't move. And then you see him pressing his palms against the ground, getting ready to rise.

“Stop, Benny! Head down!”

As we hear the sound of your voice, we understand it's inevitable. Everything's moving too quickly and too slowly – all at the same time. It means I don't quite reach the merry-go-round in time to haul it to a stop before the little boy hears you. And he has to look for you – he does it without thought. He jerks his head up like there's a line strung between the muscles in his neck and the vocal cords in your own. He lifts himself right into the orbit of the metal disc. It hits his scalp like the dulled edge of a buzz saw. All six of us scream at once.

I've stopped the spinning and now Levi is standing over Benny, struggling to undo it all by hefting his brother to his feet. Then he sees the blood. Both of Levi's hands come up to cover his mouth and nose and he turns away to gag.

“Scottie! Come and get Levi out of here!” you're calling.

Benny's angel-white hair is clumped into mucky red dreadlocks against the back of his head. The cut must be somewhere beneath it, gashed across the flesh over his occipital lobe. It must be the worst cut any of our kids has ever had.

“Ack – Brigs, did you see that?” you demand as you pull your cardigan off your shoulders and try to press the fabric to Benny's wound.

“What?”

“The blood comes spurting out the back of his head every time his heart beats.”

There's no time for me to feel sick or sad or even to stop to get a good look at my baby's issue of blood. Benny is still fully conscious – even feisty. That will have to be enough for now. “Keep the sweater on it. Apply pressure,” I say because that's what they always told us in Boy Scouts. It's all I can say before I order the rest of the kids into the minivan so we can get Benny to a hospital.

In the back of the van, Benny has stopped crying and he's fighting to keep your sweater away from his head. “You have to leave it on, baby,” you're saying. But Benny keeps swatting and ducking, complaining and cursing in his broken toddler-English it's probably best we don't understand right now.

We drive right past the town's hospital – the one where I had my appendix removed when I was a kid. The building's been turned into a long-term care residence for seniors so we head out to highway. In ten minutes, we'll be at the hospital in the nearest town – the town where you lived while you were in high school.

“You can probably slow down a bit,” you call from where you're holding onto Benny in the backseat. “It's just regular bleeding now. The horror movie's over. Right, Levi?”

Levi shudders behind the little hands he still holds pressed over his closed eyelids. He won't believe any of it.

I know I won't be able to see Benny's wound from the driver's seat but I glance at you in the rear view mirror anyway. You tell me later that the blood had been bright red and kind of thick – living blood oozing out of our baby's head like it was getting squeezed out of a tube, pulsing and pulsing. In the back of the van, between all our boys, your hands and arms and clothes are covered in blood. And I remember a scene from a movie that used to make us laugh – the one where a character in bloody clothes turns to alarmed onlookers and says, “Oh, it's okay. This isn't my blood.”

And this blood isn't yours either. All of our kids' blood is full of Rh antigens – those harmless little blood proteins that make your immune system freak out. You don't have them in your blood, but the boys inherited them from me. That's why you needed to get all those shots of immunoglobulin right in the butt every time you got pregnant. We needed to make sure your body didn't start trying to melt down our babies. But Benny's blood isn't my blood either. It's steeped with the B antigens you gave him – the ones that would make me sick if anyone tried to pipe your blood into me, no matter how much you might say you love me.

Benny is calm and even pleasant by the time we get to the hospital. “Do you still think we need to go in?” I ask.

You purse your lips and squint into Benny's head. “Uh – it's pretty flappy and oozy. We'd better have someone check it out.”

We're the only people in the small town, weekend emergency room. You and Benny look dirtier and gorier than ever, now that you've been seated on a clean, white-sheeted gurney.

You hold the little boy against your body, I clamp his legs together so he can't kick, and a nurse with a warm, damp washcloth swabs Benny's scalp, looking to see the full extent of the cut. It isn't nearly as big as either of us expected – not quite two centimetres long – and it isn't bleeding at all anymore. The nurse comforts Benny with a gift of the most ludicrously over-dyed purple Popsicle I've ever seen. She leaves us, promising the doctor will be coming soon.

“I know,” you say – which is a strange response. But you've already heard the doctor's voice through the curtains drawn around us. It wasn't his loud, authoritarian talk that gave him away. Within all the contrived officiousness of his voice is a sound you've known even longer than you've known me.

“It's Dan, isn't it?” you ask the nurse as she's trying to leave us.

She startles and starts to stammer. It's like she's trying not to answer, like she knows it's her duty to hide the secret first name of the doctor from all the bleeding riff-raff.

“Dan,” you repeat. “Dan is the doctor here today, isn't he?”

“Uh, yeah,” she admits.

When the nurse finally gets away, you breathe out an enormous sigh. “Brigs, Benny – you are about to meet Mummie's prom date.”

I bend at the waist and laugh at you as you sit on the clean sheet, looking like an expendable extra from a slasher movie. We know this doctor – or, at least, you do. We are now at the mercy of one of your ex-boyfriends. Benny's been dying for a break in the tension and he laughs with me.

“Hey, that's Doctor Prom-Date, to you guys,” you interrupt me through a little laugh of your own. There's still half of a smile on your mouth, and your eyes haven't quite finished their roll, when a thin but ordinary hand parts the curtain. And there he is in a white lab coat that fits him about as well as a Halloween costume: the boy you used to write letters to after you left that cousin of mine who wouldn't call you his girlfriend. That was years before you'd ever met me. They were long, handwritten letters like people used to write all the time – only the ones you sent to this boy usually had Joni Mitchell lyrics scrawled all over the outsides of their envelopes.

Here in the hospital, the stethoscope slung around his neck actually looks real. He's already read your name on the chart in his hands so there's no surprise left in his manner when you meet. You introduce me to him. We shake hands and everything, but we're both kind of stiff about it.

“It's not personal. He's like that with everyone,” you'll tell me later. “And so are you, Brigs.”