Fear Nothing

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

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    12
        
        “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 found her husband's body in the garage.
        Candlelight flickered across her eyelids.
        In time, she opened her eyes, but for a while they remained fixed on a faraway sight. She sipped her brandy.
        “I was happy,” she said. “The cookie smells. The Christmas music. And the florist had delivered a huge poinsettia from my sister, Bonnie. It was there on the end of the counter, so red and cheerful. I felt wonderful, really wonderful. It was the last time I ever felt wonderful-and the last time I ever will. So… I was spooning cookie batter onto a baking sheet when I heard this sound behind me, an odd little chirrup, and then something like a sigh, and when I turned, there was a monkey sitting right on this table.”
        “Good heavens.”
        “A rhesus monkey with these awful dark-yellow eyes. Not like their normal eyes. Strange.”
        “Rhesus? You recognized the species?”
        “I paid for nursing school by working as a lab