The Miracles of Ordinary Men

by Amanda Leduc

  “I don’t think,” Lilah snaps the concealer case shut, “that Joel will be around much anymore.”

  “Ah.” Debbie, bless her, lets her keep this, lets Lilah turn back to her meal. “Are you going to go on another date?”

  She thinks of Timothy, somewhere on the streets. The crack of Israel’s hand. “There are — there’s so much other stuff going on, Debbie. I don’t know.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.” Debbie is an only child and has been in one relationship forever. “I just — it’s exciting. He’s quite striking, Israel. I’ve always thought that.”

  “He’s very . . . intense.”

  “I’d expect so.” Debbie says, her voice firm with the confidence of the young. “A man can’t have hands like that and be wishy-washy. It just doesn’t mix.”

  Lilah laughs in spite of herself. She wonders what Timothy’s hands say about him. “He has these crocheted doilies all over his apartment. Apparently his mother made them, and she’s been dead for years. Don’t you find that creepy?”

  “My mother made doilies,” Debbie says. She plunges her tea bag in and out of the cup, clears her throat. So you went to his apartment. “She won’t do it now because they’ve gone out of fashion, but when I was little we had them all over the house. Didn’t your mother do things like that?”

  “I suppose.” Roberta was into macramé, when she wasn’t raging against men or praying at the church. She made Lilah a hideous green wall hanging that had pockets for her books; whenever Lilah had friends over, she took it off the wall and crumpled it under the bed. Eventually, though, the macramé stopped. By the time Lilah moved out, Roberta was too occupied with Timothy to do anything other than pray. But perhaps she’s begun again now, these years on. From what Lilah hears of her during their strained hours on the phone, there isn’t much more for Roberta to do.

  “Anyway,” Debbie says, “that’s kind of sweet. He must have loved his mother.”

  She moves her hand up to her jaw and traces the skin. “I guess.”

  Debbie’s eyes narrow. “Lilah. Come on.”

  “It’s nothing.” Debbie has been living with her partner for most of her young adult life. They go to the cheap two-for-one movie showings every Sunday and are planning to buy a condo next year. It hurts, knowing that for some people there is this much happiness in the world. “It’s just different from anything else I’ve ever done. I don’t really know how I feel about it.”

  “You can’t know how you feel about someone on your first date,” Debbie says, her voice solid with authority. “Maybe you just need to give it time.”

  “Maybe.” Lilah bites into her avocado and lets it slide around on her tongue.

  Debbie crunches into her sandwich. “Or maybe it’s just weird because it’s a work thing. I’d sure feel weird if my boss started whisking me away to dinner. At least at first.”

  She winces. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

  “Why be sorry?” Debbie shrugs. How funny, that she can be so romantic and yet so practical all at once. “He’s interested in you. You’re interested in him. He’s the boss — why not take advantage? I would.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Debbie laughs. “True. But then, this isn’t happening to me. Although I’ll admit that it’s nice to sit at my desk and watch Penny go white and terrible with rage.”

  “I’m going to lose my job.” Lilah covers her face with her hands. “This could be a disaster.”

  “Maybe,” Debbie says cheerfully. “I mean, I can’t imagine it would be comfortable if things were to go wrong. Think what it would be like at the office, even if you didn’t lose the job!”

  “Thanks.”

  “Just see it through, Lilah. Who knows what could happen? Maybe you’ll fall madly in love.” Debbie claps a hand over her heart. “With the Hass Avocado. How romantic.”

  Inexplicably, this thought fills her with terror. “I think it’s a little early to be talking love.”

  “Love is best when it happens early,” Debbie says, earnest. “You never know, Lilah. This could change your life.”

  “Maybe,” Lilah says. She finishes the rest of her meal and thinks about Roberta, ensconced in her house on the other side of the Strait. Timothy, making his way down some street in the city. And Israel, who is also there now, who has his own little spot in her mind, his voice and his smile inside of her, pulsing with energy. How much potential heartbreak is it possible for one person to hold?

  “Well,” Debbie takes a sip of her lesbian tea, “are you going to go out with him again?”

  Or perhaps it’s not the heartbreak that scares her, but the possibility. The possibility of a heart more than whole, or a life that reaches so far beyond what’s expected that you can’t see where it ends and forever begins. “Friday,” she says. “He’s cooking.”

  “Good.” Debbie claps her hands like a child. “Make sure you tell me everything.”

  —

  Timothy went to the video store, those months ago, and did not come back — that’s what happened. Twenty-four hours later Roberta issued a missing person’s report; forty-eight hours after that someone found him across the water, crouched in a Vancouver alleyway, dirty and disheveled but very much alive. He wouldn’t leave. He sat hunched on the ground, shivering, and when Lilah tried to touch him he shied away.

  They went to the station, but the police were no help. “He’s old enough,” they said. They meant age of majority; Roberta heard it literally.

  “How can someone be old enough to live on the streets?” she raged, back in Lilah’s kitchen. “That’s ridiculous. That’s inhuman, Delilah.”

  “It’s his choice,” Lilah said. The words felt like dust in her mouth. She drank cheap Earl Grey and thought of her brother, the fever in his hands. “He’ll come home if he wants to.”

  “I haven’t been a bad mother,” Roberta said, looking at her. “Have I?”

  “No.” Mediocre. Not enough. “No, you haven’t.”

  “He doesn’t have his medication,” Roberta said. “I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  “The police will keep an eye,” Lilah said. She had her doubts. But you had to have faith. You had to put it somewhere.

  “I don’t know what happened, Delilah,” Roberta said then. “I tried so hard.”

  Lilah ignored this and waved her cigarette in the air, so that the smoke swirled between them like a veil. Trying —and there. Such a gulf in between. “Mom — he’s eighteen. You can’t make decisions for him forever.”

  “I know that.” Roberta’s hands twitched at the table. “But he’s sick. How is he going to survive? How — who is he going to talk to, who’s going to pray for him? Should I talk to the diocese here? Maybe we should ask them to talk to him. To take him in.”

  “What, so he can suck some priest’s dick just for a place to sleep at night? He’s not going to get help from the diocese.”

  Roberta slapped her so quickly it stunned them both. “You,” she said, breathing hard, “are a terrible human being.”

  “I’m terrible?” Lilah snapped. “I’m not the one out there destroying children’s lives. I’m not the one building wars for God, or going into sub-Saharan Africa and telling women that birth control could send them to hell.” Her own fury was brittle, yet familiar. “Why the fuck should Timothy listen to what a priest has to say when odds are they’re just as fucked up as he is, if not more?”

  “How is it possible,” said her mother, “that you’ve travelled and experienced so much and still have eyes that see so little?”

  “Timothy’s never left the province and he feels the same way.”

  “How do you know?” Now Roberta was merciless, unforgiving. “You haven’t been there.”

  “You think that just because I wasn’t there while you indoctrinated him means I don’t know these things? He’s not st
upid.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Roberta said dully. “He’s just — I need to believe, Delilah, that he’ll be okay.”

  “The world eats good people,” and as her mother’s face crumpled Lilah pushed her own guilt away. “My experience taught me that. And no amount of praying will change it.”

  “What did I do wrong?” Roberta whispered. “With Timothy, with you?”

  “Jesus Christ. Will you stop that? He left school at fifteen, Mom. He didn’t have any friends, and he didn’t play outside, and when I was home all we ever did was stay up late and drink hot chocolate. He read too much. He was too sensitive.” Dyspraxia, Asperger’s, or maybe even autism. Schizophrenic tendencies. Doctor speak and fancy labels that in the end all meant the same thing. Strange little boy who became a strange young man. She would do anything for him, and destroy anyone else who ventured to say such a thing, but still, it was true. “That’s not your fault. That just happened.”

  “He hates crowds,” Roberta said. “How is he going to survive in this city?”

  “Vancouver has plenty of places for people to disappear,” Lilah said. She stubbed out her cigarette, lit another. The urge to vomit was almost unbearable. She closed her eyes, and eventually it passed.

  “You need to stop smoking.”

  “I have stopped. I’m stressed. You stress me out.”

  “Oh.” Roberta sniffed. She reached for her bag. “Fine. I’ll go.”

  “You know you can stay, if you want.”

  “And stress you out?” Roberta threw on her coat. “I wouldn’t dare.” She pulled out her wallet and tossed a few bills onto the table. “This is for Timothy. When you see him. Get him whatever he wants. Whatever he needs.” She strode to the door, opened it, and slammed it behind her.

  She called Lilah later that night, once she was home. “Will you call me if you see him? Will you let me know he’s okay?”

  “Of course I will.” This family, her family, splintered like glass. She cradled the phone and did not say it, although they both knew it was true. Together they were broken; the three of them. So different, and so lost.

  —

  Israel is not in the office on Friday, but halfway through the day a message comes through to her desk. Emmanuel, wanting to know when he should pick her up.

  “I’m fine,” Lilah says. “I’ll take the bus.”

  “Mr. Riviera specifically asked that I pick you up, madam.” His own accent is not as rich, not as exciting. But Emmanuel sees Israel every day, and some of the other man’s power seeps through the phone. “It is not, as I understand it, a request.”

  “Well,” Lilah says brightly, “you can tell him to go to hell, then.”

  A pause. “Madam,” Emmanuel says. “That is . . . hardly appropriate.”

  “Emmanuel. Tell Mr. Israel Riviera that I will be there, at seven, and that if I see your car downstairs before I leave I won’t come out of my apartment. Is that clear?”

  “Madam, I really would advise — ”

  “I don’t care what you’d advise,” she says, still in that cheerful tone. “You tell him that I’ll be there, and that I won’t be picked up like some hooker.”

  Another pause, this one heavy, disagreeable. “I will let him know,” Emmanuel says finally. He hangs up without saying goodbye.

  “‘Like some hooker?’” Debbie’s hands are poised over her keyboard, her eyebrows arched, amused. “I bet that’s going to get you brownie points.”

  “I don’t care.” She does not want brownie points. She wants him angry, she wants the righteous slap of his upturned hand. “If he thinks I’m going to answer to his beck and call — fucking men.”

  Debbie laughs. “It’s just a date, Lilah. You’re so wound up.”

  “I’m not,” she protests. But Debbie just smirks and turns back to her desk.

  Lilah leaves the office at four, goes home and soaks in her tub for an hour. She climbs out with wrinkled fingers, towels off, then pads naked into her bedroom and picks her outfit for the night. Red dress, neckline low, no jewellery. She wears hardly any make-up, and twists her hair so you can’t see the early bits of grey. Then she slides the black shawl out of her closet and hooks the black peep-toes onto her feet. Not quite glam but not quite office. Her bruises faint but there. Waiting.

  She takes the bus downtown and walks the rest of the way to Israel’s apartment, careful in her heels. She is exactly on time. She stands outside of the building for a moment, looking in. The lobby is sleek on the opposite side of the glass. She raises a hand and presses the buzzer. She will not run away.

  “Delilah.” His voice over the intercom is cracked, knotted with power. “Come up.”

  This time, she rides the elevator alone. There is no music — this feels strange until she remembers that there was no music before, either. Just a steel and glass box rising silently into the night. She focuses on the marbled floor and thinks of Emmanuel, Israel, breathes in deeply. Brownie points. The elevator slows and stops. She raises her head, and the elevator doors slide open.

  “Hello,” Israel says. He stands before the elevator, waiting for her. He’s wearing an apron, black pants, one oven mitt. If this was any other man he’d look ridiculous. But this is not Joe-with-an-L. This is not any other man.

  “Hello.” She holds her breath and waits for more, but there’s nothing, so she steps over the threshold. Israel smells of cedar and incense, like the apartment. Heavy, waiting. He slips Lilah’s coat from her shoulders, slings it casually over his arm. “You must remove your shoes,” he says. “Please make yourself at home.”

  Lilah slips off her heels and sinks her feet into the carpet. Plush. Even the floor here is expensive. The apartment is lush and calm, a soothing mix of beige walls and recessed lighting. She hardly notices the doilies now. The front foyer opens into a great room that looks out over the city. City lights twinkle at them through the glass.

  “I’ve made tortellini,” Israel says. “Stuffed with pork and rosemary — I trust you don’t object?”

  “No, it’s fine,” she says, and she follows him into the kitchen.

  Israel pauses at the counter and passes her a glass of wine. Red, this time. “Good.”

  Lilah perches on a bar stool and watches him move through the stainless steel expanse of the room. This hulking, beautiful man in a kitchen apron and oven mitts. Saxophone music drifts from the stereo by the window.

  “Emmanuel called me,” she says suddenly. “I told him I didn’t want to be picked up.”

  He smiles. “I know what you said.”

  “Are you . . . upset?”

  Israel shrugs, then turns from her and fiddles with the oven knobs. “You are here. If you would like to be stubborn and walk instead of being driven, who am I to argue?”

  “I didn’t walk the whole way,” as though it matters. “I took the bus.”

  “Oh.” His voice is smooth. “Excuse me.” Then he nods in the direction of the music. “John Coltrane. An American saxophonist.”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Do you,” he says. “That is interesting. In my experience, most women do not.”

  “In your experience, do most women also crochet?”

  He chuckles and slides a casserole dish out of the oven. “Every woman should know how to make beautiful things for her family.”

  She doesn’t know what to make of this, so she says nothing. The wine is heavy, delicious.

  “You should tell me more about your family, Delilah.” He takes two plates out of the cupboard and slides them onto the counter. “I am very interested. You can tell me now, while we eat.”

  “You didn’t tell me anything about your family,” she counters. A childhood in Mexico, a struggle with math that mirrored her own. “Anything important. You first.”

  He laughs. “Very well. I am an only child, and my moth
er is dead.” He spoons the tortellini out as he speaks, the movement of his wrist quick and sure. When he finishes, he reaches for the bundle of parsley sitting on the counter, then tears two sprigs and places one on each dish. “My father . . . became irrelevant years ago. I am alone in the world. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “You don’t have to be so blunt,” she mutters. “Jesus. I thought you said you knew how to tell a story.”

  His expression flickers, unreadable. “I said I had many stories to tell. That is different.” He slides a plate in front of her and sits on the opposite bar stool, then takes the cream napkin that sits next to his plate and unfolds it over his lap. “You asked me a question, and I answered it. Would you prefer a fairy tale?”

  A fairy tale, a happy ending. She unfolds her napkin and spreads it carefully across her knees. “So you haven’t seen your father,” she says. She picks up her fork and then puts it down again. “In years.”

  He shrugs. “It is not a problem. He is dead in every way that matters.” He nods to her plate. “You can eat. I won’t poison you.”

  Lilah frowns and scoops a forkful of pasta into her mouth too fast; she coughs and narrowly avoids spitting everything back out onto her plate. Israel smiles. She avoids his eyes. She pretends to concentrate on the food and says nothing.

  “Your father is also gone,” Israel says idly. “You haven’t seen him in years, either.”

  She stops eating and stares at him. “Who the hell told you that?”

  He laughs. “Surely you don’t think you hide it all that well, Delilah. You have — how would you say it? Daddy issues.”

  “I do not fucking have daddy issues.”

  “But your father is gone, yes?”

  Lilah puts her fork down. “Why the fuck is it important?”

  “People show who they are when they are upset,” he says. So calm. “I am trying to know who you are.”

  “Why can’t we just talk about hobbies, or favourite books, like normal people?”

  “Normal people are mediocre,” he says. “Is that what you want? Is that truly who you want to be?”

  The door is just on the other side of the foyer. All she has to do is take her shoes and go. “Don’t tell me what I want. You have no idea.”