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living room curtains.
When she spoke again, there was a catch in her voice. “Are you him?”
“I don’t know what you—”
“There was somebody else there that night. Harry saw him and so did I. Are you him?”
“What night?” Only it came out whu-nigh, because my lips had gone numb. It felt as if someone
had put a mask over my face. One lined with snow.
“Harry said it was his good angel. I think you’re him. So where were you?”
Now she was the one who sounded unclear, because she’d begun crying.
“Ma’am . . . Ellen . . . you’re not making any sen—”
“I took him to the airport after he got his orders and his leave was over. He was going to Nam, and
I told him to watch his ass. He said, ‘Don’t worry, Sis, I’ve got a guardian angel to watch out for me,
remember?’ So where were you on the sixth of February in 1968, Mr. Angel? Where were you when
my brother died at Khe Sanh? Where were you then, you son of a bitch?”
She said something else, but I don’t know what it was. By then she was crying too hard. I hung up
the phone. I went into the bathroom. I got into the bathtub, pulled the curtain, and put my head
between my knees so I was looking at the rubber mat with the yellow daisies on it. Then I screamed.
Once. Twice. Three times. And here is the worst: I didn’t just wish Al had never spoken to me about
his goddamned rabbit-hole. It went farther than that. I wished him dead.
9
I got a bad feeling when I pulled into his driveway and saw the house was entirely dark. It got worse
when I tried the door and found it unlocked.
“Al?”
Nothing.
I found a light switch and flipped it. The main living area had the sterile neatness of rooms that
are cleaned regularly but no longer much used. The walls were covered with framed photographs.
Almost all were of people I didn’t know—Al’s relatives, I assumed—but I recognized the couple in
the one hanging over the couch: John and Jacqueline Kennedy. They were at the seashore, probably
Hyannis Port, and had their arms around each other. There was a smell of Glade in the air, not quite
masking the sickroom smell coming from deeper in the house. Somewhere, very low, The
Temptations were singing “My Girl.” Sunshine on a cloudy day, and all of that.
“Al? You here?”
Where else? Studio Nine in Portland, dancing disco and trying to pick up college girls? I knew
better. I had made a wish, and sometimes wishes are granted.
I fumbled for the kitchen switches, found them, and flooded the room with enough fluorescent
light to take out an appendix by. On the table was a plastic medicine-caddy, the kind that holds a
week’s worth of pills. Most of those caddies are small enough to fit into a pocket or purse, but this one
was almost as big as an encyclopedia. Next to it was a message scribbled on a piece of Ziggy
notepaper: If you forget your 8-o’clockies, I’LL KILL YOU!!!! Doris.
“My Girl” finished and “Just My Imagination” started. I followed the music into the sickroom
stench. Al was in bed. He looked relatively peaceful. At the end, a single tear had trickled from the
outer corner of each closed eye. The tracks were still wet enough to gleam. The multidisc CD player
was on the night table to his left. There was a note on the table, too, with a pill bottle on top to hold
it down. It wouldn’t have served as much of a paperweight in even a light draft, because it was empty.
I looked at the label: OxyContin, twenty milligrams. I picked up the note.