by test
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woman on the boy's lap, holding her huge pocketbook with both hands. Hoping for the best, Sarah creeps forwards, easing onto the main street.
"I'll take you there and wait outside," she says. "In case you need me."
Nobody answers.
The funeral home has a yellow stucco front and a low, red tile roof. There is a gate in the shape of a gothic arch and a brick walkway lined with white petunias. The old woman struggles with the door and the three of them tumble out. "I'll be here," calls Sarah, but no one looks back.
She looks at her watch10:20and waits five minutes. She can see it in her mind, now that she is awake, clutching the baby and their clothes in the dark and shaking the old woman awake, they must have run out to their car, yelling at each other, searching for the keys. They must have had no idea what they were supposed to do once they got to the hospital. They must have sat on the orange plastic benches in the hallways like things without souls. No one had bothered to tell them this might happen, they had never suspected it, never imagined it, not the way Sarah has with her mother. At some point, it must have occurred to them that getting back into their car and driving home made sense, that they could understand everything from the start if their father was there to tell them what comes next. Their father, she thinks, and sees him again gripping the door of her car at the bank, his big, froggy mouth clamped shut and that denim jacket, probably a birthday present, his shirt buttoned wrong. Asking her for a gas can. Five minutes pass and she begins to wonder if she is doing the right thing. She might be able to help. She knows nothing about what it's like to lose a baby, but she knows about making funeral arrangements. Three times she has come home to find xeroxed Reader's Digest articles Mrs. Andrews has left for her to read, articles about how to avoid being taken. The first time her mother met her at the door with it, saying it was a note from "that woman who keeps coming here." Sarah was fairly certain her mother had not bothered trying to read it, but as soon as she got her undressed and put to bed, she called up Mrs. Andrews. There was a row over the phone in which Sarah nearly fired Mrs. Andrews and Mrs. Andrews nearly quit. Back then, Sarah could still afford to doubt that she needed Mrs. Andrews's help. But she has since read the articles, and although she has not told Mrs. Andrews, she has followed much of the advice. She has discussed the future with Mr. Pry, the attorney, with Mr. Sims, the minister at her mother's church, with Mrs. Stumps, the woman who plays the organ, and with various funeral directors, including the one who owns this place, though she cannot remember now one thing about him. She has even picked out the coffin. The pages of the catalogue felt like white satin under her fingers, the coffins floating on a glossy white background like baby bassinets. The prices were printed in Old English text. She does not remember which one she chose or what it felt like to make her decision, only that after the
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funeral director left her in his heavily carpeted library, a phone began to ring, unanswered, out in the front office. Later, when she called her younger sisters to tell them, they told her it was probably a good idea, but she could hear in their voices what they thought. But now it's done, and she's glad of it. Mrs. Andrews was right. It will be one less thing to think about.
On the other hand, maybe these Indians don't need any help. Maybe they just want to be left alone. Chances are, they've already forgotten her. She is the last thing they need to think about right now. She is just another white person with no idea, no idea in the world. The truth is, Sarah feels a little crazy just sitting there, not knowing what's going on. She gets out of her car and goes through the gate.
Inside the front door is a rectangular anteroom with a pair of glass doors to her left leading into the main building. The walls are yellow and the floor is yellow linoleum with an astro-turf doormat trimmed in black. Against the far wall is a plastic raincoat hanging on a wooden coat rack and a single pair of galoshes, the old-fashioned black kind with buckles. When the heavy door sighs shut behind her, the light coming through a diamond-shaped stained glass sky light in the ceiling turns the narrow room a thick, dusty gold. It is like stepping into an underwater air lock. Sarah tucks her T-shirt in and steps in front of the glass doors, pulling one open.
She expects the heavy, perfumed smell, the dark wainscot paneling, the venetian blinds on the front window throwing weak bars of light across the bloodred carpeting, carpeting that seems to be standard in all the funeral homes she visited; but she is unprepared for the confusion. The room is filled with Indians. The walls, the deep couches and chairs, and the bench behind the organ by the window are lined with Indians, shoulder to shoulder, young and old, holding coats and hats and purses like a tribe waiting for a bus. Everyone is talking, some with their arms folded or hands in their back pockets, some leaning against the fireplace or sitting on the edge of the Spanish-style coffee table in the center of the room, some restraining small children, babies between their knees. Everybody looks disheveled, as if they have slept in their clothes. She sees no sign of the funeral director. She waits for someone to notice her and to stop their neighbors from talking, for everyone to stop, go silent and turn and look at her, her, walking in on them like this. As if she owns the place. As if she has a right to watch. She holds still, feeling the blood pump into her face.
"Hold on a sec. Everybody?" At the far side of the room, holding up his hand, a young Indian stands at a door marked OFFICE that he has just closed behind him. He is about twenty or so, a rosy brown color and very fat, his hair pulled back and braided into a thick rope down his back. He is wearing thongs, a rumpled T-shirt, and green plaid shorts that stop at the knees. When he crosses the room to speak to someone, Sarah recognizes the big girl, her head thrown back as if pulled by the fierce weight of her hair, and her hand, still hold-
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ing the Kleenex, jammed angrily into her side. They may be related because they look somewhat alike, though she is not soft and rosy with fat like the boy. Just big, her massive weight hard on one foot.
"It's not that they doubt our family," the fat boy announces. "The law says when there's a crib death, they have to do an autopsy. It's the law."
"They don't have to do anything," cries the big girl. "I'm the mother, aren't I? They can't take him away from me without my permission. Did I tell them they could take him to Albuquerque?" She turns to the silent room, flinging one arm. "I'm the mother," she cries.
The room falls silent, everyone watching the fat boy. He puts his fingers to his forehead as if to think, a gesture older than he looks. "But that's what we're trying to tell you. They couldn't get hold of you. You'd already left the hospital. She had to sign"
"The truck ran out of gas," howls the big girl, stamping her foot. "Didn't you tell them that? They can't just take him from me. How am f supposed to know where he is now?"
There is pause, a feeling in the room of looks being exchanged, and two elderly women stand up from the couch and move towards her. The big girl slaps their hands away, her black eyes burning, on the edge of violence. She reaches into her back pocket, takes out a handful of bills, and goes to the corner, hauling someone away from the wall. It takes Sarah a moment to realize it is her husband. Against the dark wood paneling, his young face looks almost skeletal, his eyes huge. He looks ready to bolt. She pushes the money in his hand and pulls him towards the front door by the wrist like a bad child. The women follow her with their mouths open. Sarah opens her mouth, too, but the big girl cuts her off.
"I want you and him to go get a gas can and go get his father and bring him back here." She seems ready to hand over her husband's wrist to Sarah, but then drops it as if she does not even know what it's doing there and turns away, the women parting as she shoves past them.
Sarah and the boy go outside. As they are getting in the car, his mother comes out, shielding her eyes against the light and calling them to wait. The boy, who looks too young to have ever been a father, holds the door for her and they get in. Sarah drives one block down
to the Wal-Mart. Unreal, she thinks, as a fat, boiled-faced man in a cowboy hat and a cigar crosses in front of the car pushing a shopping cart of dog food. The boy gets out before they've stopped, leaving the door open.
"Wait a sec," calls Sarah. "Have you got money?"
The boy freezes, slaps his breast pocket and his face clears. "Yes," he calls.
His mother closes the door and they watch him go into the Wal-Mart. The old woman has her hand cupped over her mouth and she is mumbling something. For a moment, Sarah thinks she is praying, but then it occurs to her that
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in the confusion and panic of the night before, in the yelling and running out of the house in the dead of night only half dressed, only half awake, being jerked along by her son and daughter-in-law, none of it has been real for the old woman, not until now, until she is sitting here alone with a white person in front of Wal-Mart and aware all at once that her teeth are not in.
"This must be awful for you," she tries gently, looking the other way. "All of this."
But when she turns, she sees she is wrong. The woman has a better set of teeth than Mrs. Andrews. "I couldn't sleep last night," she bursts out. "I don't know why but I kept getting up. I kept asking myself 'Why don't you go to bed, old woman?' but I couldn't. I knew something was wrong. I could feel it. I went to the living room, I went to the kitchen, I had a glass of milk"the old woman is pointing these things out with the crabbed edge of her hand as if she is naming objects on Sarah's dash"I even went outside and swept the porch." She stops, turning to Sarah. Looking into her face is like looking through the cracked basement window of an abandoned house and finding someone inside, looking out. "I went everywhere in that house last night, honey. But I didn't go into his room."
"Why would you, though? You didn't know. It was a night like any other night. That sort of thing," Sarah says, "you don't know when it happens. It just happens out of nowhere, doesn't it? And then it's done?"
"But I did know," wails the woman, her eyes rolling back. "I heard."
"You heard?"
"Yes. Of course. The last time I went to bed. His crib is right on the other side of the wall from where I sleep. I hear everything. My room is next to his. And my God . . ." the woman falters. "I kept thinking I heard a little scratching sound. As if he was reaching through the bars of his crib, trying to call me, his little hand, you see . . . but I was so tired by thenI kept thinking I'd have to get up early to fix everyone's breakfast" She stops, putting her hand over her mouth.
"Don't. It's never anybody's fault. It could have been just a dream he was having. It could have been anything. You could have been dreaming"
But the old woman is shaking her head. When Sarah tries to go on, she hisses and grabs her sleeve with sudden force. Sarah turns and sees the boy trotting towards the car with a red plastic gas can. He opens the door, jams the gas can into the narrow space between the boxes of stone samples and the roof, and climbs in beside his mother. "I got it," he says. "Got the gas can."
"Good," says Sarah. The old woman is staring out the windshield. Sarah pulls out of the parking lot, bumps over the median and into the gas station on the other side of the street. The boy gets out, yanks the gas can from the back, and trots over to the pumps.
"I just wish I could help," says Sarah, pushing her comfort at the woman,
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feeling her eyes well up. ''I feel so badly for you. For all of you," she hastens. "It must be awful, what you've been through."
"That's right, honey." But she says it without feeling, turning her head away. "He kept saying stupid things on the way to the hospital. You wouldn't believe how stupid. He kept saying 'Why do we have to do this ourselves, Mom?'"
Sarah stares at the back of her head. "It was shock," she says. "People in shock don't know what they're"
"Oh yes, he did." Her voice has suddenly gone bitter. "He kept saying 'Why didn't you call an ambulance, More? Why didn't you?' Can you believe that? He was holding my grandson and he kept saying that to me. His wife told him to be quiet. She slapped him." The old woman turns to Sarah, her eyes empty. "I know it sounds terrible of her to slap my youngest boy like that, but she was right, don't you think? The baby's face was blue when I saw it. It was blue as a cornflower. I can tell you it was. They couldn't have used an ambulance. I'm sure of it. They have no right to blame me. Besides, I didn't ask them to move in with me. They just came. I know I'm getting old, both my husband and me, but we've done our best to look after the three of them since they moved in, haven't we?"
"Of course you have. Your son wasn't thinking straight. He must just have been so upset when the baby" She stops, instantly ashamed. Who is she to say it out loud, to speak it so casually? She feels as if she is a tourist taking photographs, as if she has spat in the woman's face.
"I know, honey," says the woman. "Do you want to know the worst part?"
But Sarah does not want to know the worst part, or any of the parts. She is getting mixed up now, and she wants it to be over, this confession and this woman and her son out of her car.
"The worst part is that we can't bury him at the pueblo because his mother is Apache," says the old woman. "We're going to have to put him in the public cemetery, I guess. It's going to cost, too. The one behind the Allsups. Do you know which one that is? I'm not sure if I know where it is or not."
For a moment, Sarah has the idea that the old woman has Alzheimer's. The boy opens the door. "I got the gas," he cries. "Three dollars." His face has a bright rosette of color on each cheek.
They drive down the street, the boy pressed against the door with the gas can against his chest. When they pull into the bank, it occurs to Sarah for the first time that the old man has been waiting here for them, probably standing there in his new jacket, watching the street, no idea what to do next. There is, however, no sign of him. The drive-up bank is busy now, cars moving in and out, all the lanes full.
"Maybe I should stick around?" she asks the boy as he helps his mother out of the car. "I could stay until you find out where your dad is."
The old woman is bent over her purse, searching in it for something. The
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boy shakes his head. "I got the gas can and the truck is down the street. We'll find him. He's around somewhere."
"Are you sure? Are you alright?"
He shuts the door, in his bottomless black eyes a meaning she cannot understand. "I don't know how"
The old woman pulls the boy aside by his jacket. "Take this, honeuy," she says, thrusting a dollar bill at Sarah. "I haven't got much but you're welcome to it. You've been so kind"
"No." Sarah holds up her hands. "Don't."
"You have to. Please."
"No," cries Sarah, suddenly frightened. "I would do it for anybody. Anybody would."
"Mom," calls the boy. "Come on." He is looking back at her from the edge of the parking lot, the gas can on his shoulder. When the old woman turns, confused, taking her hand with the dollar in it off the door of Sarah's car to shade her eyes, Sarah drives away.
For the rest of the morning, she visits the furniture art galleries in the center of town. She does not stop for lunch. She feels her heart beating in her wrists, feels the familiarity of her own life returning. She feels as if she has just stepped out of one of those terrible made-for-TV movies. By the afternoon she has seen four stores, two more than she expected to have the energy for. No one has ordered anything. The tourists are gone, the buying season over. Her clients, all pale women in southwestern jewelry and geometric haircuts, glide through their display rooms to piped-in music, pausing to fluff a pillow or straighten their skirts, watching the door, waiting. Sarah goes from gallery to gallery. "You wouldn't believe what just happened to me at the bank," she says. Then she puts down the boxes of stone. She doesn't care whether they want to look or not. At one gallery they do, two of them crouching next to the box so that their stockings turn their knees to alabaster, the wings of their hair falling forward. They s
mooth the samples of stone under their long fingers, clicking burgundy nails on it as if testing the shell of an egg. Sarah crouches next to them while they look. She keeps explaining what it was like from different angles, what it was like to drive away afterward. She knows it's not the way to make a sale, but she doesn't care. She's no good at selling anyway. She feels strange and lightheaded, almost as if she's witnessed a miracle. "What an incredible experience," they say, brushing off their skirts. ''With a story like that, you should become a writer." Sarah is vaguely aware that she is being indulged, that if they are fascinated, they are less fascinated by what she is telling them than by Sarah herself. The thought is unpleasant to her, almost offensive. At the next gallery, she keeps reminding them of how quickly it happened, how the whole thing was over so quickly. Forty-five minutes, an hour, max. She didn't even find out the name of the baby or how old he was. She never even learned their names.
