Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  “I want to help.” His eyes plum-dark and wet, his face crumpled as a child’s brown lunch sack at the end of recess. Tossed in a bin or left on the empty blacktop. If she looked at him too long, gleaming with his own slick repentance, she might be tempted to forgive.

  “Get out,” she repeated, looking to the doctor for help. Dr. Caldera, her name badge read. A woman with Mama’s complexion and long, shiny black hair. A thick pair of square, tortoise-shell glasses rested on her mushroom of a nose. She wasn’t Bianca’s regular ob-gyn but the hospital’s on-call one. Bianca stared at her paisley blouse ruffling beneath the white coat. The kaleidoscope of patterns on her blouse swirled under the fluorescent hospital lighting.

  “Bee. Let me stay with you.” His voice a plea.

  She said nothing. The colors churning across the doctor’s chest needed all of Bianca’s attention. They were prisms, catching light. They were so beautiful.

  Dr. Caldera put her arm on Gabe’s shoulder. “I think it’s best you leave.”

  Gabe nodded and pulled away from Bianca. Then he stood up and his shape grew hazy in her peripheral as he walked out of the room.

  “Can I call someone else?” Dr. Caldera asked, breaking the spell.

  Bianca forced herself to look up from the paisley maze and at the doctor’s face. Her thoughts muddied. She was still under ditchwater. She shook her head.

  “Someone should be with you for this.”

  Bianca blinked, wondering if time had stretched, turned viscous. Or if she was moving in slow motion. She blinked again.

  Dr. Caldera explained how they would move her to another room soon where she would induce labor. She said since Bianca was past thirty weeks she had to push vaginally. She would give her Pitocin, and she’d start feeling contractions. “Sometime within the next eighteen hours, you’ll feel the urge to push.”

  The nurse squeezed her hand, and Bianca became aware of her presence at the sensation of skin against skin. She hadn’t realized anyone else was in the room. The nurse’s voice sounded like honey, thick, through a comb, sticky. “Your body will help you, hun. You’ll feel what to do. And we’ll tell you when it’s time. You want us to call someone?” Bianca shut her eyes. “Brave girl,” the nurse said. “I’ll go get you some ice chips.”

  She should’ve called Lily. She should’ve had a hand to hold.

  But she couldn’t face anyone with what she’d done. For a second, she almost wanted Gabe’s rumpled face to return so she could focus her shame outside herself. Without him, she had to admit the truth. She’d turned the steering wheel. She’d driven them into the ditch.

  She was a murderer, as Katrina had called her. A baby killer. La Llorona risen from the night waters. Stealing babies. Drowning babies.

  She shouldn’t have bought the bassinet and other baby furniture from the yard sale. They were cursed. She shouldn’t have bought them secondhand. She’d have to go home to them, empty. Stark and cold and pink.

  The nurse brought her ice chips. She ignored them.

  “Let me check your IV drip, hun. Gotta make sure we’re hydrating you properly.”

  She watched her blood fill the small tube, then turn clear with fluid. She stared at the nurse’s pale-blue scrubs while she finished taking vitals, robin’s-egg blue. She would’ve wanted to know the nurse’s name, but her name tag was backward, and all Bianca could see was an empty, white placard. She would’ve asked. But the fog rolled in. She closed her eyes.

  Opened them again. Closed.

  It went on like this.

  They must’ve wheeled her to another room, for now she opened her eyes to a room that reminded her of a motel, a seaside inn she’d stayed at once. Or was she dreaming?

  At some point, outside her window, night clouds skimmed the moon in puffed gray shapes like the ones on her ceiling above the mattress on the floor in the empty house. Stains in the sky. A parade of babies down the drainpipes.

  Coatlicue, mother of all, where are you now?

  Sandra Cisneros, cabrona of my heart, where are you now?

  A fragment of a poem came to her. Sandra must’ve known what Bee would do, for she had written,

  It Occurs to Me I Am the Creative/Destructive Goddess Coatlicue

  I deserve stones.

  Better leave me the hell alone.

  I am besieged.

  I cannot feed you.

  You may not souvenir my bones.

  Coatlicue bore death. Bianca bore death.

  She closed her eyes, drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the urge to push.

  The urge came at 10:12 p.m.—a Tuesday night, twenty-four hours after she’d come to the ER for sliding a pine-green truck into the water—on April 21.

  “Please don’t make me push her out.” She clenched the nurse’s hand, the nurse whose name she did not know. “Please let me keep her.”

  “I’m sorry, hun.” The nurse held her. “You’ve got to push. You’ve got to dig deep. Reach inside yourself. You can do it. I know it’s hard. Put your head down honey, your chin to your chest, like this.” She pressed her head to her chest. “Now push hard like you’ve got to go to the bathroom. I know it hurts. I know it’s hard. But you’ve got to push.”

  Why had she jumped on the truck? Why hadn’t she gone back inside the house? Why had she let Gabe drive her to the country?

  Pink lines across an empty screen. Pink lines.

  A raspberry pressed to her belly.

  She’d had pictures. A long stream of pictures, a fold-out wallet of pictures. “It’s a girl!” the sonogram tech had typed onto the screen, in the three folds between the legs.

  Dr. Caldera held her hands as Bianca imagined Our Lady herself might have. Had she been there.

  “Push, Bianca. Push.”

  An ocean. A sinkhole. A feast of mothered bones.

  Somewhere, back home, Mama was baking pancakes on a Saturday morning, after chores. Somewhere Matty was singing. This is how you hold your head high. This is how you love the world even when it doesn’t love you back. Somewhere Dad was swinging his little girl through the air on a swing set he’d built. Higher, Daddy. Higher. I want to touch the leaves. I want to fly.

  “A few more, you’re almost done.”

  This is how you say goodbye.

  “She’s out, honey.” The nurse wiped Bianca’s face with a white towel. “You can lay back. They have some cleaning to do down there.”

  The labor room was silent except for the rattling of instruments, the swishing of suction. The dripping into a bucket.

  “You want to hold her?”

  Bianca nodded.

  Wrapped in a hospital blanket, her girl, the size of a doll. Bianca’s tears fell on the bluish skin.

  “We’ll give you some time with her.”

  Bianca squeezed the tiny creature to her chest. Traced the outline of her nose and lips. Imagined pressing her to her breasts to nurse her. Made the sign of the cross over the heart.

  “Do you have a name for her?” the nurse asked, reentering the labor room, breaking the silence. A brittle sound. A name.

  Bianca shook her head.

  “We have to take her now.”

  “Can’t I keep her?”

  The nameless nurse’s face softened, her brown eyes crinkled at the edges. “Oh, honey. I’m sorry, no. The hospital policy is we have to take her.”

  Bianca’s chest constricted, her throat tightened. “What will you do with her?”

  “I’ll give her to the doctors, love. Who can I call for you?”

  “My friend Lily.” She told the nurse the number, which Bianca had memorized in elementary school.

  “I’ll call her for you. You rest,” she said, reaching for the baby.

  Bianca held her tight. She held her until the nurse took her. Out of her arms. Out of the room
. Out of the world.

  The nurse with no name came back a few minutes later and told her Lily would be there soon. Bianca stared out the window, pretended not to hear. The clouds had scattered. The moon was full. And in its fullness, it was blank.

  Gabe stood in the doorway.

  “The baby’s gone.”

  He sighed, ran his hands through his spiky hair. He still looked like shit. Like he hadn’t slept or showered since the accident. She couldn’t look at him before, but now she stared at his face, the face she’d known since she was fourteen. She’d memorized every scar, knew all the stories to go with them. She could add the newest cut to his forehead: truck into ditch. Baby lost.

  When his neck muscles twitched he was clenching his jaw, either in anger or trying not to cry. His jaw clenched.

  She’d adored that face since he was a boy and she was a girl. She’d believed everything he’d ever said about getting married and settling down, raising a family, opening a restaurant, growing old together. She’d failed to limpia his heart. She wasn’t his curandera—her mouth not sage, her tongue no candle. She searched his black eyes. What she’d mistaken for guilt, for angst, for tragedy-ridden love, for some turning point in a romance novel, she saw for what it was: regret. Gabe regretted their life together. And he was right to.

  They were over. La Bee was gone. She’d lost the last of Gabe’s babies.

  “I never meant for any of this, Bee. If I could take it all back . . .”

  “Me too.”

  He stepped closer to her bed.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No. Lily’s on her way.”

  “Do you want a funeral for her?”

  “No. Then it’s real. This way, I imagine she’s still here. She’s going home with me.”

  Gabe choked back a sob, reached for Bianca’s hand.

  “You should go.”

  “I love you, Bee. I always will.”

  “Too little, too late,” she whispered to his back as he walked through the recovery room door, the butterflies and music and color fading around him.

  Lily came after her shift, with a requisite sweet tea from the donut shop. “I come bearing gifts, m’lady,” she said, stooping down to Bianca on the hospital bed and kissing her BFF’s cheek. “Drink this elixir and be healed.”

  “I wish it were so simple,” Bee said, but reached for the Styrofoam cup anyway. She swigged several gulps, allowing the sugar to wash over her like holy water. “I hope there’s a jelly donut in there.”

  Lily reached into her tote and fished out a white paper bag. “Do you doubt me?”

  Bee grabbed it greedily, snatched one of the two donuts, and took a bite. She almost smiled as the jelly hit her tongue.

  “Hey, donut monster. You know, one of those is supposed to be for me.”

  Bee shrugged, handed her friend the one she’d already bitten into, and pulled out the other for herself.

  “You’re lucky I tolerate you,” Lily said, smiling wryly, then started on the donut, chewed end first.

  They sat in sticky silence a few minutes.

  “Oh, hey. I found Kanga wandering around the neighborhood and took her back to your house. The front door was wide open, chica. Your dog’s safe though. I fed her, gave her water, locked up the house for you.”

  “Oh, fuck. I can’t believe I forgot my pobre boxer. I told her to stay and then never came back for her. Thank God you found her, Lil.”

  She almost couldn’t stomach the last of her donut, but hunger took over, and she licked the jelly from her fingers, then swished it all down with the last of the iced tea.

  When they’d finished, Lily motioned for Bee to scoot over, and lay down beside her in the bed, resting her head on Bee’s shoulder. “We’ll get through this,” Lily said. Bee nodded, afraid to say anything for fear she’d bring the donut and sweet tea hurling back up. She grabbed Lily’s hand and held it tight.

  “They got you hooked up like a chupacabra,” Lily said, nodding toward the IV pole, where the nurse had left the empty bags of blood they’d pumped into Bee. “That’s a sweet setup. Keep you from gnawing on people’s necks?”

  The deflated bags held remnants of blood and plasma, a yellowish slime, an organ whose life-force had been drained away. The tubes were like veins bubbling with the last splotches of red ink, the inside of a pen that no longer writes. The label flashed a large A and beneath that positive. “I’ve earned an A plus at bloodletting, Lil. Aren’t you proud of me?”

  “Always,” Lily replied, matching Bee’s snark with rare earnestness. Her voice grew raspy, and she held Bee’s hand tighter. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier.”

  “You’ve got so much already, with your mom and Little Gran being sick, and Sam monopolizing all your time . . .”

  Lily pinched Bee’s arm, and they both laughed.

  “There’s nothing you could have done, Lil. It was over already.”

  Lily sighed, grasped Bee’s hand again, entwining their fingers. They’d lay in bed together like this for sleepovers every other night most summers since they were eleven. They’d recited, acting out the motions on each other’s head and back, Crack an egg on your head, let the yolk drip down. Stab a knife in your back, let the blood run down. Spiders crawling up your arms, spiders crawling down your arms (tickle lightly up and down). Cool breeze (blow on the neck), tight squeeze (give a bear hug). Now you’ve got the chills. That’s still how it felt.

  “At least you’re rid of Gabe.”

  Bee wrenched her hand free of Lily’s, turned to look at her friend. It was as if she’d stabbed Bee for real. “Rid of his baby, you mean?” She couldn’t control the vitriol in her voice. “That’s some sick silver lining.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that, Bee. It’s just, now you’re free of him.”

  “Just . . . stop talking.”

  Bee turned toward the empty bags of blood on the IV pole. A Rorschach test. What do you see? A failed mother. Someone else’s blood. Bee’s soaked the ditch bank. Bee’s was gone. She would never be free again.

  Lily sighed.

  She tried making other small talk but Bee shut her eyes, pretended to fall asleep. She stayed silent so long, Lily got up, whispered, “I didn’t mean it like that, Bee.”

  When Bee didn’t answer, Lily said, “I’ll come pick you up when they discharge you, and stay with you as long as you need.”

  Bee wanted to answer Don’t bother, but her throat was coated in jelly.

  Every person in this house has died. Even you. Especially you. She was misremembering a line from Rigoberto González. A poem from Black Blossoms about Lizzie Borden. Why did it feel so apt now?

  This is not your bird and this is not your house

  You’re not the daughter

  You’re not the spouse

  You’re not at home.

  This is not your burning house.

  Kanga snored beside Bianca where she lay on the couch in the living room. She’d slept there because she couldn’t stand to sleep on the mattress on the floor in her parents’ room. She couldn’t stand to go into that bedroom, look out that front window where the truck’s presence remained, though the truck itself was gone.

  She hadn’t wanted to come back to the empty house, but after Lily, there was no one else. She couldn’t face Esme. What would she say? What would Gabe tell her? A lie no doubt. A comforting lie.

  Lily would check on Bianca, she knew. Even after her friend’s tactlessness. Even after kicking Bianca while she was down. To Lily, it was just putting her foot in her mouth. It was a joke. To Bianca, it was unforgivable. But what could she do? Life resumed. As the truck kept driving. As the dog kept snoring. Bianca stroked Kanga’s brown fur. She pulled a blanket over her body, imagining she were a corpse in a morgue herself. Would anyone identify her? Edna St. Vincent M
illay knew her pain. “Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more! / Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!”

  It hurt to go to the bathroom so she was trying not to drink anything, despite the doctor’s instructions to drink fluids. She was past feeling thirsty.

  She did feel cold, though it was in the eighties outside.

  Spring in the desert was like summer everywhere else. Daytimes were hot, nights were cold. Monsoons would come, drowning the grasshoppers, winged and mothlike, swarming into town from the drought-ridden desert edges. Mothers would warn their children not to squash them with their chanclas or, worse, their bare feet—not to catch and bottle them with leaves to eat and a napkin covering the lid because a life contained in the hands of a greed-curious child as large as a giant or a monster in comparison, large enough to murder entire nations of grasshoppers, was no life at all. Still, when the chocolate mountain ranges in the distance covered themselves with thick fawn-colored clouds and lightening crackled the sky, even the grasshoppers must have understood their time was nearing its end.

  Bianca stood gingerly, pain springing through her thighs and crotch, and hobbled like an old woman toward the bathroom where she’d felt Dad’s ghost the other night. What makes us do it? What makes us hurt ourselves and those we love?

  In the mirror like a girlhood sleepover game of Bloody Mary, she sprinkled sink water on the glass and called, “Dad.”

  The yellow bathroom walls reminded her of “The Yellow Wallpaper”; she imagined herself trying to climb in rather than out. “Dad!”

  She picked up a hairbrush and hurled it at the mirror, shattering a chunk in the corner.

  “I’ve fucked up, Dad. I’ve fucked up big time. I need help, Dad. I need help.” She sank to the toilet seat, wrapping her arms around herself and sobbing, rocking. Her Dad had joined leagues with God. He was silent. He would not help her. She was past redemption.

  All her babies were ghosts.

  From the medicine cabinet beneath the sink she took the iron that Lily had let her borrow when she’d told Lily that her boss at the newspaper was upset that Bianca kept coming into work with wrinkled clothes; she walked toward the sliding back doors in the living room, past the fake Christmas tree and the empty wrapped presents with their garish ribbons. She left the sliding glass open and pushed a lawn chair toward a patio rafter. Kanga woke and followed her outside, wagging her boxer’s stump of a tail. She ran toward a ball in the grass and brought it back to Bianca for fetch. Bianca ignored her.