The Belief in Angels (11 page)

“If Jack says she’s alive, she’s alive. She probably got a concussion, like me.”

“What’s a concussion?”

“Come on, let’s go downstairs and see if we can find something for dinner. I’ll tell you all about concussions.” I’m proud of my newfound head injury knowledge.

I start to push to my feet to go, but Moses grabs my hand and pulls me back down again. “I didn’t tell anyone she’s my mother—the whole time. At first she started moaning, then she didn’t make any noise anymore. I thought she might be dead. I didn’t tell anyone about her being my mother even when the ambulance car came. I didn’t tell anyone.”

I put my arm around him and pull him over to me, not knowing quite what to say. “Don’t worry. There wasn’t anything you could do anyway.”

I’m still dizzy and sort of wobble up out of bed and down to the kitchen. David comes in. He’s all sweaty from basketball practice. “What’s going on?”

“Wendy’s at the hospital. She got in a motorcycle accident and Jack’s gonna call us later and let us know how she’s doing.”

“Who’s gonna make dinner?” David says on his way into the shower.

I end up making us TV dinners.

This is the part where I take over making dinner.

Jack comes back from the hospital later that night and tells us Wendy might stay there for a while because she hurt her neck in the accident. She broke bones in her vertebrae. I study all the vertebrae information in our encyclopedias, but it doesn’t make sense she would be alive if her neck is broken. I decide he didn’t get the story straight. He tells us he’ll call my father to come and take care of us. I argue we can take care of ourselves, but Jack won’t listen, and he makes me call my Aunt Doreen. She’s back in her winter home in Rhode Island, but she knows how to contact my father.

He stopped showing up for our Sunday visits a long time ago. The last we heard, he moved to Florida. Aunt Doreen tells me she’ll call him, though. I try to assure her that we can take care of ourselves, but she has a rough idea of our situation, and she responds as I expect any responsible adult would: she tells me if he won’t come take care of us, she will. I’m thrilled at the prospect of having Aunt Doreen come back to Withensea and stay with us for a while. We haven’t seen her much since the divorce.

I figure my father won’t want to come. He hates Wendy’s parties, her friends, and the fact she smokes pot. He complains how “it’s not good for the kids to see.”

His absence, although I enjoy it, still seems like desertion. I think if he cared he would find a way to change the situation. Even when he was still showing up now and then for those Sunday visits, he never called to let us know either way, and Wendy refused to keep calling him to keep tabs on his plans. I know she loves the fact he’s stopped visiting. He’s rude, bossy, and occasionally even violent when he comes here.

He showed up once about a year ago, drunk in the middle of the day, waving his gun around. Jack was sleeping, as usual, when my father arrived, but he woke up quickly with all the screaming and ran downstairs. Moses and I were standing in the living room staring at Wendy and my father as they went at it.

Wendy yelled, “Shoot me, motherfucker, and you’ll never see the outside of a jail cell.”

“I’m not gonna shoot you, you lousy slut, I’m gonna shoot him.” He pointed the gun at Jack.

“You’re such an asshole. Whadya gonna shoot him for?” Wendy said.

Although Jack seemed shaken, standing there with my father pointing a gun at him, he acted equally shocked to hear Wendy in full verbal assault mode. She presents well most times and hadn’t shown him her full colors until that point. He kept glaring at her and shouting, “Wendy!” every time she swore.

“Listen man, you don’t want to shoot anyone. Your kids are here, and I know they don’t want to see either of you this way. Why don’t we all calm down?”

Wendy stormed upstairs and left Jack and us with my father. He didn’t shoot anyone. I guess her going away calmed him down. He left soon after.

Tonight, I’m praying two prayers to the wooden woman, the old ship masthead: First, that my Aunt Doreen will come take care of us. Second, that my father will stay in Florida.

Jules, 8 years | April 16th, 1970

HEMINGWAY’S MAFIA

I WAKE UP with the same huge lump on the back of my head and I’m still dizzy.

Jack has disappeared. I knew there was no way he would stay and take care of us.

Normally I go to Stillton Elementary, which is a short walk up the road. David takes a bus to Withensea Middle School, and Moses spends the mornings playing, while Wendy sleeps in, until the bus for his afternoon kindergarten session comes. But if David and I go to school, nobody will be there to babysit Moses. We decide we can
all
skip school.

This is the first time any of us have ever played hooky. It’s warm outside, but we don’t want anyone to find out we skipped. We stayed inside all day. First we play Life until we feel hungry. My brothers eat Wheaties, but I like Raisin Bran and we’re out. I eat croutons from an old box in the cupboard while we all watch TV.

We’re jumping on the sofa when the mailman comes. We scream and hide. That’s fun. We play Hide and Seek ‘for reals’ inside our house, which we haven’t done for ages. We play and laugh hard until Moses gets stuck trying to go down the hamper shoot. This is
really
funny until we have to pull him down by his legs to unstick him and he lands with a crash, tipping over the hamper. He’s crying hard and there’s a huge bump on his forehead. Now we both have bumps on our heads. Other than that, we’re having one of the best days we’ve had in a long time.

Later that day we get a surprise. The wooden woman has ignored my prayers.
My father shows up. He doesn’t just show up. He brings our new stepmother, Paulina. Until today, we’d no idea he’d remarried.

All my fairy tale ideas about ugly stepmothers shatter. Paulina is breathtakingly beautiful. She’s tall, about six feet tall, with bangs and long, coppery-brown hair flipped up at the ends in big curls. Her lashes are unbelievably long, and she has big see-through blue eyes she’s heaped loads of makeup on. She has a curvy body with long, long legs and big breasts. Her lips are outlined with a dark ruby-red pencil and painted in with a bright fuchsia-pink lipstick, and when she flashes her wide, white-toothed smile, she dazzles.

I’ve seen the Playboy magazines my father stashed under the bed when he lived with us, and Paulina looks like the women in those magazines, but with clothes on. Her perfume smells like lemon peels and nutmeg.

“Hello, you must be Julianne. Your father has told me so many nice things about you.”

I wonder what nice things he might have said. We’ve rarely heard from him since his move to Florida, and he hasn’t remembered to send birthday or Christmas cards for any of us for about two years, since the divorce. He puts his arm around Paulina proudly.

“I’d like you to meet my new wife, Paulina. We would have invited you to the wedding, but we decided quickly and had no time to bring you guys down to Florida.”

His excuse doesn’t fool me. It’s clear we aren’t part of his new life. I wonder if Paulina’s figured out what a lousy father he is or if he’s lied to her about how he treats us.

This is the part where we meet my father’s second wife and we all play house.

The first thing he does is put us to work cleaning. Probably a good idea. Everything looks like a cyclone hit it and someone had a party with the debris. I don’t think Wendy has dusted or cleaned anything thoroughly in the two years since he’s been gone.

My brothers are told to clean their rooms. Since mine is already tidy, I’m on dusting duty. I am given a rag and a rusty can of Pledge and put to work in Wendy’s room, where he and Paulina are, apparently, going to sleep.

My father was a neat freak when he lived with us. Many fights with Wendy were about her low standard of cleanliness. So I’m not surprised we’re cleaning again. Still, I resent having to make things clean for him. Paulina pitches in and cleans up the kitchen while he makes several phone calls.

“Oh my,” she keeps exclaiming from the kitchen. I’m not sure if she’s reacting to Wendy’s kitchen décor, the kitchen’s state of disorder, or both.

My father makes a few crass comments about Wendy’s credit card redecorating spree, but otherwise he seems happy. It seems like he’s enjoying being back. After a while, when she sees we have nothing in the refrigerator, Paulina leaves for the store to grocery shop.

Wendy calls.

There are several phones spread around each floor of the house. My brothers and I each take our own extensions to talk to her. We all say hello. David is on the phone in the den and Moses is upstairs in Wendy’s bedroom. I sit on the piano bench in the living room, where my father listens to my end of the conversation.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

“How long are you going to have to stay in the hospital?” David asks.

“Not sure. They
dunno
how long it’ll take for my neck to heal. It’s broken in two places,” Wendy says. She sounds funny, like she’s talking with her mouth full of food.

“But can’t you come back home while it gets better?” Moses asks.

“No, the doctors
wammetuh
stay in the hospital case my breathing becomes worse. I
dunno
know how
longI’llbeere”

Wendy begins to cry as we all listen on our various phones. No one knows what to say to her. Moses tries. “It’s all right, Mummy. Dad’s here and he brought his new wife, Paulina. They’ll take care of us and you’ll be better soon and come home.”

We can hear her make a terrible gasping noise. “He brought
thadwhore?”

Moses made a big mistake.

“Puddyafatha
on the phone,” Wendy says. I shakily hand the phone to him.

“She wants to talk to you.”

I can hear Wendy’s scream through the receiver even when I cross the living room.

“You asshole! You bring that whore inside my house?
Getherouttathere
!”

At first he talks quietly back to her even though he says nasty things. “You’re lucky your neck is already broken. If you think you can tell me what do, you’re a crazy bitch! She’s my wife, and she goes where I go.”

“Get your ass out!” Wendy screams, completely clearly.

Now he loses it. “I gave you this house. Don’t you talk to me that way! You better shut your fucking mouth or …”

“Don’t you dare threaten me or I’ll mess you up so bad you won’t know your ass from your elbow!”

“You can’t do shit from a hospital bed. You’re going to have to shut up and let me take care of my kids. Do you understand? This wouldn’t have happened if you
stayed home where you belong instead of riding around like a teenage imbecile on a motorcycle!”

He hands me back the phone. “Say good-bye to your mother.” I accept the phone from him, still shaking. “Goo-good-bye, Mom,” I say quietly. “W … w …w … will you call us tomorrow?”

“I will,” she says.

My brothers say good-bye and we all hang up our respective phones.

I worry about what will happen. Wendy and my father are at it again, and it seems clear neither one is going to back down.

I’m not happy about having him here again. He’s been here barely a few hours and he’s created a war zone. Paulina seems decent, though, and it’s good to have a semblance of parental intervention again. We’ve gone two years without any and managed to remain safe, but I know it might become a dangerous situation for my brothers and me. I’m afraid Wendy will make him go away again, as much as I’m afraid of his terrifying temper, living here with us.

When Paulina gets back, my father helps her unload tons of bags from the grocery store and she starts making us dinner. This is a treat. We are told dinner will be at six thirty sharp and to wash our hands, change our clothes, and brush our hair, which no one has told us to do for years.

At six thirty we all sit at the dinner table, wide-eyed with gratefulness, and wait for the signal from my father to begin. After he lifts his fork we’re allowed to do the same, and not a moment sooner.

Dinners with my father were usually tense. His idea of parental responsibility included a strict manner code for meal etiquette. We had been trained to eat as though we were attending a banquet held by Emily Post.