The Miracles of Ordinary Men

by Amanda Leduc

  “It’s not really important. I’m just curious.”

  “Hmm,” Debbie says. “My dreams are so boring. I mean, showing up naked in science class is about as stressful as they get. Obviously, I need more excitement in my life.”

  Lilah laughs. “Maybe. But weird dreams and lost brothers are hardly excitement.”

  “You haven’t heard from him, then?” Debbie asks.

  “I hear from him,” Lilah says. “But it’s not the same. He can be right in front of me and miles away all at the same time.”

  Debbie nods. But she doesn’t understand, either. “Maybe it’s a phase, Lilah. I know it sounds ridiculous, but maybe he’s just . . . I don’t know . . . working through something.”

  “Maybe,” she echoes. She pushes more noodles around. The waiter comes by a few minutes later and takes her half-finished meal away.

  “It will get better,” Debbie says softly. “You’re a good person, Lilah. Good things will come to you. I’m sure of it.”

  A good person. A nice person. Is it true? Or is this just what people say? Three weeks ago she might have believed this — now, her life has splintered into so many pieces she finds it hard to call herself a person at all. Perhaps she is just energy, a blue-white pulse of power waiting for a moment to ignite. The days of her life losing focus, becoming one headlong rush to salvation, or damnation, or both. Timothy. Israel. Roberta. So much can change, Delilah, in a minute, an hour, a day. “I don’t know, Debbie. I don’t know anything, anymore.”

  —

  In the morning she finds Timothy in front of the bakery, eating cupcakes. He licks icing from his fingers and grins up at her. His smile is so dazzling that she wonders, for a moment, if he’s high.

  “I love cupcakes,” he says. “Don’t you just love cupcakes, Lilah?”

  “Yes.” She sits beside him, on the ground, and sticks a finger in one of the cupcakes on his lap. The icing is chocolate buttercream. She licks her finger clean, and then runs it over the cupcake again. “You’re in a good mood.”

  “You’re going back to the hospital today,” he says. He puts the cupcake on her knee. “That’s what you’ve come to tell me.”

  “I am going to the hospital. Yes.” She bites into the cupcake. How absurdly nice, to sit here with him in the cold December air and eat chocolate frosting. “You don’t have to come. I won’t force you. I just wanted to see you before I go.”

  “Now you see me. And then you won’t. It’s just that simple.”

  She stops mid-bite and looks at him, at how calmly he picks the crumbs from his jeans. “Timmy. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he says. Then he looks at her, at the scarf around her neck. “You’re the one covered in scarves.”

  Suddenly the cupcake tastes like Styrofoam. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m not dumb,” he says, hurt. “You keep talking to me like you think I’m some kind of idiot.”

  Lilah swallows with difficulty. How many times have people said things like this? “It’s not what you think.”

  “Let me guess. You fell down the stairs.”

  She pulls a tissue out of her purse and wipes her fingers. Slowly, carefully. “I’ve met someone.”

  “Someone who makes you fall down the stairs? That’s nice.”

  “Tim. It’s not like that.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he says. “You have bruises on your neck.”

  “I had hickeys on my neck all the time when we lived at home. You never said anything.”

  “I was a kid!”

  “Anyway,” she says, “it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But I always worry about you.”

  She laughs. “Right. Because — clearly — I’m in worse shape than you.”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he says. “That’s why I don’t tell you. Mom doesn’t understand, either.”

  Lilah pulls her scarf tighter and shivers. “Is this going to go on forever, Timmy? I’m right here, and you won’t talk to me. What do you want me to do?”

  “It’s a bruise,” he says. “It’s not a hickey. And you won’t tell me anything else. So we’re even, then.”

  “Even,” she echoes. A woman steps out of the bakery and casts a quick glance over the two of them, huddled on the ground. She walks away quickly, without looking back.

  “Mom took her rosary into the hospital,” Lilah says. “I bet she’s driving the nurses crazy.”

  Timothy snorts and looks at the ground. “Maybe. Or maybe they like it. Maybe it’s comforting.” He seems so far removed from tears today.

  “If I was a nurse,” she says, “it would drive me nuts.”

  “I think,” says Timothy, “that when you’re around death all the time, you can’t help but believe. You’d go nuts otherwise.”

  Lilah remembers the crucifix in Roberta’s bedroom, and her silent, hurried words. Not a prayer, though. Not quite. “People always want to pray when they’re down. It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

  “I don’t think so. I think it’s the hardest thing anyone can do. Because there’s a part of you that always knows nothing might happen, that you might just be speaking words into air. And people do it anyway.”

  “Do you?”

  “All the time,” he says. He sounds so old. “Whether I want to or not.”

  She watches him, sprawled out on the concrete. Her little brother, fading bit by bit into the street. “And what happens?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “And at the same time, everything.”

  —

  Roberta is thinner, weaker, confined to the bed. She’s been puking so much that they’ve taken her off food altogether, and now there’s an IV in each hand. One for the drugs, one for the food. It hurts her to use the TV remote.

  “He didn’t come,” she says, as soon as Lilah walks through the door. “Did he.”

  “No.” Someone has sent Roberta flowers, orange chrysanthemums that clash against the wall. Lilah drapes her coat over the couch and looks at the flowers, at the card. Church friends. Get well soon, Roberta! as though she’s in bed with a cold. “But he sends his love.”

  Roberta laughs, or sobs — Lilah’s not quite sure. “Yes. Yes, I thought he would.”

  “He’s okay.” Lilah sits in the chair beside the bed. “I saw him earlier today, and he’s fine.”

  “I’ve been here,” Roberta says, “all this time. Lying here, in bed, all day. And I think about Timothy, and I think about you, and I can’t do anything. Do you know what that feels like?”

  Lilah reaches over and takes Roberta’s shrunken, withered hand. Her skin is crinkled, like tissue paper. “It’s okay,” she says. “Mom — it will be okay.”

  “You really think so?” Roberta doesn’t look at her. “I can’t see anything else, Delilah. I can’t see a way out.”

  Lilah doesn’t answer. She sits and she holds her mother’s hand. Eventually Roberta falls asleep. Lilah sits there still, silent, until the nurses come in and ask her to leave.

  —

  She walks down to the harbour and sits by the water. She lights a cigarette and draws her feet up so that she is cross-legged on the bench. When the cigarette is finished, she lights another, and another.

  After a while, she shifts so that she’s lying on her back, exhaling smoke straight up into the air. The bench is cold beneath her head. The stars shine above her, seeming larger here than they are in Vancouver. She lies still and at some point she falls asleep. She dreams fitfully, anxiously — of her brother, Israel — and wakes shivering on the stone. But instead of getting up to walk home she turns over, brings her legs in, and stays curled on the bench.

  Eventually she falls asleep again. The dreams are much the same. She wakes just before dawn, just as the sun is beginning to lighten the sky. She can’t
tell the difference between the bench and her own frozen skin. She stands, painfully, and walks back to Roberta’s house, where she showers, eats oatmeal, and then makes her way back to the hospital.

  —

  She buys Roberta magazines and flicks the remote for her, all through that long afternoon. They do not talk about Timothy. When she is hungry, Lilah eats alone in the cafeteria. Otherwise, she sits in the room and reads Cosmo and Vogue while Roberta watches daytime TV.

  “I can’t believe people do this.” Roberta waves her hand at the screen. It’s not his baby. The talk show host is a young woman barely able to contain her glee. “Can you believe people do this?”

  “People sink to all kinds of lows.”

  Roberta picks at her bedsheet. “I always thought you’d end up on one of those.”

  “A talk show?”

  She shrugs. “Maybe. I also thought you’d end up in court.”

  “Thanks.”

  Roberta doesn’t laugh. “You surprised me.”

  Lilah flips the pages of her magazine. “Oh.”

  “I thought your boyfriend was going to come,” Roberta says then. “Didn’t he say he’d come back this weekend?”

  “Something came up. He had somewhere else to be.”

  “Oh.” Roberta nods. “Well — it was nice to meet him, last week. He’s very — ”

  “Striking.” They say it together. Roberta laughs.

  “Yes. Well. He looks like he’s good in bed. Is he?”

  “Mother.”

  Roberta shrugs. “What? Don’t tell me I can’t say these things now.”

  “I’m sure your church friends would love to hear it.”

  “Church friends, my darling, know a good fuck just like everyone else.”

  Is this the drugs talking? Lilah puts her magazine down slowly and stares at her mother. Roberta stares back.

  “He wants to have a baby,” she finds herself saying.

  Roberta nods, as though this is the least unexpected thing in the world. “And you don’t.”

  “What if the baby ends up like Timothy?” she whispers. “What if — what if I’m not good enough?”

  “No one thinks they’re good enough.” Now it’s Roberta’s turn to grasp Lilah’s hand. Her fingers are hot and dry. She stares at the bed, at the tubes poking into her arms. “But you’ll have time to figure it out. He’s a nice man. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  A nice man. Is that what other people see? Lilah nods and stares at their fingers, woven together. Roberta’s knuckles are ivory beneath her skin, the IV bruise on the back of her hand an ugly greenish-brown. “There’s so much sadness in the world,” Lilah says. For some reason she thinks of Sabastian, and his stories from that other part of her life. The unnamed woman who drowned in the river. “That’s not — I don’t think it would be fair to a child.”

  Roberta holds her hand and says nothing. Eventually she falls asleep and Lilah leaves again. She goes back to Roberta’s house to find the sheets still crumpled on the bedroom floor. She dumps them in the washing machine and throws in detergent and bleach, and then she takes a spare sheet from the closet and spreads it on the mattress. She falls asleep on this bed, in this room, away from the green macramé. She dreams of nothing.

  It is dark outside when she wakes. She has enough time to catch the last ferry, so she waters the plants, locks the front door. She smokes out the window of the car. She thinks about Roberta as she boards the ferry — Roberta, and Timothy, and this mess they call a life. Could she sedate Timothy long enough to bring him back across the water? Would he forgive her, eventually? Ever?

  Seated, she prays as she did in the bedroom — quickly and without thought. Except that it’s not praying so much as asking, or begging. An imaginary conversation with someone who isn’t there. The ferry moves through the water and people move around her and still she sits, and her thoughts bounce from her mother to her brother and back again, and nothing happens.

  Three

  Within hours of that first meeting, he found himself mirroring Timothy — or maybe it wasn’t the boy he was mirroring but just this shade of his new self, this final slide into strangeness. Things that had once been ordinary were now odd and new. The whisper of cloth against his skin, the tap of a toothbrush against the inside of his mouth. The click of Father Jim’s pipe against his teeth. All these memories suddenly so hazy, so out-of-focus. What was it, that bush by the side of the road? That bright spot of colour in the air, following the child and parents who skipped over the bridge? Balloon. Yellow balloon.

  He forgot words, forgot things. The veins in his arms and across his torso grew darker. Migraines came, went away, came back again. The world shimmered green and blue and gold.

  The next day, they left Father Jim to his lunchtime whiskey and once more walked into the city. The day was cold and clear and the air carried a faint hint of snow. Timothy scuffed his shoes as they walked, and mumbled softly to the ground.

  “Who are you talking to?” Sam asked when he couldn’t take it anymore.

  Timothy started, stopped. Flushed pink. “My sister,” he said, his voice small. “I’m sorry. I know it’s crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy.” He moved in step with Timothy so that the two of them spanned the sidewalk. A quick glance over his shoulder showed a small line of black dust trailing behind them, so fine that it was almost invisible against the cement. Dust. Blur. Nothing. “I’m sure she talks to you too.”

  “Maybe,” the boy said. Then he shrugged. “I don’t think so. We’re — we’re too far apart, now.”

  “Because of the wings?”

  Timothy shook his head. “We were apart before. It’s been that way for years.”

  Julie, standing before him at the funeral. White lily in the dark twist of her hair. The memory flickered, faded.

  “My sister always wanted something else,” Timothy continued. “Another city. Another life. It drove our mother crazy. Drives,” and Sam remembered his words from the night before. My mother is dying.

  “And now?” Sam asked. “What does she do?”

  The boy shrugged. “She works in the city. She comes to find me on the street. She still isn’t happy.” He picked at a thread hanging off the cuff of his sweater. “Looks like I ended up with something else, instead.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Delilah.”

  “That’s pretty.”

  Timothy laughed. “She hates it. She always said our mother named her after the most famous whore in history.” He scuffed a shoe and started walking again. “She went to the hospital, yesterday. In Victoria. She wanted me to come, but I couldn’t go. I couldn’t.” Then he said something, too low for Sam to hear.

  “What?”

  “Lilah,” he said. “That’s what I call her. When I speak to her in person, and even when she isn’t there.”

  “Oh,” Sam said. They kept walking. Men with wings, melting into the landscape. They walked along the edges of Granville Island, through the markets, through the colour. Even in these last days of November the island was busy, though for all the attention paid to the two of them, it could have been a ghost town.

  “I still can’t believe,” Sam said, neatly sidestepping a young boy intent on walking and playing his videogame at the same time, “that hardly anyone can see us.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” said the boy. “No one sees God anymore.”

  “But we’re not God. Not even close.”

  Timothy shrugged again. “Maybe not. Probably not.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means whatever it means,” said the boy. “Not God — but we’re not us anymore, either. We exist in between now.”

  —

  It came on him suddenly, inexplicably — that bone-jarring need for caffeine. Surprised that he could still wa
nt something, that the tastes of Sam Connor had not completely disappeared, he waited until they reached a coffee shop and then tugged on Timothy’s shirt.

  “What do you want?” he asked, nodding to the café window. “I’ll buy.”

  Timothy laughed, mischief sudden on his face. “I’m a penniless beggar. Of course you’ll buy.”

  “Yeah, well. Espresso? Latté?”

  “Hot chocolate. With whipped cream.”

  “No problem.” Sam pressed against the café door, then paused. “Do you want to come in?”

  “No.” The boy shook his head. “Too many people. I’ll wait. Here.”

  “Okay.” Sam walked into the café and took his place in line. He held the wings close around his shoulders and shuffled with the others as everyone moved forward. When his turn came, he watched the barista blink, just as that girl had blinked at Timothy a few days ago. As though he was almost, not-quite there. Then she shook her head and smiled.

  “Latté, you said? And a hot chocolate?”

  “With whipped cream.” He watched her fiddle with the knobs on the espresso machine. Someone knocked into him from behind, pushed into the left wing. A jostle, a nudge. Unintentional. He felt the pain slice into and down through his arm.

  “Sorry,” said a voice. A woman’s voice. She sounded frazzled, embarrassed. He heard a child’s giggle.

  “It’s fine.” He didn’t look back. The barista slid his drinks across the counter.

  Then it came. Sam. Sam, help me. A voice out of nowhere, filled with terror. He looked up and saw Timothy, on the other side of the glass, speaking to a man in a long dark coat. A tall, balding man with a high forehead and dark eyes. That was all. He frowned, passed money across the counter, and glanced around — no one else had stirred. The child behind him smiled with white, shiny teeth. The call came again. Sam. He turned to the window and saw the sky darken, ever so slightly, saw the air shimmer and swirl around the man, whose elegant hands reached for Timothy. Everything went still.

  Panic slammed into him like nausea, hard enough to make his fingers shake. He grabbed the drinks and sprinted for the exit. There were suddenly too many people in the coffee shop — his turn to jostle the crowd now and push his way ahead. When he finally got to the door and heaved it open with his shoulder, the answering rush of cold wind was sharp enough to make him dizzy.