by Amanda Leduc
“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, we
re 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.
“What about him?” Julie threw her hands out to her sides and narrowly missed hitting one of the wings. “It’s his life, Bryan. He made that very clear.”
Sam pressed his hands to his temples. Two years ago, Julie and Bryan had been his closest friends in the world. “We should go back downstairs.”
Bryan rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He reached back and pulled the doorknob and almost collided with Father Jim, who stood with his hand poised to knock on the door. “Oh.” Bryan shook his head, once more embarrassed. “Sorry, Father.”
Chickenhead made a strange sound, then ran to Father Jim’s feet and rumbled. He bent and picked her up. “That’s all right.” He nodded to Sam. “Are you all right, Sam? Everyone downstairs is worried.”
“I’m fine,” he said. No one would believe him, but only the priest knew exactly what he meant. “I just wanted to rest.”
“There aren’t that many people,” said the priest. “Doug, Janet, and Kenneth. A few people from the church, and your friend, Emma. Father Mario. Everyone else went home.”
“Emma?” said Julie. “I don’t know an Emma.”
“She’s from school,” Sam said. “A student. It’s nothing.”
Father Jim looked from Sam to Julie to Bryan, then back. “You don’t have to come down,” he said. “I can tell everyone that you’d prefer to be alone. If you like.”
“No.” Sam moved toward the door. “I’ll come down.” They followed Bryan down the stairs, Sam at the rear so no one could step on the wings. Then they were in the kitchen, and there was Emma, there was Doug. There was Father Mario, small in a corner of the room.
He ignored the glare from Janet and made his way to Emma first, because she was alone. Alone, awkward, uncomfortable. Pale. She hovered over the sandwiches and held a glass of juice in her hand.
“Mr. Connor,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“No one calls me Mr. Connor here,” he said, trying to be funny. “To everyone here I’m just Sam. You might as well say it too.”
“Okay.” She took a gulp from her glass. “I know I shouldn’t be here — I just wanted to say — ”
“It’s nice that you’re here,” he said. Somehow, surprisingly, it was true. “It was nice of you to come.”
She shrugged. “I just wanted to say — I’m really sorry. It must have been such a shock.”
“Yes.” Shock was everywhere. In the air, in the floorboards beneath his feet.
“How are you . . . otherwise?” She was looking at everything except the wings.
“Fine.” He could see Julie watching them, trying not to pay attention. “I’m fine.”
“Have you told anybody else?” Why was she speaking so low? Couldn’t she see everyone turning toward them, flagged by the drop in her tone? Julie’s eyebrows were so
high they looked fake, painted on.
“Father Jim,” he said. “He can see them. Father Mario too.”
“Really?” She glanced over at the priests. “What does that mean?”
“You tell me.”
She looked troubled. Her hair shone against the blackness of her dress, and her eyes were very green. How had he not noticed her eyes before? “They . . . they look like they’re taking all of your energy. Like leeches.”
“Leeches.” That was a good word. He hadn’t thought of that word. “You could say that.”
“What do they say?” She gestured to the priests.
He snorted into his fruit punch. Everyone wants to know why — even me. “Religious psychobabble. God works in mysterious ways. Etcetera.”
“Maybe it’s not psychobabble,” she said. “Ever think of that?”
“Yes.” He wasn’t lying. “All the time.”
Emma nodded jerkily. She drank the rest of her juice and then placed the glass carefully on the table. “I’ll pray for you,” she said. “If it helps at all.”
“Thank you.” So many people, so many prayers. The wings twitched at his shoulders.
“You can . . . call me,” she said, awkwardly. “If you need anything.”
“I don’t have your number.” This was ridiculous. This was dangerous ground. He could see Julie inching closer, her own glass in hand.
“Here,” Emma said. She handed him a scrap of paper. “My number. And my email. Use it whenever you want.” She smiled. “See you later, Mr. Connor.”
“Sam,” he said, but she was already moving, making her way to the door. He watched until she left, and then he turned his head, and there was Julie.
“Are you sleeping with her?” she asked. Her voice shook.
“What?” More shock. Underneath it, yes, a hint of laughter. So much hysteria, so little room. “Of course not.”
“Oh.” Julie ducked her head. “It just — you just looked so intense, the two of you.”