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 stareits bleak gray sheen-I felt
the nape of my neck shrink, and I no longer found any comic potential
whatsoever in the word monkey.
“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