Falling Angels (26 page)

Their mother dying has changed her again. She knew this when she accepted the marijuana cigarette. Why not? she
thought, watching Lou inhale and imagining their mother floating up to heaven, unburdened enough and brave enough to float because of having nothing left to be afraid of.

Lou is humming in a distant, off-key way that Norma takes for mourning and that makes her sad. But she also feels as if she is floating, as if she and their mother are holding hands. “I wish,” she says,“we could drive to Disneyland. Right now. Just drive south and west, south and west, ‘til we got there.”

“Let’s hit the road,” Lou says.

Her eyes still closed, Norma smiles.

Lou glances at the back seat and sees that Sandy is asleep. She switches off the radio.

The rain falls softly in grey, bad-television-reception lines. Everything that Lou is looking at is grey and dirty white. Except for their father’s ridiculous green-and-red suit. The typical used-car-salesman’s suit. She remembers him going off to work in that suit and that hat. His confident, military walk to the car. On the lookout for the neighbours’ slip-ups. It’s no compensation, Lou thinks, addressing him, referring to what she figures would be his defence of those grey years: “Nobody can say that Jim Field didn’t own a colourful outfit!”

Norma is asleep now. Snoring. Dead stoned, Lou thinks and is reminded of when the sight of Norma at the end of the street made her want to cry and then made her want to make Norma cry. How could she have been so mean? To Norma, of all people? Look at her asleep there. Her kind, plain face. A saint’s face, Lou thinks, good and kind and unprotected by beauty.

Their mother was good and kind
and
beautiful. Lou smiles at the thought that she used to get their mother mixed up with the Virgin Mary. Beauty was no protection against people dying on their mother, though. First her own mother died of a stroke, then a few years later her two brothers got killed in the war, and then a few years after that the baby died. If throwing the baby was just speeding up the inevitable, Lou wonders why their
mother didn’t throw herself, too. Of course, you could say that she did—she threw her life. And yet she didn’t seem unhappy. Except …

Lou remembers something. She has a revelation. Her heart begins to pound, and she rummages in her pockets for a cigarette, but she hasn’t got any. She takes the roach out of the ashtray and eats that.

What she has remembered is the morning that she dropped acid, and their mother talking about an urge to be where the baby was when she let him fall. That’s not exactly what she said, but it’s what she must have meant. Because on the night she died the highest place she could get to was where she went.

Ever since swallowing Maternal Instinct at the funeral, Lou has believed that their mother loved the baby with a mother’s blind love. Whether or not their mother threw the baby or dropped him, whether it was an act of craziness or sacrifice, whether or not all these years she has been sorry, it dawns on Lou that sometimes she must have been haunted by the moment at which she was standing at the railing, and there was the thunder of the falls, and her eyes were glued to the water that was on the verge of going over—nothing could stop the water now—and she had that weight in her arms. The moment at which the thing she loved enough to die for, she let die.

“I have to be up high,” she said when she wanted to get up on the roof, when Lou and Norma tied her up with the skipping rope. Lou lets out an astonished laugh at the memory of tying her up. She wipes the windshield with her sleeve, but nothing happens, and she realizes that why she can’t see out is because she’s crying.

God, I’m stoned, she thinks, pressing her palms into her eyes.

The rain is suddenly falling hard again. Lou wonders about their father and leans forward to look out Norma’s window. What is he doing? She sits straighter. What the hell is he doing?

Jesus Christ, he’s climbing the wall!

She covers her mouth with a hand that smells of marijuana. God! He’s got over! She pulls on her door handle. It’s stuck. “Come on,” she mutters, bumping the door with her shoulder.

Their father is walking down the bank.

“Come
on.”
She jiggles the door handle and hits Norma on the arm to wake her up. Norma moans in protest but doesn’t open her eyes. All Lou can see now is their father’s hat. He must be on the edge of the bank.

Lou starts to climb over Norma, and then it comes to her that her door is locked, not stuck, and she turns back around, pulls up the button, opens the door and jumps out. The rain is like a hose turned on her. “Dad!” she screams.

The only people anywhere near him are under a black umbrella, facing the other way. They don’t hear her either. She runs across the parking lot and the road. A car throws up a wave of water, drenching her. The car behind it skids, honks. She screams “Dad!” again as the black umbrella moves away from him, as a seagull swoops down from the sky and circles above his head.

He just seems to be standing there. Listing. The seagull won’t go. The seagull is their mother, Lou thinks, already reincarnated.

There is so much rain that there are puddles on the grass. Lou splashes through them. She stops. Where is the hat? God, God, she can’t see his hat! There goes their mother, flying off.

“Come back!” Lou screams at their father. “Come back! Fucking idiot!”

Their father is gone.

Lou is at the railing now, dashing up and down the bank, shouting “Dad!” She races to where the people under the black umbrella were, where you can see the falls and the river below.

Nothing. Not even his hat. No trace.

She stands there, stunned. Rain pours over her. The seagull
flies back. The seagull who is their mother, Lou thinks. Their mother plunges into the water and shoots up with a fish, then soars into the mist, the fish drooping out her bill.

The rain feels warm now, almost hot. Lou shuts her eyes. Something obscene is happening to her. She is getting that feeling again, as if the rain is washing away her resistance to it, washing away whatever else she should be feeling, and all that’s left is relief, ecstasy, the sheer happiness she experienced up on the roof and in the washroom at the funeral parlour.

“Mommy,” she says out loud, like a child, appealing and apologizing to the bird, but as the feeling peaks and fades, the idea grows in her that the reason their mother flew by was to give the feeling to her. A benediction, a legacy, last words, comfort from the other side. “You are on your own now. The world is all yours. Your father is the fish I ate.”

A tremor passes through Lou’s body. She starts crying. She runs back to the car, where her sisters are asleep. The rain is hot, and her feet don’t seem to touch the ground.

BARBARA GOWDY is the award-winning author of The Romantic, The White Bone, Mister Sandman and We So Seldom Look on Love. Her books have appeared on bestseller lists throughout the world. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award, she has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a repeat finalist for the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Gowdy’s most recent novel is Helpless. She lives in Toronto. Visit her at www.barbaragowdy.ca.

www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Author Biography

Select Awards

How
Falling Angels
Took Flight, by Liam Lacey

The Feral Side of Fiction: Reading (and Writing with) Barbara Gowdy, by Marni Jackson

Web Detective

An Excerpt from
Mister Sandman
, by Barbara Gowdy

B
ARBARA
G
OWDY
was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

Her first book,
Through the Green Valley
(a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published
Falling Angels
to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look on Love,
was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into
Kissed,
a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
Falling Angels
was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.

Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—
Mister Sandman
(1995),
The White Bone
(1998) and
The Romantic
(2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English
and the
Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each
for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Romantic
earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in
Harper’s Magazine,
singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel,
Helpless,
will be published by HarperCollins in 2007.

She lives in Toronto.

Barbara Gowdy received the prestigious Marian Engel Award in 1996, recognizing her contribution to Canadian literature.

We So Seldom Look on Love

• Finalist for the Trillium Award
  

Mister Sandman

• Finalist for the Trillium Award
  
• Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
  
• Finalist for the Giller Prize
  
• Named a
  Times Literary Supplement
  “Book of the Year”