Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  “Look boys, Daddy’s come back to us. And here I’ve already gone to the trouble of picking out hymns to sing at your funeral, Brigs. Hey, do you think bringing a string quartet into the chapel would be over the top? I mean, as long as you’re dead I should be able to afford it, what with all that life insurance blood money and everything.”

  I drop my keys on the counter. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be late. Someone came into my office to talk to me right at five o’clock, and I couldn’t get away.”

  “And so you turned off your phone, naturally.”

  You’re standing over the countertop where a small, dead, raw chicken is dripping a thick, pink fluid onto a block of wood. There’s a knife in your hand – one of those astoundingly expensive ones people only buy from salesmen-relatives who are down on their luck. You’re using it to carve a leg off the chicken carcass. Everything you do in the kitchen looks so easy – the way you separate an egg or roll a meatball onto its raw side without having it crumble into bits in the frying pan. Even this precise mutilation of the chicken – where you take the animal apart as if it was never held together with anything more than tiny, invisible zippers – there’s a kind of perfection to it. It’s gorgeous. And it’d make you even madder than you already are if I mention it.

  But that’s not what I’m thinking as I pull my cell phone out of my pocket to prove you’re wrong about me shutting it off. “See, I didn’t – what? I did not turn it – ah, dang it. I must have forgotten to switch the ringer back on after my morning meeting. Sorry. But having your cell phone ring in the middle of a meeting like that is the worst. It’s like openly passing gas or something.”

  “Anyways,” you go on, flipping the chicken over to cut off its wings. “I thought each of your sisters could offer prayers at your memorial service. But I couldn’t decide which one of your cousins I should ask to give the eulogy. I mean, ideally I’d do it myself, but since speaking at your mother’s funeral was almost emotionally impossible for me, I decided I’d better assign it to someone else, right? Someone who’s kind of close but kind of far away at the same time.”

  That’s when I cross the floor to hug you into the crackling down fill and nylon of my winter coat. You’ve still got the knife in your hand but I’ll hold onto you anyway – at least until I feel you starting to straighten and strain away from me.

  “Brigs – Brigs, my hands are covered in chicken gunk.”

  When you say it, I can smell it. I let go and you step away to take hold of what’s left of the chicken. There’s a crack as its vertebrae come apart in your bare hands.

  “By the way,” you go on, “you still haven’t given me definitive permission to have all your loveliness cremated. I need something in writing in case anyone tries to get up in my face with their nonsense about ‘desecration.’”

  To the snap and sting of static electricity, I slide my heavy coat off my arms. I’m kicking through the pile of winter boots and coats and mittens strewn in front of the hall closet. The floor is wet with melted snow, soaking through my socks. It looks like the boys came home from school and then just exploded inside the front door.

  “Okay, okay. Enough with the funeral planning,” I say. “I made it home just fine.”

  “And for floral tributes,” you continue as you break through the marrow of the chicken’s sternum with the knife blade, “I guess we’ll go with whatever’s in season – and not too girlie. Only no lilies. Lilies have a terrible smell. There, I said it.”

  I sniff. “You don’t like lilies?”

  “Hate ’em.”

  I cock my head. “I must not remember what they smell like.”

  “Well, it’s one of those pricky smells that gets right up inside your cribriform plate.”

  I snort. “All right. No funeral lilies. How about some fancy orchids then – something to go with the string quartet?”

  “Yuck, no.”

  “Come on. You can’t hate all the over-priced flowers on principle.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with principles. It’s just that orchids–” You pause to roll your eyes at yourself over the dismembered chicken. “I wouldn’t have to explain this to you if you hadn’t been too busy with all that math to ever take a zoology class in university.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve never dissected a rat, Brigs.”

  I’m shaking my head as you step away from the tray of neatly arranged, butchered chicken pieces to wash your hands in the sink. “Are we still picking out my funeral flowers?” I ask.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. But the fact is the look of certain kinds of orchids reminds me of – rat testes.”

  I laugh so loudly the boys join in from the living room, even though they don’t know why they’re doing it. You lunge at me – clean, wet hands on my dress shirt – and push against my chest with both your palms.

  “It’s not funny. And it’s not something I like about myself.”

  I don’t try very hard to straighten my face. “No, of course it’s not.”

  “Then stop laughing about it. It’s awful. My zoology lab partner was some kind of crazy person, and she came back from the bin full of dead rats with the frickin’ Alpha Male for us to dissect. He was so virile the lab instructor called the whole class over to marvel at his gonads after we finished skinning them. And then she made me stand there and point at every bit of his reproductive anatomy with a probe while I told everyone what everything was called and what he used to do with it. It was a nightmare. And they – the things – they looked almost exactly like pink lady slipper orchids.”

  I’m still laughing a little but I’m trying to apologize for it at the same time.

  You give me one more shove and I finally see the red glassiness in your eyes – like you’re not that far from starting to cry. “Orchids look exactly like rat testes,” you say. “And after the dissection, the smell of the rat stayed with me for the rest of the day. It was in my hair, or in my brain, like another one of my stupid post-traumatic stress reactions. Stop – it’s not funny. I’ve never been the same since.”

  You let me hug you for a moment. When you lean away from me, you brace my head between your hands and pull my forehead down to yours. “So no orchids at our funerals, okay?”

  “Right. Absolutely no orchids under any circumstances.”

  You’re stepping away from me, eager to move on.

  I’m nodding, grinning. “So,” I say, catching your hand, kneading your palm with my thumb, “you didn’t get around to planning a second marriage for yourself, did you?”

  “Gross, Brigs. I’m standing here, staging my mourning for you, and you’re asking me - ”

  “Sorry. Sorry.” And I’m gathering you into me again, against my shoulder in that way I know I can’t hold for very long before your hyper-flexed neck starts to hurt. “Anyway, I made it home just fine.”

  “I know you made it this time. But it’s scary when – I shouldn’t even be here, I shouldn’t even know you.”

  “Don’t start with that again–-”

  You’re holding my hand again, running the edge of one fingernail along the length of the bone below my forefinger. The pressure leaves a white line in my skin that disappears moments later. You’re speaking again. “Here you are married to me when I’m not even good enough to have coffee with you.”

  “We don’t drink coffee.”

  “Everyone knows I shouldn’t be here. The waitress in the restaurant last weekend who asked if we wanted separate cheques because, clearly, there’s no way you would actually be with me – even that girl knew it. Everyone knows it but you.”

  None of this is anything I haven’t heard you say over and over again. It always leaves me feeling strange – flattered and guilty, awed by the ridiculous proportions of your feelings but sad, like it might be my fault.

  And that’s when I bend my face all the way down
to yours, low enough to kiss you. “Hey now,” I say as I pull away, “there’s nothing that can take me away from here.”

  You aren’t looking at me. All I can see when I try to find your face is your hair. It’s long and loose and I can barely discern half a dozen tiny keratin crescent moons – little slivers of our boys’ freshly cut fingernails – tangled where they flew off the end of a pair of clippers and into the net of your hair. I raise my hand and start to work at removing them from the strands.

  You swallow. “There is something that can take you away. There’s what almost happened tonight. There’s death.”

  I scoff. “Come on. We’re great with death. Death is our thing. Ask anyone in the family.”

  “That’s it exactly,” you say, quietly. “It’s like death has been specially grooming us for something for years.”

  “Nah. Death is grooming everybody. It’s just that not everyone knows not to slink off somewhere and hate it.”

  You’re just shaking your head, moving back to the counter, spooning the runny red sauce you’ve made over the skin of the chicken pieces. You won’t say anything more – as if you’re afraid to make any kind of answer out loud.

  And that’s the end of it, even though the question of my funeral flowers is still far from settled, and I haven’t told you which of my cousins to ask to speak for me when I’m gone. I haven’t even given you the permission you wanted to cremate my body. But the boys are cantering around the kitchen telling you how good everything smells and how hungry they are. So this will be the end of it until the next time, when you manage to keep me alive a little longer, moving through this pantomime of my death, here in the house, after dark, without me.

  Seven

  Remembering the clatter and slam of the front screen door, you come back into your grandmother’s house on the morning of your grandfather’s funeral through the back entrance. Inside, you find your Uncle Ned, fully dressed except for his socks, leaning forward in a chair with his forehead pressed against the hard surface of the kitchen tabletop. He sits up at the clicking of the door clasp.

  “You’re back,” he says, rubbing at the red line in his forehead where he knows the edge of the table has left its imprint.

  “Mom just dropped me off,” you say. “She’s gone back to the hospital already.”

  “Yeah, you got me in trouble with your Mom. Thanks a lot, kiddo. I wish you’d come to me for help last night.” Uncle Ned is smirking as he rises to his feet. He pours a glass of orange juice as he stands in front of the open door of the refrigerator. Even you know it’s not one of those new, frost-free fridges, and he should shut the door before the glacier in the freezer compartment inches down any further.

  “Sorry. Grammie never asked me to go get anyone else to help.”

  Uncle Ned snorts. “No. No, I don’t suppose she would have. So how is she doing, anyways?”

  “Oh – um,” you stammer, your neck flushing red. “She’ll be okay. But her arm’s in a cast all the way to the elbow.” Your hand clasps your own elbow and you pause long enough to make Uncle Ned look up from his juice. He’s still standing in the open refrigerator. “And – um – she did have a bit of a bad reaction to the – medication – they gave her for the pain.”

  He chuckles and closes the refrigerator door. “A bad trip, eh? I suppose we should have seen that coming. Mom’s definitely not what anyone would call ‘mellow.’”

  You watch Uncle Ned standing on the linoleum in his bare feet. He’s leaning on the edge of the kitchen sink. “I’d better get over to the hospital, I guess,” he says, tipping the remaining inch of his juice down the drain.

  He leaves, the unfastened metal buckles of his sandals jingling away across the dewless back lawn. The gate closes with a dry clatter of wooden planks, and then his luxury pickup truck roars out of sight down the alleyway. As the engine noise fades, you hear something else in the old house – another voice, a woman. You crane your neck around the corner of the kitchen wall until you can see her, standing at the screen door at the front of the house.

  A woman you’ve never seen before stands outside the screen. She’s dressed in office clothes – high-heeled shoes and a cream-coloured suit that’s badly creased across her hips. Her bone-thin hand holds a large floral wreath. Her face is cast in one of those automatic, professional office smiles as she talks through the wire mesh to Uncle Ned’s daughter, your cousin Janae.

  “So maybe I’m at the wrong house,” you hear the woman say through the screen. “I’m looking for – Ned?”

  Janae doesn’t say a word. You start to wonder if she’s really awake – if she’s sleepwalking, or something. But her stance in the doorway isn’t loose and sleepy. It’s taut and alert – almost convulsing.

  The woman just keeps talking. “I’m a co-worker of Ned’s. From his firm in Calgary.”

  Janae makes no move to open the door. “I know who you are,” she says. Her voice scares you. It’s not the voice of fourteen-year-old Janae, but her elemental voice – ageless.

  Outside, the woman’s face turns ashy around her lipstick and she coughs against the back of her free hand. “We all wanted to send some flowers with our respects but we weren’t sure which funeral home the family’s using. The obituary must not have run in the Calgary papers – ”

  “No. Why would it?” Janae answers in the same voice as before. It’s too much. You’re stepping out of the kitchen – past your sleeping brothers in the living room – moving to jostle Janae out of whatever’s got a hold of her.

  As you advance, the woman extends the flowers toward the closed screen door – gladiolas, white carnations, and large, rigid lilies pocked at the bases of their petals with little bumps, like skin tags. The smell of the lilies stings at your nose with a scent like the pearly white antiseptic soap dripping from dispensers hung in the hospital bathrooms. You can tell from Janae’s posture that her arms are folded over her flat middle. She will not open the door to receive the flowers. The woman can see that and stoops to lay the wreath on the concrete step outside.

  “Please give Ned our best wishes,” she says, almost meekly, and she turns away, moving down the walkway.

  You’re not sure if Janae knows you’re there, standing behind her, listening along with her to the soles of the high-heeled shoes scraping grit into the face of the concrete. Janae’s head droops toward her chest, bringing the white wreath into her view. Its pricking sweetness seeps into the house like chemical warfare, borne on the small wind moving through the mesh of the metal screen.

  A rush of air breaks on your face as the screen door rattles open under Janae’s hands. She’s got the wreath in her fingers and her bare feet are slapping up the walkway. Her hands claw the flowers free and hurl them away from the house in handfuls, her fingers stained yellow with all the pollen. She wants to be vicious but the petals just sail delicately through the air, landing on the street and the roof of the woman’s car without a sound. Mouth gaping, the woman leans back – watching as Janae chases after her – stupefied in mid-motion with just one foot planted on the floor inside her car.

  You can hear the gasping – the noise Janae makes as she fights for air, struggling like she’s dreaming through a bout of sleep apnea – like she’s you, grown up and dreaming of the bodies of the Incorrupt Saints. You step through the screen door and run to her. And as you touch her shoulder, her throat opens.

  “Don’t–you–come–here!” she chokes at the woman, hurling fern fronds and white petals onto the dusty hood of the car. “Don’t–you–dare–come–here!”

  The woman stands frozen for an instant longer, watching speechless as the girl finishes tearing the flowers and greenery out of the wreath and starts pulling apart the arrangement’s foam core. It dissolves easily under the pressure of Janae’s fingers. A chip of foam lands with a dull ring on the hood of the car. The sound seems to jar the stranger out of her stupor and frees her to
duck inside the vehicle, closing and locking the doors. She drives away, watching both of you in her rear-view mirror as she goes. A cloud of shattered flowers blows off her car and on to the pavement, strewn all over the road like the battered, browning, trailing petals of a wedding procession.

  It isn’t much later in the same day when you stand in front of the enormous mirror bolted to the dark wooden dresser in your grandmother’s spare bedroom. Janae is standing beside you, dressed for the chapel, curling her glossy brown hair with a hot metal barrel. Even though you’re on your feet, you’re stunned and exhausted past the point of sleepiness. You’re connected to wakefulness by the smell in the room – deep and organic – of the human oils and proteins superheated and denatured along the shafts of Janae’s limp funeral ringlets.

  You hold the palm of your right hand up to the mirror and look at its lines reflected in the glass. You’re halfway through your teen years, and you’ve never had your future read from your palm – not counting the time you borrowed that book on palmistry from the town library. Remember that book – the one with the blue satin binding and the crusty smear of yellowed glue where a plastic gem used to be attached to the cover? I think they had a copy of the same book in the young adult section of the library in my town – complete with nothing but dried glue left where the jewel should have been. Of course, neither of us believes in any of that goofy occult stuff. But we each independently read The Young Diviner’s Guide to Palmistry anyway. At the time, it just felt like something we should know.

  You’ve forgotten which one of the cracks in your palm is called a life line. It must be the long one, you hope, as you trace your finger along its curve around the mound at the base of your thumb. Another one of the deepest lines, you remember, is supposed to be for love. That’s me – there in the mirror with you, even then. But you don’t know anything about me yet so you just close your hand.

  At fifteen, your skin runs smooth and tight over your skull without any lines at all. Before last night in the hospital with Grammie, your unlined face would have been perfectly matched to the fact that nothing much has ever really happened to you. How come we never hear about fortune tellers who read the lines in faces instead of hands? Maybe it’s because we’re born with lines in our palms but the lines in our faces only come with time. Faces must only be good for reading the past.