Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  Beside you in the mirror, Janae has heard all she can stand of nothing but the clicking of her curling iron. You’ve waited all day, but she hasn’t said anything about the lady at the door this morning. It’s getting harder and harder to remember that crisis at all. It’s being eclipsed by the day’s next crisis – the crisis of your grandfather’s dead body. You will be faced with it in a little over an hour at a service the adults in the family are calling “the viewing.”

  Janae has her mind ground into the same morbid rut. “It won’t look hardly anything like him,” she says, all at once. She knows because she went to a funeral on her mother’s side of the family when she was eleven years old. “You’ll think you’re at the wrong person’s funeral when you first see it.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be calling Granddad’s body an ‘it,’” you suggest, even though the two of you have tacitly agreed Janae is the expert on funerals – the Niagara Falls mummies notwithstanding, I guess.

  She shrugs into the mirror. Her parents’ separation, her great-aunt’s funeral, attacking her father’s mistress with flower petals, a handful of other disappointments you couldn’t possibly know about – they’ve all hardened her. She’s all bravado and bad manners. She’s arguing. “Why not call an ‘it’ an ‘it?’ I mean, it’s not like Granddad’s body is all that human anymore – no spirit, no blood, weird make-up all over him. Why do they drain all the blood out of dead bodies anyway? Like, what’s the harm in keeping it? And what do they even do with it all once it’s out? Just wash it down the sink into the water supply, or whatever? As if that’s sanitary.”

  An hour later, sleepless and sad, you stand beside the open coffin, exhaling in deep, slow breaths, looking over the waxy yellowness they say is the body of your first grandfather to die. Maybe Janae was right. The pronoun “it” doesn’t quite describe what you see – but neither does “him.” Despite the empty, pinched look of the nose, you decide death’s harshest marks fall on the hands. The embalmers have heaped them together over the body’s middle, where they rest against the white fabric of the grave clothes. The skin hangs downward from the hands like loose, leather mitts. But maybe, in his seventies, Granddad’s hands already looked like that before he died. You can’t remember.

  And you can’t see the lower half of the body at all. The coffin lid is split in two, and the lower portion is already closed and covered with a pile of white roses and carnations. You heard your mother call the flowers a “spray” as if it was flung up out of the ocean, from a thousand miles away, all by itself. Actually, you’re not wondering how the flowers got there at all. You don’t know yet – not like we do now – that nothing at a funeral appears all on its own. Someone has to sit down and make up his mind and draw it out of somewhere – choice after choice after bloody choice.

  When the time allotted for everyone to “view” the body is over, the funeral director steps forward to close the lid of the coffin.

  “Excuse me,” he says as he reaches past you. But then, even though you’re a kid, he remembers himself and straightens up. “I’m sorry. Are you finished?”

  You nod, and he presses the lid into place. Maybe he’s specially trained to close it without a sound. Or maybe it’s one of those options the bereaved get to choose while they’re sitting in the family consultation room with their chequebooks open. “Mark this box for audible casket closure.”

  After the lid is shut, and the sight of the body is hidden, the whispers in the room grow a little louder. In a moment, there will be a prayer, and then you’ll all follow the coffin on its bier down the long church hallway to the vaulted chapel for the memorial service.

  You glance behind yourself to where your family sits. Your grandmother is there, of course, perched in a chair with her ankles crossed, her feet not quite touching the blue carpet on the floor, her arm in its cast laid across her lap. You still haven’t spoken to her since you left her at the hospital.

  Her older grandsons – your brothers and cousins – will be among the pall bearers today. Little red rose appliqués are pinned to the lapels of their cheap starter suits so the funeral directors will be able to keep track of them all. One of your brothers slipped past your parents wearing a novelty necktie printed to look like it’s made from yellow police tape strung around a crime scene. There’s nothing anyone can do about it now.

  The grandsons’ full names are written in columns inside the keepsake funeral program. Someone said there’s a black limousine waiting in the church parking lot to ferry them all to the cemetery just outside the town – the cemetery sitting on the side of a hill in view of a custom cattle feed lot. The grandsons are funerary rock stars – the pall-boys standing in a misshapen circle, their long bangs hanging over their eyes, their bony shoulders slouching away from the stiff, moulded forms of their suits.

  No one seems to be looking at you – a small, teen-aged girl – standing pressed to the side of the closed coffin. Behind the screen of your body, you slide your hand along the brass bar bolted to the shiny wood. The metal is cold, and your fingers leave steamy clouds wherever you’ve touched it.

  And you know you’re not really the person you want to be yet. If you were, you would be beckoning Janae to come join you.

  “I need to hold him,” your best self would have told your cousin. “Help me. We need to hold him for ourselves, or we might not feel good ever again.”

  And both of you would have closed your hands around the yellow metal. The muscles inside your arms would have hardened as the mass of both your bodies shifted away from the coffin. You would have tipped and flexed until, very slightly, one edge of the coffin was lifted up, out of the chrome-plated bier, borne by your strength. And then your arms would loosen again, bending into soft, white curves, the raised edge of the coffin coming back to rest – back to where the pall-boys would be able to find it when the time came to take it all away.

  Your Mom’s hand is on you now. “Come sit down, honey. What a day you’ve had.”

  You let go of the metal bar, walking sideways under your mother’s arm, watching the clouds left from the moisture of your hands fading to vapour on the brass. And then your feet seem to lock and you won’t be moved another step.

  “No,” you say.

  Your Mom is frowning. Both of her arms are around you now. The strength is still there – your mother’s irresistible power summoned here from faraway in your early childhood. She’s talking right into your ear, low and unequivocal. “Come on, now. Not today.”

  And you’re moving again, away from the coffin, back to the crowd waiting on padded folding chairs. How can they not know it when they look at you? All of this – the basement, the hospital curtains, the mirror, whatever’s left of Elijah – maybe a part of this does belong to the pall-boys and your bossy cousin and your angry uncles and your broken grandmother. Yet somehow, at last, you know it’s rightfully yours.

  Eight

  People – like my mother – are able to fall down and just die of heart attacks or dengue fever or kidney failure or any of the other millions of natural causes of human mortality. But the paperwork people leave behind is different. Nature has no interest in it at all. Instead, someone needs to round it all up, stand it in a line, and manually kill off the paperwork, one shred at a time.

  Through some unspoken kind of collective consciousness, everyone in my family agreed that Mom would have wanted me – the oldest of her kids, the one who was already waist deep in her death – to be the one to finish winding up her estate. I think they may have thought it was my birthright as her firstborn or something stupid like that. It might be true that some people consider appointing a person as their executor to be an honour. Only, it’s not an honour. It’s one final, parting kick in the shins.

  At least Mom’s estate is simple and impoverished with no real property left in it. For a few thousand dollars, she’d turned over her portion of the house where I was raised to my Dad when
she left him. He’d turned around and sold it as soon as my little brother wandered away from home for good. The people who own the house now keep a flock of chickens in the yard and park their cars all over the grass. It’s not right.

  Anyway, with no house, and with the police having already impounded her car for all those traffic tickets she never had any hope of paying, my lawyer friend assured me we could probably handle her estate business without ever needing to go to court. He rapid-fired a pep talk on our jurisdiction’s estate laws at me, let me make a sheet of written notes from our conversation, and made me promise never to mention his name. And then, by degrees, unintentionally, I ended up letting you take over the whole mess yourself.

  Mom’s estate is completely your project by the time I stand behind you as you click away on our big desktop computer. Sloppy stacks of old receipts line both of your thighs as you sit cross-legged on a folding metal chair with your feet tucked under your knees. You hand me one of the stacks of receipts without taking your eyes off the screen.

  “Shred these, if you please,” you instruct me.

  The little squares of paper are mostly from the gas station convenience store in Mom’s small town.

  “You wouldn’t think a diabetic would buy that much cola, would you?” you say when you sense that I’ve started squinting behind you, trying to read the fading print on the receipts.

  “Sugar-free cola, right?” I ask.

  “Nope.”

  I smirk. There’s nothing we can do to save her now. “Well, I’m sure Mom chased her sugar cola with big shots of insulin so all the math worked out when it was time to answer to her blood tests.”

  No one knows how to cope with a big problem – diabetes, obesity, a rotten marriage, rotten kids – better than people who don’t have to live with it themselves.

  You hum back at the buzzing glass tube in front of you. “Yeah, it’s too bad diabetes isn’t really the numbers game some people like to think it is. Isn’t that right, Benny?” you ask the baby I’m holding.

  In the crook of my arm, I hold our littlest son turned outward so he can merrily kick and punch – baby-sparring with the open air as he watches you work. The whir and tear of the paper shredder charges his muscles with something and makes his movements even more animated.

  As far as babies go, big Benny is fantastic. He’s always been huge for his age – so big there was a sound from your skin like a leather couch getting ripped open at the moment he was born. The nurse actually looked up at me and said, “Did you hear that?”

  All the typical terror and pain was supposed to be over by the time Benny’s birth really started to scare me. It happened as the doctor was putting you back together and you lost your grip on – everything.

  Your head fell back against the bed. “Goin’ out,” was all you said.

  They brought you back with a shot of blood coagulant and an oxygen mask.

  Here at home, baby Benny needs to be fed an awful lot, and he still wakes you up in the night, but we both adore him anyway. Maybe it’s not so much that Benny’s fantastic. Maybe it’s just that, now that we’re raising a baby for the fourth time, we’ve finally learned not to be mad at him for all the things he can’t deliver.

  Benny is the baby who was with us – invisible, not quite created – the day we found Mom’s body, almost a year ago. So I guess it’s only fitting that he’s here with us now, at the end of her story. At the funeral, Benny was a secret between just you and me. And we kept him a secret until you were almost six months into his gestation, like a couple of teenagers who couldn’t deal with their unplanned pregnancy. It didn’t matter how long or legal or stable our marriage was when I knocked you up with Benny. It was still a catastrophe.

  That was last spring. Now, with Benny all perfect and whole in my arms, I look down to where the white plane of the computer screen in front of the three of us is split into a grid. You tell me it’s a spreadsheet proving that my mother died completely bankrupt.

  We’ll make a dozen copies of it and mail it away, enclosed with terse letters explaining that no one is getting any of the money they’re owed out of Mom’s estate – nothing, never. There’s no money for the ex-husbands, the credit card companies, the dentist she’d been threatening to sue, or even the federal tax office itself.

  The pile of bills she left behind contains demand letters addressed to every different name she used – our name, her father’s name, the names of each one of her husbands including the ones she didn’t even like.

  Her veterinarian landlord never wants to see us again, so he took his damage deposit a long time ago and accepted it was all he’d ever get to cover her back rent – not to mention the total annihilation of the Dead Lady Trailer.

  The credit card companies came at us with false sympathy, offering to clear her debts if we’d agree to pay half of the amounts she owed. We were legally entitled to refuse to pay for anything, so we did. The most obnoxious creditor of all was the long-distance phone company bent against all decency on getting their final fifty-eight dollar bill paid. One of the call centre supervisors was on the other end of the line the day you finally cracked.

  “She’s dead, okay? Dead – D-E-A-D – otherwise known to you people as ‘the cost of doing business.’”

  A stack of plain security-lined envelopes are already stamped and marked with just Mom’s now-defunct post office box number as a return address. If anyone wants to find us to threaten or sue us, they’ll have to work for it. They’ll have to work their way past you – standing here in front of me, white and shining in the glare of the computer screen.

  Nine

  We’ve met him just once since he turned thirtyish and paunchy and his forehead spread all the way back to his mid-head. It was at the wedding reception of one of the hundreds of distant relatives I share with him – all of us the descendants of one of the original Abrahams of the dry farmlands barely north of the American border. I’m grinning and smug under all my perfectly preserved brown hair as we walk away from him.

  You poke me with your elbow and tell me again how when he was yours, when you were both sixteen years old, he was beautiful – a lithe and gloomy Peter Pan, his dark bangs hanging all the way down over one eye, his thin shoulders draped in a long black coat bought from the only army surplus store for hundreds of kilometres. But I know you’ve got a generous and tolerant sense of physical beauty, so I’m still not convinced.

  There’s no need to argue it with you because you’re already laughing, moving past it like it’s all completely embarrassing. I don’t have to say a word to get you to admit that you still don’t know what it was that used to make you want to love him so badly. Maybe it was an effect of some kind of chemical intoxicant wafting up from the wet, broken pineapple weed he pulverized against the cracked sidewalks with every turn of the wheels of his glinting grey skateboard.

  “You know, he never actually called me his girlfriend, in all that time. He preferred to say we were just ‘involved.’ Sixteen-year-old kids – involved – isn’t that hilarious, Brigs?”

  Somehow, I’m not laughing. And I’m glad we’re driving away from him, moving away from another one of those pink and yellow wedding receptions.

  “Blush and butter-cream,” you correct me.

  You don’t mind the spin the bride’s given the colours’ names, but you are complaining about having to sit through a reading of that sappy poem with the forced, awkward rhyme for the third time this year. Our sweet, earnest relatives can’t seem to stop themselves from sniffling through it at all the family weddings now.

  “‘... a special dress, like very other few...’” you quote from the poem. The lines have got you shuddering behind the steering wheel. “Very other few.”

  On the passenger side of the car I’m not really listening to this rant I’ve heard just as many times as I’ve heard the poem itself. Instead, I’m remembering the story you to
ld me about a stupid fight you had with my distant cousin who used to kiss you right on the mouth. He picked the fight right there on the sidewalk outside your high school, in front of everyone. It started when he glided up beside you – unnaturally tall on his skateboard – with a wrinkled paper bag from the drug store crammed into his pocket. He pushed the bag into your hands – and that was when he asked you to dye his hair black.

  I smirk again. “Didn’t he totally lose it that time you told him his eyebrows wouldn’t match his hair if he made you dye it black?”

  Then you’re laughing at me for still thinking about him. Maybe it is weird. It’s too late to take back my prying now. You’ve already started re-telling the old legends about him – like it’s been too long since you first told me these stories, and you’re ready to repeat them.

  Yes, he was mad about the hair dye. He didn’t understand the caterpillar prominence of the thick, light brown brows over his eyes – knew nothing of the embarrassing drama in the way the stray hairs reached out for each other over the hard, white bridge of his nose. But he found satisfaction in anger, especially when it came to you. And it was with a tiny trace of pleasure that he nearly tore the paper bag as he snatched it out of your hands – glaring and rolling away, leaving the other kids on the lawn of the high school to gape at you.

  For hours afterward, he ignored you – right up until he slid a note folded like a foolscap crane into the reveal of your locker door. I’ve seen the note myself, much later – flattened but still creased from his origami. I found it when we were moving house, and it fell onto the floor out of your old copy of The Fountainhead, as I packed up the bookcase.