Excerpt of A Better Angel by Chris Adrian
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white coat and a stethoscope and her hair done up in a smart bun,
I asked her why she hadn’t warned me about the wasps. "I’m not
that kind of angel," she said.
Though my father only ever knew a tenth of the trouble I’ve been
in, I was still his least favorite child, and the last person he wanted
taking care of him when he got very ill. But every one of my sisters
was pregnant - one very much augmented and on purpose, and the
other two accidents of fate. How they celebrated the coincidence,
and then rued it when it forced them to bully me back to Florida
from San Francisco. I was in clinic when they called, and it’s a testament
to their power-of-three invincibility that they were able to
blow through the phone tree and the two different receptionists
who routinely deny my existence when patients try to find me.
"Papa is sick," said Charlotte.
"He’s been sick," I said, because this had been going on for a
year, and though nobody gets better from metastatic small-cell
lung cancer, he’d been holding his own for months and months.
"Papa is sicker," said Christine, and Carmen added, "Much
sicker!" She is eldest and barely most pregnant.
"He’s in the hospital," said Christine. "There’s an infection."
"In his bladder," said Charlotte. There are two years between
each of them but they’ve always seemed like triplets, all of them
looking the same age with their furrowed brows and disapproving
hatchet mouths, all as tall and light as I am short and dark, all
with the same blue eyes that seem just the right color to stare a
person down with. My eyes, like my father’s, are nearly black, and
Carmen says I can hide anything in them.
"A little cystitis," I said. "So what?"
"Dr. Klar says he’s very ill," said Christine.
"She doesn’t know if he’ll come out of the hospital," said
Charlotte.
"She always says that," I said. "She never knows. She’s an
alarmist. She’s a worrier."
"You have to go!" they said all together.
"You have to go," I said. "You go if it matters so much."
"We’re pregnant!" they said. And then the individual excuses:
mild preeclampsia for Charlotte and Christine and a clotty calf
for Carmen. They can’t travel from New York, where they all live
within waddling distance of each other.
"People travel when they’re eight months pregnant," I said.
"People do it all the time!" Though I knew that they don’t, and
now the angel was sitting on my desk and shaking her head at me.
"You’re a doctor," they said all together, as if that should settle
it, and I wanted to say I’m impaired, and a pediatrician to boot. I
could have confessed it right then, to them and to the whole
world: I am an impaired physician, and then started down the yellow
brick road to rehab.
Instead I quietly hung up on them. The angel was still shaking
her head at me. She was dressed to shock, with a plastic shopping
bag on her head, in a filthy housedress, and with a dead cat
wrapped around either foot.
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From A Better Angel by Chris Adrian, to be published in August by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2008 by Chris Adrian. All rights reserved.
