Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  “On the coulee at sunset. Me.”

  You explain that there was going to be a planet visible in the sky that night: Jupiter. “Or maybe it was Mars,” you tell me.

  He claimed that, for once, all you’d need to see way out to Jupiter was your naked eyes. Even though he said the word “naked” right to your face, you still agreed to ask your Mom if you could use the car to drive out past the light pollution of the town and into the countryside that night.

  Just before dark, there you were, sitting with him in the dry, needle-tipped prairie grass, wondering if dew ever fell there in the ancient valley that rolled up and away from the scrawny river below like a weathered green blanket. You leaned back, straight-armed, resting on your palms, with the folded cuffs of your jeans crossed at your ankles. That’s how you sat, lazy and not quite bored, looking for Jupiter – or Mars. Beside you in the grass, he would have been glaring out into space, hunched over his bent legs, closing his arms around his knees. A shiny chip of rock hung in the sky, almost too far away to see.

  “He was so disgusted with me when I asked him to tell me again how we knew it wasn’t just Venus.”

  And even though, from a distance, the scene on the sunset hillside could have been lifted right out of one of the novels on the small white bookcase in cousin Janae’s bedroom, your first boy just gathered his army overcoat around his thin ribcage and pulled his eyebrows closer together. You watched his face – watched your own fingers passing lightly over the edge of his mouth where a faint constellation of tiny freckles faded into the pink of his lip. His fingers were closing around your hand, pulling it away from his face, dropping it into your lap.

  “Keep your irony to yourself,” he said.

  You still hadn’t quite become yourself yet, so you just pulled your knees up and bowed your head into them. But you promise me you did manage to mutter, “Where’d you read that?”

  Riding on the plush seats of your mother’s car, the bottom of your Doc Marten shoe pressed to the accelerator, you drove out of the dark, back toward the town. He was talking and talking by then – something about an apple rotting in the broken shell of a giant bug – until your foot pivoted sharply on its heel, coming down hard on the brake. In front of your mother’s car, the headlights lit up a wreck glittering on the pavement. The front end of a car had crumpled against the stout, pressure-hardened post of a road sign. A splintered stump jutted out of the gravel on the roadside, but the rest of the sign was gone, launched into the oblivion of the broad black ditch between the highway and a hayfield.

  “It used to be a sign for the Report-A-Poacher hotline,” you tell me, shrugging. “I have no idea why I still know that. Memory is strange, eh Brigs?”

  Broken glass and plastic and machinery spread like a burned out minefield across the asphalt. Two pairs of cloven-hoofed stick legs hung down over the windshield’s empty gap. A bay-coloured body bled onto the roof of the car.

  You and the boy both opened your car doors and stood behind them as if they were great, steel shields. Music was playing loudly from within the wreck. A gloomy British bass line from a song we all had on our mixed tapes in those days droned over the dark fields.

  “It could be someone we know,” your boy said, squinting down the white columns burning from the headlights of your Mom’s car.

  You squinted too. “Should we go look?”

  His throat clicked but he actually said nothing.

  You pushed the car door closed. “I’m going.”

  “Wait,” he called, terrified, maybe, at the sight of your wings beginning to unfurl. You’re not in a basement this time – not hidden with your grandmother behind the curtains in the depths of a hospital. You’re standing right out here on the road between miles and miles of open fields where anybody could see what you are.

  The boy could hardly speak to you. “What – what are we supposed to do?”

  You shrugged one shoulder. “How should I know? You used to be the Boy Scout. Go try ’n’ flag down some help, or something.”

  You started down the road, away from him. His voice behind you was saying something you couldn’t understand over the sound of the music but you didn’t turn back.

  The song grew louder near the wreck, where blood and hair and excrement smeared the car’s glossy white paint. A deer carcass lay pinched in the crevice its impact had carved into the roof. The frame of the driver’s window had flexed and squeezed its tempered glass out onto the highway where it was scattered at your feet, broken into little green jewels. It must have crunched under the soles of your shoes as you approached the car. But it’s your English teacher’s voice you’re hearing, speaking inside your head – something about a ghost in the machine.

  You took a breath as if diving under water and stooped to the window.

  The driver was a stranger, but he was still just a little older than you were that night. The steering column had been thrust too far into the passenger compartment by the collision with the sign post – or maybe with the deer – and it rammed against his chest. His shoulders lurched as he breathed against the crush.

  “Are you okay?” you asked, even though you knew it was stupid.

  “Get m’out,” the driver said. Then he raised his fingers to keep you away. “No, don’ touch.”

  “I won’t,” you said. “It’s okay. My friend’s gone for help.”

  “Don’ go,” he exhaled.

  “I won’t,” you said again, squeezing your hands between your knees as you bent toward to the window. “I won’t go.” There must have been a trace of a tremor in your voice even though you would have tried to keep its tone light as plastic – the same voice you use now when you’re at the boys’ parent-teacher interviews.

  The driver turned his eyelids to you. “Go’s sake,” he gasped. “Turn’ff music.”

  Before you could say anything more, another voice was pronouncing curses just behind your head. It wasn’t your boy. It was a man, standing in the beam of the headlights of your mother’s car, walking toward you in silhouette like a cheap effect in a music video. Every time you tell it, I wish he was me. But he isn’t. You still don’t know who he is. And neither do I.

  “Hey, I got a cell phone here,” the man said, waving a grey box. “I already dialled 9-1-1.”

  “Hey, did you hear that?” you sang to the driver. “Help’s coming any minute now – an ambulance and everything.”

  “Hang in there, buddy,” the man bawled into the car from over your shoulder. He bent to look more closely, swearing his face off in deepest sympathy.

  The cassette deck had reached the end of the tape and was clicking in the dashboard as it automatically began rewinding the music. In the new quiet, the man with the phone straightened his back and craned his neck to look past the wreck, down the highway. You glanced at him long enough to notice the way his large, pale moustache hid his mouth. It made you want to drop your eyes to the broken glass gems at your feet. By then the man with the phone had leaned so close to you that you sprang back, covering the base of your throat with your hand.

  “Hey, is that kid out there a friend of yours?” is all he said.

  “Oh no,” you answered, sputtering, sounding stupid and scared, “we weren’t sure if we’d really found Jupiter or not but we gave up anyway and were driving back into town. And then we ran into this guy – well, we didn’t run into him, literally, that must have been the deer. But we did stop and –”

  “No, I don’t mean the poor fella in there,” man interrupted. He jerked his chin away from the wreck – away from you – motioning to the black length of highway beyond everything either of you could see. “I mean the tall kid in the long coat, walking right down the centre line in the dark. He’s gonna get himself killed.”

  We know from the wedding reception that he didn’t die on the highway – your first boy, the one dressed all in bl
ack, letting his feet pace down the yellow centre line. After the ambulance came and went, both you and the boy made it home in perfect safety that night. You even stayed entangled with one another for a little longer, though the end was clearly imminent.

  It wasn’t long after he showed you Jupiter that you found him in a small garage that was once set on fire, but still stood – charred and sooty – at the back of his parents’ yard. One side of it looked like it was cobbled together out of tiny coal tiles. He was inside the garage, in the dust and shade, pounding a small, one-handed sledge hammer against the concrete floor.

  “He called the hammer a ‘maul,’” you tell me.

  You knew he liked it when you pretended he was a monster so you asked, “What are you doing? Is it time to move the body you hid under the slab already?”

  He stood up, almost smiling, letting the shaft of the hammer slide through his fist.

  “Check it out.”

  Something glinted in the dimness, and he flipped a flat copper oval into the palm of your hand. It was almost unrecognizable – all thin and oblong with the image of Queen Elizabeth II that’s usually stamped on the metal beaten away. It had been, very recently, a penny.

  The misshapen disc fell into the white flesh of your hand and you yelped. “It’s hot.”

  He faked a scoff. “Of course it’s hot. That’s what you get with a kinetic energy transfer.”

  You shrugged one shoulder. “I never took physics.”

  He shook his head, but he closed an arm around your waist, pulling you against him, pressing the hammer still throttled in his hand into the small of your back, speaking down into your face. “Well, it means that the motion of the hammer transforms into heat energy when the floor forces it to stop moving. And that makes the copper not only smashed flat, but hot.”

  You swayed in his hold. “Seriously? That is amazing.”

  “Not really,” he murmured, bending his face toward your neck. “You know, up close like this, you’re not all that smart – ”

  “Nice.” You jerked away.

  “ – and nobody knows it but me.”

  You twisted, bending as his mouth moved closer to your neck. He pushed your hair aside with his nose and chin. You felt his breath on your skin and couldn’t help but utter a little scream as you made a pretense of dodging. You were still cackling and struggling with him when you saw a new shadow on the cement floor. Someone else was standing in the open garage doorway. He let go of you so quickly you nearly fell to the ground.

  The long shadow belonged to a little girl – his youngest sister, a three-year-old in a frilly, homemade dress that made her look like a mangled wedding cake. “Dad made me stop playing and said you guys have to take care of me now,” she told him.

  The boy hummed. “It’s the old baby-chaperone trick, is it? Well played, Dad.”

  You smoothed your hair with your hands. “Don’t tell me your parents think I’m your girlfriend or something like that.”

  He pulled another round, perfect penny out of his pocket. “Kinetic energy transfer – you want to try it?”

  “I try it,” said the little wedding cake.

  “Just stay back, okay?” he told her as he laid out the penny on the concrete.

  “Well?” you persisted. “What do your parents know about me?”

  He was the one shrugging now. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. Does it matter?”

  “Probably.”

  But he was clever too. “So what do your parents know about me?” he countered.

  You flinched, walking backwards, starting to move out of the shadow of the burnt-up garage. “Look, we both know this whole thing is stupid,” you said. “That’s why neither of us ever talks to anyone about it.”

  “Wait,” he said, folding your fingers down over the copper that had cooled but was still cupped in your palm. “Keep the penny.”

  “It is no longer a penny. Look what you did.”

  And you know this has to be the last time you’ll turn and leave him standing there, with the hammer and the pennies and – everything.

  Ten

  I’ll admit it freaks me out a bit when I pick up the phone and hear a voice almost exactly like my dead mother’s talking out of it. “Hi. Brigham?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Hi. It’s your aunt – Aunt Deb.”

  Of course, the voice really belongs to my mother’s younger sister. She’s still alive, but I don’t think I’ve seen her since Mom’s funeral.

  “Oh, sorry,” she’s saying. “I forgot you don’t go by ‘Brigham’ anymore, do you?”

  It doesn’t feel like she’s sorry. It feels like she’s stalling. “It’s okay,” I tell the lady with my mother’s voice, “You can call me whatever you want.”

  The more my aunt speaks, the less she sounds like Mom. Aunt Deb’s voice is pitched a bit lower than Mom’s and it moves faster – like she’s actually aware people might have something else to do besides sit right where they are and listen to her all day. “Well, I’m calling with news. I’m calling to let you know Grandma died.”

  It’s one of those announcements that’s supposed to come as a relief. We’re all supposed to pack up our loss in talk about how Grandma was old and sick and ready to move on, or whatever. It is true that, by the end, she couldn’t form any new short-term memories. It meant she honestly believed none of us had visited her, there in her nursing home, for years and years. It got so bad Aunt Deb left a Polaroid camera in Grandma’s room and had everyone who came to visit take a photo with her and sign their names on a calendar just so they wouldn’t have to argue about whether anyone had been there. But then Grandma started coming up with all those conspiracy theories about faked photos and forged signatures. That crazy, crushing loneliness – at least that’s over for her, I guess.

  The round of phone calls Aunt Deb is making today is different from the one I had to make the night we found Mom face down on her living room carpet. With Grandma, we’d all been able to telegraph this announcement from a long way off. It doesn’t come crashing in from the blind side like it did with Mom – but that doesn’t mean my grandmother’s death is not a shock.

  I still have the presence of mind to thank Aunt Deb for handling the funeral arrangements. “It’s a lot of work,” I say.

  “You don’t even know,” is her answer, even though I do know. And I’m not angry that she’s forgotten – not at all, not right now.

  Aunt Deb will be on the phone for days, so she wants me to call my brother and sisters to tell them what’s happened. She gives me the details of the funeral arrangements. It will be held on Wednesday, in the middle of the workday, in a city where none of my parents’ kids live. It’s nothing like a convenient time or place, but it’s not out of driving range either. Each one of my siblings could make a day trip to get there. Aunt Deb invites me to say a prayer out loud, into a microphone, at the end of the funeral service. I haven’t quite finished writing all the funeral particulars down when she tells me goodbye.

  I’m sitting down at the kitchen table with the cordless phone in my hand when you come to kiss the top of my head. “I’m sorry, Brigs,” you say. “I loved her too.”

  In a moment, you hand me the address book, knowing there’s no way I’ll have all my siblings’ phone numbers memorized. “Take a few minutes – before you start,” you say when I begin flipping through the thumb-tabs of the battered coil-bound book right away. “It’s alright if you’re not okay.”

  I nod and let out a long breath through my mouth. But it doesn’t help. “I gotta make these calls.”

  I contact my siblings in their birth order, for some reason. My first sister sighs and sounds properly grave. “Well,” she says after a pause. “Grandma led a good, long life. I, for one, am happy for her to be released from mortality.”

  I think I understand why some
people feel it’s alright to say stuff like that. But it still makes me want to punch something.

  I’m part of the way through telling my sister about the funeral plans when she interrupts. “You’re going to be driving down there for it, right, Brigham?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So – if one person comes to represent our side of the family, we’re not all expected to be there, are we?”

  For a second, I can’t say anything. It’s like I don’t even understand what she’s said.

  “Expected.”

  I repeat the word once before I default to carrying out Aunt Deb’s instructions. I’m like an automated message service meting out the rest of the funeral schedule and quietly hanging up the phone. You’re standing beside me again, alarmed by my robotic voice. I repeat what my sister told me and bow my head as you act out my own disgust for me.

  “What is the matter with that girl?”

  It’s easier that way.

  The next call is to my other sister, the one who responds to just about every kind of stress by getting mad. I know by now not to take it personally, but it’s still hard to face sometimes. I’m not sure if I’ve called her on the phone since the night after we found Mom dead. It’s bad, but maybe my sister is starting to identify my telephone voice as the trump of death, or something like that. I can sense her bristling even before we’ve finished with our hard, dry hellos.

  Naturally, she’s angry right away when I tell her about Grandma. “Dangit, Brigham.”

  “Yeah, I’ll miss her too,” I try to agree.

  “Well, I’d like to go to the funeral. But not everyone can afford to drop everything and fork over a load of money for the gas to get down there.”

  “Can I give you some money for the gas? I’d like to help.”

  She yells out a laugh that sounds distinctly insulted though she won’t be reckless enough to try to start a fight – not today. Instead she says, “I’ll get back to you on that.” But I know she won’t.