by Lynne Hugo
“No, I mean he wasn’t until in the car. Yes, a pacifier, I think so. Jen? In the bag?”
“He feels hot, but he’s worked himself up pretty good.”
“Is he sick, Mommy?”
“I doubt it. Too hot, maybe in the car with the sun on him and that sleeper. And maybe too much to eat. Sometimes they just want to suck, they don’t need more milk. Anyway, they throw up all the time when they’re little. At least you and…you did.”
“Gross. I did not.”
“Okay. He’s done. Hand me that other towel,” Madalaine says. Jenny, who’s been clutching the towel she got out of the linen closet first off, hands it to Madalaine, who dries the baby off. “Got a pacifier in there?” she repeats. “He’s exhausted.” Indeed, the baby, still whimpering, has his eyes at half-mast. She inserts the pacifier Jennifer hands her into the baby’s mouth and he seizes it eagerly. “Good boy,” she says. “Now, let’s have a diaper and a clean outfit,” she instructs.
It’s Jennifer who responds again, rooting through the bag while Bill stands with his hands, ridiculously large and useless, splayed at his sides. “I can’t find anything but diapers and…baby powder, and shampoo…a giant jar of Vaseline, oh wait, here’s…no, it’s a blanket.”
“Wonderful. A blanket. It’s a hundred and six in the shade, and we have a blanket. Oh, but it’s okay, because we’ve got shampoo, the important thing. Genius at work. Well, you certainly can’t put that back on him,” Madalaine says, gesturing to the vomit-soaked sleeper while she fastens the tape on a disposable diaper. “So, you want to take him like this or what?” she says to Bill.
“What should I do?” he asks. “I didn’t realize, I mean, I see I should have checked what was in the bag. Melody, this is her first, see.”
“And your excuse is…?” It is said sarcastically.
“I had you,” Bill answers, and his honesty and simplicity disarm her.
“I guess you did. Here, c’mere.” Madalaine picks up the baby, who quiets again in her arms. She carries him into the family room with Bill and Jennifer in tow. “Sit,” she says. “Look, put your hands here and here. If you hold him like this, see it’s too flat. Angle him a little, you remember that much, don’t you? Hold him on your left side, they like to hear your heartbeat. Now just hum a little. I’ll be right back.”
Madalaine goes back through the kitchen, past the dining and living rooms and down the hall, leaving Bill with Will and Jennifer. Halfway down the hall, she pauses, turns and goes back to retrieve the plastic glass she left in the living room. She takes a long drink out of it, wincing at the taste, warm and watered down, but swallowing and quickly taking another. She carries the glass with her down the hall.
“Help me,” she whispers aloud. “Help me.”
She goes into Brian’s room. Posters of Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal are still on the walls, and the basketball-hoop laundry basket she’d hung on his closet door in vain hope. Madalaine directs a puff of air upward, levitating the few straggling bangs there, and steels herself to open the closet door. On the far back part of the top shelf, there’s a cardboard box that she can barely reach on tiptoes. She inches it forward and then tips it off the shelf into her hands. She holds it with trepidation, as gingerly as Bill holds his new son.
Inside is white tissue paper that crinkles softly when she touches it. She unfolds it as delicately as an origami bird. Inside is a little white short-sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts sized to fit over a newborn’s diaper. There is a bit of pastel-blue-and-white embroidery on the shirt and a white, lace-edged receiving blanket with matching embroidery. She opens it and holds the soft cotton to her cheek a moment. Then, Madalaine refolds the receiving blanket and puts it back in the box, puts the box back on the shelf. She carries the shorts and top out to Bill and Jennifer. Bill is relentlessly humming, as tuneless as ever. It occurs to Madalaine that she’s done the baby no favor by suggesting that Bill do anything remotely musical.
“Here. Lay him on the couch. Let’s see if we can’t do this without waking him up. Here, you do it. I’ll talk you through it.”
“I recognize this…didn’t your mother…?”
“Brian’s baptism,” Madalaine says softly. “Come on, first just thread his hand through this sleeve, then lift his back with your left hand while you scoot the shirt behind him with your right.”
“I can’t take this…”
“You’re right. It would look stupid on you. How about you put it on the baby?”
“I’ll send it back to you with Jennifer…”
“Brian would want to give him a gift. It’s from Brian, not me. Brian.”
“You’re a good person, Maddie,” Bill says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t…”
“Dress the baby,” Madalaine interrupts.
Bill fumbles through dressing Will after Madalaine shows him how to put powder in his hand and rub it under the baby’s arms and around his neck to prevent prickly heat. All the air seems to have been sucked out of the family room. Jennifer is breathless, attentive, and gets in there twice to help him while Madalaine keeps her hands out of it. When Bill has the shorts on, he looks at Madalaine. She is looking at the baby lying on the fabric—worn, tweedy, neutral—of her couch, big-eared and raw-looking, with goosedown hair and ruddy skin. She has seen him before and on that very couch.
“Just let me hold him a minute, will you?” she asks Bill.
“Are you sure?” he answers, seeing what she does.
“Just for a minute.” Madalaine picks up the bundle of Bill’s son and cradles him against her breast, his head nestling into the hollow between her collarbone and neck like a puzzle piece that had been missing. She kisses the top of his head and then rubs her cheek on it. She breathes in the baby’s scent. Helpless tears spring to her eyes. “Damn,” she whispers. “Damn. You have a good life, have a happy, good life.” She hands the shapeless, sleeping infant to the man who’d been her husband. “Take care of him, hear?” she says. “Not that you didn’t…”
“I will,” Bill says. “Thank you. This was really good of you. You didn’t have to do this.”
“No,” she says. “I didn’t.” But she smiles, speaks to Jennifer. “Come here, baby, give me a hug.”
“Maybe you want Jen to just stay with you tonight? I can run over and pick her up tomorrow.”
“I’ll stay with you, Mom, if you want,” Jennifer inserts, though her tone belies her and her eyes are on the baby.
“No, it’s okay. Jenny’s been wanting to spend time with Will. I have someplace to go.”
“You’ve been there enough, I suspect,” Bill says.
But after Bill leaves with Jenny and the baby, Madalaine doesn’t visit the cemetery after all. She goes to her room and takes an envelope out of her underwear drawer, where she’s tucked it beneath her two white slips for safekeeping. Sitting on the bed, she breaks the seal for the first time and carefully, as if they’re dried flowers, removes the pictures she took the night of the prom.
CHAPTER 41
What’s left? I am a hooked fish, flailing and flapping, slamming myself against a wooden dock with weakening hope for mercy. There’s no one to turn to except Maddie, who blames me for her son’s death. I even understand that. How can we bear the unbearable if there’s nothing and no one to blame? If there’s fault, then we can believe that we can stand guard—that we can even know which gates need a guard posted—and save our children, if not ourselves.
I didn’t know why I started going to see Kevin at first, though after the first two times, even I could guess what I was looking for. I always call Beth, his mother, first to make sure I don’t run into Claire. I know she’d assume that I’d done it on purpose, that pursuing her was my reason for coming. It’s not, though, as I said, I’m not sure what is. Kevin’s been moved to a rehabilitation hospital. I confess I don’t see any progress. Tied into a wheelchair, a feeding tube is in his stomach, a catheter in his bladder, his only movements are random and spastic. His fingers
splay rigidly from bony wrists. He’s shrunken, of course, from the loss of weight and muscle tone, as though he’s lost years of his age, too. The bruising is gone from his face and his hair has grown back over where they put the shunt in his brain to drain the accumulated fluid, but when his eyes are open, they’re uninhabited, a ghost town. Except for the close shave he’s given daily, and the hair on his arms and legs, you’d think you were looking at a twelve-year-old. Beth and her husband Nate hope on, though. They talk about when he’s well, not as if they’re referring to an unlikely miracle, but with conviction, as if they knew something.
It’s their conviction that draws me there. I need to see if the mountain moves. If they find a way to do it, I will find a way to pack more guilt—along with gratitude—into my bag.
Beth hugs me each time I come, as if it’s I whose child is comatose. I have no idea what Claire’s told her, but tiny, dun-colored, mousy Beth is big-hearted enough not to mention it. I see that Claire has taped up notes and little marker-drawings where Kevin would see them if he could see anything, and likewise, I don’t mention those. Beth darts about Kevin, straightening his head, drawing the cotton blanket higher or lower depending on the temperature of his room, and noting every word that’s said by someone in a hospital uniform in a spiral-bound notebook. She and Ben take shifts; he comes to relieve her after work in the evenings. On Saturday and Sunday, they are there together, the whole of their real lives now enacted on this enclosed stage, cramped with machinery and white draping, in a state of suspended animation, the oxymoron of chronic crisis. Here’s the strange and shameful secret I keep: sometimes I envy Beth.
This morning, a Sunday, I carried in a vase of dahlias and zinnias, intense, primary colors to dispel the grayish cast of Kevin’s room that persists through relentless sunshine.
“How lovely,” Beth murmured. “Wherever did you find these? They’re enormous.”
“In my garden,” I said, embarrassed that I’d had the time to spend hours outdoors.
I sat down next to Kevin in his wheelchair. “Hi, Kevin,” I said. “It’s good to see you. I brought some flowers, I didn’t know what kind you like, I’ve got most everything this year, anyway, I just picked the brightest ones.”
Kevin had a long, thin line of drool between his mouth and the towel that Beth keeps draped around his shoulders, and when Beth turned toward us and spotted it, she immediately wiped it away. I went on a while more about the garden: the aphids, the fungus that had sprung up on top of some mulch, the lack of rain, the heat. Beth’s told me the doctors can’t tell her for sure whether or not anything is registering in Kevin’s brain, so she’s decided it is, and some of the technicians have encouraged her with stories of patients waking from semiconscious states able to repeat what’s been said by visitors. She asks people to talk to Kevin as if he were still himself, still there, the essential spark of himself still lit and aware. So I do. And I do it for a good ten minutes before Beth excuses herself—she usually takes advantage of someone else being there to monitor Kevin and slips out to buy a sandwich or stretch her short legs with a walk around the parking lot, even in this wilting, killing heat.
“While you’re here, would you mind if I run to the cafeteria?” she asked softly, while I was rambling on about how ladybugs combat Japanese beetles.
“Of course not, you know that. Take your time. I’ll call a nurse if I see the slightest thing amiss.”
When the door shut behind her, I slid forward in my chair, leaned a little closer to Kevin. “If you can hear me,” I whispered. “Please. Please, when Claire comes, help her understand.” I went on, as I have before, explaining myself to this once-arrogant, fallen boy I never even particularly liked. I might as well be praying to a totem, I understand, but somehow I can talk to this flawed boy who’s brought all his suffering on himself by errors at once innocent and fatal. I can ask him for help and there’s the slimmest chance that he may give it to me. God is way too far out of my reach.
Sometimes, I do it all at once, visit Kevin and then Brian’s grave, I mean, one right after the other like the stations of the cross. That’s what I did today. Sometimes I talk to Brian the way I do Kevin, ridiculously asking for help, when I know the only help to be had for me is whatever I make for myself, and I’ve plain run out of ingredients. I usually bring some flowers—maybe a duplicate of the bouquet I brought Kevin, as I did today. I never know what I’ll find on the polished marble base of his headstone. Sometimes a weighted bunch of helium balloons, like enormous simplified replicas of my flowers, sometimes a note, sometimes a miniature basketball. Once, a single metal key. I never know who leaves these things. School friends, I’ve guessed. Probably Maddie, and maybe Claire, too, when she’s able.
Today there was a little framed picture of Brian as an infant propped up. He was in the christening outfit Mama embroidered for him, back when she did things like that. I was his godmother; I held him in that suit and I know these little blue flowers, and that there are raised white ones, too, that have receded into the shadows of the picture. Mama made long white dresses with pink flowers for Claire and Jennifer, and this little shorts outfit for Brian. It “wasn’t right to put a dress on a boy, it could make him turn pervert,” she said. I squatted to look closely, thinking Maddie had put it there, unwilling to disturb it by the smallest touch.
Brian is buried under the spread arms of an old maple in an area overlooking a steep, unused decline to a wide creek. The cemetery is hilly and well-kept, except for some of the oldest sections, which are mowed by the keepers but rarely pruned and planted the way many of the newer graves are. You can pick out the graves of children without reading a word on the stones. They’re like shrines, dotted with mementos. Teddy bears nap, toys rust gently if too quickly. Once I saw people arrive with a birthday cake. I cannot say how wrenching they are, these places of terror neutralized by having done its worst, leaving nothing more it can take that matters.
“Brian, if you’re there, if you can hear me…please. She loves you, and I know you love her,” I whispered, setting the flowers next to the picture. I stayed just a few minutes more, letting one knee go forward to rest on the baked earth to balance me. That’s all I said. There was nothing more. Then, I just stood up to leave.
I can’t imagine how I didn’t sense someone approach, but I didn’t, so when I turned and saw there was someone not eight feet behind me, I gasped. A little squeak of startle and fear got out before I realized it was Maddie.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
I’ve not seen her in weeks. I don’t call her anymore, because she won’t return my calls. If Jennifer answers the phone, Maddie tells her to say she’s not able to come to the phone and will call back. But she doesn’t.
She looked terrible. Haggard, her hair stringy and the gray webbing whiter and more extensive to my eye, at least, but maybe it just looked that way because she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her eyes were ringed, and the fullness through the cheeks that all we Sams women have has hollowed out, giving her the gaunt look of a survivor.
“Maddie, Maddie.” All I could get out was her name. I took a step toward her and began to open my arms but she backed up a little and I knew immediately that she’d rebuff me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I just brought these.” I gestured toward the garden flowers, suddenly garish.
Maddie looked past my pointing hand. I followed her eyes and saw what she saw. “Oh, not that picture of Brian. That was here. But I guess you must have put it there yourself…” I didn’t finish the sentence because it was obvious something was wrong.
“That’s not Brian,” she said flatly.
“Yes, sure it is. I didn’t touch it, but I got down and looked closely. It’s from when he was christened. It could be Jen, except it’s the outfit Mama made him, too. I’d know him anywhere.”
Maddie brushed past me and leaned to pick the picture up. She looked at it briefly and said, “No, this isn’t Brian.” My sister crumpled th
en. At first I thought she’d fainted again, but when I knelt I could feel her shaking, dry sobs beginning to surface like lava from her center.
“He’d thrown up all over, and he was screaming, just screaming, and I gave him a sponge bath and changed him and got him dressed in that…that Mama made. His hair was, like it was transparent, practically invisible, because of the color, and his ears were big and stuck. I told him to have a good, happy life. He was so beautiful and I held him and I didn’t want to put him down or give him to anyone else to hold.”
“I remember,” I said. And I did. I didn’t remember Brian throwing up or Maddie giving him a bath, but I remembered that hair, and his ears.
“No, the baby. This baby. They named him Brian William. I held him….”
It took me a good minute—that’s how much the baby is Brian to the eye—to realize that Bill’s new son had been born. “Oh, God, Maddie, oh my God, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry for everything.” On the ground beside her, I pulled the upper half of her body onto my lap and stroked her hair. Then we were both crying, but I was crying with her, for her, those first minutes. That one time had no artifice, nothing disingenuous in it, nothing for myself, and neither prayer nor gratitude for Claire. I was with Maddie.
I try to remember that—that one moment that it was real and I loved her and tried to help her. I try to remember that because it didn’t last very long, and then I was crying for myself again, and for my Anna Claire, and as I felt Maddie let go and let herself need me, I knew she was vulnerable and that I’d ask her, not directly, of course. I waited, still stroking her hair and saying, “I know, I know,” until the heaving quieted and she’d lapsed into more shallow, normal breaths. I let myself cry on, though, even as I thought through what to say.
