The Miracles of Ordinary Men

by Amanda Leduc

  “All right.” Maria stands up, her clipboard in hand. She has seen many faces of death — she’s not at all surprised. “We’ll call them now.”

  Lilah signs the rest of the forms and then leaves the hospital. She picks her way slowly along the street. Before long, her footsteps bring her to Roberta’s door. Another faded, peeling house in a neighbourhood of faded, peeling houses. She stops with her hand on the doorknob, suddenly afraid. Could Israel be waiting for her on the other side of the door?

  She shakes her head and looks around. There is no black car on the street. No unmistakable Emmanuel shadow sitting calm behind the wheel. And the air — the air does not feel as heavy here as it does when Israel is around. No scent of cedar, no tremble of fear in her stomach. She rests her forehead against the wood and pauses anyway, just for a moment. Then she opens the door and walks into the front hall.

  The house smells musty, as though it hasn’t been opened in years. She drops her bags by the door and this time walks right to Timothy’s room. Roberta kept it cleaner than the rest of the house — the bed is made and the clothes are hung neatly. Even his underwear are folded and pressed into place. Only the macramé crafts, which hang untouched on the wall, have begun to gather dust.

  She stretches out on the bed and draws the duvet around her, then flips on her side and curls into a ball. The house is empty. The room is empty. The air through her lungs feels empty too.

  Wednesday

  The crematorium has Roberta’s ashes prepared and ready for Lilah by early afternoon. She collects them at two, chooses a plain and practical carrying container (no ornate urn for Roberta, whose sole foray into excess ended in the macramé that terrorizes the walls), and heads back to the house.

  She cleans for the rest of the afternoon, the music on Roberta’s tinny old kitchen radio turned as high as it will go. Beethoven. Mozart. Rachmaninoff. She sweeps up dust from the corners. She scrubs the kitchen sink until it gleams. She heaves the living room furniture against one wall and forces the vacuum across the carpet — the floor was beige when Roberta bought the house all those years ago but now it is an ugly, mottled brown. She takes the plants outside and lines them up on the back porch, then deadheads the flowers until the porch is littered with rusted petals. Her thumbs are slick with grime.

  In the bathroom, just about to wash her hands, she notices a line of green under her thumbnails. Chlorophyll. And a clear, sticky residue that has coated the inside of her palms. The plants, it would seem, still harbour secrets. In time they will unfurl, and show their green faces to the rain.

  She looks into the mirror, and she is weeping.

  —

  She goes to bed, and when she wakes some hours later, the house is enveloped in the hesitant darkness that comes at three a.m. She stands up and drags the duvet with her, out of the bedroom and down the hall. The cover trails behind her.

  She walks through the kitchen and lets herself out into the cold, and now she is once more on her mother’s back porch, staring up at the stars.

  “I hate you,” she says. Then she says it again, louder. When she breathes in, it’s as though the universe falls all at once into her lungs — she is tiny, she is endless. “I hate you!”

  Nothing happens. There is nothing above her but empty sky, nothing below her but flowers that wilt and decay and return.

  They are, after all, only words.

  Thursday

  When she gets home, she unlocks her door and he’s there, in her hallway. Again.

  “Delilah,” he says. “I’ve been calling.”

  “I went to Victoria. Like I said.”

  He steps closer. “You’re avoiding me. That’s very rude.”

  She holds the doorknob to keep from trembling. “You don’t have a key. And you say I’m the one who’s rude?”

  He steps closer still, and touches a wisp of hair by her forehead. She flinches, and he smiles. “How curious, Delilah. One would think that you are almost afraid of me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps.

  “You left,” he says quietly. “Penny tells me that you gave no notice. Also very rude.”

  “I want something else,” she says.

  He laughs at her. “What else, Delilah? What else could there possibly be for you?”

  “I don’t know.” Her mouth is inches from his shoulder. She inhales and closes her eyes. It comes back so easily, like the flowers that even now are recovering on Roberta’s porch. Terror, or excitement, or both.

  “I’ve been looking for your brother,” he says.

  She opens her eyes. The knowledge is sudden, absolute. “He’s gone.”

  “Yes,” he says. “He is gone. You are very thorough with your sacrifices.” Then he shrugs and moves past her, toward the door. “No matter. Emmanuel will pick you up at seven tonight. You should wear the black dress, perhaps.”

  She laughs, she’s so surprised. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “I am not,” he says. “We’re leaving. This Saturday. We have much to speak of, you and I.”

  “And if I’m busy?”

  He smiles. “Ah, but I have so much to give you, Delilah. You would be foolish to refuse.” He opens the door and steps out into the hall. “Seven o’ clock. Emmanuel will be waiting. We will go for dinner, and we will eat, and then we will begin to discuss the future.”

  “The future,” she repeats. She speaks slowly, as though the words aren’t quite real.

  Tonight, at the restaurant, he will be funny and thoughtful and charming. She will drink and laugh, and climb into his car as though she has no clue as to how things will end.

  “Everyone else is gone, Delilah.” His smile is dark and cruel and endless. “I am your future — you have no one left.”

  —

  He blindfolds her again and binds her so tightly to the bed that it hurts to move her hands. She whimpers and fights the bile rising in her throat. She can hear him moving around the room, taking off his clothes. The air smells of desire and fear.

  He kneels at the end of the bed, before her. “You open your hand,” he says, “and satisfy the desires of every living thing.” Then he slides a finger inside her, and another, and suddenly he thrusts in his hand. She screams. It hurts so much that the world shimmers behind her eyelids.

  He laughs. She screams and weeps and please please please stop. She arches her back and shudders, and his hand slides farther inside of her, pushes harder. He could push through and grasp her heart if he wanted, and squeeze it tight between his fingers until it became little more than dust.

  He moves to pull out his hand, slowly, and then thrusts it forward, again and again. Her throat is raw. Salt and tears coat her lips. She shuts her eyes behind the blindfold and twists her wrists until they burn, until his laughter is a dark rumble against her abdomen, his mouth low and wet against her thigh.

  Then, nothing. A moment, a pocket of calm so deep that her fists fall apart. She stops screaming. She lies silent, waiting, and as he draws his hand out the calm ebbs away and the rest of the world rushes in.

  “I am going to make you a queen,” he says.

  And then his hand is inside her again, and she is praying, actually praying.

  Friday

  The first priest she’s spoken to in years has a beard and looks like a lumberjack. He walks with a peculiar kind of power, as though waiting to burst out from beneath his robes and skewer the world. Yet he seems sad, somehow, and tired. He’s speaking to a girl when Lilah first comes into the church — a young woman with red hair that shines in the light from the windows. When the girl moves away from him and lets Lilah move up to take her place, she can see that the girl has been crying. Her eyes are deep and green, and so lonely that for a moment Lilah wants to squeeze her hand.

  But the girl shuffles past her, and Lilah turns back to the priest. She sits across from him an
d shivers, broken and trembling under the weight of her own soul. She tells him her name.

  “Delilah,” he repeats. “That’s lovely.”

  “Thank you.”

  He folds his hands across his knee. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s been years since my last confession.” She blurts the words like a guilty child. “It’s been years since I was inside a church.”

  He nods. “And?”

  “And . . .” And she has come, with the shattered bits of her life held fast between her hands. An offering. “Things are . . . happening now. I don’t know what to do.”

  “So you came to the church.”

  “I — yes. Yes.” She rubs her hands and blows on them, even though she isn’t cold. She cannot stop shaking. “Should I confess?”

  “If you think that will give you what you want, then yes.” He frowns. “Are you all right?”

  She stares at him and then at the stone beneath their feet. “I keep thinking,” she says, “that things can’t get worse. That I’ve gone as low as it is possible to go.” Her voice is so soft he must bend down to catch the words. “And then I turn around, and I just keep sinking.” Into the mattress, or into the plush leather seats of the car, her sobs so hard that it hurt to breathe. Emmanuel, who was silent as he drove her home the night before, had to help her to the door of her apartment as though she was an old lady, tired and infirm. “I don’t see a way back now. How do I confess that?”

  “Sometimes,” the priest says, “it is not about confessing. If you know what’s in your heart, Delilah, and you offer that to God, that should be enough.”

  She twists her hands. “But what if it’s not? What if things are happening to me in spite of my heart?”

  “That’s how all things happen,” he says. “We are here to be pulled out of ourselves. Pulled to God or pulled to other people — it doesn’t matter.”

  She is not prepared for the rush of emptiness this brings. She sits and stares at him, this lumbering man with his beard. “That’s it?”

  He sighs. “What more do you want me to say?”

  “You’re supposed to have answers. You’re supposed to tell me what to do.”

  “I can’t give you answers,” he says. “This isn’t about words. This — this isn’t math, Delilah.” He laughs. “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve said that, I would be a very rich man.”

  “I can’t understand a God,” she says, “that hides from me.”

  “And why shouldn’t God hide from you?” the priest asks gently. “Why shouldn’t God be deceitful, or unknowable, or terrifying? We betray God all the time. We are unknowable and terrifying to each other. So why not God?”

  He is speaking to her, or perhaps to himself. She feels that whisper of doubt along her spine. “Isn’t God supposed to be better than we are?” she asks bitterly.

  “God is,” and his voice is so sure that for a moment, she’s almost convinced. Almost.

  “I’m afraid,” she says, her voice blunt and raw. “Where can I go if God has no answers?”

  “Are you in trouble?” says the priest.

  She laughs. Israel Riviera, waiting just for her. “You could say that.”

  “Then you want the police. Don’t make the mistake of expecting God to do everything for you — ”

  “When a restraining order can do just as much?” she says, only half joking. The knowledge lies calm on his face. She wonders how many women have come here, broken and scared. Then she shakes her head. “My brother is gone,” she tells him. “My brother is gone, and my mother is dead, and I don’t know what to do. I need something.” A voice. A miracle. God.

  He stares at her for so long she begins to squirm. “I thought you looked familiar,” he says, finally. “You have the same face. Except his eyes were blue.”

  If she was empty before, now she is bottomless, a sudden darkened void. “Timothy,” she whispers. She reaches forward and clutches at the white folds of his robe. “You know where he is. Tell me where he is.”

  “I don’t,” he tells her. “I don’t know, Delilah.” He covers her hand with his own. “All of this — this is bigger than either of us.”

  “Will I see him again?” she asks, relentless. “Is he sick? Take me to him. Take me to him, please.”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t.”

  “He’s dead,” she says flatly. “He’s dead, and you found him.” And something, oh wretched, wretched miracle, brought her here.

  “He’s not dead,” the priest says. “That would be easy.”

  She wants to ask what this means, easy. Instead, she lets go, and sits back, and stares at the way his collar catches neatly beneath his chin, at the tired fierceness of his eyes. The lumberjack priest. He reaches over and takes her hands again. They sit. They stare at each other. Outside, people mill about on the street, oblivious. Inside, the great roof of the cathedral rises above their heads, bearing down on them with prayer. The stones are hushed and silent, waiting.

  “If he’s not dead,” says Lilah, “then what happened?”

  Unexpectedly, he smiles. “God happened.”

  “God.” Her voice is heavy and flat. Yet even as she says it, the word flows back into her mouth, like water, flows back into her lungs and heart and fills the nothing inside of her. It comes to rest, finally, in her abdomen, a warm golden dot that pulses with life, with possibility. “God,” she says again.

  And everything changes, and still everything is the same.

  Saturday

  She stays at home, and tries to stand him up, and he comes to find her anyway.

  He beats her in the bedroom, in her kitchen, on the floor. He whips her with her own belt, and she feels the pain like coming out of the womb and tasting that first shock of air — clear and cold, Infinitely deep. She offers him her shoulders, the mottled expanse of her back. She kneels before him and hides her breasts, her abdomen, the delicate skin of her ribcage. Her neck is bowed and ready.

  “Delilah.” His voice is so beautiful. “You cannot hide from me. When will you learn?” He cups her face and then slaps her, again, white-hot against the mouth. “We will leave tomorrow, instead. Emmanuel will pick you up at noon. And if you are not there, I will come and find you. I promise.”

  He leaves her on the bed, curled and shaking, blood at the corners of her mouth. She could not speak even if she wanted to. She watches him walk into the bathroom. Her heart beats very slowly. Caving in on itself, one chamber at a time. The sheets slip to the floor.

  Israel dresses in the bathroom and leaves without saying goodbye. Lilah lies alone in a darkened room. Her breath wheezes in and out, like Roberta’s. She closes her eyes and listens and yes, it is still there, inside of her, that humming golden dot. Night slides into morning. The shifting shadows across the backs of her eyes tell her that the sun is rising, creeping slowly through the window.

  Then she opens her eyes, and it is not the sun, and she lies there and wonders if maybe God has heard her, after all.

  Sunday

  The angel standing in her bedroom doorway is tall and bald with pointed ears. Its lips are thin and pinched and its eyes are blue. The angel is naked, from what she can see, and shaking. It looks like someone’s lost child — it could be her brother, except for the wings.

  She’s dreaming. Or she’s been beaten so badly this time that it’s a spectacular delusion. How many saints were raped and saw God?

  “Can I help you?” Because she can’t, on her life, think of what else to say.

  The angel shivers. It splays its hands on either side of its face, blue-veined hands with long fingers, no nails. It shakes its head and rocks back and forth, keening in fits and starts. The skin between its legs is wrinkled and blue, a network of veins that congregate where its sex should be and spread outward, fading into white above the pelvis.

  There’
s an angel standing in her doorway.

  “Hell-o.” The angel has a high voice, almost hysterical. The words are strange and clipped — triangle words coming out of a square mouth. “Hell-o. Li-lah.”

  “Can I help you?” This time, when the angel doesn’t answer, Lilah turns and curls her legs over the other side of the bed. She reaches for her ratty bathrobe and places it delicately around her bruises.

  “Li-lah,” the angel says. “I bring you a message. From God.”

  So sharp, that spike of fear in her chest. She turns back to the angel. “Is it about Timothy?” she whispers.

  “What?” The angel blinks, then shakes its head. “No.” It stops and takes a breath. The sound echoes through her room, oddly vast. She blinks and sees air flowing into the angel’s mouth — a gaping hole, black, a million stars. “It is not about . . . Timothy.” The angel spreads its hands. “I am a messenger,” it says. “I bring you a message from God.” Then it frowns. “The message is . . . ” and it brings its hands forward, folds them in a knot against its stomach. “The message is . . . ” The angel stares for a moment, and then bows its head and moans. “I do not know.”

  Lilah blinks, focuses. The tips of the angel’s wings are black, and fine black dust litters the floor around the door. The angel whimpers, shakes its head, draws the wings close around its face like a veil. Then it shuffles out of the room, down the hall.

  God happened. God is . . . happening. God in front of her, around her, everywhere. There is no blue-white energy, no fizzle of electricity in her hands. Just a strange being, shimmering and impotent, passing through her house. By the time she gets to the kitchen, the angel is already sitting down. A bottle of whiskey lies open on the table.