Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  You hum. “Is he tall?”

  I shrug. “Tall-ish.”

  “Taller than Deirdre?”

  Just when I thought we were moving on to Mitch, Deirdre’s future, I see you’re winding the discussion back toward me after all. You want to know if Mitch is a good match for Deirdre – a better one than me. The truth is the woman looks like she could be a sister to me. She’s tall and strong and pale and loud, like the lead soprano in an opera by Wagner. I do understand that Deirdre and I look good together. Why did they have to take that picture – the one from the competition where Deirdre and I were sent to represent the university? The school flew us all the way out to Halifax and made sure we were photographed at the awards ceremony – me in a cheap charcoal-coloured suit and Deirdre in red lipstick and a black cocktail dress. The photo ran in the newspaper back in Edmonton. You came home with three copies of it piled into the basket on the bottom of the baby stroller.

  “This is so totally going in our scrapbook,” you cackled over the scissors as you clipped the photos out of the newspapers.

  Good together – I hate to hear you say it, you and the lady at the coat check in the Halifax banquet hall who handed me Deirdre’s long red dress coat saying, “I went ahead and got your wife’s too while I was back there.”

  I’ve never confessed what the coat-check lady said – not to you. But Deirdre heard it.

  I try to picture Mitch, Mr. Deirdre, in my mind – nondescript, plain old Mitch from the Edmonton research and development office. I want to see him in charcoal grey with a Valkyrie on his arm.

  “I think he’s about her height,” I tell you.

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then we definitely need to go to this wedding.”

  It isn’t easy to do. Deirdre gets married while we’re still living up north. We drive for five hours through November ice and salt to make it to the city – to the old Protestant cathedral that will look pretty in Deirdre and Mitch’s wedding pictures.

  The ceremony has just barely begun as we come in late and sit in the back. Deirdre is already at the front of the church. Through her veil, we can see her broad back and her long white neck.

  “Look,” I whisper. “I told you they’re the same height.”

  The wedding itself is short and political. The officiator is actually a government cabinet minister, and he can’t help but slip the name of the Premier into his remarks.

  When he’s finished, Mitch and Deirdre turn around to face the rest of us. They’re arm in arm, pacing away from the altar. They’re halfway up the aisle – a march blaring on the cathedral organ – when Deirdre stops, just for an instant. She’s seen me – seen my own broad, pale face looking back at hers from the last row of the chapel. She raises the hand that isn’t threaded through Mitch’s arm and waves. Everyone else turns to see me. And I feel a little sick.

  Your elbow stabs into my side. “Go ahead, Brigs. Wave back at her.”

  I nod – once for Deirdre and once for Mitch.

  When the organ stops, I can hear you laughing – everyone can.

  “Did you see that?”

  I hustle you out the chapel door – the other chapel door, the one Deirdre didn’t use. But all the doors lead to the same foyer, the one where Deirdre and Mitch are lined up between their wedding attendants, waiting to be congratulated on their life together.

  When it’s our turn to greet them, you shake Deirdre’s hand with both of yours and she claims she doesn’t remember the time, years ago, when she met you in person once before. I cringe as she says it, but the whole story just seems to make you love her even more. You still haven’t quite stepped aside before Deirdre starts to move. She’s hugging me. There’s a bouquet of calla lilies and ribbons pressed against my shoulder blade. I feel the heat rising from the white satin pinched beneath her arms. And I’m sick all over again.

  We’re out in the street, walking back through the dark city blocks towards our car. You stop laughing long enough to rise up on your tip-toes, holding out your arms like a mummy, lowering the pitch of your voice, making yourself as much like Deirdre as you can. “Oh Brigs, you came,” you quote in nothing like Deirdre’s voice. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you came all this way.”

  I can’t stand it. I snatch you off your feet, my arms closed around your torso, and I spin you once and then again, in circles on the slippery sidewalk. Your legs fly out straight behind you, your feet barely missing the parking meters, and you start to squeal, but the spinning takes your voice away. You’ve buried your face in the wool of my coat, against my shoulder.

  “Stop,” I say as we turn. “Stop it.”

  I’m setting you down, your feet on the top of a retaining wall that runs along the sidewalk, beneath the wedding church. The extra height of the wall brings your face close enough for me to look right into your eyes.

  “Stop.” I say it again. I say it even though I know you’re not jealous.

  You’re laughing, kissing my cheeks and my forehead, your hands on my face. “Sweet, sweet Deirdre,” you say. “My favourite rival – one weak and meaningless, just another human being – one you can halt in the middle of her own wedding march.”

  “You do not have any rivals.”

  “Oh, that’s not it,” you interrupt. “That’s not it at all.”

  You’re reaching for my hand, making that mark again, drawing the line along the bone from my knuckle to my wrist.

  “I do have a rival. And it will never get old or fat or married. Heck, Brigs, it could be here with us right now, for all we know.”

  It’s this again. “Don’t say it – ”

  “I will say it.” You push at my chest, stepping down from the wall, walking backwards along the sidewalk, calling to me. “My one true rival – it’s coming for you whether I dare to say it or not.”

  Eighteen

  You’re laid out under the lights, your head held in a brace, mouth wide open. The man in the mask and goggles is leaning over your face, his nose hidden but just inches from yours. Behind the safety lenses, his eyes are wide and alert – not a trace of social recognition in them. This deadened human closeness – it must be what we mean when we call things “clinical.”

  There’s a bitter taste of bleach at the back of your mouth where your tongue sprouts out of the walls of your throat. And there’s a sound, deep inside your head, travelling into your brain through the Eustachian tubes that connect your pharynx to your ear canals. The sound is a scrape, scrape, scraping that goes on and on somewhere within your jaw.

  “So now we’re using our tiny little files here to grind out what the drills couldn’t get at. Would you like to see what the files look like?” he has asked you.

  “No, I’m good,” you’ve answered, all in vowels around the rubber dam clipped to your numbed gums.

  He had paused before he clamped the dam on you. He’d flicked a glance at his assistant. “See if we still have the paediatric-sized one.”

  It’s one of our secrets – that inside your head is a mouth like a child’s. And I always hate it when anyone else finds out – even people like him.

  You rolled your eyes at me when you realized it. “Professional dental care is not intimate.” That’s what you told me. But how can it not be? The warmth, the pink, moisture, the smell – not even our kids know you that well anymore.

  In the dentist’s chair, they’ve left the lead-lined X-ray apron draped over your shoulders and chest, all the way down to the tops of your legs. They tell you it’s for convenience, because they have to keep taking X-rays – making sure they’ve obliterated every last cell out the canals in the roots in that one, evil tooth of yours. But lying underneath the apron, you suspect the hot heaviness of it is actually there to treat your low-grade shock. It’s coming and going in sickening, suffocating waves. The apron makes
you think of one of those heated blankets you’ve only seen a few times before – the ones taken from special cupboards in the backs of emergency wards or out of ambulances at the scenes of car crashes.

  It’s not a standard dental cavity gone amok that’s brought on this root canal. In fact, today is the first time you’ve ever had a tooth filled at all – the first time you’ve heard a dental drill working anywhere near your mouth. It’s strange, but you’re going from having completely virginal teeth to having a full-on root canal in one afternoon.

  Somehow, your teeth just never succumbed to cavities – not even when you were a kid, not even when you had a full set of braces. Your teeth still don’t get cavities, though you only floss on the weekends. Like a real Holy Incorrupt Saint, your mouth simply does not decay. Against all time and nature, your teeth are glistening, white, and beatified.

  Even if your teeth don’t rot – not like mine – it turns out they’re still susceptible to rare degenerative conditions. The dentist says one of the bicuspids in your upper jaw – one that looks completely pristine from the outside – is actually in the middle of a slow, inexplicable fit of suicide.

  “Internal resorption,” the dentist called it. He actually sounded a bit excited when he picked it out of your X-ray during your routine check-up. “It’s one of those ironic diseases. We’re all supposed to love irony nowadays, aren’t we?”

  You wouldn’t fake a smile for him – not about this.

  “You see,” he explained, “the tooth thinks it’s trying to repair itself from some kind of internal stress – a bit like a broken bone.”

  “I didn’t know teeth could do that.”

  He nodded. “That’s right. They can’t. But this one is trying its darnedest. Unfortunately, the cells it sends to fix things end up taking the tooth apart. It’s like they get stalled in the demolition phase and never make it to the repair phase – since, for teeth, there is no such thing as a repair phase, really. It’s strange, all right – and rare. But it’s not cancer,” he added, not quite out of nowhere.

  It left us startled, wondering how we got to be talking about cancer at all. The dentist really didn’t know that much more about your tooth disease himself. The best he could do was to send you home with a brand new article photocopied out of The Western Journal of Dental Sciences.

  That was our regular dentist – the one who seems to be away on scuba diving vacations for half the year. This new dentist, the one leaning over you now, is a specialist. From behind his mask, he asks permission to show your X-rays to his colleagues. And for a few days, you and your rare tooth disease will be hot stuff in the local dental community.

  Across town from the endodontist’s clinic, in my office, I’m sitting in front of a computer screen, worrying about your appointment. I made my mark working in a northern boomtown when the kids were just babies, and my company rewarded me with a junior vice president position here in a city on the plains.

  No matter what you say, I do think about you while I’m at work when you’re not actually within my field of vision. I’ve left my cell phone on my desk beside my keyboard just in case you need to call me from the dental clinic again. I keep picking it up to make sure it’s still on.

  “Brigs,” you said when you first called me from where you were hiding in the stairwell outside the posh misery of the endodontist’s office. “I think I might leave. I don’t think this is unfolding the way it’s supposed to.”

  “Did they start yet?”

  “No. I haven’t seen any sign of the Great and Powerful Oz. But his receptionist is trying to get me to sign this form saying I’ve been properly informed about a whole bunch of stuff no one has ever informed me about.”

  I stand up. “Well, don’t leave yet. Go back inside, get them to explain everything, and hang in there. It’s okay.”

  The empty air on your end of the phone is hollow and funny. You’re still in the stairwell, trying not to cry, and I can tell you hate yourself.

  “Aw, it’s okay,” I say. “In two hours, it will be all over.” And then I can tell you’re hating both of us.

  I try something else. “Come on. Remember when Aaron cracked his back tooth wrestling with Scottie? And he was too little to tell us there was anything wrong until it was all abscessed and dangerous?”

  You sniff. “I know, I know.”

  Aaron’s accident was years ago now, when he was just a toddler. We had to take him to a paediatric dental specialist – a dentist who could drug kids to sleep before treating them. The dentist wasn’t in the room yet when the anaesthesia team gathered to press that tiny black gas mask over Aaron’s nose and mouth. Flat on his back on the table, the boy was frantic – like he was fighting for his life. He was sure he was being killed. It didn’t matter that you were standing right there telling him not to struggle and not to be scared. He thought he was dying even though it was you who held his shoulders down and looked into his eyes while the doctors turned on the gas. And when his body went limp, you didn’t believe the anaesthetist when she told you Aaron was already asleep. How could he be sleeping when he was still making that noise after you let go of his shoulders – a high, repeating, rattling alarm sounding through his open mouth? She called it a “little hiccup” – said it happened all the time. And then, while someone threaded a tube down his throat behind her, she smiled at you and showed you the door. Once you’d finished betraying your son, you were just in their way.

  “Your tooth is in serious trouble. And the problem’s not going to just go away on its own, right?” my voice says over your phone in the stairwell of the endodontist’s office building. “You don’t want to lose it – not when you’re awake, not in real life.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “So go.”

  You promise you’ll turn off your phone and head back inside the waiting room. The receptionist tries not to look smug as you hand her the waiver forms, dated and signed.

  I’m on my feet at the sight of you coming through the door of my office. You’ve come all the way up to the top floor of the glum, brutalist building where I go to work every day. You’ve been hoisted up in the elevator, you’ve come through the glass doors of the office and smiled at my secretary with the half of your face you have the power to move, and you’ve made your way down the hallway to find me. Now you’re sliding your arms inside my suit jacket and closing them around my ribcage. I’m crushing your face into my chest with one hand and pushing the door closed the other.

  “Are you okay?” It’s as stupid a question as it ever is, but I ask it anyway – just like we all do.

  You turn your face, resting your cheek against me so your mouth is free and you can speak – lopsided and woolly. “I went in there and lay still while he hollowed out my living tissue and packed me full of plastic and silver. I just lay there like a cadaver for hours and let him do it. And near the end – I started slipping. My brainstem got all slow and sick, and I had to consciously tell myself, ‘breathe and breathe and breathe,’ every single second.”

  I run my tongue over the ceramic crown anchored in my own mouth. “Yeah, it’s always kind of an awful procedure.”

  Your hands are on my forearms, your elbows straightening, forcing a distance between us. “Brigs – he was embalming me. They just did one tooth this time but I know eventually it will all be finished. He was trying to get the dead off me so I could be presentable among the living again. Embalming me. I never wanted that. I’m meant for burning, not for emptying out and keeping.”

  There’s nothing to do but laugh. I do it quietly and carefully and – mostly importantly of all – kindly. “Hey, don’t think about it that way,” I say. I’m sitting down, bending into my big vice president’s chair that still feels to me like a prop in a play I’m acting out. I’m pulling you with me, onto my lap. No matter what you’ve just been through today, your body feels like it always does to me – like it’s sup
posed to feel. “Cadaver,” I scoff. “But you’re all warm and soft. You’re not dead. Though you might still be in shock – and a little bit silly, maybe.”

  You sit across my thighs, shoulders rounded, staring out the window at the dirty, concrete parking garage across the street. I glance at the closed door and think about sliding a hand inside your clothes. But this isn’t that kind of play. And I know it’s best just to keep still and wait. When you finally move again, it’s to wipe at the numbed corner of your mouth. You look surprised when your fingers come away dry – no blood, no spit, no fluid of any kind.

  And I can see the light returning as you shrug. “Silly – maybe. But Brigs,” you look into my face, still faintly sad, “what if my head really did fill up with cancer? I mean, don’t you ever worry about losing me?”

  I sit back. And I know I don’t worry about losing you – ever. I don’t know why. Maybe I’ve seen you wrestle your own death too many times – there in those hospital delivery rooms when the tiny blood vessels burst in your face and you lose the power to speak and the portal to the world outside this one opens through your flesh – but then you just live on through it. Or maybe that’s not it at all. I don’t know. But I can tell – I can tell just from your pressure and warmth against me, across my legs, against my shoulder – that I won’t ever live one moment here without you.

  Nineteen

  The year I graduate from university is the year we move house together for the first time, right out of the capital city. There’s nowhere for us to go but north, to the oil sands mines. It’s the only way to pay back all the money we borrowed to finish the nine years of university we have between the two of us. And the only way to get to the oil sands by land is on Route 63 – that one, jammed, two-lane highway through the wilderness. So we’re careening through the boreal forest right along with the logging trucks and the industrial wide-load trailers and the Mustangs that run on booze and testosterone. Through their windshields, the men see the silhouette of your long hair in the driver’s seat of our car. They come up fast, staring at you through the glass – in spite of me and the kids in their car seats and the fact that you’re pregnant with Levi, our third son. The men are leering sideways as they cross over the solid yellow centre line to pass us. Maybe you’ll get used to it over the next few years, but I never will.