Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

Your brother is living with Reuben Claflin in a cave. Abby took a dime from Reuben to steal a pie and bring it to them. She gave the dime to me, as if that would undo the theft somehow. I enclose it because I didn’t quite know what else to do with it, and surely Tercin owes you reparations for all the harm he’s done. Abby is a clever little magpie. She described their situation and even did a sketch — it is all very cozy and domestic, and Reuben’s hand is tender when he mops Tercin’s brow. I wonder a little what he sees — I have had four visions since he fell ill and never found him once. Perhaps a debased spirit only perceives the horror, and hides itself from every decent friend in that world as in this one. In any case you should tell your mother he is thriving .

I am thriving too, Peter. Not that any ordinary person would notice it to look at me. The mirror me — the one that is all of this world and all surfaces — is spotted up and bruised and jaundiced and thin, and my hair, as Mother tells me, has lost its spirit. But beyond my body I am a growing giantess, and every time I enter another vision I get a little closer to an end that I know is not death. You are a giant too — I see it no matter how you seek to hide from me. We stand over all the others the way the towers once stood over us, before we became them. Don’t you understand the progression — from frail little person to soaring angel to monolith? What next, except the sky above it all, and a spirit that comprehends everything, and is apart from nothing? Never mind Reverend Wallop’s good news, here is mine: Something wonderful is coming, dressed in a raiment of fire and destruction and grief. We will be elevated, and understand, and returning to health will be such a small thing we’ll do it in a blink of the mind’s eye. So never mind poor Edgar. His ailing decline teaches a false lesson, one to be ignored. Come out, my love — come out of your depths. Maybe Edgar Minton is going to die, but we are going to live .

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she told me the first time we met. Six years old, I was digging under a log, trying to turn it up to look for worms underneath. This was back when my father still had all his property and I could walk for the whole afternoon without leaving his orange groves. I spent a lot of time amusing myself that way, playing games I made up, inventing friends to play with since I really had none of my own, or looking for buried Indian or pirate treasure. My sisters were all much older than me and hated to have me underfoot, and so they’d draw me false maps, age them by beating them in the sand with a baseball bat and burning them around the edges, send me on a quest. I fell for this sort of thing for years.

She was sitting in a tree, gently pushing at an orange where it hung near her face, making it swing. My imaginary friends were not the kind you could see. I figured her for a smart-aleck picker’s daughter, since it was the end of the season and the groves were full of Guatemalans. She wore a sleeveless yellow dress with a furry kitten face on the front — I remember that very clearly, and remember wondering later how, if she didn’t exist, I could have made that up. Her skin was very dark. Her hair hung past her lap. She looked to be my age and like she could be in my grade. I ignored her.

As soon as I got the log up I disturbed a nest of yellow jackets, which flew out and attacked me, stinging me on my face and my neck and my hands. I could see her watching me while I slapped at them and yelled and cried. She said nothing but stood up in the branch, and spread her wings out behind her, which amazed and frightened me. I tried to run back home but could hardly breathe — I was having an allergic reaction. But I found a group of pickers having their lunch in the grass, and collapsed in front of them, swollen and wheezing.

She came to see me in the hospital. High on IV Benadryl, I told anyone who would listen that there was an angel in the room, and the doctors and nurses thought that was charming. Even back then I was a quick and subtle thinker when I was stoned, and when my father asked me about what I had said, I could tell by his tone of voice that it would be best to pretend not to know what he was talking about. But when we were alone, and she stood silently at the foot of my bed, looking strange not just on account of wings but because she was dressed now as a doctor, with a white coat and a stethoscope and her hair done up in a smart bun, I asked her why she hadn’t warned me about the wasps. “I’m not that kind of angel,” she said.

Though my father only ever knew a tenth of the trouble I’ve been in, I was still his least favorite child, and the last person he wanted taking care of him when he got very ill. But every one of my sisters was pregnant — one very much augmented and on purpose, and the other two accidents of fate. How they celebrated the coincidence, and then rued it when it forced them to bully me back to Florida from San Francisco. I was in clinic when they called, and it’s a testament to their power-of-three invincibility that they were able to blow through the phone tree and the two different receptionists who routinely deny my existence when patients try to find me.

“Papa is sick,” said Charlotte.

“He’s been sick,” I said, because this had been going on for a year, and though nobody gets better from metastatic small-cell lung cancer, he’d been holding his own for months and months.

“Papa is sicker,” said Christine, and Carmen added, “Much sicker!” She is eldest and barely most pregnant.

“He’s in the hospital,” said Christine. “There’s an infection.”

“In his bladder,” said Charlotte. There are two years between each of them but they’ve always seemed like triplets, all of them looking the same age with their furrowed brows and disapproving hatchet mouths, all as tall and light as I am short and dark, all with the same blue eyes that seem just the right color to stare a person down with. My eyes, like my father’s, are nearly black, and Carmen says I can hide anything in them.

“A little cystitis,” I said. “So what?”

“Dr. Klar says he’s very ill,” said Christine.

“She doesn’t know if he’ll come out of the hospital,” said Charlotte.

“She always says that,” I said. “She never knows. She’s an alarmist. She’s a worrier.”

“You have to go!” they said all together.

“ You have to go,” I said. “You go if it matters so much.”

“We’re pregnant!” they said. And then the individual excuses: mild preeclampsia for Charlotte and Christine and a clotty calf for Carmen. They can’t travel from New York, where they all live within waddling distance of each other.

“People travel when they’re eight months pregnant,” I said. “People do it all the time!” Though I knew that they don’t, and now the angel was sitting on my desk and shaking her head at me.

“You’re a doctor,” they said all together, as if that should settle it, and I wanted to say I’m impaired, and a pediatrician to boot. I could have confessed it right then, to them and to the whole world: I am an impaired physician , and then started down the yellow brick road to rehab.

Instead I quietly hung up on them. The angel was still shaking her head at me. She was dressed to shock, with a plastic shopping bag on her head, in a filthy housedress, and with a dead cat wrapped around either foot.

“I barely know him!” I shouted at her, and she didn’t respond. And I told her I had a patient waiting, which she already knew because there is nothing I know that she doesn’t know, and nothing I’ve ever been able to hide from her.