Web of Angels

by Lilian Nattel

  “Please. Don’t go. Can’t you go to school here?” In her cotton nightgown, she looked smaller, shoulders hunched as she hugged her knees, face bare of makeup. Sharon knew the curve of her sister’s cheeks, the long lashes when her eyes were closed. Sometimes at night she used to watch her sister sleep in moonlight, keeping guard, though she didn’t know from what.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going yet, Paulie.”

  When the summer ended and she was packing for school, Sharon asked her sister to come with her and stay for a while. But Pauline wouldn’t, she couldn’t, for she was the good daughter and her parents would never give their permission. She was just starting high school. Come for a visit, Sharon said. If you stay I’ll register you for school. I’ll get another job. I’ll support you. Or come later, Sharon said. When you’re eighteen you can do anything you want. They won’t let me, Pauline said. Don’t go. Please don’t go. You can’t go. If you go I’ll never speak to you again. That I promise you. She kept her promise.

  And here was another good daughter, touching her thumbnail to her upper lip, pronouncing her nails done. “It’s Emmie’s turn to help with the pancakes. Nina and Cathy, you can get back to your knitting if you want.” Sharon left the sliding doors open, a breeze bringing in the smell of rain-drenched earth as she put away the groceries, setting a small aloe vera on the windowsill above the sink. Franky the kitten, accustomed to the family now, was lapping water while Nina stood on a stool, reaching for popsicles in the freezer. “Not now. You can have one for dessert.”

  “Awwwwwwww, Mommmmm.”

  Sharon put all the ingredients on the blue table along with measuring cups, measuring spoons and a mixing bowl. Emmie kneeled on a chair while Sharon handed her a cup and said, “Fill that up with flour, honey.” Cathy’s head was bent, her lips puffed out as she concentrated on the yarn. “That scarf will look nice when you’re done. Josh will love it.”

  Nina was using small plastic needles and Cathy larger bamboo ones, both of them laboriously digging the point into a knot, wrapping yarn, pulling. Emmie slowly measured more flour, oat bran, baking soda and baking powder. Sharon added vanilla. Emmie cracked eggs. A breeze tinkled the wind chimes on the back deck. Franky chased a stray piece of yarn.

  “Is this good, Mom?” Nina held up her knitting.

  “Excellent.” She put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Nina had a plan. She was going to knit a scarf for each of her teddy bears. One in each colour of the rainbow. “How’s Madeline?” she asked Cathy.

  “Linny’s over her cold.” The older girl rubbed her nose. “I think I’m getting it. You know what Heather wanted to call her?” The girls shook their heads. What? What? Tell us. Cathy rolled her eyes. “Amethyst. Isn’t that so precious?”

  “It’s pretty,” Emmie said. “Ammmmthissss.”

  “Not Amthis, Amthist!” Nina said. “Don’t you know anything?”

  Emmie stuck out her tongue, reaching for Nina’s knitting with her floury hands. Green eyes blazed, dark eyes flashed, Nina was shouting Mom! while her mom put an arm across Emmie’s chest, blocking her from leaning forward, threatening no maple syrup or worse—they’d have to go to their room and make up. They glared at each other as they settled back down in their chairs. There was flour on Emmie’s freckled nose. Nina’s nose, a smaller version of her Chinese grandma’s, was flaring. Cathy kept knitting, head bent, not looking up.

  “Madeline was my grandma’s name,” she said as if there had been no interruption. “I guess it’s okay. But it’s too long. Linny is better for a baby.”

  She moved the needle with the full row to her left hand, shifting the empty needle to her right, the skein of blue wool on the table. Not dollar-store yarn. Sharon believed in using good wool, even for kids who were learning. It was cobalt blue, like beautiful china, like the kitchen tiles, and soft in the hands. It was the feeling in her hands that she loved about knitting, needles moving faster than the eyes could follow, wrap and lift, wrap and lift, counting stitches, the rhythmic click clack, knit eight from back stitch holder, knit sixteen from front stitch holder, increase four evenly across. That was the hood of the hoodie she’d made for her niece.

  “I like that. It makes me think of the Madeline books that I read to Emmie,” Sharon said. “That Madeline is an orphan, too, and she’s got spunk.”

  “My grandma had chronic fatigue.” Cathy examined her knitting. “S! I dropped a stitch.”

  “Let me have a look.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lewis. I ruined it. I’m so clumsy. I can’t do anything.”

  “Mom will fix it,” Nina said. “She always fixes mine.”

  Cathy shook her bit of scarf as if the hole was a chasm. “How?”

  “Please,” Sharon said. “I’ve dropped a million stitches.” She pulled a crochet hook from the knitting bag. “You see this ladder right here? Just hook it with this and then slip your needle through. There you got it! Now wrap the yarn and it’s just a regular stitch.”

  Cathy looked at it critically. “You can still tell.”

  “Okay. I want to show you something.” It didn’t take long to run upstairs and come back down wearing the old cashmere sweater and carrying a jacket, which she dropped onto an empty chair next to Cathy. “Ta-da! This is my first sweater. I made it for Dan and he wore it, believe it or not, until it shrunk.”

  “But it’s awful!”

  “You know what’s worse? I wore it to Eleanor’s house and everyone saw me in it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.” Sharon smiled. “Thank goodness your mother didn’t. Can you imagine what she’d have thought?”

  “What, Mommy?” Emmie asked.

  “That it was butt ugly!” Nina crowed.

  “She said butt!”

  Now the little girls were laughing uproariously, so hard they started to hiccup, their fight forgotten. Cathy laughed with them, everybody laughing so hard, even Sharon, that it wasn’t until Cathy put her hands over her face that they realized her tears weren’t laughing tears anymore. Nina peered at her inquisitively, then said, “She’s crying, Mom.” Emmie picked up the kitten, but her mom motioned her away before she could shove him at Cathy. An arm around the weeping girl’s shoulders, Sharon made soft sounds, Shhh it’s okay it’s okay, shhh, just as she did with her girls on a night of bad dreams. Nina and Emmie stood close, arms around each other.

  “I can’t even hang on to a stick,” Cathy wailed.

  “A stick?”

  “The stupid flash drive. They took it.”

  “You can get another,” Sharon said. “I’ll get you one.”

  “No you can’t.” Cathy cried harder. She cried so she could hardly breathe and it was a while until she could speak. “It was my sister’s,” she gasped between sobs. “Now it’s gone.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sharon said.

  Cathy was rocking in her chair, hands over her face, multicoloured fingertips spread wide to hide as much as she could. As the sobs subsided, she wiped her eyes, leaving trails of mascara on the back of her hands. Her head was still bent, hair covering her face. “It doesn’t matter. My mom’s got it.” She lifted a thumbnail to her teeth.

  “No, no, no,” Sharon said, pulling Cathy’s hand gently down. “Not with that great new polish on it. Your nails are getting so nice now. Did you stop biting them?”

  “Uh huh,” Cathy said through the curtain of her hair.

  “My nails always split,” Sharon said. “My mother never had any hope of me.”

  “I could do your nails. They wouldn’t split.”

  “That would be nice,” Sharon said. She stood up and went to the glass doors, sliding them shut. On the other side of the wall, the grandma next door, who still waxed her kitchen floor, was revving up her ancient floor polisher. “You haven’t seen the other thing I brought down to show you. I found it yesterday at Value Village.” It was the jacket she’d seen in her mind—she must have seen it some other time when she was at the store and forgotten. Fo
r here it was, exactly the same, with the bad stitching at the shoulders and the staples as if someone had tried to alter it and, failing, had just stapled it back together. It was only two dollars and so for a lark she’d bought it. An eighties silk jacket with vertical black stripes overlaying a pastel plaid, nipped at the waist and long, like a riding jacket, but who would ride a horse wearing silk? “I’ve got no idea what to do with this. I’d never wear it.”

  “But it’s fantastic,” Cathy said, hoarse from crying. “It is so retro, it’s sick.”

  “That good?” Sharon laughed. “Let’s make it over for you, then.”

  “What for? If I take it home, they’ll put it in the bag for Goodwill.”

  Sharon might have left it at that, for you have to respect other parents’ rules if you want to get along with your neighbours. But words were said inside, urgently, insistently and she was listening. “I have an idea. There’s lots of space in my basement closet. How about if I help you fix the jacket and we keep it there?”

  “Okay.” Cathy smiled. She had a lot of smiles. The polite girl next door. The savage grin. The smirk. And this new one, hopeful. Had Sharon really never seen her smile this way before?

  “Good. You girls need to clean up for lunch. Cathy, can you take them upstairs and help them?” As Cathy got up to follow the younger kids, she stopped, turned and put her arms around Sharon, hugging her quickly, releasing her as soon as Sharon hugged back. Then she ran up the stairs after the girls while Sharon called, “Faces and hands everybody. With soap!”

  Plugging in the griddle, Sharon listened to the clatter of feet overhead. She had real maple syrup—none of that sugar water dyed brown for her family. Pipes rattled upstairs as water flushed down, flowing into larger pipes laid underground a hundred years ago when Seaton Grove’s bylaws stipulated that no whole sheep or hogs or geese were allowed to run free in the streets on pain of a ten-cent fine. Before that the roots of a forest intertwined and Garrison Creek flowed between ferns. Now pipes connected the houses on either side, across the street, around the corner, their sewage led far away. That was how civilized people handled shit: pipe it; bury it. And they sacrificed the creeks, the streams, the living waters in order to do it, their land dry and quiet except for the sound of sprinklers.

  Later Sharon took the silk jacket to the dining room to unstitch and unstaple it while Franky, black except for the white tip of his tail and two of his paws, stalked a dust bunny in the corner. Asking Cathy to stay still, Sharon pulled sleeves over her arms, pinning shoulders and cuffs, explaining that it was the fabric that mattered. No matter how misused or misshapen, it could be made again into something lovely.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  “Mama! Mama!”

  “I’m here.”

  Emmie was sitting up in the lower bunk, her older sister still asleep. “I saw Heather. Her hair falled off.”

  “It was just a dream, kiddo.” Alec had come running when he heard his child scream, no memory of how he’d got to the girls’ room. He was in the kitchen, talking online. Then he was on the second floor. Nothing was out of place, nobody else there. His breathing slowed, eyes still scanning to be sure.

  There was a doll on the floor. Before bed the girls had been playing, “Get the baby out,” re-enacting the Caesarean that had been done on Heather’s body. Brigitte had said that was a healthy way to process the tragedy, but she didn’t hear these kids scream at night.

  “Everything’s okay,” Alec said. “I’ll sit here. Go back to sleep.”

  Emmie rolled over in her nest of stuffed animals, clutching Lambie, eyes fluttering open occasionally to make sure that her nighttime mommy was still sitting in one of the plastic chairs, legs stretched out. She still refused to eat lamb chops, though she’d eaten roast beef for dinner and asked for seconds, not realizing it was cow as Josh had been threatened with dire consequences if he told her. Grounding, loss of allowance, garbage duty.

  The moon was full. Somebody inside had noticed it and knew the calendar, that Easter was coming and Good Friday. Holidays were always hard for them. There had been no refuge on days when school was out and adults home from work. Now the lils were hiding inside as if the walls of the house were penetrable, terror on its way through their skin. Alec got up to check doors and windows, make sure everything was locked. After he sat down again, he heard the sound of footsteps in the hallway, then the click of a light switch, the bathroom door closing. A train was squealing along the railroad tracks, starting and stopping. Warning whistles. A heavy load. The toilet flushed, rattle of pipes, door creaking. Bare feet slapped slapped on the wood floor, which squeaked just past the stairwell. Josh stood in the doorway, his shadow long and narrow in the girls’ dancing fairies night light. His hair stood on end like his dad’s. T-shirt and SpongeBob PJ bottoms, ancient and threadbare.

  “What are you doing, Mom?”

  “Shhh. Emmie was having bad dreams. Why are you still up?”

  “I heard you when I went to the bathroom.” Josh sat down in the other small chair, his legs stretched out alongside his mom’s. He was a kid who took his sweet time figuring things out for himself, keeping it to himself until long after the fact. When he was five, Dan had given him “medicine” for nightmares. A year later Josh had said that he knew the medicine was just molasses but it was funny that it worked anyway. Alec glanced over at the bunk beds. Emmie hadn’t stirred, not even at the sound of her brother’s voice, which, if she’d been the slightest bit alert would have had her up and jumping on him.

  Alec’s stomach was rumbling. “I didn’t eat any supper. I’m going to fix a snack.”

  “Can I have something, too?” Josh asked. If it was his daytime mom, she’d have directed him back to bed. And he’d have gone, sullenly, more or less obediently. But everything was different in the night. He might talk, his mom might say yes. Food tasted better.

  “I’m thinking cocoa and sandwiches. You want to help?”

  Alec made cocoa the way he’d learned from Uncle Frank. Half milk, half water, chocolate syrup, a glob of honey. Uncle Frank used to heat it in a coffee tin over a fire. They’d drink cocoa and watch meteor showers while Uncle Frank showed him the constellations. Ursa Major pointed down to the North Star, the tail end of Ursa Minor. Big bear and little bear, Callisto and Arcas.

  Condensed milk made better cocoa, but there wasn’t any in the pantry, and Alec had to search way at the back to retrieve the syrup. Offering no advice and no instruction, he put the bread out on the board, telling Josh to slice it while he rummaged in the fridge for cold meat, mustard, pickles. The microwave hummed. Beep beep beep. The cocoa was ready.

  “This is good, Mom,” Josh said. The bread was uneven and so was the meat. Slathers of mustard. Wedges of pickle. Standing at the counter, they chewed on their sandwiches. Slugged down cocoa.

  “So what’s up?” Alec was trying not to look at the masking tape holding back his son’s ears, his gaze on the aloe and the ivy on the windowsill. Franky had appeared out of nowhere and was rubbing his head on Alec’s foot, clearly unaware that Alec didn’t go for small animals. Or perhaps it was. Cats were like that. Alec shoved the kitten aside with his foot, as gently as the little bugger deserved.

  Josh took another bite, talking with his mouth full. “Cathy’s parents are sending her to a shrink.”

  “Who?” The kitten was mewing pitifully, kneading Alec’s toes. He got a can of cat food from the cupboard, opened it, and dropped the food in the kitten’s dish, all the while wondering if the kid was being sent to see her father’s cousin and what he’d put her on.

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t really want to go, but I told her you talk to someone and it’s okay. It is, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Sure. If you got someone you can trust.”

  “Like you used to have headaches all the time and you don’t anymore.”

  “True.” He didn’t know that Josh had noticed. He wondered what else Josh had noticed. Someone should ask the thera
pist if this was bad. If seeing their suffering could hurt their son.

  “Mom, why don’t we ever see your parents?”

  “Whoa …” Out of left field and he hadn’t seen it coming. He made himself pick up his sandwich, take a bite, chew and swallow. “What brought that up?”

  “Just thinking about it.”

  “What you been thinking?”

  But Josh wouldn’t hand over his thoughts that easy. “Why don’t we see them?” he asked again, waiting for his nighttime mom to answer his nighttime questions.

  “They came here once. That was enough. Do you remember?”

  “Just that you didn’t feel well so I got to watch a lot of TV. I thought it was fun and then I got bored. And …”

  “And what?” On the inside folks were sharing information, passing the pieces of their memories back and forth, running through the visit in their head. Josh was three years old. Had they left him alone for an hour they didn’t remember? Had the father touched him. The mother. If so, if so …

  “Your mom got me a big banana split when you were sleeping. She told me not to tell. I really wanted her to come back again and make me another one. She said that Dad should get you real jewellery. She had a shiny bracelet.”

  Alec exhaled. “Nice lady.”

  “How come, Mom? Is it because she didn’t think Dad was good enough? Is that why we don’t see them?”

  “It’s late. You should get back to bed.”

  “Oh, right.” Josh was looking at him with adolescent scorn. With hurt. Being treated as if he was stupid or as if he couldn’t be trusted with the truth. Was that how they’d raised him? To be unworthy of truth? This kid who carried an air of dignity around him, even when he forgot deodorant.

  Alec put his plate in the sink. “Let’s go outside.” The nights were mild and spring had come though the birch tree was still bare. “If we’re going to talk about this, then I need to get some air.”

  He slid open the glass doors, stepped outside on the deck, his son beside him, both of them in bare feet. Next door laundry was flapping in the wind. As he walked across the deck, lights went on, bright enough to read by. Alec would prefer not to have motion detectors. You could see better in the dark without lights blinding you to the shadows. He liked the cold wood of the deck under his feet, the crinkling grass, the square of mud that would be their garden, then the parking pad that made a bouncing surface for basketball, the hoop screwed into the side of the shed. “You want to know the real reason?”