The Miracles of Ordinary Men

by Amanda Leduc

  Chickenhead mewed in the hallway, and he went to find her, and from there to find the priest.

  IX

  In those years before — before the street, before the office — Lilah spent her time moving, and flying, and sleeping on strange floors all over the world. A basement floor in Dublin, a cold beach in Edinburgh, littered with seaweed and trash. A whirlwind few weeks in Madrid, where men touched her hair as though each strand were made of magic. She called home once a month, if at all. Aidan, the boy from New Zealand she met on a dance floor in Cork, thought this was hilarious.

  “I’ve never met anyone who hates their own family so much,” he said. He grew orchids back in Wellington, and had come to Europe just because.

  “I don’t hate all of them,” she said. Careful, even then, to make the distinction. There was Roberta, and then there was Timothy. “I just — I’m just tired.”

  He laughed again. Aidan from New Zealand was always laughing. “You’re not tired,” he said. “If you were tired you wouldn’t have the energy to run away.”

  “Maybe.” She thought of Timothy, alone in his room. When Roberta wasn’t yelling she spoke of doctors, psychiatrists, and disapproving parishioners. Timothy wouldn’t come to the phone — he never came to the phone — but when Lilah stayed in one spot long enough he sent postcards. One found her in Amsterdam, weeks after her time in Ireland, when she was staying with Sabastian the artist. Sabastian was tall and thin and clumsy in bed, like an overgrown child. He collected plaster busts and sat them around his kitchen table, as though they were family that wouldn’t go away.

  “You have mail,” he said. He passed the postcard across the table. Somewhere over the Atlantic it had gotten wet; the ink was smudged on the left-hand side of the card, the writing small and blurred. Lilah, it ran. I miss you. I hope your well. Mom thinks we might get a dog, maybe. I told her it could sleep in my room, but she wants to put it in yours. See you when you come home. Love, Timmy.

  “I didn’t know you had a brother,” Sabastian said. The busts around his table were replicas, cast from the bronze torso of a woman who had drowned herself in the Seine in 1889. The night Lilah arrived, he’d told her the story in his garret bedroom and said that her body reminded him of the woman they’d pulled from the river.

  “You hold teardrops in your shoulders,” he said. “As though you are so sad, you have nowhere else to put them.”

  Now, thinking of this, she looked at the postcard and shrugged. “I have a brother, yes.” She put the postcard in her backpack and carried it around like a talisman, or a child. And three weeks later she left, early in the morning after a sleepy goodbye, like something from a film.

  There were other men, other artists. Halfway through that first year away she stopped paying attention. She poured drinks in a greasy pub to make money, posed for a photographer in Oslo, and played volleyball for cash on an Anzio beach. She kept the postcard in her bag, and as she moved through Greece and Turkey it was joined by another, and another. Some of the postcards had Roberta’s name dashed across the bottom beside Timothy’s — a jumble of letters, an x, an o.

  Sometimes the postcards came after she’d gone. Sabastian, who had left her his number, and whom she called now and again because she liked the sound of his voice, kept her last postcard on the dinner table, next to the bust he’d painted red.

  “They have not gotten a dog,” he said. His voice was gravelly, all angles and bones. “He says your mother has decided not to have one.”

  “That’s because she’s a bitch,” Lilah said. She shivered in the phone booth and stared out across a busy Dhaka street blanketed in rain. Monsoon season in Bangladesh, and she had only one pair of shoes. “Does he say anything else? Is he okay?”

  “Come home,” Sabastian said.

  “What?”

  “No. ‘Come home.’ That’s what he says.”

  “Oh.” She tapped a finger against the receiver and the sound echoed through the booth.

  “You’re not going to go home.”

  “What are you, my father?”

  Sabastian snorted. “No. But you’re not going to go home.”

  “Not yet,” she admitted. “Maybe never.”

  Now he laughed. “‘Never’ is a big word.”

  “Look. It’s not — I shouldn’t have to stay there. To live my life.”

  He was quietly, gently amused. “Did I say that?”

  She closed her eyes and saw the postcard, Timothy’s words haphazard and crooked over the page. “Well, whatever. Can we talk about something else now?”

  “Of course,” Sabastian said. “We can always talk about something else.”

  —

  In Chiang Mai, she met a man who had left his wife for an opium den in the hills. His name was Rainer. His wife lived in Berlin, with their children, and when Lilah met him he hadn’t seen his son or daughter in almost five years.

  “Do you miss them?” she asked. They were sprawled on the floor of a hut that smelled of grass and mould, dark paste between them in a little earthen dish.

  “All of the time,” he said. “But there are more important things.”

  “More important things?” Even there, stoned and as far from Timothy as she could possibly be, she couldn’t quite believe it.

  “God,” and he breathed out as he said it so that the word became silver smoke. “I have God here. Everything else is just an illusion.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it. Did Roberta’s arm stretch this far, this hard? Was the bad-daughter guilt going to catch up with her now, more than halfway across the world? “You’re not serious.”

  “Of course I am.” He shifted so that he was on his side, looking directly at her, drawing circles in the dirt. “You have to let go, Lilah. So much can change in a minute, or an hour, or a day. You can’t let anything tie you down. God goes beyond the world.”

  “But,” she said, not quite understanding, “it’s your family.”

  “This is my family,” and he spread an arm, took in the hut, the smoke, the pitter patter of mountain rain. “Only this.”

  She watched him, silent, and then took a turn with the pipe. “I think that’s a load of shit.”

  “You’re a child. Children don’t know anything.”

  “Fuck off,” but her words were sleepy and slow. “My mother believes in God and she’s a crackpot.”

  “Your mother believes in fairy tales,” he said. “That’s different.” He pushed the opium pot off to the side and rolled so that he was on top of her, grinding her into the dirt. He tasted of smoke and burning leaves. “Only idiots believe in happy endings.”

  In the morning, she went back to the city. She left Rainer in the hut, a week’s worth of opium still beside him on the ground. God around him, in the mountains and the tress. She met a group of American tourists back at her hostel and they spent the winter months trawling the beaches on Koh Samui, fucking and sleeping and wondering where to go next.

  But as that second year drew to a close she found herself thinking of them both, Timothy and Roberta, all the time. Timothy’s twelfth birthday came and went — she was dancing on a beach in Pattaya and paused, just for a moment, to stare across the water. Little brother, growing up so far away.

  The last postcard came to her in Bangkok, the edges soft and worn. Lilah, it ran. Lilah, I’m lonely. I love you. Timmy.

  Running to them, running away from them, always away. She flew back like a boomerang, gathering strength for her next curve into the world even as she drew near to home.

  —

  Today, she finds Timothy singing. A dirty, scuffled youth, rocking away and singing nonsense to himself on the beach. Beach strollers mark a wide path around him.

  “You look like a lunatic,” she says, by way of hello. “You’re going to scare all the children away.”

  “Let the l
ittle children come to me,” he says, and laughs. “It’s just a song, Lilah.”

  “I know it’s just a song.” Whatever that means. Lilah sits beside him and pulls food from her bag — sandwiches, apples, a hunk of sharp cheese. “Eat.”

  Timothy makes a face, but he doesn’t run away. He reaches for the first sandwich but Lilah stops him and puts a bottle of sanitizer in his hands instead. “Wash your hands with this, first.”

  He rolls his eyes and opens the bottle. The sanitizer cuts lines through the dirt at the bottom of his wrists.

  “When was the last time you had a shower?”

  He shrugs, and this time gets the sandwich. “I don’t remember. Two weeks ago?”

  “Yeah, well — you smell like it.”

  “Thanks,” he says, his mouth full of tuna. “You’re always so tactful.”

  “It’s true.” She pushes another sandwich across the wood, and he takes it. “Why don’t you come home with me for the night and get cleaned up? I won’t tell Roberta,” she adds hastily, as his face clenches in panic. “You can sleep in my room. I’ll take the couch — you won’t even have to talk if you don’t want.”

  He hesitates, and she lets her heart expand with hope. “What if I want to leave halfway through the night? What if I want to go at three in the morning?”

  “Then you can go.” She doesn’t breathe. “I’m not taking you to a fucking prison, Tim.”

  “Don’t swear,” he says. He finishes the sandwich. “You won’t have company, or anything? The boyfriend won’t be there?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she says instantly.

  “Mom thinks he is.” Timothy reaches into her bag without asking, grabs another bun. “You’re lucky Mom can even keep track. The Actor. Your Montreal men. And Joel. You know, that’s a stupid name.”

  She blinks, and then remembers. Of course. They are talking about Joel, the somewhat-boyfriend, because Timothy does not know about dates with the boss at the office. “It is not.”

  “Sure it is. It’s one of those names that people always think is so cool, so different. And then they realize — it’s just Joe. With an l.” Third sandwich done, he goes for an apple and bites. His hand is hard and white around the fruit.

  “Well — whatever,” she says. She could laugh. It would be so easy to laugh. Also easy to tell him how many times she’s heard the joke before. “Are you going to come or not?”

  “You can’t follow me if I decide to leave.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You can have showers at the Y, you know. That’s where I went the last time.”

  “I thought you said you couldn’t remember the last time.”

  Timothy wipes apple juice on his filthy jeans. “I just remembered.” He stands. It’s almost dark, and Lilah’s stomach has begun to rumble. Guilt flickers over Timothy’s face. “Were those for you?”

  “No.” She stands too. As always, she is surprised to see how much he now towers over her — how he can be so large and so small all at once. “Do you want to go now?”

  “Fine.” He falls in step beside her.

  They don’t talk. Lilah concentrates on the sidewalk in front of her and the soft pat-pat of Timothy’s feet as he follows her along the streets. She thinks of Roberta, worrying in her house across the water, and of Joe-with-an-L, who has indeed been scheduled to make an appearance tonight. She will text him when Timothy is in the shower and tell him that she’s busy.

  They drift, not talking, to the other side of the city. The landlord, a skinny grey woman with yellow fingers, is there, waiting, when they enter the building.

  “Good evening,” the landlord says. Her name is Jemima, and she doesn’t trust anybody. She sits on the couch in the front foyer with a magazine across her knees. She’s probably been there for hours.

  “Hello,” Lilah says brightly. She thinks of Debbie and smiles with all her teeth. Then she grabs Timothy’s wrist and pulls him into the elevator, jams a finger against the number 4. The doors shudder closed.

  The elevator is noisy and old. Timothy wiggles out of her grasp and stares at the floor. “I hate elevators,” he mumbles.

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever.”

  “You never said anything about that to me,” she says, hurt. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Idiots are afraid of elevators,” he says. When the elevator stops, he is the first one out into the hall. She’s not sure if he’ll remember — he’s only been here once in the entire two years that she’s been living in the place — but he stops directly in front of her door. When she opens it, he walks in, his shoulders stooped and his head down, like a misbehaved dog.

  She shuts the door and points to the bathroom right away. “Get in.” The closet to the left of the bathroom holds towels and soap — she pulls them out, folds them into his outstretched hands. “I have some of your old clothes here, if you want them.” Roberta had sent them for moments such as these, but Lilah keeps her mouth shut, says nothing. “Throw those clothes outside of the door and I’ll wash them now.”

  He nods. Once upon a time he’d been ten years old, slipping milk into her hot chocolate. Her co-conspirator in life.

  He shuts the door, and she walks into the kitchen and lights a cigarette to calm her nerves. The water starts running. A moment later the bathroom door opens and closes again — when she comes back into the hall, Timothy’s clothes lie in a pile on the floor. She finishes the cigarette and scoops up the clothes, then slides out of the apartment as quietly as she can and takes them down to the laundry, where she feeds coins and powder to the washing machine and then sits on one of the grubby chairs. She watches a beetle scuttle across the linoleum. The lights flicker, go out, come back on again. Timothy’s clothes tumble through the quick cycle — when they are finished, she shoves them into a dryer and lights another cigarette.

  Jemima, who doesn’t smoke, glares at her as she passes through the foyer. Lilah smiles again and blows a ring out into the air — a most unladylike skill, that, learned courtesy of Rainer and those days in the Thai mountains. Jemima huffs in her seat and pretends to go back to her magazine, but her eyes follow Lilah as she heads for the stairs. Lilah ignores her and slides her hand along the greasy rail as she climbs the steps.

  Back in the apartment, Timothy is sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace that does not work. He wears the clothes that Lilah gave him, bunched under his filthy jacket. His ears are red, as though he’s scrubbed them too hard.

  “Hi,” she says, softly. She closes the door behind her and is careful not to lock it.

  “Hi.” He fidgets and then holds out his hands. “Where are my clothes?”

  “They’re in the dryer,” she says. And then, because she can’t help it, “I could keep them here. For you. If you don’t want to carry so much stuff.”

  “No.” His voice shakes with urgency. “Give them to me.”

  She nods. “Okay. When you want to go, we’ll get them from downstairs.” She tries not to stare at his hands. His wrists are thin, his arms long, so awkward. “You’ve grown.”

  He snorts. “Yeah. It’s what people do.”

  “You need new clothes.”

  Timothy shakes his head. “My clothes are fine.”

  How many times have they said this? “Look — I can take you. Shopping. We can just get a few things — ”

  “I’m fine,” he snarls.

  “Just a few things,” she says again. “How can you sleep if you’re cold?”

  “I’m not cold.” He rocks forward as he sits, just as he did when he was young. “Are you leaving again? Is that it? Do you want to buy me clothes again to make yourself feel better?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she says, her voice low.

  “That’s what you always say. And then oh, look — you’re in Europe, or you’re
in Thailand, or Mom’s sick and you’re in Montreal. Or Toronto. Or New York.”

  “I came home,” she shoots back. “I always come home. And now you’re sleeping by some garbage can. Mom must be so proud — some family this turned out to be.”

  “That’s different,” but already he is smaller, unsure. “That’s completely different.”

  Lilah stares at him, watches as he rocks on the floor. Then she gives up. “Do you want something to drink? Tea? Anything else to eat?”

  “Hot chocolate,” he says, surprising her. She can hear the hint of a smile in his voice. “With milk.”

  She laughs. “I always make it with milk.” She steps into the kitchen, pours milk into a pan on the stove. She pulls out the spoons and the nice mugs, the ones that Timothy gave her years ago as a birthday present. Clay mugs, rough and brown. When the hot chocolate is ready, she fills the mugs and lets the steam brush over her face.

  “Are you sure you don’t want anything else?”

  “I’m fine,” he says. And then, when she hands him his mug, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She sits on the floor beside him and pretends not to notice when he inches himself away.

  “This is good,” he says, sipping. “I always forget how good it is.”

  Lilah snorts. “Of course it’s good. It’s always good.”

  “Hey — I made a pretty good cup too. Back in the day.”

  She sniffs. “You always left lumps.”

  “I did not.”

  “Did too.” She turns to face him so that he can see her smile. He was so tiny, then, her Timothy, swinging his feet in the air. “I ate them anyway.”

  “Right. Because you’re the greatest big sister ever.”

  “Naturally.”

  He doesn’t laugh, or disagree. They sit and drink the chocolate. Lilah has opened one of the windows and they listen as two people shout at each other on the sidewalks below. Fuck you this, and motherfucking that. A quarrel, maybe, or two people falling in love.