The Children's Hospital

67

I do not like your brothers, Pickie Beecher says. It is very early in the morning, and he sits on the edge of the roof, kicking his feet idly in the air and sipping at a packet of blood. I like every brother. Every brother lives in my heart, but these two… I do not like them.

Never mind them.

Angels hate me.

You are an orphan of creation.

Brother-killers, all of you. Even now brothers are dying, and what are you doing about it?

I am the recording angel.

Another and another and another. Death after death, and didn’t my mother undo death?

Not for everyone. But do not fear my brothers. The accuser has nothing to say to you, and the destroyer will not touch you. A different way has been prepared for you.

Death, he says.

Not death, I say. But life. Someone has died for the sake of everyone else’s happiness. Even yours.

Will I get to be with my brother again?

No, but the grieving for him will be done. You won’t want to anymore.

That is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard, he says.

You say that now. But how can you know what tomorrow will bring?

It is always the same. Every new day dawns, and my brother is still gone, and my whole life is one great aching after him.

I am supposed to say, Have faith. I am supposed to compare his small, strange mind, unfavorably, with the gigantic and subtle wonders of providence. But though I can feel those very words forming in the empty air of my chest, my own will and my angelic destiny shaping them together, I find I cannot speak them. They stick in my throat and feel as solid as a bone.

It’s hard, I say, to miss your brother or your sister

Sisters are nothing, Pickie says. And what do you know about, it, anyway? But then he reaches out beside him without looking at me, and takes my hand.