Falling Angels Read Online Free

he? When he was in the war, he ran from cover and saved a man being shot at. In Mary Jane’s bedroom she tried to whack him one with the hammer, but before she could, he got it away from her, threw her over his knee and spanked her. Then he dragged her down the hall and ordered her to tell Uncle Eugene and Aunt Betty she was sorry. But by then she was thinking,“I’m a doll” (she had turned herself into a doll), so how could she cry or speak or be bad, let alone be sorry? He spanked her again. He kept spanking her until Uncle Eugene hauled him off into the kitchen, where in a low voice that they nevertheless heard out in the hall, he explained about the newspaper cutting downstairs. Their father said,“Jesus fucking Christ”—on Christmas Day. When he came back outof the kitchen, he stalked over to the closet and began throwing out their coats and mittens and hats. Their mother’s pillbox hat rolled down the three stairs into the living room. “Get dressed,” he said.
    “What about dinner?” Aunt Betty screamed.
    In the car Lou tugged the back of their mother’s fur collar. She wanted their mother to speak, even if it was only to whisper “Don’t,” but their mother pretended not to feel anything, and her face in the rearview mirror was dreamy. Lou fell back against the seat. Beside her, Norma and Sandy whispered. Lou looked out her window and let her eyes fill at the unfairness of the spanking and of being the daughter of their father. His tantrums. His yelling and complaining. All his rules. The minute he came back from work, she and Norma and Sandy had better be lined up in the front hall for inspection, or else, and if they didn’t pass muster, he ordered them to wash or change on the double. What other father did this? After inspection he went outside and looked up and down the street for something to get in an uproar about: the neighbours’ dandelions, their dirty cars, their unshovelled driveways, their noisy kids.
    She was glad that the baby of him died. She knew that their mother threw it. But for some reason she kept her mouth shut the rest of the day, kept it shut even now, talking about it with Norma.
    Sandy climbed into Norma’s bed, under the covers. She made a slow, unfurling motion with her arms. “Mommy
threw
our brother over Niagara Falls,” she said wistfully.
    “Dropped
him over,” Norma said.
    “It was a tragic accident,” Lou snapped from the next bed. She didn’t want the damn kid to start crying and get them in trouble.
    “Can you tell us a story?” Sandy asked her.
    “What about?”
    “About David.”
    Lou sighed. “Oh, okay.” She waited until her sisters had climbed into her bed, one on either side of her. “It came to pass,” she said in her quiet, expressive storytelling voice,“that a woman had a boy child that she wanted to save from being murdered by the king, so she covered him with slime and put him in a basket amongst the bulrushes.”
    “No, that’s Moses,” Sandy said.
    “Yeah,” Lou said, realizing it was. “I know.”
    Sandy woke up first. She was curled into Norma’s stomach and looking straight at Lou’s face, which had a peaceful aspect that Sandy had never seen when Lou was awake. Eight years later, lying on a vibrating bed in the middle of twin brothers, Sandy would open her eyes from a dream that she wasn’t sleeping between those brothers but between her sisters. “It’s not nymphomania!” she would declare and then cry her heart out with relief and for old times.
    Now, very gently, she braided a lock of Lou’s long dark hair around her own wrist. She made a Lou-hair bracelet. She was very quiet and gentle, but Lou woke up anyway and said,“The TV’S not on.” Sandy shook off the bracelet. “Something’s the matter,” Lou said, jumping out of bed and running down the hall to their parents’ bedroom.
    Their father was standing at the window, reading the thermometer. “Well, your mother’s gone and gotten herself the flu,”