On Unfaithful Wings (2 page)

My stomach knotted as the gravity of my situation set in: after eleven on a Wednesday night, bleeding on the lawn outside an empty church in the kind of downpour that convinced people not to venture out for a chat with God.

Did I mention I was bleeding? A lot?

Water pooled in my ear canal until the unnaturally loud plop of rain drops splashing into the tiny pond drowned out even the sound of my breath. Not steady, metronomic drips like I imagined a water torture would be, but an uneven patter that, should I live long enough, would likely prove equally effective at driving me crazy.

“Help.”

In my head, the single word came out a scream, shaking trees and rattling windows, attracting the attention needed to save me so I could see my son again, even if it was for the last time. In reality, it was more of a peep. I closed my eyes and sucked dirty water through my nose then coughed it out my mouth. The pain it induced in my back and side hurt worse than the original stabbing, like someone stood over me with a hot poker pressed to my side, except I was cold and wet and bleeding to death, too. A hot poker didn’t sound so bad.

“Help,” I peeped.

***

I don’t know how long I was passed out, but when consciousness forced itself mercilessly back into my head, not even a finger would move. The rain may have stopped, or maybe not; my skin tingled like someone had hooked me to a car battery. Water ran into my eyes and I blinked it away, a process which felt like it took an exceptionally long time.

“Help,” I ventured once more, but produced no more sound than a sigh.

So this is how it ends.

Memories passed before my eyes, the frames flickering like an old silent movie. I made it stop. I didn’t want the horrid experience called life to fill my final thoughts. Forcing my mind to dig for the good times--an admittedly difficult endeavor--I came up only with those first few years with Rae. She was beautiful and she loved me back then and I hadn’t disappointed her or Trevor yet. The good times lasted maybe four years, until I screwed it up, then things spiraled downward, out of control, until our split four years ago. That’s when she spouted the revelation that Trevor and I didn’t share any genes.

There’s a saying: you have to hit the bottom to find somewhere to plant your feet. For a while, I lived like a man without legs.

I took what felt like a few hours to blink the memories out of my head, but they wouldn’t go. So much for keeping life from passing before my eyes. I heard a voice, too, small and faint and indistinct, the words eluding me. Probably my mind dredging up Father Dominic’s voice telling me the reasons why I’d be condemned to Hell, or listing my sins like he’d done in my youth. Now, a little shy of forty, the list would have been considerably longer.

The voice grew louder, but the sounds still meant nothing. Whether the words were foreign or the muscles in my ears and brain simply gave up on comprehension, I didn’t know, but it became apparent the sounds didn’t originate inside my head. Hope flickered in my chest; if I could make the voice see me, maybe I’d be all right. I strained every muscle, funneling every remaining bit of energy toward moving something or making a noise. I managed a grunt, nothing more.

My eyes slid closed, resigned to the rest of my life seeping onto the church’s lawn, washed away by a spring storm, until I heard an identifiable sound--the splash of feet trampling soggy grass. I opened my eyes and saw a muddy white shoe. It looked comfortable.

I slipped into darkness.

***

The latch clicked behind Sister Mary-Therese as she pulled the door closed, leaving the questionable odor emanating from the homeless men bunked down in the church hall for the cool and rainy night. She stood, back to the churchyard, listening to the raindrops patter against the stone walk, the sound bringing a smile to her lips. Clouds, fog, rain, snow: they all filled her with wonder. She especially loved thunderstorms. Everywhere one looked, examples of the beauty of God’s earth were abundant, but weather like this reminded her of His might. Often she thought it fortunate she didn’t live somewhere tornadoes or hurricanes frequented--she’d be tempted to chase them. At least, she might have in her younger days.

No thunder tonight, though, only rain. She stowed her wire-rimmed glasses in her pocket, pulled the collar of her coat up in an attempt to keep the hair pinned in a bun at the back of her head dry, and turned toward the church lawn, ready to descend the steps and head for home. The sign outside the bank down the street flashed eleven-fifteen p.m.--later than she normally left. She’d gotten busy planning the annual spring bake sale, an extra task taken on after Father Dominic took suddenly ill. His condition worried her, but she breathed deep through her nose, allowing the smells of the weather into her soul: damp blossoms, wet grass, the delicious aroma of rain drops on concrete. These smells calmed her heart.

With feelings of peace and God’s power brimming in her, she went down the five stone steps onto the path, her face turned up as she walked, letting cool raindrops run down her cheeks. Halfway to the stone wall marking the edge of church land, Sister Mary-Therese stopped. A sound amongst the symphony of rain on grass and leaves and stone caught her attention, a small noise, insignificant, maybe her imagination. She glanced around the churchyard, lips pressed tight together as she realized she’d left her satchel and the can of pepper spray it contained behind.

No one behind her. No one on the street.

Then what was it?

She looked back at door, considered going back for her satchel, or for help, but something drew her on. She moved down the walk, choosing her steps carefully, her lips moving in a silent prayer. The path bent closer by the old oak and her step faltered. The tree usually evoked thoughts of children playing hide-and-seek or tag around it during the summer, but it felt ominous today, dark, like it loomed over the path. She pressed her fingers to her lips as she spied a shadowy outline on the ground beneath the limbs of the oak. With so little light she couldn’t see what it was. Perhaps a bag of garbage dumped on the church lawn? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

No. It’s too big. It’s big enough to be a man.

The thought prompted her off the path, fear forgotten, concern taking over. Her heart beat fast as the soles of her shoes squelched in the grass, the saturated dirt sucking at them, trying to pull them off her feet. Three steps closer confirmed her worst fears.

“Are you all right?” she called, voice trembling.

No answer.

She crouched at the man’s side, the dark making it impossible to determine whether injury or intoxication laid him out here. Hand quaking, she reached out her hand and rested it gently on the man’s shoulder.

“Sir, are you all right?”

A car went by on the street, tossing light over the church’s stone wall and across the lawn. Sister Mary-Therese thought about signaling for help, but the face it illuminated stopped her, forced her heart into her throat.

“Oh, dear God. Icarus.”

***

If hospitals are for the sick, those in need of help, why are they such unpleasant places?

I no longer felt any pain and the tingling in my skin had calmed, allowing me to focus on the gurney’s squeaky wheel as paramedics shuttled me across the sidewalk, then jarringly out of the somber night into fluorescent-light-hell. Doctors and nurses in pristine whites and muted greens hovered around me, their silhouettes blissfully blocking out the too-bright light as they poked and prodded, hung I.V.s and called for blood. By then, it was too late to help me, I knew it but lacked a voice to tell them. I was flattered they showed so much concern for preserving my life but felt a little guilty they worked so fervently to save someone un-salvageable--a doctor term they don’t like the general public to know they use. Wouldn’t want a dying patient to feel like a car with a thrown rod.

The world blended into an indistinct meld of whites and greens, barked instructions and beeping equipment. The blaring lights, the crinkle of a plastic-covered mattress beneath my soaked clothes, the smells found only in a hospital, they all dimmed together, like a full-sense movie fading to black. Bring down the lights, cue relief.

A weight lifted from my chest and limbs, as though my mass disappeared, like floating on my back in a pool. I opened my eyes expecting to see the hospital’s glaring lights above me, but I didn’t. Instead, I stood amongst the medical staff as they brushed past me without noticing. The team of doctors and nurses fought soundlessly in organized chaos to save another me lying on the table in the emergency ward.

I looked like hell.

Blood and rain soaked my white shirt, staining it a uniform pink. My suit jacket was gone, probably cut off by the paramedics who brought me here and a pang of regret tweaked my chest--it was my only suit not purchased at the Sears bargain basement. Mud smeared my face and stuck my dark brown hair to my forehead. Some mortician would clean me up, probably make me look better than in life. Hopefully, he wouldn’t use too much make-up. Rae always called me a pretty man and, though years of hard living dulled my looks, unprofessional application of cosmetics would either make me look like a clown, or worse, some old queer’s boy-toy. Above all else, I hoped he wouldn’t disguise the expression on my face, one I wanted so badly to wear in life but never found: relief.

This isn’t happening.

It was the only thought I could drum up while I stood there watching. No sadness or disappointment, no anger or relief, only disbelief.

Sound crept back into my little world of silence. First, a persistent, high-pitched tone, then the voices of the doctors, the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum. An overweight nurse pushed a cart to the bed and one of the doctors grabbed the two paddles sitting on it. The nurse squirted goo on them and he pressed them to my exposed chest.

“Clear!”

My body jerked along with the me on the table and pain shot through my chest. The electricity passed through me, yanked me back toward my body. I fought it like a fish on a hook. The guy on the table didn’t look very good, even by dead guy standards. The machine buzzed again, the doctor shouted again, electricity jolted me again. My feet skittered on the linoleum but I held my ground.

I’m not going back there.

Not that it mattered, anyway: none of this was real. I was in the body, this scene just a creation of my mind, an amusement before the final curtain fell. Nothingness, the end of it all, would be next on the program, but the medical staff disagreed and kept me hanging around for the better part of an hour.

A curious calm settled in as they injected me with solutions with names unpronounceable without years of education and shocked me with enough juice to make a shock-therapy patient jealous. I’d been raised by Father Dominic as a ward of the church, thoroughly versed in God and Heaven and all the requisite trappings, but the way my life had gone convinced me long ago that, if those biblical rumors held any truth, then God must hate me. And, let’s face it, if God existed, he probably looked down one day on the shite he created, packed up his tent and went somewhere else to give it another shot, hoping for better luck on the second go-round

“Okay, that’s it everyone. I’m calling it,” a doctor with an overbite said glancing at the wall clock. “Time of death: two forty-seven a.m.”

I surge of panic caught me unaware. Calling it? Giving up? This was really the end? I didn’t get to give Trevor his birthday present.

“Do we know who this guy is?”

“They found his ID on the scene. Looks like a mugging.” Nurse Overweight looked to the cop standing at the curtain. “Got a name, Ted?”

“Yeah. Icarus Fell, thirty-seven years-old.”

“Icarus Fell?” Dr. Overbite said. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. That’s what it says on his driver’s licence.”

A rubber glove snapped as the doctor removed it. “Guess his parents didn’t like him much.”

Their conversational tones irked me--where did the caring go? Thankfully, sound faded. My mind still told me I stood amongst them like a medical student learning how to make fun of a dead patient’s name. I stepped back from the melange of medical personnel, glanced around the room, waiting for darkness, emptiness, nothingness.

Nothing is exactly what I got.

Dr. Overbite left; Nurse Overweight pulled a sheet up, covering my corpse all the way to the top of my head leaving a tuft of wet, spiky hair remaining in view. I stepped up to the gurney, alone with my corpse, and stared at the pink, rose-like blossoms of blood soaking through the sheet. Soon, someone would come and wheel away this inanimate piece of meat, take it somewhere to be identified by my next-of-kin: Rae and Trevor. I rested my hand on the corpse’s shoulder, sighed heavily, and wondered if they knew I loved them.

I didn’t get to say good-bye.

This was really it, then. I surveyed the area, heard the sounds of movement beyond the curtain partitioning my deathbed from the rest of the ER. Were both my morbid beliefs and Father Dominic’s bible wrong? Was I doomed to spend eternity hanging around an emergency room watching the sick and injured dragged in and out? Better than at least one of the priest’s alternatives, but I didn’t believe in Hell any more than I did Heaven. If this was it, the ultimate destination, it promised to be terribly dull.