Graceland

by Lynne Hugo

  “Claire’s not a girl, she’s my cousin. She’d think it was weird if I said she looked good.”

  “Claire most certainly won’t think it’s weird, and for heaven’s sake, Brian, it’s awfully nice of her to take you.”

  “She’s not taking me. We’re doubling.” He was fooling with the part in his hair now, trying to get it perfectly straight.

  “Well, I imagine she could have doubled with other seniors. Do you want me to fix your part?”

  “I’ve got it okay now,” he says, as he leans closer to the mirror and does it again.

  Madalaine watches him in the mirror, and then her eyes are drawn sideways, to her own reflection where her eyes appear as pale islands set in deep gray ponds. She notices lines between her nose and mouth, and horizontal ones in neat parallels across her neck. The gray webbing in her hair, especially to the right of her side part, looks harsh. Really, her face looks mismatched with itself, still young and too old at the same time, none of the changes blending in a natural or attractive way on the face of the person she used to be in her life with Bill. Even the weight she’s unintentionally lost—after so many years of struggle with an extra fifteen pounds—hasn’t made her look better, just tired. She wonders what her son sees when he looks at her, and what he sees when he looks at Melody. She catches his eyes on her as she looks at herself, and smiles immediately to distract him.

  “So, handsome one, it looks like you’re ready. Claire and Kevin should be here now, so it’s a good thing. I hope you have a great time,” she says, glancing momentarily at her watch and then raising her eyes back to the mirror and speaking to his reflection there. “You shined your shoes, right?”

  “Right, Mom.” He sighs to communicate that he’s sick of her promptings.

  “Well, then, I’ll be in the kitchen. The camera’s all loaded and ready.”

  “I hate how I look in pictures.”

  Madalaine understands exactly why, but says automatically, “What do you mean? You look wonderful.”

  Claire leads Kevin when Madalaine answers the door. Her niece is in a low-cut, long sheath dress, spaghetti straps crisscrossed three times in a beautiful, intricate pattern against her bare back, the only detail to the dress other than the rich simplicity of the black crepe fabric. Her shoes, black-dyed fabric, have delicate straps crossed over the instep and toes that echo the straps of the dress, and when she sits on the couch, Madalaine sees that she wears sheer stockings. Claire looks the way Madalaine always wished she could look, with her dark long hair curled and caught up to one side and held with gardenias, which she has fastened there instead of on her dress. The effect is original and beautiful, especially against the depth of her hair. Claire’s used a flattering coral lipstick, too, one that matches her nail polish, and her eyes are made up with subtlety and flair. Madalaine recognizes Lydia’s cultured-pearl earrings, the ones that are set into circles of real gold.

  Madalaine has met Claire’s boyfriend several times; it’s the one thing about Claire that Madalaine finds less-than ideal. What attracted her to this boy who seems arrogant and self-centered? Madalaine doesn’t imagine it can be his looks. The boy has ordinary brown hair, small hazel eyes and his head is a little too small for his body. Tonight, though, he looks handsome in his tux, black bow tie and cummerbund. Claire would never have picked a color for herself that would make Kevin look ridiculous, and Madalaine wishes Christy were the type to think of such things.

  They make brief small talk while Brian calls to them from the kitchen. He bangs the refrigerator shut and lopes into the living room carrying Christy’s corsage.

  “Hey,” he mumbles, suddenly embarrassed. He looks to Madalaine as if he doesn’t know whether to go sit down, shake hands with Kevin or stand on his head.

  “You look great,” Claire says warmly.

  Madalaine waits for Brian to remember to compliment Claire, but he mumbles again and looks down. “Thanks,” he gets out finally.

  “Claire, you look absolutely beautiful,” Madalaine says pointedly, as if she hadn’t said it twice already.

  “Doesn’t she?” Kevin echoes, and Madalaine hates him a little more.

  “Okay, you all, you’d better go get Christy. Let her mom get pictures and then stop back here so I can get mine.”

  “Kevin and I have already been through this at my house and his, you know,” Claire says, but her tone is good-natured. “We’ve actually been dressed and driving around for pictures since yesterday noon.”

  “I’m sorry, honey….”

  “Oh Aunt Maddie, I’m only teasing,” Claire interrupts. “It’s okay, we don’t mind.”

  “I don’t?” Kevin says, and Claire slaps him lightly on the arm.

  “No, you don’t. Remember? I’ve told you over and over, you don’t mind.”

  “She thinks I’m just putty in her hands,” Kevin says to Madalaine. “Unfortunately, she’s right.” Madalaine feels the familiar onset of tears when Kevin says this, but she’s not even sure what exactly hurts about it.

  Forty-five minutes later, Madalaine has finished a roll of twenty-four pictures of her son, her niece and their dates. She’s arranged them in couples, girl-girl and boy-boy, as a foursome and as couples again. Just as Brian is fussing that they really want to get going, Madalaine has a thought.

  “Claire, honey, take a picture of me, Jen and Brian, will you? Sometimes, a twenty-fifth picture will come out….”

  “God, Mom, no. You’ve taken enough pictures.” Predictably, Brian is refusing, and Claire speaks over him.

  “You be quiet and get over there. Sure, no problem. Jen, you get here, next to your idiot brother.” She propels Brian into place, and he assumes a resigned look and posture.

  “Brian, cut that out. Smile and behave yourself, or trust me, you’re not going to make it to the prom.”

  That was the thing about Claire. Madalaine didn’t know how she had such a sensitive touch, but she could get Brian to do what his mother wanted, and Madalaine loved her for that, too.

  CHAPTER 7

  Strange, how moments can play over and over in your mind, like some terrible broken movie. I keep seeing myself in the living room after Claire and Kevin left to pick up Brian and his date. The sun was still well above the treetops; daylight savings had begun, and the shouts of children playing hard before supper came in through the open windows on soft May air. I’d straightened the living room before Kevin came over so I could take pictures, and the first three roses from the yard were in a little vase on the coffee table. I remember looking around, reasonably satisfied that the room was clean and homey. We need new carpet, and yes, the couch has seen better days, but I’ve stopped looking at those. It’s been a choice, and any extra money we’ve had has gone into Claire, one way or another, whether it was when she was sick, or when she needed braces, violin lessons or ballet classes. Wayne’s been good about it, not a word of complaint, really, and how can a woman not appreciate that?

  Wayne was watching car racing and I looked at the television pretending to watch it with him, but really I was looking at Claire’s senior portrait, the big one I had framed to hang as the focal point of the room. She’s wearing a simple black drape—all the senior girls do—and it put me in mind of the dress she’s wearing tonight. What a beauty she is, the sweetest gift of my life, the good heart at its center, and given to me twice, both times undeserved. I was thinking about how terrified I’d once been that Claire wouldn’t live to grow up like this, go to proms, go to college, have her life. This will sound too dramatic, but I know it’s true, in the way a certain knowledge can be wordless in the marrow of your bones: if she hadn’t lived, I couldn’t have survived it. When Claire was little and so sick, I thought about John, the possibility of his comfort. I didn’t call him, though. Perhaps I was afraid that he had neatly bricked over the hole in his life where I’d once fit, and the notion someone can utterly disappear was one I refused to allow in my mind.

  Anyway, I’d not thought about John in mon
ths, nor had I thought of when Claire was sick. Things like that, you can push from your mind if you work at it across time, and I have. That’s what makes it feel as if I somehow brought it on, because I’d been thinking about John and about when Claire was sick, and within the hour, the phone rang.

  A man cleared his throat to ask if I was Claire Merrill’s mother and I said I was, my heart already pounding to escape my chest. He said, “There’s been an accident. You’re needed at the hospital.”

  I argued with him, to explain that it was impossible. “She’s out to dinner with her boyfriend and her cousin. They wouldn’t be at the prom yet.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but she’s here at St. Francis and you need to come. Is there someone there who can drive you?”

  “My husband is here. We’ll drive. All right. We’ll drive… Is she all right? God, is Claire all right?”

  “She’s been injured, ma’am, I don’t know exactly how serious it is, but she is injured. A car accident. They were brought in by ambulance. She’s asking for you. You just come on,” he said. Later, I thought that maybe he’d confused me with Madalaine, that he thought it was Claire’s mother who would be alone instead of Brian’s. It was one of those ridiculous details of no consequence that you focus on, as if in figuring out exactly what happened, the whole insoluble, terrible mystery of how to put your life back together will suddenly appear, clarified and shining.

  I didn’t even ask about Brian.

  I am trapped with my terror, the seat belt pressing it to my chest as Wayne drives like a crazy man, running lights and stop signs on the way to St. Francis. For once I haven’t a word to say about his speed. The Saturday-night traffic is dense—it always is—and I am frantic, praying desperately even though I don’t believe it will change a thing.

  “We’ve given her a shot, but she’s been conscious several times. You can see her,” a nurse says. I have run in ahead of Wayne, saying, “Claire Merrill? Claire Merrill?” over and over. Wayne catches up, his soft-soled shoes soundless on the linoleum, while the slapping of my flats echoed my arrival into each curtained-off cubicle, I am sure. The nurse guides me with a light hand on my back, toward the second cubicle. Claire is lying on a cart of some sort, with an IV on one side of her and oxygen tubes into each nostril. There are wires to monitors that flash patterns in neon-green and white. She’s draped in white, some of it bloody, and absurdly I wonder where her beautiful dress and shoes are. There are several white-dressed men and women bustling in and out, making adjustments, hooking up another apparatus.

  “Claire, Claire, I’m here. Sweetheart, you’re going to be all right, I’m here.” I touch her hair, then her hand before I notice Wayne, huddled miserably back from the cart, his clothes brushing the cloth divider between Claire’s cubicle and the next. I don’t have the grace to gesture to him to come up with me, though. I want her all to myself.

  “Mrs. Merrill, we need to get a history. We need to talk to you. Her doctors are still stabilizing her. Please come with me, now.”

  I am crying and shaking my head no, but the woman who’s spoken to me is insistent. She puts an arm around me and a hand on my other elbow, the one between us. “She only has one kidney,” I babble. “I can’t go with you, she only has one kidney.”

  Even though nobody said he had to, Wayne follows us to a little room, where the nurse sits us both down and picks up a clipboard. “Tell me everything you can,” she says, clicking up the point of her pen. Around me, the peach-colored walls are moving forward, squeezing all the air out of the room like lungs that can only exhale.

  I finish giving Claire’s history. The one too-small kidney that she was born with, not that we knew it then, and because we didn’t know, the bladder infection we didn’t catch, how sick she got when the good, the blessed, the normal-sized kidney got infected, too. The care with her diet since, avoiding the enemy potassium, anything that might put undue stress on it. As if from outside myself, I hear my voice bleeding its own chemistry of hurry and begging as I tack on how beautiful Claire is, how talented, how brimming with future.

  “All right, Mrs. Merrill. Thank you. Try not to worry. She has wonderful doctors, and she’s going to be okay. Try not to worry,” says the nurse, whose name and face I never so much as registered. “I’ll go see if you and your husband can be with her now. Later, you both might want to be typed and cross-matched in case she needs more blood.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I want her to have my blood. Please hurry back, I want to see her.” Then, as the nurse is leaving, it finally occurs to me. “What about the other kids? Are they all right? What happened?” She comes back in the room and gestures to the seats from which we had just risen. Wayne and I obediently sit back down. The nurse sits in her chair again. I am studying the shades of blue, green and teal in a picture of a sailboat out on the water that hangs on the wall when she says it.

  “I’m so sorry. I thought the police had talked with you. There was a fatality. One of the boys was dead at the scene, and the other is critically injured. He was airlifted to Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati. Another girl who was in the car seems to be fine. She’s already had a cut on her knee stitched up… Your daughter is very lucky…” Her voice continues, but my mind leapfrogs over her.

  “The boy who was killed? Which one? Which one?”

  The nurse consults her clipboard. “Brian Beeson.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Ellie is the last person Madalaine wants, but there’s no one else. The police officer who appeared at her door says he has to call someone to come help her. “At least let me get someone to take care of your little girl,” he says. “I need to take you to Maysfield General, ma’am. I’d like to have someone meet us there, at least.” He keeps using that phrase, at least. “It’s the least I can do,” he says when he goes into the bathroom and wets a washcloth for her, and her knowledge begins that she will never be a normal person again.

  “No, no, no,” Madalaine had sobbed and half screamed when the officer told her. Madalaine gave him Lydie’s number without thinking, without putting it together that Lydie would have been receiving her own uniformed visitor. There was no answer, and so she’d fallen back on Ellie to come for Jennifer. As the connection lights in her own mind, she says, “Who else is dead?” and then, when he hesitates, says again, “Who?”

  “The other boy has been airlifted over to Children’s Hospital,” the officer, whose face is too young and raw-shaven for this job, answers. “He’s critical, that’s really all I know, ma’am. One of the girls is pretty bad, and the other one’s just cut on the leg. They’re at St. Francis.”

  “Which girl is hurt? Anna Claire Merrill is my niece.”

  The policeman can’t take any more. Nobody told him the kids were related. They should have dispatched another officer to do this with him. “I really don’t have details, ma’am, I’m sorry. I was at the scene, and they sent me to get you,” he lies, but she reads his eyes and tone, and knows she will not have Lydia’s strength to collapse into.

  Shadows were eating the details of civilization when the policeman escorted her through the hospital emergency entrance. He turned Madalaine and Jennifer over to a nurse who embraced them each before she took in Madalaine’s eyes and said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Your sister is here for you, she’s in the chaplain’s area.”

  “I want to see my son,” Madalaine says.

  “Of course. We’d like someone to be with you. Would you want that to be your sister, or…his father?”

  “Have you reached Bill?”

  “I’m sorry, not yet.”

  “Maybe I should wait for him. No, I want to see Brian. I can’t…I don’t know. Are you sure it’s Brian?”

  It was taking root now, the nurse knows, the pit of the terrible knowledge just beginning to erupt and send its long tentacle shoots into Madalaine’s being. She has seen it too many times, how unbearably large it grows, crowding out everything and anything else that might have grown in someone the r
est of her life.

  “Are you sure?” Madalaine’s voice is a wail now, and Jennifer is crying into her hands.

  “I’m so sorry. Yes, we’re sure, the girls gave us the names. But the police need you or a member of your family to make a positive identification, but it’s a formality. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” While she talks, she applies a gentle pressure to Madalaine’s back, drawing Jennifer to her side and working them toward the short hall to the chaplain’s office where Ellie is waiting, white-faced and alone.

  When Bill comes, Melody toddles alongside him, ready to burst into birth at any hour by her looks, though she’s not due for a while yet. Madalaine catches a glimpse when Bill and Melody pass the chaplain’s door, strangely unescorted and lost momentarily.

  Madalaine shrinks back, furious, humiliated, utterly isolated in the contrast of losses and gains with the other woman. How could she possibly have thought she should go in to Brian with Bill? Bill is crying though, and when he comes in and sees Madalaine, he steps away from Melody and puts his arms out to the mother of his first child. “God, God, God,” he rasps, and Madalaine strokes his head even as her own legs weaken underneath her and she weighs into him. They both stagger a little, then balance themselves against one another.

  A moment later, they leave Jennifer with Ellie, and the two of them to contend with Melody, while the chaplain on duty accompanies them to the morgue where their son’s body lies on a table in an area off to one side. She fingers the stiff neck of her clerical collar and steps back deferentially when she says, “You can be with him as long as you like. I’ll wait just outside unless you’d like me to pray with you and him, or just be…in here.”

  “That’s all right,” Madalaine says, meaning she’s not ready for any prayers addressed to a loving or merciful God right now. She sees her son motionless beneath a sheet that is tucked around him as though he were still her little boy just settled for the night, but she knows he screamed and suffered, and that God did not even have the grace to let him die in his mother’s arms. “You can go.”