The Wave Theory of Angels Read online

  ‘And to think you once said you wouldn’t change me for the world.’

  ‘Thank God I realized I’d be better off with the world.’

  He still loves the way she can’t say her ths. He tries to see around the door. ‘Is there someone here?’

  ‘Someone?’ She studies him. Laughs. ‘Like a man, you mean?’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘We had coffee two months ago. The first time in what? A year? Believe it or not, Giles, one Grande Whatever at Star-bucks doesn’t give you the right.’ She brushes a strand of hair out of her eyes. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘You never said you were in Bridgeview, Nat.’

  ‘I didn’t. My point exactly.’

  ‘Why Bridgeview?’

  ‘It’s a community. Aarif needs that.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m easy, Giles. I don my hijab when I dust. I pull out my grandmother’s rosary when the vampires of life descend.’

  ‘I stand warned. On both counts.’

  ‘Don’t think I didn’t notice that you avoided my question.’

  ‘About?’

  She sighs. ‘Okay. We’re out of here.’

  She runs into the house for her keys and bag. He starts singing – ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing’ – in his best Louis Armstrong voice. He sounds almost jaunty.

  From inside: ‘Amusing yourself out there?’

  ‘No,’ he calls back. ‘On a good day I generally manage to save that for the shower.’

  The old act. Yet, in these last few minutes, he’s been outperforming even himself.

  It wasn’t her. On the phone. In the middle of the night. Of course it wasn’t her. And the old sense of shame returns to him, as if he’s lifted money from her bag when her head was turned.

  She hasn’t come.

  Angel has waited for three and a half hours now, restless in the clearing, stared at, wondered about, and she hasn’t come. Like the time only a few weeks ago when he’d cleaned and oiled the old signalling lanterns in the lodge and lit them, one by one, so they could picnic that night by more than flashlights and Duracell; so she’d be surprised by the glow of lantern-light in the woods.

  That time, that night, she was supposed to go home, to get warm clothes, and then meet him back at the lodge. But she never came back.

  She couldn’t get out, she told him days later. Her sister, her father, both home unexpectedly. Their mother’s favourite movie was on TV: Dr Zhivago. Lost love. They always watched it together. Her mother loved Omar Sharif, who was Egyptian, not Russian at all. Did he know that? She and her sister knew all the words to ‘Somewhere, My Love’. Not from the movie, because the movie only uses the melody, but because their mother had it in an old songbook.

  Gabbing away about a movie. She had no idea. Again.

  She looked up, saw something in his face. Started talking faster. It was impossible, she said. They would have asked questions. And he was the one who didn’t have a phone at home or even a cellphone. How were they supposed to do this if she couldn’t even get him by phone?

  ‘Do what exactly?’ As if suddenly he didn’t know her, as if she had imagined everything.

  ‘This,’ she said. ‘Be together.’

  ‘You think we’re together?’

  ‘I know we are.’

  ‘I think you’re ‘‘together’’ with a lot of people.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I think you’re together with that guy, for instance, that blond-guy-with-the-glasses volunteer you talk to a lot.’

  ‘Jonathan?’

  ‘I’ve seen you.’

  ‘You’ve seen me what?’

  ‘I’ve seen you with him. You light up around him.’

  ‘I light up around a lot of people. I love you.’

  ‘You touch him.’

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Seventeen times. You touched him seventeen times last Friday.’

  ‘We were working together. We were a team.’ She takes a step back. ‘My God. You actually counted. You watched me from some bush or something and you counted.’

  ‘I should have known. What kind of girl fucks at the back of a railway line? Maybe your brainy father could help me with that one. Maybe I’ll get your dad on the horn and say, So, Mr Carver, tell me, what kind of girl – ’

  ‘My God. On the phone the other night.’

  ‘What kind of girl, Mr – sorry – Dr Carver – ’

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Fucks a man she hardly knows against a tree?’

  ‘Your mind goes into that crazy overdrive – ’

  ‘Or I’ll walk up to your nice house and knock on its nice door – ’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And I’ll say – ’

  ‘Listen to yourself. Just listen. No wonder you’re so alone.’

  He stopped, his eyes narrowing to something primitive. ‘You’ve got it. I’m alone. On my own. I’ve got nobody. And you know what? I’m going to keep it that way.’

  ‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?’

  ‘You mean, instead of feeling sorry for yourself?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You go on about your mom dying, about seeing her waste away, about feeling cheated. That’s not cheated, Tina. That’s just fucking bad luck.’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk – ’

  ‘Cheated, Tina, is having your mom run out on you and your dad when you’re not even a year old because she’s seventeen and she wanted to have you adopted, and so did her parents because you were keeping her from her high-school prom, but your dad said no because he’s got no family, and he likes the idea of him and a son doing the great outdoors thing together. He likes the idea of being a moral force with his belt and its buckle, same as his dad was a moral force before him. Cheated, Tina, is then having your dad bail out, die, when you’re twelve years old. Cheated is growing up in care, and ‘‘care’’ means getting tied to things – bedsteads, banisters – so you can’t run away.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she stammered. ‘You’re always talking about him. Your dad. About the two of you in the woods. Laying apples in the snow so you could watch deer together. About being in the lodge with him, him teaching you the hand signals. Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why. He started off as a trackman, same as me, right? He got promoted to signalman when a piece of concrete fell off a crane on to his leg. They handed him a promotion so he wouldn’t go for compensation. Anyway, the leg never healed right. Never hit the floor running again, but signalman, it’s practically a desk job. He got the certification stuff he needed. Bought himself a Thermos and a birdwatching book. And he was set. After a while he didn’t even need the stick any more to walk. You wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong with him unless he had to move in a hurry.

  ‘He always worked the West Line – you could work just the one line in those days. So people had loyalties, traditions. They’d get to thinking they knew their bit of the line as well as the track of worn carpet in their own living rooms. But the thing is this. Your timing, from living alongside the track, starts to feel like some kind of sixth sense. It gets almost spooky, the way your body starts to know the timetable better than you do. So you get comfortable. Not lazy. But comfortable.

  ‘Anyway, there were kids, about my age, messing around on the embankment on the other side. They got through a fence that was on its way down. So my old man crosses the track. He’s done it a thousand times. Steps over the rails and sleepers. Doesn’t step between the points. It’s all second nature to him, right? Even in a hurry. Even with that twisted leg.

  ‘I’m watching him from the other side, from the door of the lodge. I’m thinking about the really big Hershey’s bar I get if I learn that day’s hand signals on the page in the manual. He’s standing on the embankment, trying to keep the kids at the seven-foot-minimum clearance while they argue with him. Because he knows a train
’s coming. High speed for those days. Eighty-five miles per hour. One of the kids has a pellet gun. The others are just mouthing off but, from the other side, I can see they’re getting to him.

  ‘He’s got money problems. Gambling debts, someone told me later. So what? Everyone’s got something, right? But the day before, I asked him for money to get a new pair of sneakers, because there’s a big hole in the sole of one of the pair I had, and when I showed him his eyes started to fill up. Which scared me, I remember, cos I didn’t even know then that adults cried, let alone a man and let alone your father. I didn’t think there was anything scarier than the sight of him taking off his belt, but that day I wished it was the belt in his hand instead of his eyes filling up like that. Anyway, there are the kids and he’s getting distracted and maybe he loses track of time. But he sees them off and starts to cross back.

  ‘He must have thought he could make it. Either that, or he knew he couldn’t. I don’t know. He had a bit of insurance, and the company decided it was suicide, even though Metra said different in their own report. Maybe that was just Metra trying to help me out. Fuck knows.

  ‘But the poor bastard did slip. I saw him. Saw him try to get his balance back, like you do. And you know how when you’re falling, and almost righting yourself, and then falling again? You know how it feels like time is passing slower than it really is? Well, I felt like that too, like I was falling with him, for a long time. And I know he thought he was going to be on his feet again any moment. It was his track, after all. His territory.

  ‘But the floorboards of the lodge are already humming through that hole in my sneakers and the tin coffee mugs on the shelf are starting to tremble like they always do, and I’m yelling at him, but already the horn’s almost blowing him off the tracks, and I can’t tell whether he’s doing what you’re supposed to do – raising his right arm clear over his head to tell the driver he knows the train’s there – or whether his arm’s flying up because he’s falling down.

  ‘He was stupid to be on that track – and that’s the best-case scenario, right? But he didn’t throw himself under or stand there waiting for the thing to flatten him. Guys I work with, when they find out, say to me, So what was it? Ice on the tracks? Rain? Wet leaves? A diesel leak? And usually I say, Yeah, one of those things, cos there are statistics.

  ‘But the truth is, it wasn’t any of those things. The truth is, the Metra report found that my old man slipped in cess. In toilet waste. The train that passed ten minutes before had evacuated its tank on its approach to the lodge, a few minutes before pulling into River Forest station.

  ‘I don’t tell people. They might be asking stupid questions, but it doesn’t seem fair to leave them with that punchline. Or sometimes, if you make the mistake of saying too much, they think you’re after sympathy or, worse, their girlfriend. But the real reason I tell as few people as possible is cos, when it comes down to it, I’m ashamed. My old man put up with shit in his lifetime and he died in shit at the end. ‘‘Start as you mean to go on.’’ That’s what he used to say to me.’

  They were breathing. Just breathing. ‘Look at me’ – turning his cheek towards her. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come back . . . I didn’t mean not to come back.’ Her arms round his neck. His arms, dead wood at his sides. ‘Know that. Okay? Know that.’

  Now, nowhere. He’d waited all morning and, again, she was nowhere.

  ‘You’re telling me only now, Giles?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You come to my house. You joke with me on my doorstep. You walk with me to Aarif ’s school. You kick a ball around with a bunch of nine-year-olds in the playground. You wait, with what some might consider fortitude, while I scramble for back-to-school supplies at K-Mart. You sit on the bus and smile as Aarif sounds out every Arabic shop sign we pass, from Al-Omari Islamic Fashion to the Blueberry Hill Pancake House. And all the while your daughter is lying in a hospital in a coma?’

  ‘I know. I don’t know why I didn’t say something . . .’

  ‘What is it, Giles? What’s going on?’

  They are standing in the well-stocked Arab grocery section of a convenience store on Harlem Avenue, Bridgeview’s main drag. Giles Carver stares at containers of hummus and ‘Smoky Eggplant Mutabal’. He eyes vacuum-packed vine leaves, halal cheeses, packages of ‘Islamically slaughtered’ sliced meats, microwave kebabs – even halal pizza in cling film. Beyond the chiller section: red lentils. Falafel mix. Tabouli mix. Pitta bread. Bags of almonds still in their green husks. Majool dates. Jars of translucent honey. Fresh figs like small dark minarets.

  ‘That’s just it. I don’t know what’s going on, Nat. Nothing’s making sense any more.’

  Aarif is pleading with his mother to buy a special can of Turkish cookies. On the lid is a picture of a flash-toothed genie who holds one finger in the air.

  ‘When did she go in?’

  ‘Friday night. I got her there myself. In minutes. Maggie did mouth-to-mouth on the back seat.’

  ‘Have they said anything?’

  ‘Only that the tests indicate significant damage.’

  ‘My God. Giles, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry – Aarif, I said no.’

  ‘They’re wrong.’

  ‘They could be. They really could be.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Giles.’

  By the olives, a heavily set woman adjusts her glasses and fixes him through the slot of her black burka. He looks away, back to Nathalie; to Aarif, who is scowling at him. ‘She’s going to be fine. She is.’

  ‘Maggie. How’s Maggie?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The woman is handling something labelled zoater and shaking her head, as his own mother might. At him, he feels sure. Not at the price of the zoater. ‘Okay. Okay, I think.’

  ‘Giles, look at me. Why are you here? Why aren’t you at the hospital?’

  As he opens his mouth, he feels himself empty – of words, of meaning, of logic. The truth is no good. How can he explain fast enough? He was crazy to have turned up at her door like he did. Crazy to be chasing a phone call. Crazy to have suspected her. A tied-up dog chasing its own tail. Only now, without it, without the chase, he feels he could start to break. He’s got no clever words, no jokes, no bravado. There’s only his tongue thick in his mouth; his shirt sticking to him; Nat’s wary concern; Aarif wanting him to go away; and the tawdry genie on the cookie can promising one last wish.

  ‘Nat, you have to help me.’

  12

  Marvel comes quietly, cloaked in the mundane.

  It’s the woman waking to the smell of smoke as fire spreads, miles away, through her brother’s house. It’s the sharp flash of recognition as a young man glimpses, in the ordinary hubbub, the stranger with whom he will share his life. It’s a mother’s dream of her baby, blue in the cold store, six months before he comes, stillborn, into the world.

  Even the Church Fathers admitted the category of the marvellous – or mirabilis, as they knew it. For them, an irksome classification. A grey area.

  Compare the marvel with its less troublesome metaphysical kin. In the thirteenth century, the miracle reflected the steady-handed authorship of the divine – truth made manifest. Similarly, magic or magicus demonstrated, with tell-tale show-manship, the desperate guile of the devil. The marvel, however, was of poor provenance and tended, therefore, towards ambiguity. It took shape in the merely mortal sphere. It seemed to lack the requisite supernatural chutzpah. Here, the clergy were typically surplus to requirements.

  Yet, if less outwardly compelling, the marvel was also less easily contained than either the miraculous or the magical. It remained more elusive. More stubborn. And, if finally reducible in time, with the erosions of memory, to rationalization, anecdote, drinking tale or woman’s lore, the marvel also rarely failed to leave behind a certain residual uncertainty. A discomfiting sense of possibility. Or, on bolder occasions, an appetite for wonder.

  In an age of faith – spiritual or secular �
� awe is certainly helpful. Awe boosts ratings. Wonder, on the other hand, distracts. Wonder involves wondering. It takes us to the brink. It makes us think, imagine, beyond. It has a nose for gaps, for omissions.

  Maggie is wondering. Now. There, in the hospital room.

  Empty. Her sister’s bed is empty.

  She only went out for a cup of coffee.

  Tina?

  Her body moves on without her. It sets her cup of coffee down on the floor by her feet. It remembers the nurse’s station down the hall. It turns to run for the door.

  It stops short when she sees a waterfall of light on the air.

  She lurches backward. Bumps into a metal frame. Tries to focus. Notices another frame on the other side of the bed – each like a movable rail on which you might hang coats. A pulley system with hooks. Christina is suspended above the bed on a broad sheepskin rug, her feet exposed; her hair dangling below her.

  Maggie understands. She understands that she has mistaken one sight for another. Her sister’s hair for a waterfall of light. She understands that the surprise of her sister not being where she left her has confused her. She knows this and, at the same time, she cannot not see the current of light slipping from her sister as she hovers four feet above her bed.

  A nurse rushes in. ‘I’m sorry. The hoist jammed, so we decided to work it higher, then it jammed again. Normally she’d be on an electronic mattress by now but they’re all in use. The porters are coming just as soon as they can.’

  Maggie can’t speak.

  ‘Did your father tell you? It’s on her chart. Turning every four hours. To prevent bedsores.’

  Doesn’t she see? The gush of light is thinning now. It’s drying up. Her hair is going dark, almost strand by strand. Energy is leaving her. Something’s wrong. She feels she is about to cry. Her father has already told her. No unhappiness in front of Christina.

  ‘Would you like a chair? Can I get you something?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  ‘What about your father? Can I call him for you?’

  Not her father. Not now. ‘I’m fine.’ She needs the nurse to leave.

  ‘The porters really will be here soon.’