Bright Angel Time

by Martha McPhee

  I held the doll and the rock and remembered Dad’s hands. They were strong, with long slender fingers and not too much hair. Dad and I had a game. I squeezed his hand four times. He then squeezed mine three times. I squeezed his twice. He squeezed mine once, long and hard. Each squeeze was a word. “Do, you, love, me?”

  “Yes, I, do.’

  “How, much?” And the last squeeze indicated how much. Sometimes he’d squeeze so hard it would hurt.

  ♦

  I got sick. Fever crept beneath my eyes, making it hard to move them. My body ached and my lungs grew sore. It was a familiar feeling. I had had pneumonia seven times since I was born. It was one of those queer things that I was proud of. Julia and Jane were sent away to a college friend of Mom’s who lived in the South. Mom couldn’t handle more than one sick child and after a while she couldn’t even handle one. She said the doctor said that it would be best if I went to the hospital. She said not to worry, that going to the hospital didn’t mean I was any more sick than I’d been before. She said that he said it would bring my father back.

  I spent two weeks in the hospital and Dad did not come back.

  ♦

  In early September I went home. My sisters were still away. I crawled into bed next to Mom and her arm wrapped around my stomach, pulling me into her chest. The sheets were gentle and smelled of so many things: of Mom’s honeysuckle perfume, of detergent, of sweat.

  The house was quiet. The television was off. Outside, the sun was sinking into the trees and the sky was striped with paths of color, turning first orange then violet and then a deep red. Every so often Mom would wake and stare, blankly, listening. A web of creases surrounded her eyes and they were swollen. “I love you, little Kate. You love your mother, don’t you?” I’d reassure her and then she’d fall asleep again, pulling me with her, deeper against her chest. I lay there trying to keep my eyes closed, but they were heavy and static seemed to sizzle beneath the lids.

  Then I heard the sound of wheels rolling over gravel, rolling slowly, cautiously. It was already dark on that side of the house. Carefully, I slipped away from Mom and went to the window. A car was sneaking up the driveway, my father’s white Volkswagen. Instantly, I was flooded with joy. I shoved the window to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. I wanted to scream out to him. I could see him. He stepped from his car, rising tall above it. I could see his head of black curly hair.

  “Dad’s back,” I shouted. “He’s back!” I clapped, turning to Mom, but she was already at the bedroom door, locking it. I shouted at her, why?, and my stomach lurched.

  “Quick. Be quiet. He’s just here to get things,” she said. “He’s been here before.” Her voice was angry and sharp. She wrapped her arm in mine and we moved close to the door. In her other hand she clutched the phone.

  Dad’s footsteps pounded into the rug as he climbed the stairs to the bedroom door. The banister creaked. Blood banged in my ears.

  “Eve,” he said, knocking. “Eve. Open the door. Don’t be foolish.” His voice was impatient, but I could feel he was trying to be calm. “We need to talk.”

  “Go away,” she said. “Go away or I’ll call the police.” She started dialing on the phone.

  Almost instantly they were fighting. Their voices vibrated in waves into my skin. My eyes were wide and stinging.

  “You never loved me, Eve. Always your father, always your father. I could never live up to your father.” The picture of Granpy stood on Mom’s bedside table; it had been there since I could remember. He was a tall, distinguished man with graying hair and a strong jaw. He’d died when I was six, two years before Dad left.

  “That’s too easy, Ian,” Mom screamed. They were both screaming at once. About Camille Cain, then about us, then about money.

  “I’m going to come in there, Eve. I’ll smash this door down if I have to.” The room was a mess. The drawers of Mom’s bureau hung open and clothes streamed out of them. Dangling bras and underwear. Her taffeta dresses. Her purse strap. Her robe. Books and papers and magazines littered the floor. The slow stir of the ceiling fan made the papers rise and sink as if they were breathing. Mom was a clean person. She loved being clean. She loved washing behind our ears and scrubbing our necks. I felt embarrassed for her.

  “Kate was sick, damn it,” Mom said.

  “You spend up a storm. What do you think? That money grows on trees? You put the children in the hospital and run up thousands of dollars in doctors’ bills. What do you think I’m made of?” I could hear the panic in his voice. I couldn’t breathe properly. I had to concentrate to breathe. My tongue felt too big for my mouth. “I won’t work another day in my life. I’ll go to Hawaii and live on the beach. I’m not going to be burdened with all these bills that you run up carelessly.”

  I felt all this was my fault.

  “Daddy,” I blurted out. I wanted to explain. There was silence, loud silence. Mom and I sank down into the rug, which was prickly with little things. It hadn’t been vacuumed in weeks.

  “Kate?” he asked. “Is that you, Kate? Sweetie?”

  “I was sick, Daddy,” I said. “Really.” I swallowed. I needed to swallow.

  “Oh, baby,” he said, drawing out the words. “I didn’t mean…” He stopped. I could hear him on the other side of the door, sinking down as we had. I pushed my cheek into the hard wood door. Maybe his cheek was pushed into the hard wood door too. “Baby. Open the door for Daddy.”

  I thought if I just let him in everything would be all right. I could explain. I thought if I opened the door they could work things out. He would come back. Everyone loved Mom. Waiters and store clerks and teachers, the mothers and fathers of our friends, they all fell in love with Mom because she was always so interested in them and their lives. It was impossible to believe that she didn’t love Dad or that Dad didn’t still love her.

  “Kate,” he said. Kate. Kate. It rang in my ears. I reached for the knob and as I did, Mom clutched my arm. In her hand my skin was soothed. Her hands were soft and warm and gentle.

  “Tell him no, Kate,” she whispered in my ear. “Tell him you don’t want to see him.”

  I said, “No, Dad.” A thick lump caught in my throat and my mouth became dry. “No Daddy, we don’t want you. We want you to leave, Daddy.” Then I started screaming it. “Leave, Daddy.” My face burned. In fact, my whole body burned. I screamed blindly. “Leave, Daddy.” And then I heard him cry. I wanted to hear him cry.

  ♦

  The police came discreetly, without flashing lights. Two solid men in solid blue suits. I heard them coming up the stairs and I heard the crackling of their walkie-talkies. I heard them ask my father to leave. From the window in the late evening light I saw Dad being escorted to his car, a shadow between two solid figures, his arms linked in theirs. Gently they set him in his car. And just as quietly as he came Dad drove away.

  ∨ Bright Angel Time ∧

  Anaconda

  Anton pinned money to our bedroom doors. Fives. Tens. Twenties. Once we got a fifty. The bills smelled acrid and wonderful, and there was something dusty about the way they felt on your fingers. I loved their smell; it got into my hands just as garlic does and I started to sniff my hands all the time just to smell that smell.

  Monday nights were Anton’s poker nights and Tuesday mornings, early, when it was still gray and misty outside, I’d check my door. Finding the money sent a rush through me, like the thrill of finding an Easter egg – the good kind, stuffed with cash.

  It was spring now and Mom was out of bed all the time because Anton was coming around a lot. He drove a turquoise Cadillac with windows that hummed like flies as he put them up and down. He played high-stakes poker with hundred-dollar antes and thousand-dollar chips. He played with a group of real estate pirates and a local policeman who didn’t ticket Mom the time he pulled her over. Practiced men, who played in the Islands and Las Vegas. Some of the men were worth three hundred million dollars, Anton told us. “I play with a man, Mickey Eager, worth so much he
doesn’t trust the banks,” Anton said, squinting and winking. He was always squinting and winking. It made you feel he was including you in something big and mischievous. “Keeps all his money in gold Krugerrands – fifty thousand of them – buried in his backyard.”

  There was something dazzling about a man worth so much money. My father had told me that a human body wasn’t worth much. He said maybe all told the value of the individual pieces – the heart, lungs, liver, kidney – would be worth a dollar and a quarter in a scientific laboratory.

  Julia put her money from Anton toward ballet lessons. With mine I bought rocks and minerals for my collection. Jane left her money tacked to her bedroom door in one long snaking strip. Only a few bills disappeared, borrowed by Mom for groceries. Jane didn’t trust Anton anymore. She said he’d never leave his wife. His wife was a Texan oil heiress and also a nun. She’d been a nun when Anton was a priest and while they both served God they fell in love. Jane and Julia called her ‘the wife’. I called her ‘the nun’. I liked ‘the nun’ better. I liked thinking of her in a black habit with those wide strips of white banding her face and neck.

  The first bill on my door had been small. A five. But it seemed large at the time, and beautiful, scrolled with important fives, fives all over it. And the memorial. Thin white lines webbed over green like lace. A red pushpin tacked the five to my door and when I saw the money I felt suddenly guilty because I wanted to steal it. The hall was quiet and cold. It didn’t occur to me the bill was mine. Mom’s door at the end of the hall was locked, bolted now because before Julia was always trying to pop the lock with knitting needles and straightened-out clothes hangers, trying to prove that Anton spent the nights. Julia said you could smell it when Mom had had sex. She said sex smelled like bad breath.

  Nothing got by us. In the mornings, from the school bus, we’d see Anton’s Cadillac hidden beneath a willow tree, down an overgrown lane not far from our house. It reminded me of a boat I’d seen, sunk in the shallows of a lake.

  In the hall, I thought about the three of us behind that door, in bed with Mom, watching the Late, Late Show after Dad had left – how we didn’t do that anymore. The house creaked, scaring me. I stared at the five-dollar bill, my skin in goose bumps. I noticed Jane’s door and then Julia’s, each with money pinned there the same as mine, so I snatched the bill.

  ♦

  “Act smart when he’s around,” Mom would warn. “He’s an intellectual, a thinker. He’s a philosopher writing the definitive treatise on the psychology of love.”

  All over town Anton spray painted I LOVE YOU EVE in bold blue paint. Drizzles of paint slithered down street signs, polka-dotted the pavement, decorated the windows of stores and the water tower that loomed over town. I LOVE YOU EVE. He’d been writing his treatise for ten years and was still on chapter one.

  “He’s married,” Jane said. We weren’t suppose to talk about that, but Jane did all the time.

  “Don’t be difficult,” Mom said. She pushed her thumbnail into her lip and thought, running her eyes over us. The nun lived in Europe with their children. Mom worried about her coming back. She didn’t tell Julia or me that she worried. She told Jane, who told Julia, who told me. Mom confided in Jane as if they were sisters and sometimes it seemed Jane really believed she was Mom’s sister.

  “If he leaves the wife he’ll have nothing, because she won’t give him any money,” Jane said to us when we were alone. “Especially if she can prove he’s had an affair.” I didn’t like thinking about Mom as an affair. Dad’s girlfriend, Camille, with her long ginger hair, was an affair. Julia said Camille ‘oozed sexuality’ as if sexuality were something liquid. I said that this reminded me of bulldog ants I’d seen on a nature program, which oozed infertile eggs called ‘omelettes’ to feed their young.

  “That’s absolutely disgusting,” Julia said.

  “If the nun goes back to the nunnery,” I said, “she’ll leave Anton her money.” It was really an ashram in India that she was considering, but I liked ‘nunnery’ better. “You can’t take money to a nunnery unless you donate it, and I don’t think anybody would throw away all that money.” That’s what Julia had said. I liked using Julia’s thoughts. They made me feel smart.

  “We need to protect Mom,” Jane said, giving us her serious look.

  When Anton started coming to our house for dinner he always brought enormous boxes filled with wonderful food – Hydrox cookies, ice cream, doughnuts, slippery steaks of such a brilliant red I was afraid Mom wouldn’t let us eat them. Mom didn’t care much about food, and since Dad left we’d eaten creamed chipped beef for dinner every night. It was pasty and gooey, like plaster of paris, and it was slopped over well-done toast and was very salty because we always forgot to rinse the beef. The food Anton brought glistened like birthday presents in its cellophane packaging, and we tore into it greedily.

  The thing about Anton and Mom was that they really knew how to have fun together. “We have the same sense of adventure,” Mom would say. And they always included us on their adventures. In the beginning he and Mom would take us for late-afternoon drives, so that Anton could get to know us, scaring us with stories. They drove us to the site where the murdered Lindbergh baby was found. They drove us to the home of a woman who’d chopped off her mother’s head. It was strange to be scared by Anton; it made us feel protected.

  At dinner one night, Anton told us that he came from a family of murderers in Corsicana, Texas. His grandfather, Johnny Darling, had killed at least three men – two black men, shot in the forehead for tipping their hats at his wife, and a white man, his brother-in-law, shot square in the back for writing an article for the Corsicana Star in defense of the black men. For the first two Johnny Darling was charged five dollars for disturbing the peace. After the latter, he skipped town.

  “You wouldn’t believe him,” Mom said brightly, “but he’s got the article from the Corsicana Star.” A big smile spread across her lips; she was proud.

  “It’s true,” he nodded. “It’s true.” He sat forward in his chair, Dad’s chair, at the head of our kitchen table. His eyes sparkled and he fingered his chin, resurrecting stories and details. I hoped we were acting smart. You could always count on Julia to act real smart. Jane slumped back in her chair and Mom shot her a look. For Mom, sometimes, it was as if our whole world depended on what Jane thought, as if Jane knew all the answers. “Clairvoyant,” Julia would say.

  In town Anton had a reputation. People were divided. Some thought he was grand. “Unique,” they’d say. “An individual with charisma – he’d give his soul to help you out.” Others suspected him and didn’t want their wives doing therapy with him. They said he had ‘multiple’ wives. “Multiple wives,” Julia would repeat, flexing her left eyebrow. And from the multiple wives he had multiple children, who were scattered about the world.

  “They’re just jealous,” Mom would say. That’s what she’d always say when someone criticized her.

  Anton was a lot of things, but to me he was a poker player and I liked cards. I could shuffle evenly and quickly, and could deal with one hand. I knew a lot of games, but I didn’t know poker yet.

  ♦

  Anaconda high and low. Up and down the river. Five-card draw. Seven-card stud. Hold ‘em – a Texas game. Anton taught us the different varieties one evening over dinner. He said it would be good for us to learn poker. Poker made you tough, and we needed to be tough and to trust.

  Anaconda: Eunectes murinus. I learned that name at a Coney Island freak show. The snakes could live up to twenty-eight years and grow over forty feet long and the females could give birth to seventy-two babies at once. Though they were strong enough to crush a doe, they ate only small animals and birds. “The hug of death is how they kill,” that’s what the freak showing us the snake had said.

  “Whichever game you play, babes, it’s all in the face,” Anton said to us. “You have to know how to hold the same face all the time regardless of your hand. Mickey Eager’s the only man I
’ve ever known to consistently hold his face.” I thought about the Krugerrands and tried to hold my face still. “An inscrutable face that gives no hint of your thoughts or feelings.”

  The kitchen smelled of lemon polish. Mom’s Christmas cactus thrived on a windowsill, in full crimson bloom. The long stems fountained over the pot like narrow green ribbons cut with pinking shears. The fire hissed. The five of us sat at the table eating steaks and grits. Big slabs of steak, trimmed with thick translucent gristle. The steaks reminded me of Dad. Dad loved steaks. I remembered how he’d said when he died he wanted us to have a feast and eat thick juicy steaks with peppercorns to celebrate his life. I wondered where Dad was now.

  After dinner we played a few open hands of poker to learn the rules. Julia asked a lot of questions about the rules. She always asked a million questions to look smart. The rules were a cinch. It was holding the face that was the difficult part, and already mine was twitching.

  “Keep your face straight, stupid,” Julia said. She wore her ballet outfit and sat next to Anton, flirting with him. He kept fingering the fabric of her tutu, telling her how pretty it was. Mom liked us to flirt with him.

  “Fuck off,” I said. I wished I were wearing my tutu instead of the velvet dress.

  “Kate!” Mom said. But the tone of her voice was light and I could tell she didn’t care. There was a lot she didn’t care about anymore. She didn’t care if we licked our fingers or if we put our elbows on the table. “Elbows off the table, Mable,” she used to say. But I knew she wouldn’t be caught dead saying something as stupid as that now.