A Song for Issy Bradley (18 page)

Jacob tugs Al’s sleeve. “I’m Miracle Max,” he hisses.

“What?”

“I’m Miracle Max from
The Princess Bride.”

“Oh, right.”

“Doing miracles is what I do,”
Jacob whispers, trying his best to sound like the crazy old man from the movie.

Al sniggers. “OK,” he says. “In that case, I’m Inigo Montoya.
You killed my father, prepare to die
.” He delivers the line in his best Spanish accent to make Jacob laugh.

“Shush.” Zippy pokes him. “Don’t be immature.”

He’d rather be immature than super-holy. Zippy probably thinks the prophet will say something amazing once the choir’s stopped singing, something like “Get ready for the Second Coming … tomorrow!” instead of his usual snore-ful stories.

He pokes Zippy back. Dad frowns and shakes his head, but he doesn’t stop singing.

“The dawning of a brighter day, the dawning of a brighter day
.” Mum isn’t singing, she’s just staring straight ahead. She looks like she’s been whacked in the face by a football, sort of concussed. Al twists the hoodie bundle in his lap until he can feel the roll of cash through the zip-up pocket. Maybe the prophet will say something
amazing, something so bloody brilliant and wonderful that it will make everything better. If the Second Coming
is
just around the corner it’ll be followed by the Millennium and then Issy will come back … 
if
it’s true. He watches Jacob rest his hand on Mum’s lap; she doesn’t seem to notice, and as the song slows to its conclusion and Dad’s voice gets louder
—“Thus Zion’s light is bursting forth, to bring her ransomed children home
”—Mum closes her eyes. She does it in such a deliberate way, it’s as if she’s closed her ears too and it’s like she’s not sitting with them anymore.

The opening prayer begins, and although he usually keeps his eyes open, Al squeezes them shut ’cause he feels like he did when Kuyt stepped up to take the penalty earlier; he’s willing something good to happen but he can hardly stand to look.

Claire can bear to be up only when they are out. She hides under the warm puff of Issy’s duvet, eyes squeezed shut as Ian’s panicky voice floats up the stairs.

“Have you got your lunch, Zipporah? I made some sandwiches. They’re on the side in the kitchen. Well, I didn’t know you don’t like tuna. Do you need some bus money? Sorry, it’s all the change I’ve got. Can’t you get off a stop early? Jacob, come on, hurry up. Where’s your helmet, Alma? Don’t be silly—you’ll look a lot worse with your brains on the road. Jacob,
come on.”

The front door closes and Claire remains under the cover in case one of them comes back for something. When the quiet has settled she climbs out of bed and inches down the stairs like an old woman, one hand on the banister, the other braced against the wall, dragging the ugly lump of her grief behind her.

The kitchen smells of toast and decomposing flowers: roses, delphiniums, chrysanthemums, carnations, and lilies; they’ve been stuffed into vases, jam jars, and plastic beakers, two especially large arrangements languish in buckets. The stink of the lilies turns her stomach; something sour and rancid lurks under their sweet pungency. She ought to throw the flowers away, they are long past their best, but to remove them would be to admit something, to mark a conclusion. She sits at the table trying to ignore the incongruous optimism of the homespun crafts and knickknacks.
“No Other Success Can Compensate for Failure in the Home
”—the laminated jumble of cutesy letters is particularly inapt.

There have been so many failures. When the children were younger they were all hers—impatience, disorganization, boredom, tiredness—but as the children have grown older, the tent of Failure in the Home has marqueed to also include their inadequacies—untidiness, disobedience, irreverence, breaking the Sabbath, and a multitude of other discouraged behaviors and sins of omission—all evidence of her spectacular Failure in the Home. She shuffles over to the sign, pulls it off the wall, and drops it in the trash, wondering what to get rid of next.

So far this year, the sisters have made felt flowers, sugar-cube Temple sculptures, Daughter of God fridge magnets, Temple marriage clocks—♥
For Time & Eternity
♥—oatmeal-bath sachets, and wooden wall signs. She’d been looking forward to the wooden wall signs, she’d been thinking about painting her sign with something kitschy and self-deprecating like
“God Bless This Mess.”
But when she arrived at the chapel, Sister Stevens had already stenciled a quote onto each rectangle of wood.

Claire hates her sign. She brought it home from the Relief Society meeting and hid it in the musty cupboard under the sink, punishing it with darkness and a top note of shoe polish and bleach. Ian found it; perhaps he inexplicably decided to clean his own shoes and saw it lying there purposelessly. She followed the racket one Saturday morning and discovered him kneeling astride the sink pushing a gyrating drill bit into the window lintel.

“Pride of place.” He grinned and blew her a kiss.

Because Sister Stevens stenciled the letters, the sign is the neatest of Claire’s homemade efforts. The characters sweep and loop in even calligraphic curls:

Sometimes Claire sneers at the sign, occasionally it makes her feel like crying; she is definitely not one of the best homemakers in the world—there is evidence of this all over her kitchen, all over her life. The BEST homemakers in the world buy supplies for their children’s birthday parties ahead of time, they check on their children and notice when they are seriously ill. She pushes the chair to the sink, climbs up, and reaches for the sign. It is solid and heavier than she remembers. She steps down and puts it on the table. She would like to deface it, to replace BEST with a word like “stressed” or “depressed.” If she was clever she’d be able to think of something funny, a way of changing the words around to make it say something entirely different, then she could hang it back up and take pleasure in everyone’s obliviousness. Instead, she unlocks the back door, takes the sign outside, and stuffs it in the trash can.

As she comes back indoors, she notices Issy’s goldfish and can’t remember when she last fed him. She hunts for the little pot of food and discovers it behind a jar of flowers. After she’s fed the fish she thinks about feeding herself. The fridge is littered with foreign casserole dishes, plastic-wrapped and crusted with leftovers.

They must be passing a sheet around in Relief Society
—“Sign here to make a meal for the Bradleys.”
The sisters choose recipes rich in calories and comfort and leave them on the doorstep alongside Tupperware tubs of treats: chocolate brownies, cookies, cupcakes. They don’t ring the bell. Claire imagines them tiptoeing up the driveway, arranging their offerings, then dashing away before she can assault them with her sadness on the doorstep. There’s nothing she’d like to eat so she closes the fridge and sits down.

Sympathy cards are stacked in a zigzag pile on the table; the mantelpiece and windowsills are full. The postman slides fat bundles of commiseration through the letter box every day: heartfelt wishes and bad poems in muted, floral pastels. People write little notes inside the cards. She is longing for a note saying
“I’m so sorry”;
she is sick of explanations and justifications.

What is she meant to learn from this experience? Ian would answer the question with a list of virtues like the ones written on the Sunday-school chalkboard each week, irrespective of the lesson topic: patience, faith, long-suffering, endurance … It’s easy for him, his thoughts traverse a one-way system, there’s no room for roundabouts of doubt or recalculations; once he settles on something it’s true and she mostly likes this about him, it’s what makes him so steadfast and loyal. When he decided he loved her she knew he wouldn’t ever change his mind; loving her became a fact of his existence, as veritable and infallible as scripture. He’s a man who sticks to the road of his experience, he doesn’t look left or right or back; he never rubbernecks or pulls over to glory in the wreckage of other people’s lives, he never gossips or points fingers; he calls encouragement as he passes those who’ve broken down, he throws a towrope to people in difficulty, but he always keeps to his designated route. There’s one truth, one way, and Ian is following it. It’s true she has caught him once or twice staring into the distance, hands clenched, blinking back tears, but, with the exception of that first night, each time she has reached out to touch the hem of his unhappiness he has wiped the feelings from his face and pulled away. She wishes he’d come to a halt. Pause. Just for a while. Why can’t everyone just stop? Even the children adhere to their routines in a way that suggests their feelings are superficial. She has wondered if Zipporah is hiding her grief in her bedroom, whether Jacob’s tiptoeing and whispers to no one in particular are a symptom of cheerlessness or conciliation, and as for Alma, he has dressed whatever unhappiness he feels in a coat of jokes.

“It’s no wonder Sister Valentine is so fat,” he said as they tackled one of her monster meals, last week, before Claire retreated upstairs.

“That’s unkind,” Ian chided. “Perhaps she can’t help it. You don’t know, it might run in her family.”

“
No one
runs in her family.” He looked around, waiting for someone to laugh; when they didn’t, he carried on.

“The best thing about this is the food. What? I didn’t mean I was glad or anything. Wow, that went over like a fart in church.”

Ian told him not to say “fart” at the table, so he got up and went into the kitchen and said it there. Ian told him to sit down, but he was incorrigible.

“If a rat catcher is called a ratter, what’s a bug catcher called?” he asked Jacob.

Sadness that’s so easily disguised can’t run deep. None of them are sad like she is, no one else’s grief is immobilizing. The way they are carrying on—going to school and work, pretending everything’s OK—sickens her. They are allowing the momentum of routine to push them onward, ever onward, as if they are marching to the chorus of a relentless hymn.

There is a smack as another bundle of sympathy lands on the mat in the hallway. She gets up, retrieves a handful of envelopes and a small package, and shambles back to the table. She opens several cards, the verses are absurd and twee.

She dumps the cards in the pile with the others. There are two envelopes left. One looks like a letter and the other is the small package. She opens the package first. It contains a book and a note from Sister Stevens.

The book is small and slender. It’s called
Angel Children
and Jesus is pictured on the cover, holding a small boy, his right hand outstretched. He looks like the Child Catcher. She flicks through the pages, glancing at the chapter headings: “Faith and a Time to Die,” “Faith Sufficient to Heal is a Gift,” “Overcoming the Challenge.” Her eyes are drawn to a quotation near the end of the book:
“And the prayer of faith shall save the sick.”
She cracks the narrow spine and begins to read about King Hezekiah. Isaiah tells the king to set his house in order as he is about to die, but when Hezekiah prays the prayer of faith, God allows him to live for an additional fifteen years. Claire remembers not praying in the hospital, not believing her words would work:
“the prayer of faith”
—was it so simple? She keeps reading. Hezekiah’s story is followed by that of an ordinary man whose son is sick. The man prays for his boy’s recovery, he absolutely refuses to give him up to death, and Claire wonders about the apparatus of such a refusal—how does one go about refusing God? The boy’s life is saved, but when he grows up he becomes a great sorrow to his parents and they decide it would have been better if he had died when he was a child. She slaps the book against the table.

The remaining envelope contains a letter.