Web of Angels

by Lilian Nattel

  “I want her with me.”

  “That’s settled, then.” Sharon began stripping the beds. “You don’t think your toes looks bruised with black polish?”

  “No.” Cathy rolled her eyes. Stay firm, but flexible, the social worker advised. It was obvious that the social worker didn’t have teenagers in her house.

  Cathy was still sharing the girls’ room when school started that fall, as fixing up the basement was delayed by Bram. On Labour Day, he came over in his truck, and walked in with his tool box and a spool of cable. Saying only, I’m not letting something happen and wishing I’d done this before, Bram went out again and returned with a ladder and a portable work light. It was a good day for what he intended to begin, warm but not too hot, especially in the basement. Bram picked a wall and knocked a hole in it. There was aluminum wire behind it, some of it blackened and partially melted. When he cut a hole in the ceiling, he saw that, contrary to code, the aluminum wire had been patched through knob and tube connectors. It was a miracle there hadn’t been a fire. Bram said, You’ve got five kids with you now and I’m not losing any kids in my family to an electrical fire.

  When the wiring was finished and new drywall installed on a weekend of Indian summer, Alec varnished the pedestal he’d found to go with the tabletop in the dining room. It would make a good desk for Cathy’s new room. These days, he and the others switched more gracefully, lightly, because they wanted to rather than they had to.

  “I need a break,” Dan said, coming out with a couple of beers. He’d been supervising the kids, who were painting the basement. “You want one?”

  “Sure.” Alec took the beer from Dan and sat on the edge of the deck, knees apart. The puppy, half grown, sandy like her Lab mother, crouched at Alec’s feet for a pat and scratch, then chased after a squirrel. “How’s it going?”

  “Cathy uses too much paint.” There was a streak of lilac in Dan’s hair where he’d run his hand through it. “The table’s looking good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll have more space in the dining room with the table top out of there. I don’t know how you manage. It’s so cramped.”

  Alec shrugged and grinned. “Not me that sews,” he said and Dan laughed, lifting his bottle. In the dappled shadow of the birch tree, which hadn’t yet lost its leaves, they drank together while squirrels stashed seeds for the cold days ahead.

  They celebrated Dan’s forty-third birthday and Linny’s first the next February at the skating rink. Her eyes had finally changed colour, settling on hazel. The stroller was her throne, and from it she looked at the snowy wonders and clapped her hands. Pushing the stroller, Lyssa walked along the rubber runners that covered the concrete between the clubhouse and the rink. Eleanor and Bram were already on the ice among the usual assortment of good skaters and people just learning, little kids getting in everyone’s way, the old guy with the beer belly who must’ve been a hockey player the way he speeded around the rink. Just past the rink parents and grandparents watched kids on toboggans dive down the snowy slope and into the pit, clinging to bushes for purchase as they climbed back up, hauling their sleds.

  Lyssa’s hair had grown longer in the last six months, red coils hanging down her back, though sometimes there was a thought about cutting it all off. In the rink she unzipped her jacket as Dan pretended to fall, making the baby laugh. Linny bounced and crowed while Lyssa pushed her in the stroller around the slouching, lounging boys and girls.

  Ceecee, who had joined a hockey team, was using the blade of her skate to surreptitiously slide a puck to Judy. When the rink guard came over to remind her (as if she’d forgot) that pucks and sticks weren’t allowed on the ice during recreational skate, she scowled and shoved her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket.

  Josh separated from the clump of his friends, the wind blowing his hair off his forehead. “How about a race?” he asked her.

  “You’re on!” Ceecee grinned wickedly.

  Around and around they raced while Emmie and Nina and Judy leaned over the penalty box. Holding Linny, Lyssa cheered Ceecee, and so did Eleanor while Dan and Bram urged Josh on.

  “Move, shitheads!” Josh yelled at his friends. He skated with arms wide, Ceecee with elbows in, minimizing air resistance. Josh ground the ice as he came to a stop, hands held high above his head. Ceecee was right behind him, one of her skate laces trailing. “You’re getting old,” he said.

  “It was my laces,” Ceecee said. “I’ll beat you next time.”

  Afterward, they all took off their skates in the clubhouse and wiped the blades. Skates slung over their shoulders, they walked to Magee’s for cocoa and fries. They sat down and ordered just as if her mother’s office wasn’t right above the ceiling, as if there wasn’t still a sign on the door saying that she was away on leave.

  The firm of Johnston and Olivera had a reputation for obtaining acquittals in difficult cases. Among their recent successes was a sexual assault case in which they made the complainant look like a fool and an idiot, if not a bald-faced liar. This was a firm that understood how a spouse might accuse her husband of heinous crimes just because she was pissed or how a child might fall under the spell of malicious influences. The lawyers sympathized, they looked like accountants, they charged a fortune. Debra and Rick hired them. Their relatives were helping out, but even so, without work, they were on a tight budget.

  On a spring day that was clear but cool enough to require a jacket, Rick and Debra parked in Seaton Square. They crossed to the library, pressed the button for the automatic doors, and entered. They looked in the children’s section, in fiction, and among the computers, but nobody they cared about was there. Then they stepped into the room where the local history collection was housed. Debra was the one who said hello.

  “You’re not supposed to be here.” Callisto put down the calendar of online graduate programs she’d been perusing. Every Saturday she visited the library and the librarian expected her, ready with recommendations of new books. Today Cathy had come along so she could use the local history material for a school project, relying on her foster mom to show her how to find information without a search function. Cathy sat across from Callisto at the library table.

  “This is a public place.” Debra clutched her purse, moving to stand on one side of Cathy. “I can’t guess where my daughter will be.”

  “Mom …” Cathy looked up from her notes on Mrs. Brown, whose first name was Deborah, like her mother’s. Escaped from slavery. Cottage surrounded by farmland. Worked as a washerwoman. Later listed as “nurse” in the city directory.

  Rick moved to stand on her other side. He studied his daughter’s shorn hair, the piercing in her eyebrow. “How are you, darling?” His voice was gentle and concerned.

  “I’m okay.”

  Her dad looked worn out. So did her mother, who had been without her children on Mother’s Day. They stood so close she could smell her mom’s perfume, her dad’s soap. She could feel the warmth of their bodies as if she was a little girl crawling into their bed and they would never hurt her.

  “I can’t believe you’ll be sixteen soon. And finishing grade ten. I miss you,” her dad said. “We both do. It hurts us terribly.”

  “I didn’t want to,” she said sadly and her mother put a hand out to touch hers, then pulled away, because it was against the law. What kind of stupid law was that, banning your own mother from touching you?

  “It’s been hard on all of us,” Debra said. Her daughter’s eyes were wet.

  “It’s not too late. You think you’ve said things and you’re stuck with it. But that isn’t the case,” Rick said in the same gentle voice.

  “It’s not?”

  “You can come home if you explain that you were just sick from the shock of your sister’s death.”

  “I feel sick.” She was blinking away her tears, her father watching, holding her in place with the sound of his voice and the hope it gave her.

  “Of course. Anyone would understand that. L
osing Heather makes me sick, too.”

  “How do you explain away the child pornography on your computer?” Callisto asked, interrupting the trance of lies so desirable any child might swallow them.

  “I don’t know how that got there.” He spoke to Callisto but his eyes were only for his daughter’s, as blue as his own, reflecting him. “Maybe it was Heather. When she ran away, she must have done terrible things.”

  “Heather.” Her face, upturned to his, registered her sister’s name and her jaw tightened.

  “You know what kids have to do on the street.”

  “We gave the police a photograph of the girls playing with Josh in the sandbox,” Callisto said. “They match the child pornography they found on your computer.”

  “That simply can’t be true. How could you suggest this beautiful girl was involved in anything so dreadful?” Rick couldn’t read the expression in his daughter’s eyes. They mirrored him; they shut him out. “It’s a coincidence. Another blonde five-year-old. Come home to us, Cathy.”

  As she got to her feet, he held out a hand to take hers, heedless of any court order, ignoring Callisto, who was removing a cellphone from her bag. The past year could be ploughed under the earth, gravel laid over it, and cement. He smiled, murmuring more reassurances while Callisto spoke into the phone, asking for Detective Chan.

  And his daughter, who had also learned how to switch gracefully, without his request and without his permission, smacked his hand. “Get away from me,” she said, shoving her chair out of the way, rounding the table to stand next to Callisto.

  His face darkened. “So this is what you’ve become?” He looked at her piercing and sneered. “You sound just like Heather.”

  “Shut up! My sister died for her baby. And she died for me. Nothing else would have made me tell. But I did. And I will. I’ll say everything again and you can’t stop me. My sister’s baby deserves better than what we got.”

  “Cathy, please,” her mother said. “Don’t make a scene.”

  “That’s what you care about? Now I get it.” Ceecee eyed her mother and her father, the barriers inside going down so that everyone there could see what she saw: a blonde woman greying, a blonde man stooping. Heartless. Gutless. “You’re pathetic.”

  At the sound of voices, the librarian came around the corner. “We have children in the library,” she said to Rick and Debra, her voice thick with disgust. “You’ll have to leave.”

  As it transpired, the Dawson-Edwards parents did their child and her foster family a favour that day, for violating the terms of the injunction sped up the termination of their parental rights. Adoption didn’t take that long if someone wasn’t waiting for a newborn. The home study was done in four weekly sessions, the medical exams and police clearance obtained at the same time, the engine of government revved up to give the file priority.

  A year and a month had passed since the drive to the police station. In the backyard of the Lewises’ house tomatoes were ripening, nasturtiums around them, the yellow and red flowers good in salad and distasteful to snails. Sparrows chattered at the crows overhead. Franky meowed and clawed at the tree while the much larger Beans, having grown into her paws, barked at the birds, tail wagging. Next door a new family had moved in, the little kids squealing as they climbed in and out of an inflatable wading pool in their yard. Mrs. Brown’s cottage had been declared a heritage site, a plaque affixed to the exterior wall.

  The weather was perfect, the wind quietly shifting from north to south, promising another heat wave, but not for a day or two. Balloons hung from the birch tree, a homemade banner on the shed said, HAPPY GOTCHA DAY! Dan thought if he was making a list of good days, this one would be right up there. He surveyed his yard, his small and unpredictable domain, which somehow contained whatever it grew. He caught his wife’s gaze and smiled. Josh had the camcorder pointed at them, recording the day for posterity. He hadn’t had another girlfriend since Cathy, but would soon. He turned the camcorder slowly around the yard, taking in his grandmother, his dad talking to Uncle Bram, Nina pushing her cousin who was balanced on two scooters, his zaidey snoozing in a lawn chair, snorting and waking up as Aunt Eleanor filled a plate for him. Amy was putting fruit salad on a plate to share with Ingrid.

  “What is that?” Ingrid asked, eyeing Jake’s knishes, dripping with gravy. For this occasion, he was allowed to eat anything he wanted.

  “It’s good.” He’d shrunk a bit more, his hair wispier. “You want a taste?” He lifted his fork, smiling happily as she took a bite. The closing for Ingrid and Amy’s new house was at the end of the month. They’d bought close to the park, for the dogs, and close to the shooting range, though there were rumours it would be shutting down soon.

  “Beef in pastry. There’s also potato,” Eleanor said. She went running every morning with her sister-in-law and had (mostly) stopped caring whether it showed on the scale or not. “Very unhealthy. I brought the knishes and the Chinese bean cakes. I can’t resist anything in pastry.” She glanced at Sharon, whose eyes were on the baby. Linny Amethyst Lewis was toddling up and down the yard with the determined pleasure of a seventeen-month-old who expected the world to get out of her way, and wailed in shock when it didn’t. Emmie had finally got over not being the youngest and Linny adoringly gripped her hand. “I love dumplings, noodle kugel. Oh my God, even gefilte fish.”

  “It’s because you have a double heritage, so you get double the appetite,” Sharon teased. In the drawer of her nightstand was a pocket camera, on top a stack of magazines, an application for a distance M.Ed. program, and a teddy bear. In the last year Dan had started reading stories to the lils. There had been dancing at Hammond House and camping under the northern lights, a hunting trip, a seminar on using power tools, an evening course on the origin of the universe, many family dinners and the art of knitting, the keeping of books, the paying of bills while eyes changed from moss green to jade, from malachite to willow or to sage.

  “Oh sure. Now you,” Eleanor said, her eyes shining with mischief. “Nothing shows on you. Skinny as a rake. Still the sister-in-law I’ve always loved. Quadruple, quintuple, oh however many you are—it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “You! I’ll get you.”

  “What?” But Eleanor laughed, too, for they had talked at midnight in all of the seasons, bared their hearts while the stars looked down, and shared many of their true names.

  Sliding the glass doors open, Cathy carried out the cake. Her fingernails were blue, like her new mom’s, which she had painted and decorated with punky decals on the thumbs. After the final adoption papers came by courier, she had spent hours on the Internet. Poring over recipes and icing patterns, she decided on chocolate cake with a yellow sunflower in the centre and the writing in orange. Her sister’s baby, now her youngest sister, would be tasting chocolate for the first time. The basement had become the girls’ bower, where—when she was in the right mood—she taught her sisters to dance or apply makeup or arm-wrestle so that a boy wouldn’t win unless they chose. One wall was covered with drawings of Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Princess Amethyst of Gemworld. She’d made her own curtains out of a fabric printed with bold geometric shapes. There was a braided rug on the floor. In a dresser drawer, underneath her socks, was a newspaper with the front-page headline SEATON GROVE COUPLE CONVICTED. Every week, she—Cathy, Ceecee, the flirty girl, all of them—spent some time in a therapist’s office, setting free all that was supposed to have been locked inside.

  “Happy Gotcha Day!” everyone shouted as she came out.

  Her mom and dad brought their children close, sweeping her into their arms, too, as soon as she put the cake on the table. Her mom’s arms were freckled from the sun, eyes as changeable as her own. She jostled with her brother and her sisters while the grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousin and friends looked on, taking their turns in front of the camera.

  After dishes were done, Mimi ordered her granddaughters to take off their shoes and socks so she could check their feet, from
youngest to oldest: Linny, Emmie, Nina, Judy and Cathy. Her grandson’s feet were already bare and dirty from the yard, but she made him sit down to be examined, too. As Mimi squatted on her heels, forgiving the universe its propensity for viruses, she proclaimed, Excellent feet.

  There are nine dimensions in total, or perhaps eleven, some too small to perceive, others too strange, too dark. But that is only because they are not yet known. They are wrapped in membranes and when the membranes collide, a universe is born. This is called M-Theory, or the theory of everything. M is said to stand for magic, mystery, matrix or mother.

  INSIDE

  im ally and im showing the punishers how to have a tea party. dont stick your big feets in my face i tells them. we are having inside pretend tea and pretend cookies. yesterday i sneaked them real ice cream. it isnt nice to stick your feets in somebodys nose when you are having a tea party. we is sitting on the grass in the field cuz that is where the healing tents be. there is a bunch of lils looking but them dont come out just peeking. i look back and wave hihihi.

  peoples been talking to the housekeeper. sometimes they sits in her lap. bertie says it is supposed to be wrote like this. Housekeeper with a big letter in front. bertie is bigger then punishers be. he is having the tea party too. he holds a little cup in his big hand it looks so funny. i laugh and laugh and laugh. what is funny bertie asks me. i says you be funny. your wings be sticking out i says bertie why dont you put your wings down. you look like you got elephant ears. the lils look out and go uh oh cuz them think bertie be mad. his wings go flip flop and he laughs. the punishers go hicccccccupp when they laugh too hard. i laugh harder than anybody i laugh so hard tears is coming down my eyes and bertie pick me up and put me in his lap and his wings go round me and i hides cuz i dont want nobody see me cry like a cry baby. i says i want a mommy. and he says i will be your mommy. and i says you are silly and i hiccup too. he says i Love you lil ally. oh. oh. you know what? maybe i get wings too. echo! echo! you want to have wings?