Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  Instead, you begin with the whisper of the always inadequate question: “Are you alright?”

  Your grandmother can’t quite speak but she glances up into your face. At other times, she’s noted that your face has always been like your mother’s. Only your face is wide open and scared. Your grandmother’s own face is shocked pale and slicked with a salty sheet of cold sweat. And if you were a bit older, maybe you wouldn’t be able to recognize the specific strain of pain in your grandmother’s look. But every kid knows shame when she sees it.

  “Grammie?”

  Your grandmother doesn’t stop rocking herself but she does manage to add voice to the air moving through her teeth. “My arm,” she pants. “I fell on it.”

  You look up to the top of the stairs where the doorway stands dark and gaping. “All the way down the stairs?” you ask.

  She shakes her head and jerks it toward the wall of machines. “No. From there.”

  You follow her gesture with your eyes. Again, you see the khaki army surplus sleeping bag lying as empty as a newly shed snake skin across the feet of the workbench. The table saw is unplugged from the wall outlet, and the saw blade on top of the workbench has been lowered far enough to disappear into the steel surface. A small cushion still rests at one end of the workbench like a pillow lain neatly on a bed. All at once, every bit of the picture becomes clear.

  She does sleep, after all. She sleeps there – underground, over the blade, on the narrow, steel deck of the saw table. This is the hard bedrock of her sacrifice.

  There’s nothing for you to do but to bend over to look at the arm your grandmother clasps against her stomach. You don’t remember enough about how her arm usually looks to be able to know if it seems damaged now. “Is it broken?” you ask.

  “Don’t know.”

  “I – think you need to go to the hospital,” you whisper.

  But she doesn’t quite hear you. “Hm?”

  “The hospital.”

  She lowers her head over her arm. “Dammit.”

  From the basement, you creep back up the stairs and go right into the room where Uncle Ned sleeps. Your grandmother has sent you to try to find something for her to wear outside the house. Maybe this night is the first time you’ve ever moved inside a dark, sleeping house in this particularly feminine state of quiet. It’s not new to your grandmother. She knew to promise you that Uncle Ned’s snores would cover any noise you make. Your Dad always said it was a shame Ned never got his tonsils out when he was a kid. Now, they say, it’s too late.

  When you return to the basement, you find your grandmother unmoved from where she’d been sitting on the concrete floor. Her good hand is still clamped around her busted arm, and she makes no move to take the clothing you bring. The pair of you is stalled – waiting for something. Maybe it’s for your parents, sleeping in the travel trailer outside in the backyard. There must be some sort of social adaptor that can show you the secret place where you and your grandmother can become properly connected. Even in the fit of this emergency, it still doesn’t seem possible that you could have anything truly helpful to offer her. Rescuing her seems incomprehensible – profane, like that Bible story about reaching out a hand to steady a holy relic and being struck dead for it.

  Upstairs, Uncle Ned heaves out a massive snore you can both hear from the basement. In unison, you look up at the underside of the floor.

  Your grandmother shakes her head, as if she’s waking. “Up off the ground,” she says.

  You wrap an arm around her back. She pulls her feet underneath herself and each of you straightens at the knees, standing up together.

  “Over to the stairs,” she tells you, inhaling instead of exhaling as she speaks.

  You keep hold of her shoulders as she sits down on the grey wood. When you help her slide her nightdress away from her tender arm, the air caught inside the fabric drifts away from her body and into your face. Its smell fills your nose – familiar. It’s something like your own smell – musty and feminine – only her scent is shot through with traces of men and work. It smells like the earth of a backyard garden, early in the morning – a garden that’s bountiful and beloved but badly tended.

  Your grandmother is dressed, and you’re waiting in your pyjama bottoms and T-shirt for her to name the adult relative you’ll wake up to drive her to the hospital.

  But she doesn’t give anyone’s name. “Got your Learner’s Licence?” she asks you, referring to the permit your libertarian, wild-west government issued to you so you could start practising driving when you were just fourteen years old.

  You’re nodding. “Yeah.”

  She lets out a long, heavy breath. “Good enough.”

  You guide her into your grandfather’s titanic steel car with doors that are more like airplane wings – heavy and nearly impossible for you to swing closed. You drive slowly and painfully while you grandmother directs you through the wide, empty streets.

  “Left – left – right – that was a stop sign.”

  She’s leading you to where the brown brick box of a hospital is lit up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. You’ve pulled the driver’s seat up as far as it will go, and you still have to sit perched on the outermost edge of the maroon velour so your toe can reach the pedals on the floor. Every time you try to use the turn signal lights you end up switching on the windshield wipers instead.

  “Sorry – sorry,” you keep saying – to your grandmother, to the car, to yourself, it really doesn’t matter.

  The night triage nurse at the hospital glances up as you tear a numbered ticket from the fire-alarm-red dispenser bolted to the wall of the nearly empty emergency room. The nurse has already looked back down at her paperwork by the time she begins to speak.

  “Over here, dear.”

  “I’ve come with my grandmother,” you begin with even more than the usual meekness you had back in those days. “She fell – off the – the –”

  “How old?” The nurse looks up over the counter.

  “I’m fifteen. But I have my Learner’s Licence so – ”

  “No. Not you, dear. How old is your grandmother?”

  “Oh. Uh, seventy-something – I’m pretty sure,” you stammer. “She fell and hurt her arm. Badly, I think.”

  “Have you got her health care card?”

  “Oh, sure.” You fumble through the bulky wallet you’ve taken from your grandmother’s purse until you find a green and white, dog-eared scrap of paper.

  The nurse takes it and lifts her eyebrows, raising rows of parallel wrinkles across her forehead. “Okay. Something’s not right here. It says your grandmother’s first name is ‘Elijah?’”

  You’ve accidentally given the nurse your grandfather’s old health care card and, for some reason, the mistake seems grave enough to make you gasp and snatch it out of her hand. You do a lot of sighing as you look for the right one, further back in the wallet, behind a stack of senior’s discount cards.

  The nurse jabs at her keyboard, probably unaware she’s frowning again. She looks like she’s about the same age as your mother so you’re trying to get yourself to think of her as someone benevolent.

  Her chair squeals as she rises and leaves the high-walled, melamine fortress of the admissions desk. She takes hold of one of the wheelchairs folded up and lined along the wall behind her. With a quick jerk of her thick, bare arms she throws the chair open and kicks it locked with the soft sole of her shoe.

  “Alrighty,” she addresses your grandmother, much too loudly even for her hearing. “Into the chair and we’ll take you right over to X-ray.”

  The nurse turns her head toward you as she wheels your grandmother away. “You wait here,” she calls. The wheelchair moves smoothly on its axles and hardly slows at all as a pair of doors with word “Restricted” stencilled across it in red letters parts in front of it.

  There
’s a row of chairs lined up against a pink wall beside a rack of tattered magazines. You sit down in the chairs and read the scandal headlines off the magazine covers, but you don’t actually touch any of them. Your mother always says reading the magazine in a medical waiting room is just like licking the spout of a public water fountain. In a moment, all you have left to read are the words on the seniors’ discount cards in your grandmother’s wallet. You raise them to your face and sniff. They smell like copper and leather and that stiff white lotion she calls cold cream.

  And that’s where you sit while the cranky babies cough against their croup and the drunks vomit onto the hard, white floor. Wind blasts into the hospital with every backward slide of the motion-sensing doors to the outside. It’s nearly dawn and the hospital is starting to fill up with people who haven’t slept all night. The wind they let inside helps to refresh the waiting room air a little, but you still raise the wallet to your face like a nosegay over and over again.

  The restricted doors at the back of the waiting area spring open and a man dressed in a wrinkled green uniform with tufts of black hair showing through the V of fabric at the base of his throat comes walking out. His head is down, and he’s walking right into the centre of the waiting room. You’d think he was a janitor if it weren’t for the stethoscope draped around his neck like a spoiled cat. He announces your surname into the waiting room.

  You’re on your feet. “I’m her granddaughter.”

  “Here all by yourself?”

  You look over each of your shoulders. “Yes.”

  He almost shrugs as he looks down at the notes scrawled on the chart in his hands. “So Grandma broke her arm, all right. That’s not a surprise, really. She’s about the right age to be having breakages.” He still isn’t looking at you – still doesn’t see your age or your fear. Maybe it’s deliberate. It doesn’t really matter. Now he’s pointing to his own flesh to help describe how and where the ends of the broken bone lie unmoored inside your grandmother’s arm. You wince and squirm, and he still doesn’t see.

  “So we’ve set the bone and casted up the arm,” the doctor goes on, “but we haven’t released her yet because she’s…” He stops and coughs – almost nervously like an ordinary human being. “Well, Grandma’s a little overwrought. Crying a lot. Can’t seem to get a hold of herself.”

  That’s all he needs to say to raise your anxiety to a level just below the threshold of panic. But he keeps talking.

  “It may have to do with the shot we gave her – just a little something for the pain, nothing out of the ordinary. But there’s a very small portion of people who don’t handle that kind of drug very well – almost like an allergy.” He flicks his eyes down toward your face and you suspect he might still have grandparents of his own – distant and austere, and every bit as incapable of sleep or tears as your own. “I just thought you should know what to expect before we bring you back to see her,” he finishes.

  “See her,” you repeat, ragged and slow. Then you know. The hospital people are about to take you through the restricted doors. They will present you to the distraught old stranger so you can comfort and calm her. The thing is not possible. The secret, private rescue your grandmother wanted from you is over. It’s failed. You know you can’t go any further on your own.

  “I really – I should – ” you begin. “I need to make a phone call.”

  Forgetful of the rule about the phone at the nursing station not being available for patient use, the hairy young doctor leads you back to the triage counter and hands you its telephone.

  The phone rings and rings in the blue dawn of your grandmother’s house. It’s your brother Derek who finally answers.

  “What are you doing on the phone? Where the heck are you?”

  “I’m at the hospital – with Grammie. She fell and broke her arm. Go out to the camper and tell Dad.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, Derek. Go tell him right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Uncle Ned. You have to tell him too.”

  “Fine.”

  “Don’t just go back to sleep – please.”

  “I said, okay.”

  The nurse is back, standing with one hand on the restricted doors. She sweeps her other hand toward you like she’s Virgil trying to get started on your tour of the Underworld, or something. “Come on, now. Grandma’s not herself and needs a familiar face to cheer her up. I’ll take you back.”

  You breathe in a chestful of hospital air. They keep saying your grandmother isn’t herself. It’s not true. She is finally herself – right out in the open where even her granddaughter will see it and know what it means.

  You follow Nurse Virgil through the restricted doors to where three gurneys sit lined along a wall, separated from each other by long yellow curtains blowing open at their edges with the currents of the air conditioner. A curtain edge parts slightly as you come near, and you glimpse a boy who looks a little older than you, just about dead drunk, lying on his side with a blue kidney pan pushed against his face. Another nurse jabs at the top of his hand with an IV needle. He sings a moan into the pink sheets.

  Nurse Virgil pulls back the curtain by the bed farthest from the entrance and holds it open while you step through the breach. On a narrow bed, a small, shaking figure lies tucked under a thermal blanket – the kind that’s kept in a warming closet for people in shock.

  “We’ve got your granddaughter here,” the nurse calls to the heap on the bed.

  It sputters and shakes.

  “Have a seat there, dear,” the nurse says without looking at either of you.

  The curtain rattles to a close on its plastic hooks, and she is gone. You are left alone with your grandmother. “Looks like they’ve got you all fixed up, eh Grammie?” you chirp in a clinically light voice. “We can head home as soon as you’re feeling a little better.”

  Something turns under the blanket. There is nothing like recognition in the face looking out at you. The long pretense of intimacy between you and your grandmother crumbles. You are strangers now, as you have always been. She moves her hands to cover her face and seems startled at the stiff, white bandages swathed around her arm.

  She begins speaking into her fingertips. “I will send you Elijah the prophet,” she quotes, “before the coming of the great and dreadful day–”

  “It’s okay, Grammie,” you croak, interrupting the Bible verse she’s reciting – the one from the very end of the Old Testament. “It’s okay. You fell on your arm in the basement. Remember? The saw bench? But – but it’s alright now. We’re at the hospital, and you’re okay – mostly okay.”

  It’s a credit to your under-developed sense of compassion that you know to lean forward, taking hold of the small hand your grandmother uses to cover her face. Its fingers spring closed on your own hand, trap-like, pulling you into the hollow of her throat, between the tendons of her neck.

  “I will send you Elijah,” she repeats, loudly and clearly between the drawn curtains, “lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”

  You’re glancing over both your shoulders again, but there’s still no interpreter, no adaptor, no one else but you.

  Your grandmother’s eyes drift off to the right, and she speaks so softly you can’t hear her. In a moment, her shaking subsides until it’s almost stilled. She grows so quiet you’re afraid. You’re pulling your hand away – leaving to find Virgil, to get help – but her fingers are suddenly strong against your skin, pressing white, oval impressions of her fingertips into your flesh. You can’t go anywhere.

  And the poisoned boy is shedding green film from his stomach again, two curtains away.

  Time passes in the emergency ward – in this tiny curtained block of space big enough for just the two of you and the clock spinning its hands over your grandmother’s bed. Outside, there’s a shuffling of feet and the hospital curtain clicks op
en behind you. Nurse Virgil flings it back far enough to make way for the substantial forms of both your parents. The small gurney is exposed to the rest of ward. The curtain won’t close around all five of you, so Virgil leaves it hanging open.

  “Well, will you take a look at this rescue party?” your Dad says. “It’s our girl.”

  At the sound of her son’s voice, your grandmother opens her eyes, skittish and alarmed.

  “Took a fall tonight, did you, Mom?” your mother says, moving forward to smooth the blanket over the end of the thin mattress.

  Your grandmother pushes your hand back at you. Her eyes trace the length of your arm to the shoulder, up your neck, and into your face. And all at once, the creases etched into the woman’s face seem to twist and crack. And you know you have betrayed her.

  Six

  Sometimes, usually when the weather is bad and the freeways are black with ice and the commute takes too long, you try it on – my death. You take it in – shallow but still very much beneath your skin. It’s a tiny injection of grief and fear. It’s meant to protect us, like an inoculation. You stand in our kitchen as the sky outside gets darker, and you let this contrived, imaginary tragedy immunize you against real sorrow. In your imagination, you marshal the possibility of my death into the small, controlled sphere – one you hope cannot coexist in the same world as a truly dead me. It’s a bit like Halloween – playing dead, acting it out to keep real death away.

  I’m late again tonight. You turn the lights on, pull the food out of the refrigerator, get the older boys to set the table, glance out at the weather, check the phones again, and wait.

  When I finally come walking into the kitchen from the garage in my shiny black shoes, you look up at me from your cooking and our kids.

  “Oh, there he is,” you begin, talking over the heads of the little boys who’re chattering and hugging me by my knees and waist. You’re nothing like gushing with relief at seeing me, but you’re not quite acting normally either.