Earth Angel: Chapter 2
May 15, 2026
chapter two
“I’m hurrying,” I said.
That horrible cry again.
“I’m hurrying,” I repeated, stepping out of my underpants. I reached into the shower, turned on the hot water faucet, and quickly ducked back out before getting splashed. The water took forever to heat up, which for some reason I always forgot and always stripped down too early. I stood there waiting for hot water, watching my naked and shivering body in the mirror.
I looked funny naked.
Seeing myself in the mirror gave me the creeps, like I was seeing my head on top of someone else’s body. A bonier, paler someone else. A corpse prepped for autopsy. I’d lost about ten pounds since the shootings and the puffiness around my stomach that appeared in my late twenties (and which I’d been unable to diet or jazzercize away for the last three years) was now gone. My stomach curved in under my rib cage like a flat river basin that ran from my sternum all the way down to my dusty blonde public hairs. Just as I’d always wanted it to.
I opened the shower door, stuck my hand under the water. Not hot enough. “Almost ready,” I said, not looking at him. “Just a couple more minutes.”
I ran my wet hand over my white skin, watching myself in the mirror. I touched my pubic hairs. They used to feel wispy and soft and touching them sometimes used to arouse me. Occasionally, I would masturbate. Now I felt nothing. The hairs seemed scratchy and brittle, like toothbrush bristles.
I patted my flat stomach. I missed my poochy stomach, what Tim had called my little jewel pillow, like those tiny pillows they used to present jewels to royalty. That’s how he gave me my engagement ring. We were flat on our backs, naked and sweaty after vigorous sex, and he reached under the mattress and pulled out the ring, which he screwed into my navel. “A jewel for my little jewel pillow,” he grinned and kissed my stomach.
Now my body was perfect. Like a Cosmo cover girl. The jewel pillow, the jewel, and the jewel giver were all gone. My body didn’t know what to do except devour itself.
When the fog spreading across the mirror began to eat away my image, I opened the shower door. Hot steam billowed into my face and clung like plastic wrap. “It’s ready,” I said, looking down at the floor.
The small black kitten nestled in my pile of discarded clothes wheezed pathetically with each breath. I scooped him up into my arms and stepped into the shower. The nozzle was aimed against the tile wall so we wouldn’t be splashed by the scalding water. I closed the shower door and laid a towel on the tile floor at the back and sat down. The kitten lay in my lap, exhausted, struggling with each breath. He was six weeks old, and I’d had him for only three days, the last two of which he’d been sick. I’d taken him to the vet twice already. They ruled out the usual feline distemper and other such diseases. They told me to keep his nasal passages clear with Q-tips. They gave me antibiotics, which I had to squirt down his throat with an eye-dropper.
He’d been a gift from Francine Becker, the doctor who owned the walk-in clinic where I worked. A couple days after the funeral, she’d dropped by with the kitten, thinking it might cheer me up. “I know this is a presumptuous gift, Season,” she’d said. “Handing you a creature you’ll have to care for and everything. Feed, et cetera. I don’t know, it just seemed like a good idea when I thought of it. Anyway, if you don’t want him, I can take him right back to the store where I got him. Cute little bandit like him will be snatched up in no time.”
I named him Shaft and dug out my old soundtrack album from the movie. “‘Whose the cat who won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about,’” I sang to him, trying like crazy to cheer myself up, but feeling instead desperate and foolish. My fat cat Blue just hunched up on top of the kitchen cupboards and watched disapprovingly. Since Shaft had arrived, Blue came down only to eat and take horrendous dumps in the litter box.
The day after I received Shaft, his health suddenly collapsed. The first day he’d been peppy and playful, scratching the hell out of my arms. Then this. The vet said he should pull out of it. I suggested they drain the lungs but she said that was premature. She said it in a way that let me know I might be a medical doctor, but I was trespassing on her turf now.
So every couple hours I stripped down and climbed into the steamy shower with him, hoping the humidity might alleviate the congestion, clear his nasal passages. The results of these continual steam baths was my muddy-blonde hair was as flat as a soggy mophead, my skin was drying out faster than any moisturizer would help, and my lips were perpetually chapped. Still, it seemed to help him breathe easier for a little while afterwards.
Shaft shifted on my lap, but even that tiny movement caused his wheezing to worsen. He gasped for air as if he were drowning. Uselessly, I waved steam toward his tiny face. The incident passed, but his breathing was still labored. I looked down at his limp heaving body. “For God’s sake, I’m a doctor, Shaft, not a veterinarian.” I forced a smile and scratched his chin, but his blank expression didn’t change.
I sat there a few more minutes before I realized I was crying. What with the steam and everything it was hard to tell. But when I tasted the tears on my chapped lips, I knew. I’d always been that way about crying, never knowingly launching into it, but always having it sneak up on me like a mugger. I thought of it as a variation of bedwetting. Statistically, up until the age of twelve, males and females cried with the same frequency; after that, women cried five times as often as men. Were we just wimps, or did we have more to cry about?
Suddenly the shower door flew open. Cold air swept in and tightened my skin.
“You should lock your front door, you know. I could be a rapist or something.”
“Close the fucking door, Carol,” I said.
She ignored me, noticing Shaft for the first time. “What are you doing sitting in the shower with a kitten? Are you having some kind of breakdown?”
I yanked the shower door closed and the sound boomed around the shower tile. The noise startled Shaft but he didn’t have the energy to do much more than widen his eyes and gasp.
I was a little annoyed that Carol was here. This shower ritual was as much for me as it was for Shaft. It was something to do, a pattern to follow. Since Tim’s death I had no pattern, no routine. No place to go, nothing to do. And no one to talk to, not the intimate way Tim and I had talked--or so I’d thought. Carol was a good friend, a better friend to me than I was to her, but she was someone I could laugh with—not cry with. When Tim had gasped his last breath in my arms, he’d sucked my life right out of my body, the way superstition has always accused cats of stealing children’s air. Since that day, each breath I took seemed labored, something I had to force myself to do, monitor the air going in and the air going out like a respirator at the hospital.
The first three days after Tim’s funeral, I’d taken to not answering the phone or the doorbell. I wore only white: t-shirts, shorts, underpants, a cotton shift. I took five baths a day with twenty lighted white candles around the tub. It took a good ten minutes to light those candles, which I did with excruciating precision. I don’t know what I thought I was doing, probably being spiritual or something. In the end, all I had to show for it was lots of laundry and some stubborn melted wax I had to chip from the tub ledge with a butter knife.
“What’s the deal with the kitten?” Carol asked. I heard a match strike, smelled smoke. “Should I be reserving a padded room in your name?”
“No smoking in the house.”
“Oh, shit, I didn’t even know I lit up.” I could see her wavy figure through the smoked shower door turning on the faucet, sticking the cigarette under the water. She looked around for the wastecan, finally just dropped the soggy butt back into her purse.
I shut off the shower. Shaft had had enough. Carol handed me a fresh towel from the counter. I patted Shaft’s fur and carried him into the bedroom. I set him on my pillow.
“So, what’s the story?” Carol asked.
“Francine’s idea of something to cheer me up.”
Carol snorted. “She brought you a cat? That’s her response to what happened? Christ, she’s more demented than I thought. She’d probably just gotten around to reading some four-year-old issue of JAMA where they talked about that hospital that gave patients cats because it helped them recover faster. God, no wonder her kids are so screwed up.” Francine’s druggie daughter and gigolo son were constant sources of office gossip.
I looked down at Shaft, whose wheezing seemed to have lessened. “He’s been dying from the moment I got him.”
“Really? Dying?”
Suddenly Shaft sneezed three times, and his wheezing was worse.
“Whoa, that’s some wheeze she’s got. They should drain her lungs.”
“It’s a he. Shaft.”
“Oh, yeah, like in the movie, uh, that guy...”
“Richard Roundtree.”
“Right! And the song by that big bald guy. Isaac Haines.”
“Hayes.”
“Yeah.” She sat on the edge of the bed and watched me towel-dry Shaft. “You’d better start eating, girl. Looking at your naked body is making me hungry for ribs.”
I went over to the wicker chest and pulled out some sweats, which I quickly put on. “Better?”
Carol didn’t say anything. She looked at her purse as if to take out a cigarette, remembered she couldn’t, sighed.
“How’s Lolita?”
“Fine. The name du jour has been Axel for the past week. Her hubby loves it. I see some lumpy roads ahead for young Axel.”
The clinic had reopened a week ago, after the blood had been washed away and the bullet holes plastered and painted over. Francine made it clear I was welcome back as soon as I felt like working, but both of us knew that was an empty offer. I couldn’t go back there even if I wanted to. And she sure didn’t want me to.
“How’s business?” I asked.
“Slow. No one wants to walk in if they think they might not walk out again. But it’ll pick up. People forget.” She started for her purse, caught herself. “Christ, I’ll give you twenty bucks if you let me smoke a cigarette.”
I tucked another pillow around Shaft and gestured for Carol to follow me. I could hear his labored breathing behind me as I led Carol out onto the patio off the kitchen. She lit up and took a deep drag. I sat on the wicker chair and slid the ashtray across the wicker table. “Use this,” I said. “We keep it for Tim’s father, when he comes to visit.”
She looked at me as if to correct my verb tense, but took another drag on her cigarette instead. “I talked to his folks at the funeral,” she said. “I thought they might hang around a little longer.”
“They offered. I didn’t want them too. They need to get on with their lives, not nursemaid me.”
Carol didn’t say anything. It was not like her to be so circumspect. Usually she just blurted whatever she was thinking. It made me nervous and a little angry to be treated like a patient.
“So Lolita’s okay?” I asked. “No trauma to the fetus?”
“You wouldn’t believe that girl. She has the resilience of rubber. She’s sad and all, but otherwise it’s as if nothing had happened. I don’t think she comprehends how close she came.”
From what the cops had been able to piece together—which was reenacted on Hard Copy with “dramatization” flashing at the bottom of the screen—Tim had started by shooting Helen, who’d come out to give him my message. No one knows whether or not he’d shot her before or after she’d told him I’d be a few minutes. Naturally, I spent a lot of time wondering if she had given him my message and if there was something in the way I’d phrased it that had set him off.
The three Japanese businessmen were next. Ironically, the cops discovered they weren’t even patients. They had been discussing some business strategy in the elevator from their office and when they passed our waiting room, they’d stopped in to sketch out their ideas before they forgot. Their bodies were all found slumped onto the glass table they’d been leaning over. Tim had shot each once in the head. Helen, however, hadn’t fallen immediately. She’d staggered backwards and managed to stumble down the hall and hit the silent alarm. But Tim calmly followed, shot her again in the chest and she died. Darlene started screaming and Tim shot her in the face, the back of her head spraying across dozens of incomplete insurance forms.
Then he turned the gun on five-moth pregnant Lolita. He’d looked at her little hump of a stomach, then at the name du jour sign on her desk. “I like Evan,” he said. “Evan’s good.”
He turned from her and burst into my examination room. I saw Helen dead behind him. I stepped toward him, opening my arms. One shot echoed and Tim lunged forward into my arms. A uniformed cop appeared around the corner, gun aimed, eyes wide with adrenaline and terror. He’d been in the parking lot taking a report on a stolen car stereo when he’d heard the shots. The cop’s bullet had punctured Tim’s heart. Carol, who had been locked in the bathroom the whole time, came out, confirmed Darlene and Helen were dead, then returned to help me work on Tim. But he was dead within ten minutes.
The man with the cold who’d wanted to skip work had left a few seconds before Tim had fired his first shot. Peter and his mom were treated for shock. The amphetamine woman, Lisa Demme, had hid behind the table in a closed examination room and saw nothing. She told the police she was there to be treated for an upset stomach.
“So what are your plans?” Carol asked, grinding out her cigarette in the ashtray.
I shrugged. “Run for president. Cure cancer. Become the next Miss America.”
She nodded, lit another cigarette. “I read somewhere that the number one cause of death on the job for women is murder. Isn’t that weird. If you’re a working woman your greatest risk on the job is someone else killing you.”
“What’s the difference? It beats having a massive coronary or a tractor rolling over on you.”
Blue waddled out onto the patio, her fat body on spindly legs like a watermelon on toothpicks. She sat at my feet and chirped for me to pet her.
“Oh, so you’ve finally decided to quit sulking, huh? Going to treat Shaft like a little brother?” I scratched her ears and she chirped repeatedly. Then a sudden cold spot in my stomach bloomed and I leaped up and raced up the stairs to my bedroom. Carol jumped up and followed. “What’s wrong?” she pleaded. “Season, for Christ’s sake!”
Once in the bedroom I ran over to the bed. Shaft lay limp on my pillow. I began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it didn’t work. I lay him back on the pillow.
Carol came around and examined him, tried to massage his heart. Nothing. We both stood there silently staring at the dead body for a few minutes.
Then Carol put her arm around me and said, “Jesus, Season, what exactly did you do to piss God off so much?”