Web of Angels (3 page)

Seaton School was L-shaped, with several big maple trees growing out in front, one of them split by lightning, dead on one side. In spring only half the tree would leaf. On the short side of the L stood a row of saplings surrounded by mesh to keep out squirrels. A wooden sign in front of each young tree announced the class that had planted it. There were three entrances, one for kindergarten, one for primary and one for junior grades. On an ordinary day Emmie would line up with the kindergarten kids, examining the treasures her friend pulled from her pocket—a bead, a stone, a broken bracelet picked up in the park. Nina would stand in a circle of girls playing clapping games near the north entrance, while her cousin, Judy, huddled with her friends in the fifth-grade class at the other end of the schoolyard. But today the schoolyard was uneasy; nobody traded snacks and games stalled. In clusters along the fence, the moms, some with toddlers in strollers or babies in Snuglis, a few dads, a smattering of grandparents and nannies murmured, for this was their village square.

Did you tell your kids? Not yet. Oh God, you can still see the ambulance from here. Heather used to babysit for us sometimes. My boys loved her. She had so much energy. She babysat for me, too. She painted a mural with my kids. It’s still on their bedroom wall. You wouldn’t know she was the same kid who ran away. I just can’t believe this. I heard she shot herself. That’s impossible, it had to be pills. Her
mother is totally against guns; Debra would never have one in the house. I know, but for sure it was a gun. It’s lucky in a way, you know? If it was pills, then the baby would have died, too. Can you imagine finding out that your mother shot herself while she was pregnant with you? The baby will know that she’s special. It was a miracle. Thank God Debra’s a pediatrician—she saved her granddaughter. I don’t know about God but she had nerve. You never know how you’ll react in a crisis. Afterward, that’s when it hits you. It’s so sad. It’s scary, that’s what. My oldest is turning thirteen—I hope I survive it. Your daughter isn’t Heather. She didn’t run away when she was twelve. What do you say to the parents? I don’t know. I just don’t want to say anything dumb. Should we go to the house?

Lyssa shifted from foot to foot, watching the girls, waiting for the bell to ring so she could go. She wanted to run home and keep running. Three blocks wasn’t enough, she’d have to go up to the railroad tracks and run on the gravel path above the houses, through Seaton Grove, past the cemetery and up along the trestle bridge. Maybe then, when she was out of breath and had a stitch in her side and sweat dripping down her face, she’d have exhausted the turmoil inside. Nina was looking over at her to see if there was anything to worry about. She waved to show there wasn’t.

“Sharon,” one of the moms said to her. Her name was Ana Patel. She wore a sari under her coat and her baby, in a stroller, had Down’s. “Isn’t your son friends with Heather’s sister?”

“Josh has some classes with her.” When the sisters had come over to look at the high chair, they’d put a doll in it. They’d played at giving the doll a name and she’d played
along, naming wildflowers and making them laugh. Swamp rose. Pussy toes. Hairy mint.

“He must have had some hint,” Ana insisted.

“Nope.” In Chinese you could say
Fuck the eighteen generations of your ancestors
. She wondered if Dan’s mom knew that one. Speaking of his family, there was his sister in her purple jacket, making her way through the schoolyard. Eleanor could talk. There was nothing she liked better.

“I heard,” Eleanor said, arriving at Lyssa’s side. They’d been friends before they’d been sisters-in-law. Eleanor had been the one to introduce her to Dan, arranging for them to meet at the skating rink. She was a plumper version of her brother, a couple of years younger but with the same dark brown hair, straight and thick, cut short. She had dimples but didn’t like them because she thought they made her cheeks look fat, yet she wore purple because it was her favourite colour and tough shit if it made her look fat. She had been the one who disappointed her parents, dropping out of college to marry an electrician. Before the neighbourhood was gentrified, she’d bought a house on Lumley, then found one for her brother on Ontario Street. She had one kid, Judy, who was turning eleven and spent as much time at her cousins’ house as her own. She was Sharon’s best friend. But even so she didn’t know that Sharon was one of many alters or that another was standing next to her right now. “How’s Josh taking it?”

As Lyssa elbowed her and tilted her head at the moms listening in, Eleanor changed tack without blinking and hardly a breath between words. She said to them all, “We
have to bring food. If everyone makes a main dish we could put together a week’s worth.”
Yes, yes
—the moms eagerly took up the idea, relieved to have something they could do. Ana offered to make a curry and Eleanor to keep a list of who’d bring what. The last bell was ringing, the kids filing through the doors into the school.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Lyssa said.

In university she and Eleanor had gone skating, they’d gone running. In Hammond House with its heritage plaque and the hundred-year-old sign,
LIVE AND LET LIVE
, they’d got drunk and on the small dance floor they’d danced. Later Lyssa had danced there with Dan. But after they’d been going out a while, the little stick had turned blue, and, refusing to be pregnant, Lyssa had disappeared inside. By the time she’d come back out, years had passed. There were three kids. And while she was looking at photographs of the life she hadn’t lived, Eleanor had walked in, stopped dead in her tracks, and said, “I haven’t seen that look on your face for ages. Do you want to go dancing by any chance?” As if time hadn’t passed for her either. As if a singleton could know what she was seeing.

Leaving the schoolyard, Eleanor said, “What am I going to tell Judy? It was hard enough talking about Heather being pregnant.”

“God I want a cigarette,” Lyssa said.

“You aren’t going to start smoking again and die on me.”

They were walking up Lumley Street as the ambulance pulled away. The house was identical to many others in the neighbourhood, tall and narrow, semi-detached. The front
yard was winter brown, but a landscaper had been at it, preparing ground for winning flowers. There was a new cement porch with no railing, a pane of stained glass in the front door. Behind windows they saw a flicker of colour and movement. Someone drew the blinds.

“I don’t get it,” Lyssa said. “She was talking about having her own place.”

“Oh. Like that was going to happen. She was sixteen! Selfish that’s what it is. I don’t care what anyone says. Rick and Debra did everything for her. Everything! They don’t deserve this.” Eleanor shook her head. “I wish I’d never convinced …”

“What?” Lyssa turned to see Eleanor biting her lip, eyes narrowed against something.

“I’m rambling. Forget it.”

“Come on, dudette.” Lyssa put her arm through Eleanor’s. “Let’s go for a run up on the tracks.”

“I don’t have time.”

“Tough. You promised to start running with me. Or I’m going to bum a cigarette from someone.”

“I hate when you get like this,” Eleanor said, but she was laughing. “Can we at least get fries after?”

“Extra large. With a side of mayonnaise.”

On Hammond Street, they climbed the embankment to the overpass where there was a break in the fence. The gravel path was lined with bushes that screened the streets below. Later there would be wildflowers and butterflies. After a rain, sometimes a duck in a puddle. Running at her sister-in-law’s side, Lyssa slowed her pace, Eleanor put all she had into
keeping up. They teased each other, got hot, unzipped and ran some more with their coats flapping like capes, like the wings of birds picking up the west wind, propelled along the gravel path as if they were flying. While she ran, Lyssa looked up at the blue of the sky, her favourite colour of all, and down at the backs of houses, the messes that people didn’t fix up for their neighbours, the old porch with shredding wood, the fallen-in shed, piles of broken stuff, alleys with painted garages, an ancient metal works, a two-storey brick shed with windows, things that weren’t on display. She liked seeing what was behind, what was in back of the front. What was like her.

Seaton Grove was older than the neighbourhoods on either side, which had been farmland and estates when the Valiants and the Goodchilds took up residence around the glue factory. Back then the north edge of the village was marked by Hammond Street, and children thought it was the edge of the world, no more streets to be seen, no cottages huddled close, only the wild and the rumour of great houses somewhere on the hill above.

They marked Seaton Grove time by looking up at the sun. Noon was twelve minutes earlier in the next town west, six minutes later in the hamlet to the east. Travellers never quite knew when their trains were arriving or leaving, because time changed every few miles. Some people carried half a dozen watches set to clocks along their journey, to no avail. Time was independent, unruly, untrammelled. Then standard time was invented and clocks became synchronized.

People who were multiple still rode the vagaries of hours that leaped, disappeared, reversed and sped up. But even for
them, time moved in the outside world. If Sharon lost it, someone else gained it. Lyssa, who was sixteen in a mom’s middle-aged body, was going on seventeen as she ran beside her sister-in-law, her feet pounding the earth, the stones under her feet older than the clock.

T
he kitchen was an addition to the original house, built large enough to accommodate guests. It was Sharon’s favourite room because it smelled good, it smelled of what she was good at, cooking and feeding her family. She could hear herself and yet not herself on the phone talking to Eleanor, saying,
Uh huh, I got your orders Miss Bossy
. In her head were thoughts of running along a narrow trestle bridge, of the thrill when a train whooshed by. Lyssa’s thoughts, not Sharon’s—she was scared of heights. The girls were upstairs in their room, Josh not yet home from school. Eleanor had already organized the neighbourhood, co-coordinating a week’s worth of main courses, bagels and desserts. Tomorrow was Saturday, and her friends would have all day to shop, cook, and drop their contributions at her house. She would arrange delivery. Heather’s parents might not eat, but at the end of the day they would have food.

“You should make soup for them,” Eleanor was saying. “It’s supposed to get colder again.” Thoughts of running started to recede. “Carrot or pea.” Thoughts of soup were
bubbling up. Green pea, yellow pea, lentils, potato and leek. Sharon was moving forward, pulled by the cooking talk, and Lyssa slipping back inside. “Throw in some rice.”

Her hand went up toward a cupboard, opening it so that she could check for ingredients. Sharon was forward now all the way, remembering the sound of herself joking around in a voice that was not really hers.

“Are you there?” her sister-in-law asked.

“Hang on.” She turned to open the glass doors, the cool breeze coming in from the yard fanning her hot face. Better to think about food and not the uneasiness in the pit of her stomach. “I just want to see what I’ve got in the freezer,” she said. “How about stew and a thick lentil soup? I can bring that over tomorrow evening. Tons of time. No problem. Sure. See you.”

When Emmie came into the kitchen, she found her mother chopping, eyes light green with flecks of gold, skin warm from cooking. Céline Dion was singing through the boom box. Sometimes Dan teased her about her old-fashioned tastes and technology, accusing her of being stuck in time.

“I’m Dr. Grizzly and Sister Bear is sick, Mama.” Emmie was draped in one of her dad’s old white shirts and a stethoscope, wobbling in her mother’s shoes. Even as a baby, she’d slept well, woken well. Sitting in a high chair, she’d thrown things to see them fall; Nina had thrown things to see them picked up.

“Is Nina playing, too?” Sharon asked.

“She doesn’t want to. She’s staring.”

“What do you mean, staring?”

“She’s mad. Can we have some raisins?”

“Sure.” Absently, Sharon took down the big box as she wondered what Nina could be mad about. She’d have to see for herself and while she did, her youngest took the opportunity to sneak the whole box of raisins into the living room, where she turned on the TV.

Nina was sitting on the top bunk, arms crossed, glaring as her mother cleared the dress-up stuff off the futon couch they used for sleepovers. No, she wouldn’t come down. No, she didn’t want her mom to sit beside her. As Sharon climbed up the ladder to join her, she looked away. Opposite the bunk beds, above the children’s table and chairs, there was a sign taped to the wall,
ART GALLRY, ADMISHIN $1
. Around it were drawings of multicoloured houses under suns and rainbows and puffy clouds. Nina huddled into herself, arms wrapped around her legs, and when Sharon was close to her, she said, “You lied, Mom!”

“What about?” Sharon stroked her daughter’s hair, flinching as Nina flinched. Her middle child, quiet, brave.

“You said people die when they’re old.” She stared straight ahead at the art gallery, at the window that divided her pictures from her sister’s, at the rooftop across the street. “Heather wasn’t old.”

Nina’s eyes welled up and she pursed her lips to hold on to any sound that might wish to come out. Sharon’s heart groaned. “What did you hear about Heather?”

“She died. Deceased. That’s what my teacher said. That’s what deceased means. Lots of kids in my class knew that Heather died and the ambulance took her away.”

“Most people die when they’re old. Do you know how Heather died?” Nina shook her head. “She decided to end her life. That’s called suicide.”

“How?”

“She shot herself with a gun.”

“Did it hurt?”

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

“But why, Mommy?” Nina let her mother put an arm around her, though she wouldn’t rest her head on her mom’s shoulder. “Why would she do that?”

“Sometimes people have something wrong with their brain.” Heather had tried out all the settings on the high chair. Up and down, forward and back. Touching the thick padding. Asking how old a baby had to be to sit up like that. Her brain had seemed just fine. “It makes them so sad they can’t stand it and they forget that lots of people love them and need them. They kill themselves to get away from the sadness.”