Rise (14 page)

I'm sorry
, Ethan said.

He needed to remember what he'd done. Ruby said he should remember it and make amends but set aside the pain. It was the seed and the pearl would grow around it, and he didn't deserve her. She talked to him sometimes just as he fell asleep. She whispered in his ear.
It won't happen from one day to the next
. It was a journey, and she said the same tired things that counselors everywhere said to drug addicts and gamblers and compulsive overeaters.
One step and then another
. Her fingers were gentle against his cheek.

The woman pulled harder, and Ethan pulled back. Her lips curled back from her teeth. He felt himself rising, and he didn't know why. Ficus trees grew in the city, and morning glories covered them. Everything was heavy with growing vines. He rose above these things. Above the water rolling against the sand. Rolling and falling back and he was over the treetops and he saw the woman and the girl farther down. Sweet girl walking into the water. God forgive him what he'd done. Above them and the fishermen tending their boats and the air was cool again and Ruby was calling his name.
Only you can save yourself
, Ruby always said, but she was wrong. She saved him every day. She saved him by singing in that lousy voice and by opening the blinds. Her voice pulled him upward, and he wasn't afraid. Above the city and its cathedrals. Above the sand and the dark water and he needed to thank her.

M
rs. Schrom wore a black halo the day before she died. Raymond saw it when she spiked her tomatoes out back and when she walked her dog. The next day her husband drove their horse trailer off the road. On Route 50 just past Gunnison. He lived because he was thrown from the truck, but Mrs. Schrom was wearing her seatbelt and she was strapped in tight. His mom told him not to draw any lessons from the accident.
You should always buckle up
, she said. Mrs. Schrom was the exception that proved the rule. Sister Mary Bee up the street wore a halo, too, but she was old and Raymond didn't notice at first. You had to watch carefully if you wanted to see them. They looked a lot like shadows.

The first time he saw one he reached for it, but his fingers went right through. His mom apologized.
He must like your hair
, she told old Mrs. Dreisser, who died the next day. She went to sleep and didn't wake up, and her daughter said it was a blessing. His mom had scolded him afterward. She shook her finger and said it wasn't nice to point, and Raymond knew then she couldn't see the things he saw.

He called the people angels though some of them were mean. They had halos, and they drove their cars and rolled past him in their wheelchairs. He saw them in shopping malls and in the hospital when his mom had her attack. It was her gallbladder. The doctors said it was filled with stones. She screamed until she was hoarse and the nurses all came running. Raymond waited in the hallway and covered
up his ears, and the old man in the room next door had a halo over his bed. It hung in the air like a cloud. Like a swarm of honey bees. The next day the nurses changed the sheets in the old man's room. They stripped down his bed and rolled a new lady in, and that's when he started counting. He counted the floor tiles and the pictures in the hallway. He counted ambulances when they ran their sirens and the steps between her bathroom and the door, and all his counting made his mom well again. The numbers brought her home.

How many peas were on his plate and how many birds sitting on the wire and he counted them while they flew. There was magic in them. He knew this without anyone saying so. The magic would keep his dad's plane from crashing. He was a pilot for Continental and gone three days a week. The food was cold by the time Raymond finished his counting. Sometimes he lost track and had to begin again. His mom didn't understand why he took so long to eat. “Something's not right with you,” she said. “Don't be like your Aunt Leslie. Twenty years of counseling and she still can't eat a cookie.” He pushed his food around when she started to worry. He took a forkful of peas and counted them against his tongue and she looked happy then. She relaxed a little and smiled, and she didn't know he was keeping score. He was holding up heaven with his numbers. He was keeping the halos away.

His Grandma Hooper knew her angels. Michael and Raphael the healer and Uriel who stands by people just before they die. She had angel heads on her wall and pictures of Saint George killing the serpent. Raymond sat with her because his mom was at the gym. They watched TV together even though her eyes were bad. She couldn't read her magazines anymore or her mystery books, but she didn't want cataract surgery either because those doctors could mess you up. She knew a lady whose eyelids started drooping the day after the surgeons cut her. Her friend's eyes were clear now, but what good did it do if she couldn't keep them open.

His grandma made him grilled cheese sandwiches with extra butter. She made caramel corn in the microwave, and they ate together
from the bowl. They watched
Touched by an Angel
and
Highway to Heaven
. Thank God for those reruns and for Lawrence Welk, she said. She didn't like violence in her house. She didn't allow cuss words either because bad thoughts leave traces. If they linger they become a sin. “Fix your mind on righteous things,” she told him, and her eyes were gray and bright.

There were clouds on the TV, and the angel was walking along the road. He was in the desert where there weren't any people. It was his job to help people so he could earn his wings. Look how nice TV used to be, she was saying. It used to lift us up. It wasn't like it is now with all those naked ladies. You can't go half an hour without seeing something bad. Raymond nodded though he didn't know exactly what she meant. He reached for the popcorn bowl she held on her knee.

“I see angels sometimes,” he said. “I see them with their halos.”

His grandma scratched her chin. Her fingers were bent from her years in the shoe store. She talked about it sometimes. All the orthopedic shoes she sold to women with hammer toes and bunions.

“Their halos are black,” Raymond said.

His grandma looked at him now. “We don't talk about those,” she said, but her voice wasn't angry. She reached for the remote and turned the volume up. “They're traveling, and we leave them alone.”

He washed the bowl for her once her shows were done, and he pulled the weeds from her gravel beds. She used gasoline sometimes, too, but the neighbors didn't like it. She sat on the porch with a sweating can of Sprite. “You're a good boy,” she called out when he tossed the weeds into the bin and rolled it to the curb. “Come sit with me before you burn.” She was careful with the sun because that's what killed Grandpa Hooper. It started with a spot at the top of his head. Just a single brown spot that set down roots and spread.

Raymond sat beside her on the bench, and she patted his sweaty head. “I used to have hair just as red as yours,” she said. “It was what your grandpa noticed first.” It skipped a generation with his momma, she was saying. She got the German and not the Irish with that straight blond hair she had. They watched the sun set behind the mountains, and she looked right at it with her cloudy eyes and she didn't blink or shade herself. He wanted to ask her more about the angels. He wanted to ask her where they were going, but he already knew.

•

On Friday afternoons he and his mom went to Leon Gessi's to share a pepperoni pizza. She said carbs were okay once a week. That's why she took those spinning classes and lifted all those weights. They were early today. They went at three o'clock and not at five, and most of the high school students were still waiting for their slices. They clustered around the foosball table and some ancient video games. The boys and girls dressed alike. They wore tight jeans and black nail polish, and their skin was so white he could see the veins around their eyes. They looked like spirits, those high school kids. They looked like the anime his parents wouldn't let him watch. A group of them pushed by, three boys and two girls with pale pale eyes. They carried greasy plates and cans of soda pop. They laughed as they went out, and they wore halos, all of them. He watched them climb into a dented old car. It was rusted through in places. They pulled into the street so fast the tires left long marks and another car honked at them and had to hit the brakes.

Two weeks since his dad had been gone. Two weeks and three days, and Raymond sorted his Legos by color and grouped them in batches of ten. He counted the paper clips his dad kept in a jar. The pennies in the kitchen and the bolts and screws on his dad's workbench. He wrote the numbers down, one after the next, and the lists kept getting longer. He piled them on his floor and taped them to his headboard. He went outside, too, behind the compost heap where the crickets had built a nest. Some were as long as his pinkie, and their backs were spotted with green and gold. All their moving made it hard to count them, and so he took his mom's garden shoes and crushed them one by one. He made them beautiful while he counted them. He set them out like sun rays over the patio stones.

His mom shouted when she saw them. She dropped her laundry basket. “What's wrong with you?” She pulled him up and into the house. She looked scared like when she had to brake the car too fast and she'd throw her arm across his chest. They went together to his room, and she opened up the blinds. “Why don't you play like
the other kids? Why don't you ride your bike anymore or play video games at Ryan's?”

He sat on his bed and watched her walk back and forth across the room, from his desk to his sliding closet doors. She stopped beside his bed. She pulled the lists off the headboard. “What are these?” She waved the papers in the air. She'd probably seen them a hundred times before, when she made his bed each morning and when she ran the vacuum, but she noticed them only now. “What's all this stuff you keep writing?” She brought the papers to the window and looked at them in the sunlight. She squinted a little because she didn't have her glasses, and for the first time he noticed how she looked like his Grandma Hooper. Not her hair but the lines in her forehead and how she worked her jaw.

“What are these numbers?” She waved the papers again as if they'd talk to her if she shook them hard enough. “What do they mean?”

Raymond shifted on his bed. There were some birds in the plum tree just outside his window. They sat in a perfect line. It looked like five of them, but there might be more if he could only see them. “I'm just counting,” he said. “I'm counting them before they go away.”

She sat beside him on the bed and put her arm around his shoulders. “Nobody's going away,” she said. “I'm right here, and your dad's coming home in another week. He just needs a little time.” She gathered up all the papers from his desk and from under his bed. She even found the ones he'd taped inside his closet doors. She started talking about how eleven was a difficult age and sometimes even the good kids needed a little help. She took his lists away. She clipped them together and didn't tell him where she'd put them, but it didn't matter. As soon as she'd left he opened his notebook and started a new one.

His therapist Dr. Winer had thirty-seven snow globes. Her husband brought them back from all his business trips, and she bought her own, too, when they went together on vacation. She had dancing hula girls from when they went to Hawaii and snow angels from Vienna. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—the prettiest city in the country, Dr. Winer said, if you can stand the fog—and a stern-looking Lincoln sitting in his chair. She had a mermaid, too, with white blond
hair streaming upward in the water. Her eyes were closed, and there were golden flowers behind her ears. Dr. Winer kept them on a ledge just below her window, and on sunny days Raymond liked to shake them and watch the glitter settle.

Dr. Winer's face had no wrinkles, not a single line, but her hair was mostly silver. She wore it loose, and it made her look young and old at once. She listened closely when he talked. She wanted to know about school and how often his dad was gone. He talked about his counting sometimes but not in ways she'd understand. He couldn't tell her how it was a relief and how it kept away the halos. She wanted to know why he'd killed all those crickets. “Why did you spread them on the sidewalk?” She looked at him the way his mom did when she was worried. She wrinkled up her forehead, and the sun came through the window and lit up her gray hair.

“I was praying,” he told her. And he didn't know why he said it or exactly what it meant, but it was true. True the way dreams are or tears when you're hurt. He was praying for the people with halos and those who were still waiting.

His mom was proud of how he was acting. “You're calmer than you were before,” she said. “You're not tapping the way you used to or playing with your food.” She was wearing a sweatshirt from the gym and her Adidas running shoes. She exercised every day now and not just at the gym. She watched the fitness shows in the morning and bought a purple yoga mat. She did sit-ups on a rubber ball and old-fashioned push-ups and jumping jacks. “This is the way your Grandpa Hooper did it when he was in the army,” she said. “I never saw a man who could do so many push-ups.” Raymond helped her count when she got tired. He kept track of all the numbers.

She wiped her forehead when she was done and drank from her bottle of vitamin water. “All you needed was somebody who could listen,” she said. “A professional and not just me or your Grandma Hooper.” She screwed the cap back on and set the bottle down. “She's gotten strange since your grandpa died. It's all that time alone.”