Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Mom,” I said, “I need to go to the hospital.” I knocked again, and called out again. The dog barked, but there wasn’t any other answer. So I drove myself.

“I hate social workers,” Cindy said. She came to visit me in the hospital, though I didn’t want any visitors. She showed up with my homework and a bunch of homemade cards, and I had thought that the art teacher had made everybody draw a card for me, like we used to do in grade school when a kid got sick or their dog died, but when she gave them to me I saw that she had made them all. “One of them kept coming to our house. This Red Cross lady. I don’t even know how she found us, but she kept showing up and my mom kept letting her in, and they would sit around having tea, and then she would talk to each of us in private. Like my mother didn’t already have a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapist before my dad died. ‘It’s hard to lose your father,’ she told me, ‘but it’s even harder when it’s a national tragedy and not just a personal one.’ I told her that was very wise, but I said it like, wise , you know? Like you could tell by the tone of my voice how I thought she was clueless. But she thought I was complimenting her and she told me I was very mature for my age. So when she came again, when we were alone, I leaned over to her, and guess what I said?”

I was staring out the window at the perfect fall day. I wanted to be at practice.

“Guess what I said?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The hospital social worker had just finished talking to me when Cindy came in, asking me again about why my mother couldn’t bring me to the hospital. When I said again that she’d been sick, she asked again with what, and I said she should talk to my mother about that. She’s better about lying in that way than I am — she can make up a whole story in the time it takes to tell it. I knew I would screw things up by talking too much so I just stared at the lady and told her my stomach was starting to hurt again, so she left.

“I said, ‘I’m not a fucking disaster area.’ And she said, ‘You must be very angry. I understand your anger.’ I hate social workers.”

“Somebody has to do the social work,” I said.

“But I bet it really knocked her for a loop when you told her you were the Antichrist. There’s a rehab job none of them could resist.”

“We didn’t talk about that.”

“He is the son of the Devil but I think that with the right role models he could be a very productive member of society.”

“Very funny,” I said. She got out of her chair and sat down next to me on the bed, and took my hand. I didn’t pull away, and she didn’t say anything. We just sat like that for a while. A nurse came in to put some medication in my IV. They were treating me for an ulcer in my duodenum, the part of the small intestine that comes right after the stomach. The doctor kept asking me if I was worried about something, because this is the kind of ulcer you get from worrying very intensely.

“Do you think people are forgetting already?” she asked, after the nurse was gone. “About my dad, I mean.”

“It’s hardly been two months,” I said.

“Long enough,” she said. “People usually forget about shit like this in a couple days. I mean, imagine if it hadn’t been. . how it was. If he just died drunk driving or something. Nobody would have remembered in a week. I almost liked it, before, how people kept saying that nothing was ever going to be the same. Because it wasn’t — not for me. And I wanted it to not be for anybody else, either.”

“It never gets back to normal,” I said.

“Not for me,” she said. “But I mean for them. You know, I liked it, when they kept playing the footage over and over again. My mom kept turning off the television but I kept it on in my room. And I kept saying, ‘Yes, do it again. Show us every fucking morning so nobody ever forgets what they did to my dad.’ But now I have to watch it on my tape.”

“That sounds like a bad idea,” I said. “I get sad just looking at my dad’s picture.” She turned and looked at me then, and brought my hand up to her heart.

“You know, we are exactly alike, me and you. Exactly alike.”

“No, we’re not,” I said, taking my hand away. “My stomach hurts. I’m going to take a nap.”

“Okay,” she said. “Hey, I almost forgot.” She rummaged in her suitcase-sized duffel bag and brought out a present.

“You already gave me the cards,” I said.

“Just open it.” It was another Ouija board, just the regular kind, not fancy like hers. “You’re not supposed to play with it alone. It’ll make you crazy or possessed if you do.”

“I don’t need one of these,” I said, and she leaned close.

“You don’t have to pretend with me,” she said. “You don’t have to put up an act. I know you want to talk to your dad.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, and dropped it on the floor.

“You’re going to be all over it when I’m gone.”

“Jesus! Will you knock that off!”

“You keep saying Jesus like that and you’re going to get gonorrhea or something,” she said. “It’s not good for you to say Jesus all the time.” I pushed the nurse button, to ask them to kick her out, but she left by herself. “What do you want me to bring you tomorrow?” At first I said nothing, but then I said my lacrosse stick and a ball. Then she was gone, and I reached down and slid the game underneath the bed. When the nurse came in I told her I didn’t need her, but she stayed for a minute, refilling the water pitcher and straightening the blankets.

“Your girlfriend is pretty,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing why I didn’t say she wasn’t my girlfriend. I turned over and thought about lacrosse plays, because that usually helps me sleep, and I think I slept for a couple of minutes, because I had a dream that Paul and I were facing off together in front of a huge crowd. Which made no sense because we play on the same team and Paul’s a goalie. When I opened my eyes I was staring at a whole window full of blue sky.

I flipped through the cards. They said things like Hope the bleeding in your stomach stops soon and You are going to live! One was a stick-figure lacrosse player saying Your team needs you back . Only one of them said Get well soon, Antichrist! I threw that one away.

It’ll just be another day, my father said, meaning the day he would die. And he said not to mark it, or make it special, or keep it like some black holiday. Parents come and go, he said, that’s how it’s supposed to be, even though he was only forty-two. He made me promise never to use his death as an excuse for not trying at something, and not to be one of those people who give up on life because God demonstrates early to them that it ends. Cindy said it was like he wanted me to get over his death before he even died. And she said that for her every day was the day. She didn’t have to wait for the one-month or six-month or one-year anniversaries. She marked the time every morning, and every morning when she woke the two planes flew into her head and the towers fell down all over again.

I don’t know when we became friends, or even when she stopped being annoying to me, or when I started to look forward to sitting with her after practice, waiting for the bus. She helped me change the note from the doctor to say I could play again in a week instead of a month. We would lie on our backs, staring straight up at the sky, not even looking at each other when we talked. And sometimes the bus would come and go in that time, and she would give me a ride home.

She had become less popular, either because people were forgetting about what had happened, like she said they would, or because they just didn’t like having her bring it up all the time, or talk about it like it had just happened that morning. It made it easier to be around her when she stopped always drawing a crowd wherever she went. It didn’t bother me when Paul Ricker made fun of me for having a crazy girlfriend, even though I didn’t think of her as a girlfriend.