The Miracles of Ordinary Men

by Amanda Leduc

  Intense. There was another word. “Are you sure you’re not pregnant?” he asked mildly.

  Her voice went even lower. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can’t have sex with a student, Sam.”

  God, he was tired. “I’m not having sex with a student,” he said. “Don’t you think I have other things to worry about?” He drained his glass. “I think you should go.”

  Julie bit her lip. How many times had he seen her do that, over how many years? “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m just — I’m tired, Julie. I need to lie down.”

  “Okay.” She leaned in and hugged him. Her arms slid beneath the wings, effortlessly, unknowingly, as though she’d been hugging him like this forever. Then, surprisingly, she kissed his cheek. “Call me. Please? If you need anything?”

  “Sure.” He pulled away. When she left the room, he walked over to Bryan, who looked amused and antsy all at once. “Don’t. Don’t even think about it.”

  Bryan shrugged. “If you say so.” He shot Sam a strange look. “Are you okay, Sam? I mean, apart from this. You seem . . . weird. I don’t know. Since that day.”

  “Since the hangover to beat all hangovers?” He tried to laugh — it came out forced, too loud. Everyone looked over. “No. I’m okay. Really.”

  “All right.” Bryan, of course, was not convinced. Disheveled or not, he wasn’t stupid. “Well. You know I’m leaving this week, right?”

  “Yes,” Sam said, though in truth he’d just remembered. A tour of northern Italy for the haphazard chef. Who was not, in fact, all that haphazard when it came to his work.

  “I’ll be back just before Christmas,” Bryan said. “But you can email, if you want. Or call. When I figure out the number, I’ll send it to you.” He paused. “I really am sorry, Sam.”

  “I know.” Yet he wouldn’t be all that surprised if Bryan went to Italy and disappeared. He wasn’t even surprised to realize that this didn’t bother him, though the fact that he didn’t care made him uneasy. Who was he, now, that his life had become so small?

  “We should go out again when I get back,” said Bryan. “And do . . . something.”

  “Yes. Something,” he echoed.

  Bryan cleared his throat. “Okay. Well — I should go.”

  “Sure.” He walked Bryan to the door and got his coat. His normal, stylish coat that did not have rips in the back. “Let me know how it goes.”

  “Will do.” Bryan had one arm in the coat and was already halfway out the door. He clapped one hand against Sam’s shoulder and began to amble down the front path. Then he stopped and came back. “Tell Julie I’m sorry,” he said, sheepish. “I didn’t mean to . . . everything feels so strange. You know,” and he cast his hands in circles, “you and her and me and . . . everything’s just so different now.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ll tell her.”

  “Okay.” Bryan nodded, then walked down the path. This time he did not turn back.

  Sam watched him get into his car and drive away. He stepped into the house and closed the door. He avoided the kitchen and went back up the stairs, into the bedroom, and there was Chickenhead, once more twitching her tail on the bed. He fell on the duvet and spread the wings over the bed, until they were both cocooned in feathers.

  Bryan would be back at the end of December.

  He would not be here at the end of December. The knowledge was heavy in his stomach. His mother’s life had ended without warning; his own days were counting down, now, to only God knew what.

  —

  When he came down hours later, Father Jim and Doug were in the dining room, drinking tea. Janet had bought more Chinese food. More chopsticks. The sweet and sour sauce, in its pristine Styrofoam container, had a radioactive sheen.

  “The house, you know,” said Doug. Without preamble, without looking at him. “The house belongs to you.”

  “What?”

  “When I moved in, Carol asked me if I would stay, were anything to happen.” He shook his head. “I told her I didn’t want to stay if she wasn’t going to be there. So she gave it to you. It’s in the will.”

  Strange that this news, of all things, should shock him so. He slid into a chair, the wings hunched behind him. “She never said anything about that.”

  “Why say anything?” Doug’s face twisted into a smile, a frown. “She thought she had years left. We all thought she had years left.” He lifted the teacup to his mouth. His hands were shaking; tea slopped over the brim of his cup and splashed over the saucer onto the floor. “Fuck.”

  Doug was forty-two. Just past forty and a widower — but that’s what one might get, you could argue, when one married a woman fifteen years older. Chasing cougars. What a MILF. The kids still made fun of that kind of thing at school. And yet here was his stepfather, newly old and alone in this great wide house. The unfunny end to the joke.

  What might have happened, had he been there in time? A casual drop-in, just to say hello — a hand outstretched, another jolt of power from his abdomen, and Carol blinking up at him instead of his goddamned cat. But no — the cat was more important. The cat was the vehicle that would show him his power. His mother, the deer — these were expendable creatures, things that could disappear.

  Janet came in from the kitchen. She slapped the top back on the container of sweet-and-sour sauce and slid into the chair across from Doug. “I think you should get some sleep.” She reached across the table, grasped his hand in her own. “I’ve got everything here, Doug. It’s fine.”

  “What am I going to do?” he said. He still hadn’t looked up at them. “I don’t know what to do, Sam.” He took a breath, deep and ragged. “Can you tell me what to do?”

  He did not miss the glare from Janet, or the way that the words hung in the air, or the way that Doug’s hands shook around his teacup like those of an old man. “I think Janet’s right, Doug. I think you should get some sleep. We can worry about everything else later.”

  Doug nodded. He stood and padded out of the room without saying anything else.

  Janet looked from the door to Sam and back. “I’d like to stay,” she said. “For as long as he needs me.”

  He wanted to be back in his own house, or walking the streets of the city, or back in Tofino, throwing mud at trees. “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Stay as long as you like.”

  “Are you going to go home, Father?” she asked. “Today?”

  He looked at Father Jim, who shrugged. “Sure. If that’s what you want.”

  “I think it isn’t good for Doug to be around anyone else right now,” she said. “He needs to be around family.”

  “Sure.” He did not point out that his own family was gone now, that his house held empty rooms and a cat. That it was his mother they’d just scattered over the ground. Instead he stood, took his coat from the peg by the dining room door, and whistled low between his teeth. A moment later Chickenhead trotted into the room.

  “Make sure you call if you need anything,” Sam said.

  Janet nodded. “We’ll be fine. But thank you.”

  They walked outside and got into the car. Sam settled the wings around the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition — and then there came a whisper, a sudden shake of the world. His hands convulsed around the steering wheel and for a moment, he was and was not there. The angel takes a breath, and struggles in the car. He leaned against the horn and let it blare, let the sound pull him back.

  “Are you all right?” Father Jim grabbed his shoulder. “Sam. Sam.”

  “I think you should drive,” he said, drawing the words up from who knows where.

  “We don’t have to go now,” said the priest. “We have time. Why don’t you go back in and rest?”

  “I want to get home.” He unbuckled the belt as he spoke, p
ushed the door open, and almost fell out of the car. He stood and rested his hands above the doorframe. He looked up to the house — Janet stood at the window, watching them both.

  Father Jim got out, crossed to the other side of the car, and clasped Sam’s arm. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m sure,” he mumbled. He stumbled over to the passenger side, keeping one hand on the car. When he was inside again, buckled and somewhat calmer, he turned to the priest and tried a grin. “How long has it been since you drove stick?”

  “Years,” said the priest. His hands were hard and nervous around the wheel. “But God will get us home. Eventually.”

  —

  When they walked back into the house, Chickenhead murmured in joy and stretched herself onto the hardwood. Sam stepped across the threshold and let his jacket fall to the floor.

  “So,” he said. “That’s that.” He shot a glance at Father Jim, who had closed the door and was unlacing his hiking boots. “Why did you ask me up there, at the church?”

  The priest looked up at him and then out the window. “Sometimes people want a chance to say things.”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “Surely you knew that. Surely you knew how that would make me feel.”

  “Well.” Father Jim moved his boots against the wall. “It’s done now. There’s nothing more to do.”

  “No.” They had taken the ashes down to the ravine that morning and sprinkled them among the dirt and water. “I suppose there isn’t.”

  They moved to the kitchen, and the priest went to the refrigerator, pulled out potatoes, carrots. “Stew?”

  Sam wasn’t hungry. Had he been hungry, at all, since the day the wings had arrived? “That’s fine.”

  Father Jim took out a knife and began to chop the carrots. “I spoke with Julie for a while,” he said. “Back at the house, while you were asleep.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a sadness there that I don’t remember.”

  It was two years ago. It had only been two years. “It was a sad time.”

  “What happened, Sam?”

  “She was pregnant, and the baby died.” He coughed. “A few months before the wedding.” And then what? A mistake, a fumble into another woman’s apartment late one Saturday night. And then another mistake, and another. “She was too sad,” he said, hating the words, hating himself. How to explain? How to make it believable, and understandable, that feeling of not knowing what to do, what came next? “I couldn’t — I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be there for her, and I ended up being there for other people. Other women.”

  “I see,” the priest said. Was that contempt? Was he imagining it? “So she was the one who called off the wedding.”

  “Yes.” Sam rested his forehead against his hands. The wings slid forward so that feathers tickled the back of his neck. “She moved out, and met Derek.” Derek the professor. Derek the would-be Buddhist. “And now, here we are.”

  Father Jim shook his head as he diced an onion. His fingers were squat and strong around the knife. “There’s something unfinished there. Between you two.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sam said. “Not now. Whatever I did to make this happen — it’s done. She’s done.”

  “And who else is there, then? In your life?”

  He shrugged. “No one. I’ve been busy, with teaching. And now, with this.”

  “And other friends? Other people?”

  “There’s not much else.” The job. The cat.

  “Time was, Sam, that would have been different.”

  “I know.” He shrugged. Time was, he’d been surrounded by people. “They were Julie’s friends. They sided with Julie. Who could blame them?”

  “There’s no one else?”

  He thought of Emma. “Not really.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “This from the man who lives with trees for ten months of the year.”

  “You think I’m not involved?” said the priest. “You think I don’t do things, see people?”

  “I’m involved,” Sam protested. But already he could feel the argument thinning, becoming tired. He was not close with his kids anymore. He skulked the halls — had done so, truth be told, even before the wings. There was Bryan, whom he’d seen more in the past two weeks than he had in months. Janet, Doug — they would disappear now, eventually. There was no one else.

  “It’s not good for man to be alone,” Father Jim said softly.

  Sam snorted. How many classes had he taught, how many times had he argued and tried to make them see how words could structure things, make the world new from one syllable to the next? “Maybe I’m not a man anymore.”

  The priest sat unfazed. But then, he was someone whose path had not changed, whose life had not become something other. “I think,” and Sam had the impression that the priest was choosing his words very carefully, “that I’m going to stay here for a while. With you.”

  “I’m not an invalid,” Sam snapped. Then he was ashamed, and sorry, and he turned to hide it. “Everything’s been taken care of. It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine,” Father Jim said. “But that’s all right.”

  “Don’t you have — ” and he waved his hand “ — duties? Classes, retreat issues, that kind of thing? What on earth will the brothers do without you?”

  Father Jim ignored the jab. “I think you need me here. That’s all.”

  “That’s . . . that’s . . . ” Pathetic, he wanted to say. But the word would not come out.

  The priest shrugged. “Call it whatever you like. But you’ll need someone here, Sam, before all this is through.”

  He waited until Father Jim had finished with the onion. “What do you think you’ll have to do?”

  “We bear witness,” said the priest. “It might be useful, Sam. Someone to believe.”

  He laughed. “In me? Or in God?”

  Father Jim shrugged. “In you, or in God,” he said, echoing those words that Sam’s mother might have voiced, given the chance. “Or both. Does it matter?”

  —

  Later that night he woke in the dark, in his own room, Chickenhead a rumbling mass at his feet. For a moment he couldn’t remember why he’d awoken, and then he moved his shoulder and felt it, that sharp spike of pain. Deep breath. He turned his head slowly and saw that the left wing had somehow become tangled in the sheets, in the space between the bed and the nightstand. He twisted around and a muscle in his back popped, then popped again. He reached his hand over and pulled the wing out of the gap, unwound the sheets. The material was damp, as though he’d been tossing in fear.

  Freed, the wing bounced softly in the air just above his ear, the feathers crumpled and bent. He raised both hands and pulled the wing between them, smoothing down the feathers. Chickenhead, oblivious, slept on.

  The wing slid through his fingers like water. It was soft, and yet not-soft — the wispy down of each single feather a mask for the ribbed cartilage that lay beneath. He lay still and listened to Chickenhead, snoring faintly at the end of the bed. Perhaps he could fly now, if he wanted. If he gathered the courage to try. The world both above and below, and people spread beneath him like children, so completely unaware of how their lives could change.

  VII

  On Wednesday, Lilah and Debbie have a dinner date, so instead of scouring the evening streets for Timothy, Lilah finds herself in a West End café, eating scrambled eggs out of an avocado. Debbie is in yellow and has flowers in her hair.

  “Tell me everything,” she says. She eats wholegrain pasta and orders a cup of herbal infusion, what the junior manager, Colin, calls lesbian tea. “You’ve been too quiet this whole week. How did it go?”

  Lilah pours hot sauce onto her spoon and licks it straight. “It was . . . interesting.” Israel, above her. Israel, around her, i
nside of her, everywhere. She taps the spoon against her teacup. “We went to the Indian restaurant, the one on Eleventh.”

  “Yes,” says Debbie. “The one that everyone talks about. Did he pay?”

  For some strange reason, this makes her laugh. “Of course he paid. And he had his chauffeur drive me home.”

  “Lifestyles of the rich and famous.” Unbelievably, there’s a note of envy in Debbie’s voice. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And then what happened?”

  “And — nothing.” Lilah shrugs, suddenly thrumming with fear. How much of this is she going to tell? Once upon a time she’d have had a gaggle of girlfriends to regale. Now there is only Debbie, eager on the other side of the table. What would she say if she knew?

  “Come on, Lilah. You went on a date with Israel Riviera! The entire office is talking.”

  “Sure they are.”

  “I’m serious.” Debbie pours more tea. “You aren’t in those meetings. You don’t see the way that Penny looks at him. Like she wants to kiss him and squish him beneath her shoe all at once. Everyone’s scared of him, and everyone adores him, in a weird, worshipping kind of way, and last Saturday he went out with you. And now you’re going around the office and sitting in front of your computer like it’s no big deal.” Debbie picks up the spoon and stirs her cup of tea, her nonchalance so studied it’s almost comical. “That mark there, on your lip — did you fall?”

  “My brother,” Lilah says, her hand going automatically to her face. Luckily the Timothy story makes sense. She told Debbie about Timothy some weeks ago. This is the other thing they share in their sterile, stupid office — stories of a boy, lost and wandering on grey city streets.

  “Oh.” Debbie relaxes. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine,” she says, because Timothy is as fine as Timothy can be. Lying over a grate somewhere or shivering in some alleyway or stealing food from a restaurant garbage bin. She pulls concealer from her purse and dabs more of it over her lip.

  “So?” Debbie asks. “Come on, Lilah. How was the date?”

  “The date was fine.”

  “Does Joel know?”