A Better Angel Page 11

  As soon as I got the log up I disturbed a nest of yellow jackets, which flew out and attacked me, stinging me on my face and my neck and my hands. I could see her watching me while I slapped at them and yelled and cried. She said nothing but stood up in the branch, and spread her wings out behind her, which amazed and frightened me. I tried to run back home but could hardly breathe—I was having an allergic reaction. But I found a group of pickers having their lunch in the grass, and collapsed in front of them, swollen and wheezing.

  She came to see me in the hospital. High on IV Benadryl, I told anyone who would listen that there was an angel in the room, and the doctors and nurses thought that was charming. Even back then I was a quick and subtle thinker when I was stoned, and when my father asked me about what I had said, I could tell by his tone of voice that it would be best to pretend not to know what he was talking about. But when we were alone, and she stood silently at the foot of my bed, looking strange not just on account of wings but because she was dressed now as a doctor, with a white coat and a stethoscope and her hair done up in a smart bun, I asked her why she hadn’t warned me about the wasps. “I’m not that kind of angel,” she said.

  Though my father only ever knew a tenth of the trouble I’ve been in, I was still his least favorite child, and the last person he wanted taking care of him when he got very ill. But every one of my sisters was pregnant—one very much augmented and on purpose, and the other two accidents of fate. How they celebrated the coincidence, and then rued it when it forced them to bully me back to Florida from San Francisco. I was in clinic when they called, and it’s a testament to their power-of-three invincibility that they were able to blow through the phone tree and the two different receptionists who routinely deny my existence when patients try to find me.

  “Papa is sick,” said Charlotte.

  “He’s been sick,” I said, because this had been going on for a year, and though nobody gets better from metastatic small-cell lung cancer, he’d been holding his own for months and months.

  “Papa is sicker,” said Christine, and Carmen added, “Much sicker!” She is eldest and barely most pregnant.

  “He’s in the hospital,” said Christine. “There’s an infection.”

  “In his bladder,” said Charlotte. There are two years between each of them but they’ve always seemed like triplets, all of them looking the same age with their furrowed brows and disapproving hatchet mouths, all as tall and light as I am short and dark, all with the same blue eyes that seem just the right color to stare a person down with. My eyes, like my father’s, are nearly black, and Carmen says I can hide anything in them.

  “A little cystitis,” I said. “So what?”

  “Dr. Klar says he’s very ill,” said Christine.

  “She doesn’t know if he’ll come out of the hospital,” said Charlotte.

  “She always says that,” I said. “She never knows. She’s an alarmist. She’s a worrier.”

  “You have to go!” they said all together.

  “You have to go,” I said. “You go if it matters so much.”

  “We’re pregnant!” they said. And then the individual excuses: mild preeclampsia for Charlotte and Christine and a clotty calf for Carmen. They can’t travel from New York, where they all live within waddling distance of each other.

  “People travel when they’re eight months pregnant,” I said. “People do it all the time!” Though I knew that they don’t, and now the angel was sitting on my desk and shaking her head at me.

  “You’re a doctor,” they said all together, as if that should settle it, and I wanted to say I’m impaired, and a pediatrician to boot. I could have confessed it right then, to them and to the whole world: I am an impaired physician, and then started down the yellow brick road to rehab.

  Instead I quietly hung up on them. The angel was still shaking her head at me. She was dressed to shock, with a plastic shopping bag on her head, in a filthy housedress, and with a dead cat wrapped around either foot.

  “I barely know him!” I shouted at her, and she didn’t respond. And I told her I had a patient waiting, which she already knew because there is nothing I know that she doesn’t know, and nothing I’ve ever been able to hide from her.

  “Put that lady and her evil children behind you,” she said, not looking up as I swept by her. She did not like Mrs. Fontaine for the obvious reason but what she had against her two kids I could not figure, though she has always done that, pointed out the ones that will grow into car thieves or lottery-fixers or murderers, as if I am supposed to smother them with the great pillow of righteous prevention when they are six months old.

  The Fontaines were waiting patiently in the exam room, Zebadiah splashing at the sink while his mother fed his sister and his aunt read Highlights. “Hey, everybody!” I said, and I locked the door. Zebadiah toddled over to check it, innocently part of our enterprise. “Baby,” said Mrs. Fontaine, meaning me and not her son, “how have you been?”

  “It’s been a rough day,” I said.

  “Well, your friend has got just the thing for a rough day,” she said, and, taking a little foil-covered package from her diaper bag, she laid it upon the counter near the sink, and that is all we said about it because one of our terms of business is a nearly silent sort of discretion. I put down my envelope and she took it, and when her package was in my pocket, then we talked about her babies. Her sister did a find-the-picture puzzle while we talked, interrupting us to ask, “Where is the boot?” and “Do you see a flute?” I said I didn’t know, and she said I must not be very smart if I couldn’t find the flute hidden in the tree.

  “If you already knew where it was, then why were you asking?” Mrs. Fontaine said, and her sister lowered her lids to half-mast and said, “I was testing him.” And then she laughed, like that was the funniest thing in the world. I examined Zebadiah and then his sister, Lily, who was just four months old, fat and happy, and singing wordlessly as I listened to her heart and fiddled with her hips. The angel paced in the confines of the room, the cats going squish and squash as she stepped, and Lily seemed to be watching her. “A fire from heaven should come down right now,” she said. Though the medicine was only in my pocket, just having it near made it easy to ignore her.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said to Mrs. Fontaine.

  “She’s all right,” she said, ducking her head and smiling, and her sister reached out to take the baby and hold her a moment and proclaim that she was indeed a beautiful girl, and then she handed her to her mother, who handed her to me, and then without knowing why I handed her back to the sister. Sometimes it just happens like that, something entirely bearable, the baby smiling and laughing and going round and round, from hand to hand to hand, and her brother shouting, “I’m beautiful, too!” and lifting his arms to be picked up, and all five of us laughing while the angel scowled impotently. I wanted it to go on forever.

  “Does everybody get an angel?” I asked her one day, about a month after I met her, when it finally occurred to me to wonder if every boy and girl had a guiding spirit invisible to me. I looked around my first-grade class, squinting to see them, the girls in jumpers standing next to the seated girls in jumpers, the boys in blue pants, looking so ordinary except for their immaculate posture and drooping folded wings.

  “Only the ones who will be great, or do great things. And sometimes being great is enough. The great things go out, generated as easily as thought or love. Do you understand?” I cannot describe how gentle her voice could be in those days.

  “No,” I said. So when we got home she guided me to my father’s library, ignoring my pleas not to enter there without his permission, and sat me down in front of the encyclopedia. I opened a book to random pages and she marked with her finger the men and women who had warranted an angel to guide them into their greatness. There were fewer than I expected, and as many who were greatly bad as greatly good. I flipped backwards through the A’s, only familiar with one in ten of the names she touched, making the letters
shine in a way I could see forever after. Attila I knew, having just heard of him in history, and taken part in a little skit where I dressed up in my mother’s unused furs and shouted at the head of the class with five other boys and the girl whose long black hair had landed her the part of the Hun. “But he was bad,” I said, and she said that not everybody listened to their angel.

  I hate adult hospitals, and adult medicine, and adult patients. I could not wait to get away from them in medical school, from their aching lower backs and chronic depression and get-me-out-of-work–related injuries. I hated especially the little old ladies with their parchment faces and frail broken hearts, who’d die if you frowned at them. Even a half-dead preemie is more resilient. And I hated the smell of the place—children are not so smelly to begin with, and even as they get sick or die they do not give off that odor that fills up adult hospitals, and seems to blow out of the angel’s wings when she shakes them in agitation. It always seemed to cling to me after a particularly egregious fuck-up in medical school, so for days afterward just by sniffing at my fingers I would be reminded of how I almost killed this or that poor old zombie with my bad math.

  The angel seemed to like the place, but then she is pleased by death, or at least it seems to get her excited the way that doughnuts or handsomeness do for me. She was always making a show of sniffing at people and predicting the hour of their demise. It became the only thing I was good at, distinguishing the really sick ones from out of the confusing daily crowd of patients that was presented to me as a student, and then as a resident, though I never could remember how to save them. As we walked to see my father in his room, for the first time she had a spring in her step, and though she was dressed still as a bag lady, she’d replaced her cats with tissue boxes, and shined her wings, and put on an elegant, if very dirty, hat. It might have been the hospital or just the fact that I had come that made her happy. To her mind I had done the right thing, and so she had taken it easy on me all during the trip, and now she bounced along like a schoolgirl. I think she would only have been happier if I killed myself.

  The nurses at the station did not look up when I walked past on the way down to the end of the hall, where my father had his room, or when I hurried by again, fleeing from him. “Here he is,” the angel said when I walked in—she’d run ahead the last few feet and passed through the wall. And she gestured over him like he was a new car or a sexy motorcycle in a showroom. When I saw him last he was the same dour, black-eyed man I’d known unchanging all my life, my six-foot-four, imperious, responsible reflection, a man who I always knew should have had an angel of his own. Now he was laid out diapered in a dirty bed, as bald and toothless and somehow as grand as Aslan on his table. He looked up at me when I walked in and said, by way of greeting, “You!” and managed to invest the word with equal measures of disappointment, accusation, and surprise. I dropped my book and candy box and ran out.

  I always feel at home in a bathroom. Some nights as a resident I would withdraw into one and leave the intern to flounder and drown, claiming later that I never got the frantic pages when in fact I had turned off the pager and was sitting on the toilet with my face in my hands or taking little hits of whatever I was really into that month. There was a bathroom near the elevator on my father’s floor of the hospital, a nice one-person arrangement with a lock on the door.

  A locked door or a feeling of really needing to be alone is no deterrent to the angel. She was there in just a few moments—I never know what delays her, when she can travel at the speed of guilt and sometimes seems to be everywhere at once. She berated me while I hid my face in my hands, her voice making the little room seem very full, all the what do you think you’re doing’s and you get back there’s seeming to bounce off the white walls in discrete packages of sound. I am not this sort of doctor, I said to my hands. I am not any sort of doctor, and I don’t know what to do about what’s back there in that room. And she said that even if you are the sort of doctor who doesn’t know anything about medicine, and even if you only passed your certifying exams because you paid a certain Dr. Gupta to bypass the pathetic security measures taken by the American Board of Pediatrics against cheats and impostors, even you can recognize a patient at the extremes of abandonment and grief, even you can do the smallest human thing to improve his lot.

  In answer I gave her a little toot. Not Mrs. Fontaine but another supplier, someone who was a sort of girlfriend, though only snortable heroin had brought us together, had a little horn on her keychain she would bring out in the face of any sort of adversity—a flat tire or a broken foot or syphilis, syphilis being a two-toot trouble. “Toot them away!” she’d say, and laugh really quite innocently. She was beaten to death by a boyfriend more passionate but less gentle than me, and died one night at the General Hospital in the ER while I was on duty seeing children. I recognized her worked-over corpse when I went into the trauma room to fetch a warm blanket for a cold baby.

  The angel changed with just the smallest hit. She’d barely warned me not to do it before she was stretching and shaking her wings, and there was the awful stench just for a moment, and then there was another odor, fresh grass and cookies and new snow on the sidewalk. And she put off her haggery with a few shakes of her head, her eyes bright now but not icy like my sisters’, and with a few sweeps of her fingers—it’s always as if she is primping for me—she undid all the tangles from her hair. Three times she shook her hips and the housedress became a lovely blue sari, and her pretty feet were naked.

  “Take that!” I stuttered at her.

  “Better have another,” she said, and I did. Then she stood in front of me with her hands on my shoulders, steadying them while they shook. It wasn’t the first time that I’d felt like I was flying backwards; the toilet was a vessel in the air propelled by weeping, and with her hands laid upon me she was steering me.

  “Do I have to go back there?” I asked her, when I was feeling better.

  “Not yet, my love,” she said. “Not until you are good and ready.”

  When I was a child she was always good, but this is not to say she was never awful. Though many days she was so ordinary a tag-along that I hardly thought of her as an angel, every so often she would put on such majesty it made me cower. One day in fifth grade I was half-listening to Mrs. Khemlani’s talk about cowboys and Indians. “History always moves west,” she said, because that was one of the truisms she announced at the beginning of the semester, and she liked to point out how right she was about things at some point in every lesson. Books will always be burned, she said, and women are always second-class citizens, and history from the dawn of time has always swept in a westward circle around the globe.

  I was only half-listening, daydreaming about Chinese ladies and their very small feet, about which we’d just been learning in social studies. I was fascinated by the pictures we’d seen, and had held on to the little cardboard shoe I’d made, though it was supposed to be drying on the windowsill with the others, so I could turn it over and over in my hand. The angel was standing or sitting around the class in her usual positions, done up today in the dress and skin of a Chinese girl—sometimes her form obliged my fancy, though I knew I could not control it, having already tried to make her take on the shape of a dog or an ear of corn by staring and concentrating at her until she said to stop it.

  On little crippled feet she hobbled up to the front of the class when she heard Mrs. Khemlani talking about the grand sweep of history, a look on her face that I had learned to associate with anger at something stupid she’d just heard. I was used to getting lectures that no one else could hear, or having her place a hand on a book I was reading to say, “Listen, it was not so.”

  “Once the most important city in the world was Nanking,” Mrs. Khemlani was saying. “Then it was Athens, and then it was Rome. Later it was Vienna, and after that it was Paris and then London and then Boston and then New York. But, look here, now it is becoming San Francisco, and where next after that? My husband says outer sp
ace because he is an engineer and has a very scientific mind, but I say west, and so back to the East!”

  Cindy Hacklight, my neighbor across the aisle, asked what this had to do with cowboys or Indians, but Mrs. Khemlani’s response was drowned out for me by the angel’s voice.

  “Not so!” she shouted, stamping her foot at the head of the class, standing behind Mrs. Khemlani and growing out of her child’s form. It was the first time I’d ever seen her in the guise of an adult, and she made herself huge. Her head scraped the ceiling and her wings spread from one end of the class to the other. “Not west!” she said, and pictures started to flash in her wings, men whispering in dark rooms, and soldiers at war, and tanks rolling through villages like they did in old newsreels, and people just sitting quietly together. She had stopped saying words but her wings were certainly speaking to me, images blaring out of the white depths and, more than that, feelings radiating off them so I knew sadness and joy and rage and sourceless love together and in succession, the images and feelings a speech by which she communicated to me the true sweep of history. “It’s toward you!” she said, unnecessarily, because she had given me to understand myself as riding an enormous tide—sitting at my desk, I could feel the relentless pressure of history under my feet, pushing me up through some mysterious medium toward a goal I could not describe except by its brightness, but I could see it in that moment very clearly. I leaped up from my desk, dropping my little torture-shoe, and threw up my hands above my head and gave my best up-with-people “Hooray!” I was eleven years old and thought I understood what she had in store for me, and felt sufficient to it in a way I can’t comprehend now.