Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Did he linger?” I ask her.

“No. He got a sharp blow to the head and that was that. Volvos are the safest cars in the world, but he didn’t have a Volvo.” She is silent a moment before she asks, “What carries for you?” I don’t understand and tell her so. “Car wrecks carry for me,” she says, with a squeeze. “Crumpled metal, even little tin cans in the road. And shattered glass. And head injuries. These things bring back a feeling like I’ve eaten a stone. It’s in my stomach, usually, but sometimes it’s all through me like it’s in my blood. Blood carries, too.”

“Airplanes,” I say. “And airplane-disaster movies. I don’t like the swamp anymore, or alligators.”

“Crushed vertebrae,” she says. “Broken necks. Medical terms like ‘C1’ and ‘C2.’ And this word is awful: ‘petechiae.’ It almost hurts just to say it.”

“Flight,” I say. “Birds.”

“Copper caskets. And flowers. Red roses and yellow roses and sunflowers.”

“Even the scent of flowers,” I say. She’s got all the windows open again and she drives till the sun starts to go down. It begins to drizzle and the road gets slick, but I am not afraid of an accident.

Somewhere near Pembroke Pines I tell her that I have to get back by 7:30 or I’ll be in trouble. She drives back, not to my house, but to the St. Theresa’s parking lot. It’s totally empty. We have not said so much, but for such a long time her hand was on my leg, squeezing, squeezing in time to the radio music. It’s been very nice, I think. A nice date. But when I go to get out, she says, “Hold on. You want to learn how to drive?”

I am pretty tall for my age. I can reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel, though I must peer and lift myself up a little.

“You look like an old lady,” she tells me. I drive back and forth across the parking lot three times, then around the light poles. Eventually I’m circling one at a leisurely pace. This is easy, I think.

“Faster,” she says. “You’ve got to learn to drive fast or I’ve taught you nothing.”

I speed up a little, and she reaches over and shoves down hard on my knee with her left hand. The Volvo lurches forward but I handle it and we go around and around, faster and faster like on the Round Up at the annual St. Theresa’s fair held every May in this very parking lot. Irresistible forces are hurling Miss Ouida Montoya over to my side of the car. I’m thinking of the Coriolis force, of round hurricane eyes, and other round things: oranges, apples, eyeballs. I’m pressed hard up against the door and it seems to me that this circular force is drawing something out of my body.

“Faster,” she says. So I speed up.

“Faster, faster,” she says. “We need another master!” I look over at her face. She’s smiling like crazy, like she’s quite crazy. Her eyes look manic, like they might pop out of her head and dangle on springs. “You’re doing fine!” she tells me. Beyond her the world is just a big pole until I hit the pole. We glance off it and spin, all the way around once, twice, and another half a time. I hit the brakes and the car shudders, then stops.

“I wrecked your car,” I say, crying like a stupid baby.

“It’s okay,” she says, Her face is right in mine, close enough for a kiss. Past her I can see that one headlight has gone out, while the other illuminates the school like a prison searchlight.

“What do you want?” she asks. “What do you want?”

I moan and cry mundane little-boy sobs. I cannot name it but somehow I know what it is. She closes in on me, her arms sneaking around for a hug. She really is close enough for a kiss — so I do it. I strike like a serpent, and maybe five seconds into it I realize that her tongue is not playing with my tongue, it’s seeking to evade my tongue, and she’s pushing me away.

“What are you doing?” she wants to know.

“I was — taking something,” I say.

“I didn’t want that,” she says, wiping her mouth.

“I know,” I say.

“You better get out.”

“Sure,” I say. I knew better than to do it. I knew she was offering her sicko pseudo-motherlove but I took the other because it was close. I feel evil, but I feel better, too.

“You wrecked my car,” she says, as if she has just noticed. I get out and walk away, not looking back, but when the horn starts honking in staccato bursts, I imagine she must be banging her head against it.

I walk home, wondering, Did Satan feel like this when he almost conquered Heaven? Is there a baby nearby whose head I might dash against a stone? Am I human? The palm trees loom like kalai-zee, chuckling deep in their bellies, each one full of child. I am broken open, I think, and something awful has hatched out.

At home I pause outside the door, listening. It’s quiet on the other side. I go around and look in the dining-room window. There’s Yatha McIlvoy, putting candles on a cake. Caleb is in Mama’s lap, on the other side of the table. There are others, all Yatha’s friends. I figure she must have talked them into it or Mama paid them off somehow. They’re all girls.

I am thinking, World, life, I got you this time. I’ve had my kiss and nobody can take it away, nobody can take it back. At the door again I fumble with my key, make it loud in the lock so they’ll think they’re ready for me. Then I throw open the door and leap through, screaming like a banshee, shrieking, “Happy Birthday!”

Beatrice needed a new liver. Her old one had succumbed to damage suffered in a fall one month earlier from the top of a seven-story parking garage. She lay in a coma while the hospital prepared for her imminent transplant, but she was not asleep. That part of her which was not her broken body stood by her bed in the surgical intensive care unit and watched as a nurse leaned over her to draw her blood. Beatrice’s unusual condition gave her access to aspects of people that usually are utterly private. So she knew that the nurse, whose name was Judy, was thinking of her husband. It was eleven-thirty p.m., just about his bedtime, and Judy imagined him settling down to sleep. He would take off his shirt and his pants and fold the sheet down neatly so it covered him to just past his hips. He would turn on his side and put a hand under his cheek. Judy missed acutely the space between his shoulder blades, into which she was accustomed to settling her face as she waited for sleep to come.

Distracted, she missed the vein, and cursed softly when she noticed that no blood came into the tube. Beatrice’s body lay unprotesting as Judy shifted the needle beneath her skin, questing after the already sorely abused vein. Beatrice did not feel it when Judy found the vein, and the borrowed blood (in the first hours of her stay, Beatrice had received a complete transfusion) slipped quietly into a red-topped tube. When that one was full, Judy proceeded to fill a gray-topped tube, a lavender-topped tube, and, finally, a tube with a rubber stopper the color of freshly laid robin’s eggs.

Judy straightened up and stared at her patient as her hands went automatically about the business of attaching red-numbered labels to the tubes. Beatrice was a medium-sized woman with rich, curly red hair but otherwise unremarkable features. Beneath obscuring tubes and wires, her skin was pale and slightly greenish, and under her spare hospital nightie her once generous form was getting bony. In the same way, her hair was not so lovely as it had been on her admission, when it was bright and coppery. Now it was duller, though still pretty, and at the roots it had darkened to a muddy, bloody color. As she wrapped the tubes in a laboratory requisition form and tucked the little package into a plastic bag, Judy resolved to come back and give Beatrice’s hair a full one hundred strokes of brushing. This seemed to Beatrice, who no longer cared about her hair, a waste of time.