A Better Angel Read online

  “I wrecked your car,” I say, crying like a stupid baby.

  “It’s okay,” she says, Her face is right in mine, close enough for a kiss. Past her I can see that one headlight has gone out, while the other illuminates the school like a prison searchlight.

  “What do you want?” she asks. “What do you want?”

  I moan and cry mundane little-boy sobs. I cannot name it but somehow I know what it is. She closes in on me, her arms sneaking around for a hug. She really is close enough for a kiss—so I do it. I strike like a serpent, and maybe five seconds into it I realize that her tongue is not playing with my tongue, it’s seeking to evade my tongue, and she’s pushing me away.

  “What are you doing?” she wants to know.

  “I was—taking something,” I say.

  “I didn’t want that,” she says, wiping her mouth.

  “I know,” I say.

  “You better get out.”

  “Sure,” I say. I knew better than to do it. I knew she was offering her sicko pseudo-motherlove but I took the other because it was close. I feel evil, but I feel better, too.

  “You wrecked my car,” she says, as if she has just noticed. I get out and walk away, not looking back, but when the horn starts honking in staccato bursts, I imagine she must be banging her head against it.

  I walk home, wondering, Did Satan feel like this when he almost conquered Heaven? Is there a baby nearby whose head I might dash against a stone? Am I human? The palm trees loom like kalai-zee, chuckling deep in their bellies, each one full of child. I am broken open, I think, and something awful has hatched out.

  At home I pause outside the door, listening. It’s quiet on the other side. I go around and look in the dining-room window. There’s Yatha McIlvoy, putting candles on a cake. Caleb is in Mama’s lap, on the other side of the table. There are others, all Yatha’s friends. I figure she must have talked them into it or Mama paid them off somehow. They’re all girls.

  I am thinking, World, life, I got you this time. I’ve had my kiss and nobody can take it away, nobody can take it back. At the door again I fumble with my key, make it loud in the lock so they’ll think they’re ready for me. Then I throw open the door and leap through, screaming like a banshee, shrieking, “Happy Birthday!”

  THE SUM OF OUR PARTS

  Beatrice needed a new liver. Her old one had succumbed to damage suffered in a fall one month earlier from the top of a seven-story parking garage. She lay in a coma while the hospital prepared for her imminent transplant, but she was not asleep. That part of her which was not her broken body stood by her bed in the surgical intensive care unit and watched as a nurse leaned over her to draw her blood. Beatrice’s unusual condition gave her access to aspects of people that usually are utterly private. So she knew that the nurse, whose name was Judy, was thinking of her husband. It was eleven-thirty p.m., just about his bedtime, and Judy imagined him settling down to sleep. He would take off his shirt and his pants and fold the sheet down neatly so it covered him to just past his hips. He would turn on his side and put a hand under his cheek. Judy missed acutely the space between his shoulder blades, into which she was accustomed to settling her face as she waited for sleep to come.

  Distracted, she missed the vein, and cursed softly when she noticed that no blood came into the tube. Beatrice’s body lay unprotesting as Judy shifted the needle beneath her skin, questing after the already sorely abused vein. Beatrice did not feel it when Judy found the vein, and the borrowed blood (in the first hours of her stay, Beatrice had received a complete transfusion) slipped quietly into a red-topped tube. When that one was full, Judy proceeded to fill a gray-topped tube, a lavender-topped tube, and, finally, a tube with a rubber stopper the color of freshly laid robin’s eggs.

  Judy straightened up and stared at her patient as her hands went automatically about the business of attaching red-numbered labels to the tubes. Beatrice was a medium-sized woman with rich, curly red hair but otherwise unremarkable features. Beneath obscuring tubes and wires, her skin was pale and slightly greenish, and under her spare hospital nightie her once generous form was getting bony. In the same way, her hair was not so lovely as it had been on her admission, when it was bright and coppery. Now it was duller, though still pretty, and at the roots it had darkened to a muddy, bloody color. As she wrapped the tubes in a laboratory requisition form and tucked the little package into a plastic bag, Judy resolved to come back and give Beatrice’s hair a full one hundred strokes of brushing. This seemed to Beatrice, who no longer cared about her hair, a waste of time.

  The blood neatly and safely organized, and all her sharpswaste disposed of, Judy turned on her heel and walked out of the semiprivate recess that Beatrice occupied in the first bay of the SICU. Judy walked down the bay, nodding to the nurses and doctors whose eyes she caught. Beatrice followed her out. She was nodding to people, too. No one saw her.

  Judy walked up to the front desk, where a perpetually idle nursing assistant named Frank was flipping through an old issue of Reader’s Digest and looking bored.

  “Here you go,” she said, pushing the blood at him. “Take this up to the lab and tell them it’s extra-stat.”

  “Sure thing,” he said, closing his magazine. He took the blood from her and felt a familiar dislike. Mouse-face, he thought to himself. Others in the SICU agreed with him that Judy had mousy features: a small, forward-sloping face beset with a long, thin nose; prominent, well-cared-for front teeth. Whenever Judy was in a mood and taking it out on the other nursing staff, he would whisper to one of his friends, “Perhaps the rodent would like a piece of cheese.” He had not gone so far as to leave a piece of cheddar in her locker, but he planned to do that one day.

  The thought of her expression as she beheld the cheese sitting on top of her street shoes, and the thought that followed that one, of her bending down with alacrity and nibbling it up, amused him greatly. He laughed out loud on his way out of the bay, even as another nurse hurried up to him with a full gallon jug of urine to carry up to the lab. Beatrice, who did not find any of the mouse business amusing, and did not particularly care for Frank, followed him out of the SICU, walking just a few steps behind him and watching as he swung the jug of urine back and forth and hummed to himself.

  Walking down the wide hospital hallway, Frank looked out the enormous windows on his right. Outside it was snowing, but he could just barely see that. What the windows showed him was mainly his own reflection. Looking at himself, he regretted not wearing a shirt beneath his scrubs, because he thought the cut of his sleeves made his arms look thin and weak.

  He took the elevator labeled EE up to the sixth floor, not noticing that Beatrice had stepped in behind him. On the sixth floor he walked straight out of the elevator and down a hall that looked over a balcony into an atrium whose main feature was a shiny black grand piano. The atrium extended in a shaft up through every floor of the hospital. Sometimes people came in and played something cheery on the piano, but never during his shift. Beatrice had heard them during the day. Her favorite was a little Mennonite girl who sat primly under her paper hat and played hymns. Turning right, away from the hallway, Frank and Beatrice entered the pathology department.

  Frank was always surprised by how nice it smelled there, not at all like a hospital, or even like a lab. There were no foul odors like what proceeded from people with failed kidneys, nor any sharp chemical smells to make your nose itch. Rather, the lab smelled like the perfume of the beautiful women who worked there. To Beatrice it smelled sweet also, mostly because there were people there whom she counted as friends, though none of them had ever met her. The lab was one of her favorite places to spend time.

  Frank had a passing interest in one of Beatrice’s friends, a blue-eyed hematology technologist with poor dental hygiene but very handsome hips. His name was Denis. He wasn’t there when Frank dropped off the blood and urine. Two women and one man were intent on their computer screens, typing in various patient information, ordering tests, and ent
ering results. They did not notice Frank in the window.

  “Stat!” Frank shouted. They all jumped. Beatrice wanted to smack him.

  “Thank you,” said the man, a funny-looking, taciturn fellow with enormous ears. “You can leave it there.”

  “It’s super-stat,” said Frank, setting the urine in the window.

  “All right,” said the man.

  “We need you to get right on it. This lady’s getting her transplant started in the morning.”

  “Right,” said one of the women, who was thin with long straight hair. Frank envied her her eyes, which were green and gold. She rolled her chair over to the window and snatched the blood from his hand.

  “Thank you,” she said, setting the tubes next to her computer terminal but doing nothing with them. Her name was Bonnie. She made a show of being focused on her screen, waiting for Frank to go away. Go away, she thought, exerting the full force of her will upon the odious nursing assistant. Beatrice tried to help her out and wished fervently that Frank would return to his hell of shrewish nurses.

  “He’s gone,” said the man with the ears. His name was Luke.

  “I can’t stand the way that guy looks at me,” said Bonnie, adroitly unwrapping the blood, unfolding the requisition, and entering the requested tests into the computer.

  “Like a snake,” said Olivia, the other woman.

  “Damn!” said Bonnie. She’d noticed that the urine had no name on it. She stuck her head out the window and called down the hall, “Hey, Urine Boy!” If Frank heard, he made no response.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Luke.

  “They didn’t label the urine. What a pain in my ass.”

  “I’ll call them,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Bonnie said. She watched Luke as he got up and walked over to the phone, wondering why he always cut his hair so short instead of leaving it long to cover his silly ears. They really are very large, she thought, and wondered if that signified anything, in terms of personality. Men with large hands were said to possess large penises, red-haired people were said to be volatile, but she had never heard anything special said about people with large ears, except maybe that they heard a little better than most folks. Someone might have told her that, maybe her grandmother or her sixth-grade science teacher. To Beatrice, Luke’s ears indicated oafishness, because her big-eared father had been a great oaf. But regardless of the ears, Beatrice found herself partial to Luke.

  Luke hung up the phone and said, “They’re sending it up.” Behind him self-adhesive labels were printing out for Beatrice’s specimens. Bonnie looked him up and down again, and thought about how she might have found him attractive in some other lifetime, one with different standards of beauty. For what seemed to her the hundredth time she imagined him shirtless and was disappointed. She got up from her chair and handed the specimens to Olivia. “Would you label these, please?” she asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “Hey, it’s the jumping lady.”

  “Is it?” said Bonnie. “I didn’t notice.”

  “I wonder how she’s doing?” said Luke.

  “Not too well,” said Bonnie, “if she needs a new liver.”

  “But as well as can be expected,” said Olivia. “I mean, considering.” She was labeling intently.

  “You really should wear gloves when you do that,” said Luke.

  “I know,” said Olivia.

  “One of the tubes might break in your hand. Then where would you be?”

  “All bloody,” said Bonnie. “I know. It happened to me once. Lucky I had gloves on.”

  “Would you like me to put on some gloves?” Olivia asked Luke.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “It was just a suggestion.”

  “Jesus,” said Olivia. Beatrice came through the window and stood next to her. You have nothing to fear from my blood, she said, but Olivia did not hear her. Olivia was, in fact, wishing she had put on a pair of gloves. She smoothed a label onto the round edges of a lavender-topped tube and suffered from the perversity of her imagination. She imagined the tube breaking in half as she held it, the jagged glass edge piercing her thumb to the bone, inoculating her with the jumping lady’s blood and whatever diseases it carried. In the same way she sometimes imagined being a bystander in a bank robbery, standing behind a security guard when he got shot with such force that the bullet passed right through him and into her. Who could tell what she might get? Who could speculate on the sexual habits of that security guard, and whether or not they spelled death for her?

  Olivia shook her head and walked the blood through the lab, back into the chemistry section, where Otto, the great big chemistry technologist, sat with his feet up on the Hitachi 747, a very accomplished machine that was capable of all sorts of magnificently complex chemical analyses of serum and plasma, as well as urine and cerebrospinal fluid, and even stool, provided it was of a sufficiently liquid consistency. Beatrice had followed right behind her, and now she watched as Olivia watched the sleeping Otto, admiring his strong jaw. Olivia was committed to a girl she’d met in her organic chemistry class, but she felt no guilt admiring Otto’s jaw, or any other portion of his vast anatomy.

  “Wake up,” she said, putting the red- and the gray-topped tubes in a rack by Otto’s foot. She wiggled the tip of his shoe with her hand.

  “I’m not sleeping,” he said. “Just resting my eyes.”

  “Sure,” she said. “You’re not allowed to be tired yet. We’ve got seven more hours.”

  Otto sat up, picked up the tubes, and began to transfer them to his centrifuge. “Oh,” he said. “It’s the jumper.”

  “Yeah.” Olivia walked off toward the hematology section of the lab, then turned back. “I guess you can take some of this for the ammonia level,” she said, offering him the lavender-topped tube. “But give it to Denis as soon as you’re done.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.” The thought of having an excuse to go in search of Denis appealed to him. He felt the same way about Denis that Frank and Bonnie did.

  As quickly as he could, he pulled off a small aliquot of Beatrice’s blood and put it into a small plastic test tube. He was careless in his haste; a single gorgeous drop fell and landed on his ungloved index finger. Panic flared in him because he thought for a moment that he had a raw hangnail on that finger, but it was actually on the index finger of the other hand. Nevertheless he hurried to the sink and sprayed bleach from a squeeze bottle onto his finger. The smell reminded him of the bathroom he grew up with, which his mother had religiously disinfected, practically after every use. Beatrice stood next to him and said, You have nothing to fear from my blood.

  When he was all cleaned up, Otto got the ammonia level and other analyses running in the 747 and hurried down to hematology. He found Denis hunched over a magazine full of details about the lives of musicians. Denis looked up when Otto rounded the minus-70 freezer.

  “Hi,” he said. Beatrice came in, sat on the freezer, and began to drum her legs silently against its side.

  “Hi there,” said Otto, gazing not at Denis’s hips but at the upper portion of his biceps. Those muscles appealed to him not because they were particularly large (they were only about a third the size of his own) but because they were very shapely, and because he could imagine himself drifting off to sleep with his cheek resting against them.

  “What’s up?” Denis asked.

  “Got some blood for you. They want a CBC and a diff and a sed rate.”

  “No problem.” Denis held his hand out for the tube. Otto placed it in his palm, taking care despite himself not to let any part of his hand touch Denis, but his pinkie scraped Denis’s wrist as he drew his hand away.

  “It’s the jumping lady,” said Otto.

  “Oh,” said Denis. His placid expression belied his true reaction. He thought he could feel his heart rising in his chest, and he wanted to bring the blood to his forehead and hold it there, but of course he didn’t. Otto was standing in front of him, looking down and smiling awkwardly.r />
  “Looks like she’s getting a transplant,” he said.

  “Another one?”

  “Liver this time.” The previous one had been a kidney.

  “Where do they get all these organs?”

  Otto shrugged. “Got to get to work,” he said, walking away. The phone rang. Denis picked it up and listened for a few moments, then hung up and walked out into the hall. He could see Otto down past the other end, bending over his machine. “Hey, Otto!” he said. “The liver’s on its way! They’re sending up some donor blood for serology!”

  “Okay!” Otto shouted back. Denis walked back to his lab, sat down, and began to work. He felt very strongly about the jumping lady. It was his conviction that he was in love with her, and had been ever since she had first arrived, ever since he had heard her story and handled her blood for the first time. It was not an attraction that made sense in any way that he could explain to himself, but every night he worked in the building where she lay, and every time he handled her blood, she became a little more irresistible. He closed his magazine and sighed. He leaned his head against the machine that was busy counting and sorting her blood cells by type, waiting for the information, which was precious to him because it concerned her.

  Beatrice sat and watched him, feeling sad because if she was in love with anyone in the lab it was not Denis, and was probably nobody, but just might be Luke with his enormous ears. She could not bear to watch Denis mooning over her, so she left his lab through an open back door and headed up to the roof, where she waited in the blowing snow for the arrival of her new liver.

  She looked out on the city from a familiar height. The hospital, like the parking garage, was seven stories tall. She could see the university campus spread out before her, neatly bisected by the river. When she tried to leave, she got only as far as that river. Some force held her bound to the hospital. She supposed it was her living body, and wished it would die. It was not for no reason at all that she had thrown herself off the garage. Not that she could recall the reason, in her present state. She only knew that she did not wish to go back, and that it all had to do with a crushing sadness under which she had labored for most of her life, and which she had never blamed on anybody.