Web of Angels

by Lilian Nattel

  “No, wait.” Lyssa pulled him closer, her lips to his ear. The kids were talking, all excited, When can we go and see the baby, can we bring a toy? “Emergency C-section. What do I say?”

  “They’ve got to get to school,” he said to her. And then to the girls, “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “Awwww,” Nina protested. “But …”

  “Heather is sleeping,” he said desperately, looking at his wife for help. He had the wrong one for that.

  Sleeping. Okay, whatever. She emptied her coffee into the sink, set the cup on the counter. The only hot drink she liked was cocoa. “You’re taking Josh?”

  He nodded, putting the mug in the dishwasher. He kissed the girls goodbye, unpeeling them as they hugged him around the waist and the legs. Then he shouted for Josh, who came downstairs and through the kitchen, not looking at anyone, backpack on one shoulder, face shrouded by a hoodie. The glass doors slid open and closed, and they were gone.

  Lyssa was cold down to her bones, but she had to get out of her PJs and the girls did, too. She eyed the laundry basket suspiciously. Something they could wear ought to be in there amid the folds of beige. She crouched down, rifling through it. Nina and Emmie crouched beside her, curious to see what the mom who gave them chocolate chips for breakfast would do. “Hey you two. Teeth,” she said, without much conviction. Getting kids dressed, cleaned, schooled, that was Sharon’s job. Except that she was inside, don’t call us we’ll call you, and Lyssa was out here in the world, on her own.

  INSIDE

  Alarm bells were ringing. Lockdown! The sound scattered the inside children through the inside house. They hid in the upstairs rooms, in closets, under beds, those were good hiding places. Behind curtains, no not there, feet stick out. Here comes a punisher, pulling you out and dragging you down the stairs, bump, bump, bump. Bells clanging. Shut up, shut up, shut up! Something bad happened. Bad means trouble. Trouble means you get it if you can’t stop the sound coming out of your mouth. A punisher reaches under the bed, long arms, spider hands. He’s got someone by the hair. He’s turning to the closet. Someone is in there breathing too loud. Bang, it opens. The punisher’s face is big and white. I’ll give you something to cry about. I’ll give you what for. Down you go. Down to the basement. In the dark. With the monsters. That’s where crybabies go.

  Ally wasn’t a crybaby. She knew what to do. The other lils ran ahead of the punishers, trying to get as high as they could before they were caught, but she crept down the back stairs, Echo holding her hand, making him hurry on his crooked feet. The safest place was in the boot closet, behind the kitchen. It had a little door and a little latch and nobody would notice it. Come on, Echo. She was as cold as if she was sitting naked on the North Pole, but she pushed him inside and snuck in after him.

  Echo was sniffling. “Shh,” she whispered.

  Ally sat quiet as a mouse, holding the tiny teddy bear she kept hidden in her pocket so the punishers wouldn’t take it away. She wished she had an outside teddy, a real one with fur and eyes and overalls but nobody was supposed to know there were lils inside. Or else.

  If she peeked through the knothole in the boot closet, she could see into the kitchen. It was warm in the kitchen. Sharon was there, under the eye of the Housekeeper, but Sharon’s eyes were closed. She couldn’t see how nice it was and bright like there were windows and something outside the windows like a field where you could run or trees that you could climb. Ally couldn’t see much, but she could hear the Housekeeper humming and she could smell something like cinnamon and the air that came through the knothole was warm. When the punishers were done with the lils, they’d get Sharon out. They’d call her name and she’d go and then they’d have a nice little talk with her. If Ally knew how to get into the kitchen nobody would ever get her out.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  In Seaton Grove the streets were narrow and parking expensive so people walked. From home, it took Nina, Emmie and Josh five minutes to get to the junior school, seven minutes to the subway, three to the boys and girls club, six to the grocery store. Eleven minutes to the fortune cookie factory and twelve to the former typesetting shop, now rented as a film studio. It was eight minutes to the house painted like candy or the luxury condos built where the slaughterhouse had burnt down. Three more minutes from there to Magee’s for cocoa or down to the fruit and vegetable store. Add extra time for bouncing a ball. Even more if they decided to go down into the big playground at Christie Pits. If you squinted you could see the shadows of the boys who rioted there in the 1930s when this was a working-class neighbourhood. The first families here had had names like Valiant and Goodchild, and they’d ignored people who called the neighbourhood Satan’s Grove because of the smell from the glue factory, conveniently located near the abattoir. But now it smelled of baking, courtesy of the fortune cookie factory, which stood beside the railway tracks.

  Mrs. Agostino, the Italian grandma who lived next door to the Lewises, was already sitting on her porch, keeping watch on the street from her plump and pink armchair. While Lyssa turned to lock the door, Mrs. Agostino gestured to the girls to zip up their coats. Stout and grey, she didn’t speak any English but every year at Christmas she gave bags of candies to Nina and Emmie, even Josh, the big boy. Sometimes, on summer evenings, she offered them homemade pizza on paper plates. The girls, obedient to a maternal authority that surpassed language, zipped up.

  The three of them walked down Ontario Street, pausing to watch the garbage trucks. Nina was slightly in front as she was in most things: hopping into the bath before her little sister, going through the front door two steps ahead, losing her teeth first and learning to read first. Only in one category did Emmie stake her territory. Her backpack was pink and her jacket was pink and when Nina had attempted to sneak the pink elephant into her own bed, Emmie had said, “Stop! That’s mine. See,” pointing to her own head as if red hair, in its chromatic relationship to pink, entitled her. Nina had bowed to this irrefutable evidence. Her backpack was blue.

  “Come on, let’s run,” their mom said. And they did, running for the joy of it, not because they were late. She grabbed her girls’ hands, this mom with the moss green eyes and the pointy chin, freckles standing out across her nose, and the reckless run making a dance of her feet on the pavement. Down Ontario Street and across Seaton they ran, catching their breath at the candy-coloured house, left on Lumley toward the school and the last remaining cottages of the original village. Then they stopped short.

  Several police cars blocked the road. An ambulance and the local TV news van were parked on a slant, half on the sidewalk. In front of them on the sidewalk stood a reporter, young and easy on the eyes, wearing a short jacket and short skirt. A few feet behind her, a cameraman was panning the street, taking in the raindrops dripping from eaves, the sunshine pouring through the mist, the boarded-up cottage across the street, once the home of Mrs. Brown, an escaped slave who’d lived to be 111 years old. He turned his camera on the yard signs that said RENOVATIONS BY …, the matted lawns, the bare gardens, parents holding kids’ hands, toddlers in strollers or riding on shoulders, gawking.

  “This is Nicole Antonopoulos, reporting live for Citytv.” She pushed her microphone at Lyssa. “Did you know the deceased?”

  “What’s ‘deceased’?” Nina asked.

  Lyssa scowled at the cow with the microphone. “I’m getting the kids to school.” She wanted to say more, but the hands in hers, Nina’s and Emmie’s, were soft and small and trusting, and Lyssa wasn’t going to do anything to shock them. So she just added, “You mind?” and didn’t even flip her the finger. While she led the girls around the reporter, moving toward the schoolyard, Emmie was saying, Ambulances come in emergencies and What is the emergency? and Why are there police cars, did a burglar come and will the burglar rob our house? Nina piped up that the burglar must have fallen out of the window and that was why there was an ambulance and they had reading buddies today and she was luckier than Emmie because th
eir cousin was her reading buddy and not Emmie’s and Emmie said, I want Judy to be my reading buddy. No fair.

  Seaton School was L-shaped, with several big maple trees growing out in front, one of them split by lightning, dead on one side. In spring only half the tree would leaf. On the short side of the L stood a row of saplings surrounded by mesh to keep out squirrels. A wooden sign in front of each young tree announced the class that had planted it. There were three entrances, one for kindergarten, one for primary and one for junior grades. On an ordinary day Emmie would line up with the kindergarten kids, examining the treasures her friend pulled from her pocket—a bead, a stone, a broken bracelet picked up in the park. Nina would stand in a circle of girls playing clapping games near the north entrance, while her cousin, Judy, huddled with her friends in the fifth-grade class at the other end of the schoolyard. But today the schoolyard was uneasy; nobody traded snacks and games stalled. In clusters along the fence, the moms, some with toddlers in strollers or babies in Snuglis, a few dads, a smattering of grandparents and nannies murmured, for this was their village square.

  Did you tell your kids? Not yet. Oh God, you can still see the ambulance from here. Heather used to babysit for us sometimes. My boys loved her. She had so much energy. She babysat for me, too. She painted a mural with my kids. It’s still on their bedroom wall. You wouldn’t know she was the same kid who ran away. I just can’t believe this. I heard she shot herself. That’s impossible, it had to be pills. Her mother is totally against guns; Debra would never have one in the house. I know, but for sure it was a gun. It’s lucky in a way, you know? If it was pills, then the baby would have died, too. Can you imagine finding out that your mother shot herself while she was pregnant with you? The baby will know that she’s special. It was a miracle. Thank God Debra’s a pediatrician—she saved her granddaughter. I don’t know about God but she had nerve. You never know how you’ll react in a crisis. Afterward, that’s when it hits you. It’s so sad. It’s scary, that’s what. My oldest is turning thirteen—I hope I survive it. Your daughter isn’t Heather. She didn’t run away when she was twelve. What do you say to the parents? I don’t know. I just don’t want to say anything dumb. Should we go to the house?

  Lyssa shifted from foot to foot, watching the girls, waiting for the bell to ring so she could go. She wanted to run home and keep running. Three blocks wasn’t enough, she’d have to go up to the railroad tracks and run on the gravel path above the houses, through Seaton Grove, past the cemetery and up along the trestle bridge. Maybe then, when she was out of breath and had a stitch in her side and sweat dripping down her face, she’d have exhausted the turmoil inside. Nina was looking over at her to see if there was anything to worry about. She waved to show there wasn’t.

  “Sharon,” one of the moms said to her. Her name was Ana Patel. She wore a sari under her coat and her baby, in a stroller, had Down’s. “Isn’t your son friends with Heather’s sister?”

  “Josh has some classes with her.” When the sisters had come over to look at the high chair, they’d put a doll in it. They’d played at giving the doll a name and she’d played along, naming wildflowers and making them laugh. Swamp rose. Pussy toes. Hairy mint.

  “He must have had some hint,” Ana insisted.

  “Nope.” In Chinese you could say Fuck the eighteen generations of your ancestors. She wondered if Dan’s mom knew that one. Speaking of his family, there was his sister in her purple jacket, making her way through the schoolyard. Eleanor could talk. There was nothing she liked better.

  “I heard,” Eleanor said, arriving at Lyssa’s side. They’d been friends before they’d been sisters-in-law. Eleanor had been the one to introduce her to Dan, arranging for them to meet at the skating rink. She was a plumper version of her brother, a couple of years younger but with the same dark brown hair, straight and thick, cut short. She had dimples but didn’t like them because she thought they made her cheeks look fat, yet she wore purple because it was her favourite colour and tough shit if it made her look fat. She had been the one who disappointed her parents, dropping out of college to marry an electrician. Before the neighbourhood was gentrified, she’d bought a house on Lumley, then found one for her brother on Ontario Street. She had one kid, Judy, who was turning eleven and spent as much time at her cousins’ house as her own. She was Sharon’s best friend. But even so she didn’t know that Sharon was one of many alters or that another was standing next to her right now. “How’s Josh taking it?”

  As Lyssa elbowed her and tilted her head at the moms listening in, Eleanor changed tack without blinking and hardly a breath between words. She said to them all, “We have to bring food. If everyone makes a main dish we could put together a week’s worth.” Yes, yes—the moms eagerly took up the idea, relieved to have something they could do. Ana offered to make a curry and Eleanor to keep a list of who’d bring what. The last bell was ringing, the kids filing through the doors into the school.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” Lyssa said.

  In university she and Eleanor had gone skating, they’d gone running. In Hammond House with its heritage plaque and the hundred-year-old sign, LIVE AND LET LIVE, they’d got drunk and on the small dance floor they’d danced. Later Lyssa had danced there with Dan. But after they’d been going out a while, the little stick had turned blue, and, refusing to be pregnant, Lyssa had disappeared inside. By the time she’d come back out, years had passed. There were three kids. And while she was looking at photographs of the life she hadn’t lived, Eleanor had walked in, stopped dead in her tracks, and said, “I haven’t seen that look on your face for ages. Do you want to go dancing by any chance?” As if time hadn’t passed for her either. As if a singleton could know what she was seeing.

  Leaving the schoolyard, Eleanor said, “What am I going to tell Judy? It was hard enough talking about Heather being pregnant.”

  “God I want a cigarette,” Lyssa said.

  “You aren’t going to start smoking again and die on me.”

  They were walking up Lumley Street as the ambulance pulled away. The house was identical to many others in the neighbourhood, tall and narrow, semi-detached. The front yard was winter brown, but a landscaper had been at it, preparing ground for winning flowers. There was a new cement porch with no railing, a pane of stained glass in the front door. Behind windows they saw a flicker of colour and movement. Someone drew the blinds.

  “I don’t get it,” Lyssa said. “She was talking about having her own place.”

  “Oh. Like that was going to happen. She was sixteen! Selfish that’s what it is. I don’t care what anyone says. Rick and Debra did everything for her. Everything! They don’t deserve this.” Eleanor shook her head. “I wish I’d never convinced …”

  “What?” Lyssa turned to see Eleanor biting her lip, eyes narrowed against something.

  “I’m rambling. Forget it.”

  “Come on, dudette.” Lyssa put her arm through Eleanor’s. “Let’s go for a run up on the tracks.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Tough. You promised to start running with me. Or I’m going to bum a cigarette from someone.”

  “I hate when you get like this,” Eleanor said, but she was laughing. “Can we at least get fries after?”

  “Extra large. With a side of mayonnaise.”

  On Hammond Street, they climbed the embankment to the overpass where there was a break in the fence. The gravel path was lined with bushes that screened the streets below. Later there would be wildflowers and butterflies. After a rain, sometimes a duck in a puddle. Running at her sister-in-law’s side, Lyssa slowed her pace, Eleanor put all she had into keeping up. They teased each other, got hot, unzipped and ran some more with their coats flapping like capes, like the wings of birds picking up the west wind, propelled along the gravel path as if they were flying. While she ran, Lyssa looked up at the blue of the sky, her favourite colour of all, and down at the backs of houses, the messes that people didn’t fix up for their neighbours, the
old porch with shredding wood, the fallen-in shed, piles of broken stuff, alleys with painted garages, an ancient metal works, a two-storey brick shed with windows, things that weren’t on display. She liked seeing what was behind, what was in back of the front. What was like her.

  Seaton Grove was older than the neighbourhoods on either side, which had been farmland and estates when the Valiants and the Goodchilds took up residence around the glue factory. Back then the north edge of the village was marked by Hammond Street, and children thought it was the edge of the world, no more streets to be seen, no cottages huddled close, only the wild and the rumour of great houses somewhere on the hill above.

  They marked Seaton Grove time by looking up at the sun. Noon was twelve minutes earlier in the next town west, six minutes later in the hamlet to the east. Travellers never quite knew when their trains were arriving or leaving, because time changed every few miles. Some people carried half a dozen watches set to clocks along their journey, to no avail. Time was independent, unruly, untrammelled. Then standard time was invented and clocks became synchronized.

  People who were multiple still rode the vagaries of hours that leaped, disappeared, reversed and sped up. But even for them, time moved in the outside world. If Sharon lost it, someone else gained it. Lyssa, who was sixteen in a mom’s middle-aged body, was going on seventeen as she ran beside her sister-in-law, her feet pounding the earth, the stones under her feet older than the clock.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  The kitchen was an addition to the original house, built large enough to accommodate guests. It was Sharon’s favourite room because it smelled good, it smelled of what she was good at, cooking and feeding her family. She could hear herself and yet not herself on the phone talking to Eleanor, saying, Uh huh, I got your orders Miss Bossy. In her head were thoughts of running along a narrow trestle bridge, of the thrill when a train whooshed by. Lyssa’s thoughts, not Sharon’s—she was scared of heights. The girls were upstairs in their room, Josh not yet home from school. Eleanor had already organized the neighbourhood, co-coordinating a week’s worth of main courses, bagels and desserts. Tomorrow was Saturday, and her friends would have all day to shop, cook, and drop their contributions at her house. She would arrange delivery. Heather’s parents might not eat, but at the end of the day they would have food.