Sweet Jesus (9 page)

Zeus pulled the bird back to his chest, looked at the window, then back at Sam. He raised his eyebrows and Sam silently agreed. Zeus took the bird to the window and stood with his back to the boy. He pretended to open the window, and threw his hands out, and he was no longer wearing the white glove because it had turned into a dove. The dove flapped up through the shaft between the north and east wings of the hospital, almost pink against the yellow brick, and into the bright late-afternoon sky, until it was just an iridescent little soap bubble, and then it disappeared.

After Sam fell asleep, Zeus walked down the hall towards Lalia DeLuca’s room. He passed the common area, where two exhausted parents sat watching the
Wizard of Oz
. It was a favourite in the ward, this story of three injured characters taking a magical wish list to a mad scientist who lives in a sterile green castle, not unlike a hospital. Zeus stopped to watch it, and the wife of the couple swivelled her head to take in the whole spectacle of his appearance in the doorway, and her expression was one trapped in the singular, sad position of
why
? He gave her a slow and helpless shrug. Zeus didn’t have any answers. Things simply got more confusing the more you learned about them.

Why did anybody’s life turn out the way it did? It was just a fluke that he met Tim and Rose Crowe. If they hadn’t flown down to Chimayó to help out on a project building homes for families in need, his life would have been very different. Zeus used to sell corn chips and cans of pop and a few hand-painted tin hearts out of a wagon he pulled around his neighbourhood, and the house they were working on wasn’t far from his own.
The first time he saw Rose, she was wearing a yellow summer dress, with a thin blue belt, and her hair was golden brown and tied back with a white bandana. She was walking somewhere, holding hands with her husband, a well-dressed man with a beard. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who’d pass out on the sofa, or need a jug of cold water poured over her head, or her hair held out of the toilet while she gagged. The next time he saw her, she was making sandwiches on a plywood table set up at the edge of the building site. He pulled his wagon over and introduced himself and shook her hand in such a formal way, she laughed and said, You did that so well, you must be a professional hand-shaker.

Every day that Zeus passed the building site, Rose bought another tin heart out of his wagon. He couldn’t help thinking that she was some kind of angel. At the end of the week, he told her that his dad was in jail, that he was in foster care, and maybe she should think of adopting him. She seemed so upset, and he could remember how she’d shook her head and said, Oh, sweetheart. He’d wanted her to hug him.

Right before they left, she told him to hang in there, that help was on its way, and a few months later, the woman who ran the foster home told him he was going to Canada, and that he should pack his things. He was going on a plane journey to a place called Toronto, and when they landed on ten centimetres of fresh white snow, Zeus thought the clouds had fallen. His new parents were there to greet him. They’d brought a blanket in case he was cold. He never heard from his real parents again. They had never tried to find him.

Suddenly, he found himself sitting on a hard bench in a church beside the woman
he’d
chosen to be with. He stared up at his new father, preaching in a friendly way from his elevated position in the pulpit, and wondered how he was supposed to
behave. The pulpit was like a wooden tattoo, a carved eagle with its wings outstretched, carrying a lectern on its back. The eagle’s beak was gaping and in it was the hard wooden curl of a tongue. He concentrated on the tongue, waiting for it to move like one of his dad’s tattoos, but it never did.

Over Christmas, he met his new sisters. Hannah was coming to stay with them for a while, and Connie had flown in for the holidays. They were fourteen and fifteen years older than him, and took him to the movies, and to the zoo. Hannah had thick golden-brown hair like her mother, and was relaxed and funny and easy to like. Connie seemed more like an adult to Zeus, and wore high heels and jewellery. He overheard her say to Rose that his presence in the house made her feel shy. But also that she felt sorry for him, how hard it all must be. He hated hearing his name when he wasn’t being talked to directly.

At night, his sisters would come into his room and sit on either side of his pillow and read him books about talking animals who lived in the woods and carried picnic baskets. Everything was so new and strange to him. It made him feel like it was all a mistake, like he wasn’t supposed to be there. Even now, after all these years, he could still sometimes get the feeling that he was in the wrong place.

C
onnie sensed her daughter’s presence and opened her eyes. Emma was leaning so close, she could feel her breath on her face.

Mom, Emma said, I have a great idea.

Connie yawned and Emma tilted her head sideways and put her hands on her mother’s cheeks.

We could have waffles.

Connie was still half asleep. Ahuh?

Emma gave her mom’s face a little squeeze. You could make them.

That’s a great idea.

Because I’m really really hungry, and I really think I need to eat a waffle, and we could have frozen blackberries and whipped cream and sit down and eat it as a family.

That was a wily tug on Connie’s soft spot, mentioning the family like that.

I’ll be there in a minute, okay, sweet pea? Just let me wake up here.

Emma crossed her arms and puckered her mouth in a manner that expressed her impatience. Connie made spiders of her fingers and tried to grab her daughter, who squealed and hopped backwards, then ran out of the room.

Connie looked over at Harlan, asleep with his jaw slack and his mouth open, a damp patch on the pillow under his face – this lack of discipline, even in sleep, annoying to her. She shoved the covers off and pushed herself up. She sat on the edge of the bed, her feet dangling. She flexed her ankles, then walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. What if her husband was having an affair? Is it possible he’d given into his demons and taken comfort in the arms of someone who would indulge his weaknesses? Who’d had a similar background? He was always referring to his upbringing – the poverty and dysfunction – as something he had to overcome, and Connie could be very vocal about her impatience. She felt justified because she knew the best thing would be for him to let it go and have confidence in his own evolution. But maybe he’d found someone who would let him wallow. Some bimbo in a bar, wearing a tanktop and tight jeans, who’d let him blubber into his glass and want nothing more than the chance to console him and console him, with her perky little yoga body. Connie shook her head and dismissed her own neurotic imagination. She didn’t quite believe that such a scenario was even possible.

She dropped her nightgown and walked down the sloping slate tiles and raised her face to the big brass shower head that simulated the effect of rainfall. She let the water stroke her face, run down her body like warm hands. It was nice not to hate yourself, she thought. And then she recalled an episode of
Extreme Makeover
she’d once seen at Mary-Beth’s salon. They’d taken this very plain woman from her very normal life in the
Midwest to some gated Beverly Hills estate for six weeks to undergo a complete physical transformation. The woman hated the way she looked. She’d been teased at high school – had even taken steel wool to her face to scrub off the bad skin. They gave her new teeth, a prosthetic nose, a new chin and breasts and buttocks. It was as if she’d committed a crime and was trying to conceal her identity. Your family won’t recognize you, the host kept repeating, as if that was a desirable outcome. When they were done, she looked freakish and unnatural. A ridiculous Barbie doll. Connie had felt sorry for the woman’s kids. Where did Mom go? When is she coming back? The terrifying irreversibility of it all.

Connie turned off the shower and got a towel from the heated rack. She wiped a porthole in the mirror and began brushing her teeth. But what does anybody know, eh? Who knows what it’s like to be called pizza face, a dog. Nobody’s walked ten miles in her shoes. Maybe the woman did feel better. Maybe it really was a dream come true, like she kept saying.

What had bothered Mary-Beth most was how excited her husband looked. Boy, did he ever look excited.

What she needs is a new husband, Connie had said.

Extreme Homewrecker
, Mary-Beth said. Now there’s a show I’d watch. And they had laughed about that.

Connie spat into the sink and thought about the husband. What a rat bag.

And then she whispered, Oh God, and her mind tightened like a contraction around the nugget of her concern for Harlan.

When, finally, Harlan did get out of bed and make his way into the kitchen, it was into the chaos of waffles. All three of his children, still in their pyjamas, blackberry juice bleeding onto
their plates and whipped cream around their mouths. Theo even had some in his hair. There was waffle batter on the counter and dripping out of the waffle iron, rising with the slow determination of a weightlifter. Soon the whole house would be full of it – batter oozing from the windows and the chimney. Harlan had on his pale blue summer suit even though it was a cold day and he was carrying his empty briefcase. Simon held out a pink rubber superball. Here, Dad, he said. Try this. Harlan had a quasi-scientific thing going on with his son where they would run a series of improvised tests on a new toy, create a list of stats, and then rate its toy-ness on a scale of one to ten.

Harlan took the ball and flicked the leather flap of his briefcase over his wrist and dropped it inside. He looked at Connie across the kitchen. She was standing with a spatula held aloft about to ask him a question, but all he could do was rob a blackberry off Emma’s plate and hustle out of the house, cutting off his daughter’s indignant cry of
Hey!
by closing the door.

It was another thirty minutes before Connie got the kids ready for school and into the Volvo. Si was belting out a new song of his own invention. Theo was swinging his legs and kicking the back of the front passenger seat where Emma sat, primly unbothered, holding her pet newt in a small terrarium on her lap. Connie set her jaw against the noise and the demands of merging traffic. They arrived at the school and the drop-off area was nearly empty. Emma said, We’re late
again
, and her disappointment was sudden and severe. Today, she was giving a presentation on newts and had been preparing for it since the day before. Emma loved going to school and was already so thoroughly independent. Connie could barely get a kiss from her before she was out of the car and crossing the parking lot with quick, determined steps, cradling her little glass globe in her hands.

Connie took the boys inside, and at the door to his classroom, Simon clung to her neck while his teacher, Miss Koop, tried to cajole him away with promises of awesome games and super-fun activities. I’ll be back at two-thirty, Connie whispered. Please don’t cry, sweetheart. No, don’t do that. It’s not Miss Koop’s fault. She’s just trying to help. Thank you, Miss Koop. Here, take the other sleeve. Then finally Connie was chasing Theo down the hall to scoop him up and carry him back out to the car. She buckled him into his car seat and, to her immense relief, he settled immediately, as if struck by an idea of serious complexity dangling in the air outside the car window.

Overnight, an early frost had hardened the loose gravel of the parking lot. The tops of the fir trees were lime green in the sunlight, their bodies dark as seaweed. Connie closed the car door and turned on the heat. She put her hands on the wheel and stole a moment for herself – the first since her shower this morning. She let out a breath and released her shoulders. They always dropped an inch whenever she remembered to do this.

At the edge of the parking lot, an old man in a yellow tracksuit and a black fedora stopped to talk to a boy. He was stooped and using a cane. The boy had a beautiful golden retriever puppy on a leash. The old man reached out and touched its head and the puppy kicked its back legs like a wild pony and bounced on its front paws as if it were trying to break through the ground. The old man waggled the dog’s ears and the boy waited patiently. He smiled and said something to the old man. The old man laughed, still stroking the dog, unable to withdraw himself from the pure, lively joy of the puppy. Oh darn it, Connie said and started to cry in small gasps, like a shoe falling down the stairs. She must have made a sound because Theo called to her.

I’m all right, Theo.

And then he, too, was crying.

Oh, give me a break, she said and reached back and squeezed his plump knee. Come on, sweetheart. But he wouldn’t stop.

Well, then, I happen to agree with you, Connie said, digging around in her purse for a kleenex. It’s not right. It’s just plain not right. What do you say we go find your father and ask him what’s going on, find out what’s with all this strange behaviour. I can’t tell you how strangely he’s been acting, she said and caught sight of Theo’s face in the rear-view mirror. No, of course I can’t. You’re not my confidante, you’re my son. And this last thought occurred with all the solemn veracity of a prayer.