I could say nothing meaningful or helpful about that. No one could have. Any words, no matter how sincerely meant, would have tasted as false as vinegar is bitter.
Sure enough, she had something important to tell me, but she needed time to marshal all the words into orderly ranks and march them across the table at me. Because whatever she had to tell me—it scared her. Her fear was visible: brittle in her bones and waxy in her skin.
Slowly working her way to her true subject, she said, “I liked to bring my mother things when she couldn’t get them easily herself. A glass of iced tea. A sandwich. Her medicine. A pillow for her chair. Anything. Later, it was a bedpan. And toward the end, fresh sheets when she was incontinent. I never minded that, either. She always smiled at me when I brought her things, smoothed my hair with her poor swollen hands. I couldn’t heal her, or make it possible for her to run again or dance, couldn’t relieve her pain or her fear, but I could
attend
her, make her comfortable, monitor her condition—and doing those things was more important to me than…than anything.”
The apricot brandy was too sweet to be called brandy but not as sweet as I had expected. Indeed, it was potent. No amount of it could make me forget my parents, however, or Angela her mother.
“All I ever wanted to be was a nurse,” she repeated. “And for a long time it was satisfying work. Scary and sad, too, when we lost a patient, but mostly rewarding.” When she looked up from the brandy, her eyes were pried wide open by a memory. “God, I was so scared when you had appendicitis. I thought I was going to lose my little Chris.”
“I was nineteen. Not too little.”
“Honey, I’ve been your visiting nurse since you were diagnosed when you were a toddler. You’ll always be a little boy to me.”
I smiled. “I love you, too, Angela.”
Sometimes I forget that the directness with which I express my best emotions is unusual, that it can startle people and—as in this case—move them more deeply than I expect.
Her eyes clouded with tears. To repress them, she bit her lip, but then she resorted to the apricot brandy.
Nine years ago, I’d had one of those cases of appendicitis in which the symptoms do not manifest until the condition is acute. After breakfast, I suffered mild indigestion. Before lunch, I was vomiting, red-faced, and gushing sweat. Stomach pain twisted me into the curled posture of a shrimp in the boiling oil of a deep fryer.
My life was put at risk because of the delay caused by the need for extraordinary preparations at Mercy Hospital. The surgeon was not, of course, amenable to the idea of cutting open my abdomen and conducting the procedure in a dark—or even dimly lighted—operating room. Yet protracted exposure to the bright lights of the surgery was certain to result in a severe burn to any skin not protected from the glare, risking melanoma but also inhibiting the healing of the incision. Covering everything below the point of incision—from my groin to my toes—was easy: a triple layer of cotton sheeting pinned to prevent it from slipping aside. Additional sheeting was used to improvise complex tenting over my head and upper body, designed to protect me from the light but also to allow the anesthesiologist to slip under from time to time, with a penlight, to take my blood pressure and my temperature, to adjust the gas mask, and to ensure that the electrodes from the electrocardiograph remained securely in place on my chest and wrists to permit continued monitoring of my heart. Their standard procedure required that my abdomen be draped except for a window of exposed skin at the site of the surgery, but in my case this rectangular window had to be reduced to the narrowest possible slit. With self-retaining retractors to keep the incision open and judicial use of tape to shield the skin to the very lip of the cut, they dared to slice me. My guts could take all the light that my doctors wanted to pour into them—but by the time they got that far, my appendix had burst. In spite of a meticulous cleanup, peritonitis ensued; an abscess developed and was swiftly followed by septic shock, requiring a second surgical procedure two days later.
After I recovered from septic shock and was no longer in danger of imminent death, I lived for months with the expectation that what I had endured might trigger one of the neurological problems related to XP. Generally these conditions develop after a burn or following long-term cumulative exposure to light—or for reasons not understood—but sometimes they apparently can be engendered by severe physical trauma or shock. Tremors of the head or the hands. Hearing loss. Slurred speech. Even mental impairment. I waited for the first signs of a progressive, irreversible neurological disorder—but they never came.
William Dean Howells, the great poet, wrote that death is at the bottom of everyone’s cup. But there is still some sweet tea in mine.
And apricot brandy.
After taking another thick sip from her cordial glass, Angela said, “All I ever wanted was to be a nurse, but look at me now.”
She wanted me to ask, and so I did: “What do you mean?”
Gazing at captive flames through a curve of ruby glass, she said, “Nursing is about life. I’m about death now.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but I waited.
“I’ve done terrible things,” she said.
“I’m sure you haven’t.”
“I’ve seen others do terrible things, and I haven’t tried to stop them. The guilt’s the same.”
“Could you have stopped them if you’d tried?”
She thought about that awhile. “No,” she said, but she looked no less troubled.
“No one can carry the whole world on her shoulders.”
“Some of us better try,” she said.
I gave her time. The brandy was fine.
She said, “If I’m going to tell you, it has to be now. I don’t have much time. I’m becoming.”
“Becoming?”
“I feel it. I don’t know who I’ll be a month from now, or six months. Someone I won’t like to be. Someone who terrifies me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know.”
“How can I help?” I asked.
“No one can help. Not you. Not me. Not God.” Having shifted her gaze from the votive candles to the golden liquid in her glass, she spoke quietly but fiercely: “We’re screwing it up, Chris, like we always do, but this is bigger than we’ve ever screwed up before. Because of pride, arrogance, envy…we’re losing it, all of it. Oh, God, we’re losing it, and already there’s no way to turn back, to undo what’s been done.”
Although her voice was not slurred, I suspected that she had drunk more than one previous glass of apricot brandy. I tried to take comfort in the thought that drink had led her to exaggerate, that whatever looming catastrophe she perceived was not a hurricane but only a squall magnified by mild inebriation.
Nevertheless, she had succeeded in countering the warmth of the kitchen and the cordial. I no longer considered removing my jacket.
“I can’t stop them,” she said. “But I can stop keeping secrets for them. You deserve to know what happened to your mom and dad, Chris—even if pain comes with the knowledge. Your life’s been hard enough, plenty hard, without this, too.”
Truth is, I don’t believe my life has been especially hard. It has been
different
. If I were to rage against this difference and spend my nights yearning for so-called normalcy, then I would surely make life as hard as granite and break myself on it. By embracing difference, by choosing to thrive on it, I lead a life no harder than most others and easier than some.
I didn’t say a word of this to Angela. If she was motivated by pity to make these pending revelations, then I would compose my features into a mask of suffering and present myself as a figure of purest tragedy. I would be Macbeth. I would be mad Lear. I would be Schwarzenegger in
Terminator 2
, doomed to the vat of molten steel.
“You’ve got so many friends…but there’re enemies you don’t know about,” Angela continued. “Dangerous bastards. And some of them are strange…. They’re becoming.”
That word again.
Becoming.
When I rubbed the back of my neck, I discovered that the spiders I felt were imaginary.
She said, “If you’re going to have a chance…any chance at all…you need to know the truth. I’ve been wondering where to begin, how to tell you. I think I should start with the monkey.”
“The monkey?” I echoed, certain I had not heard her correctly.
“The monkey,” she confirmed.
In this context, the word had an inescapable comic quality, and I wondered again about Angela’s sobriety.
When at last she looked up from her glass, her eyes were desolate pools in which lay drowned some vital part of the Angela Ferryman whom I had known since childhood. Meeting her stare—its bleak gray sheen—I felt the nape of my neck shrink, and I no longer found any comic potential whatsoever in the word
monkey.
12
“It was Christmas Eve four years ago,” she said. “About an hour after sunset. I was here in the kitchen, baking cookies. Using both ovens. Chocolate-chip in one. Walnut-oatmeal in the other. The radio was on. Somebody like Johnny Mathis singing ‘Silver Bells.’”
I closed my eyes to try to picture the kitchen on that Christmas Eve—but also to have an excuse to shut out Angela’s haunted stare.
She said, “Rod was due home any minute, and we both were off work the entire holiday weekend.”
Rod Ferryman had been her husband.
Over three and a half years ago, six months after the Christmas Eve of which Angela was speaking, Rod had committed suicide with a shotgun in the garage of this house. Friends and neighbors had been stunned, and Angela had been devastated. He was an outgoing man with a good sense of humor, easy to like, not depressive, with no apparent problems that could have driven him to take his own life.
“I’d decorated the Christmas tree earlier in the day,” Angela said. “We were going to have a candlelight dinner, open some wine, then watch
It’s a Wonderful Life.
We loved that movie. We had gifts to exchange, lots of little gifts. Christmas was our favorite time of year, and we were like kids about the gifts….”
She fell silent.
When I dared to look, I saw that she had closed her eyes. Judging by her wrenched expression, her quicksilver memory had slipped from that Christmas night to the evening in the following June when she found her husband’s body in the garage.
Candlelight flickered across her eyelids.
In time, she opened her eyes, but for a while they remained fixed on a faraway sight. She sipped her brandy.
“I was happy,” she said. “The cookie smells. The Christmas music. And the florist had delivered a huge poinsettia from my sister, Bonnie. It was there on the end of the counter, so red and cheerful. I felt wonderful, really wonderful. It was the last time I ever felt wonderful—and the last time I ever will. So…I was spooning cookie batter onto a baking sheet when I heard this sound behind me, an odd little chirrup, and then something like a sigh, and when I turned, there was a monkey sitting right on this table.”
“Good heavens.”
“A rhesus monkey with these awful dark-yellow eyes. Not like their normal eyes. Strange.”
“Rhesus? You recognized the species?”
“I paid for nursing school by working as a lab assistant for a scientist at UCLA. The rhesus is one of the most commonly used animals in experiments. I saw a lot of them.”
“And suddenly one of them is sitting right here.”
“There was a bowl of fruit on the table—apples and tangerines. The monkey was peeling and eating one of the tangerines. Neat as you please, this big monkey placing the peelings in a tidy pile.”
“Big?” I asked.
“You’re probably thinking of an organ grinder’s monkey, one of those tiny cute little things. Rhesuses aren’t like that.”
“How big?”
“Probably two feet tall. Maybe twenty-five pounds.”
Such a monkey would seem enormous when encountered, unexpected, in the middle of a kitchen table.
I said, “You must have been pretty surprised.”
“More than surprised. I was a little scared. I know how strong those buggers are for their size. Mostly they’re peaceable, but once in a while you get one with a mean streak, and he’s a real handful.”
“Not the kind of monkey anyone would keep as a pet.”
“God, no. Not anyone normal—at least not in my book. Well, I’ll admit that rhesuses can be cute sometimes, with their pale little faces and that ruff of fur. But this one wasn’t cute.” Clearly, she could see it in her mind’s eye. “No, not this one.”
“So where did it come from?”
Instead of answering, Angela stiffened in her chair and cocked her head, listening intently to the house.
I couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.
Apparently, neither did she. Yet when she spoke again, she did not relax. Her thin hands were locked clawlike on the cordial glass. “I couldn’t figure how the thing got inside, into the house. December wasn’t overly warm that year. No windows or doors were open.”
“You didn’t hear it enter the room?”
“No. I was making noise with the cookie sheets, the mixing bowls. Music on the radio. But the damn thing must’ve been sitting on the table a minute or two, anyway, because by the time I realized it was there, it had eaten half the tangerine.”
Her gaze swept the kitchen, as though from the corner of her eye she had seen purposeful movement in the shadows at the periphery.
After steadying her nerves with brandy once more, she said, “Disgusting—a monkey right on the kitchen table, of all places.”
Grimacing, she brushed one trembling hand across the polished pine, as though a few of the creature’s hairs might still be clinging to the table four years after the incident.
“What did you do?” I pressed.
“I edged around the kitchen to the back door, opened it, hoping the monkey would run out.”
“But it was enjoying the tangerine, feeling pretty comfortable where it was,” I guessed.
“Yeah. It looked at the open door, then at me—and it actually seemed to laugh. This little tittering noise.”
“I swear I’ve seen dogs laugh now and then. Monkeys probably do, too.”
Angela shook her head. “Can’t remember any of them laughing in the lab. Of course, considering what their lives were like…they didn’t have much reason to be in high spirits.”