Loving Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  “Really? Bottles seem so much neater.”

  Despite the nurse’s assurances that the pain would pass, Chloe felt the aches travel hotly through her breasts. It wasn’t so much the physical act of not being able to feed the baby every meal that was disappointing. She pumped out milk, and they gave her bottles whenever she cried. It wasn’t even the relief that passed through her body when Reed nursed. Two years ago Kit was walking right past the lingerie department on her way to the toys. This was a kind of need and longing Chloe couldn’t explain to her. “Hank really wants me to nurse her. He says it’s better for the baby.”

  Kit shuddered. “I don’t think I could let a baby do that to me. It creeps me out.”

  “It’s not so bad after a while.”

  Kit handed her a blue mug, from which fragrant steam rose. “I have the totally bitchenest Christmas present for you. Do I really have to wait until tomorrow morning to give it to you?”

  Chloe’s heart softened—hormone surge—she thought, wondering when the estrogen pills would begin to level her out, make her feel like her old crabby self. “I don’t have anything for you to open. I was planning on taking you to the Trading Post so you could pick something out yourself.”

  “It’s okay. We can do that when you feel better. So can I give you my present now or what?”

  “Sure, Kit. If that’s what you want.”

  “Okay. Be right back.” She rushed down the hallway, and Chloe sipped the hot tea, enjoying its warmth traveling down her throat. Why was it that the simplest home fare tasted so satisfyingly real compared to hospital food? She tried to imagine what trendy trinket Kit was about to lay on her—a twin to that crystal necklace she was wearing, the “kind all the girls on Melrose Place wear”? When Absalom died, Kit had braided some of his tail hair into a keepsake bracelet Chloe couldn’t quite bring herself to wear. Nevertheless, the gift was one of her most treasured possessions.

  Kit returned holding a large brown envelope in her hands. “We got this computer disk in the mail. Ten free hours on the Internet. I went way over ten hours, but after I told Lita how much homework I could do on it my dad subscribed.”

  “What’s the Internet?”

  “It’s hard to explain without a computer to show you. Basically it’s all these different places you can go and talk to people, look for information. In cyberspace.”

  Chloe laughed. “This is exactly why you need to get good grades and stay in school. I have no clue at all what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, anyway, through Keyword and Search and the World Wide Web Crawler, I found this list of places. Severed Strings, Birth Quest, Finders Keepers. You remember that report I did on you last year?”

  “I remember.” The interview was supposed to be on an influential female role model. Kit’s probing had taken her back to uncomfortable memories of foster-care days. The tea tasted dull on her tongue, and she set the mug down next to Hannah, who sniffed it and decided she wasn’t interested. “Why don’t I like the sound of this?”

  “Relax. It’s nothing terrible. I mean, all I did was take some of the stuff you told me and scan your baby picture in and download it and put your name and birthday in like I was you and I was looking for, you know, your mother.”

  “Jesus, Kit!”

  “Please don’t be mad, Chloe.”

  “I’m not mad, I’m stunned.”

  Kit held out a letter that had been inside the brown envelope. “Thing is, I got this back, Chloe. I think maybe I found her.”

  Chloe could not bring herself to take the envelope. She looked at the return address, handwritten in ordinary blue ballpoint. Hacienda de Tres Hermanas. Rural Route 36, Box 11897, Patagonia, Arizona. It was postmarked Tucson.

  “I didn’t open it.”

  I would have, Chloe thought. Read it, then likely burned it in the flames of good sense. “And I’m not going to, either. Put it away, Kit.”

  A long moment of silence ensued, then Kit folded the envelope into her jeans pocket. “God, Chloe, say something! I’ll throw it away if you don’t want to read it. But please, please, don’t be mad.” Kit started to cry.

  The air in the room was close with the odors of woodsmoke, popcorn, and Kit’s bubble-gum-sweet perfume. Aside from a shocky, hot feeling flooding her belly and face, Chloe felt dead calm, as if what lay inside the envelope frightened her so fundamentally there was nothing left over in her to spend on fear. It could have been a bill, one of Iris’s mean lectures, or even Rhonda’s baby announcement, the assortment of favorite place-names falling off the allotted line into the margin.

  “You’re pissed.”

  “Well, gee, Kit, it’s not like you put my name in for a contest to win a free gym membership. This is heavy stuff. Why the hell didn’t you ask before you did that?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed so one-in-a-million that anything would come of it. And I had ten free hours! I didn’t think it could hurt just to look.”

  Chloe sighed.

  “It could always turn out to be the wrong lady,” Kit said, scrambling hopefully. “It’s almost Christmas. I’ll make us a pot of cocoa with zillions of marshmallows, and we can listen to country radio all night, talk about horses, just the two of us, go back to the way things were. Right?”

  “Sure,” Chloe said, to comfort the girl. But assurances didn’t stop the spiraling changes. What Kit had done changed everything. Chloe wanted to say, We can forget about the baby in the preemie unit, and Iris dying in California, and me here without my uterus, and how I feel every time that goddamn Indian jeweler looks at me. We can take a handful of happy pills and play Let’s Pretend for the rest of our lives. But she knew the road she’d lived in fear of crossing all her life had opened before her. She had no choice but to put one foot in front of the other and start walking.

  12

  Before breakfast the temperature hit eighty degrees. Henry senior opened the traditional Christmas bottle of Lancers red and poured out three glasses. Hank and his parents gathered on the matching sofas around the miniature potted Norfolk pine atop the coffee table. Aside from a single strand of silver garland and the paper star, which, when unfolded, became their insurance agent’s Christmas card, the boughs were bare and green. When he turned his head to the left, Hank could just glimpse the flip side of the star, where lay a year’s worth of months, during which, payments provided, insurance coverage might keep one financially secure.

  “What happened to all your ornaments?” Hank asked his mother, who wore an emerald green robe and matching slippers, and ignored the wine, sipping herb tea.

  “Nothing happened to them. They’re still in their boxes.”

  “You’re falling down on the job, Mother,” he teased her. “I remember when you used to start decorating the day after Halloween.”

  “You know how it is,” Iris said. “It’s not as if we entertain all that often. All the dusting and so forth. I can’t manage it.”

  Dad could do it, Hank thought, and immediately chastised himself for posing such a pointless solution. He watched as his father poured himself a second glass of wine. “They say red wine is good for the ticker,” Henry announced, patting his chest for emphasis.

  “In moderation,” Hank commented, remembering his Christmas morning grape juice when he was a child; then, as a teenager, the day his father secretly made the switch to wine, laughing so hard at Hank’s bewildered expression.

  “It’s Christmas,” his father said, his mouth tight against the rim of the glass.

  Iris got up from the couch and gathered up napkins and coasters. “If you two gentlemen will excuse me.”

  That was her traditional exit line as she departed for the kitchen to make the spinach-and-mushroom omelets that were also a sanctioned element of Oliver holidays. After they attended a nondenominational church service, opened gifts, and ate turkey, they would have checked every step off the Christmas to-do list. In the seven months since he’d seen his mother, her skin had lost much of its color and elas
ticity; her carefully applied makeup only emphasized the long downhill slide. Last night as he lay on the sofa bed trying to get comfortable, all he could think of was her face as she greeted him at the door. Sunken in against the bones, it resembled a skull. And her hands—her rings sliding up and down her fingers. Just to the left of the coffeepot, in vials of that amber plastic, such an ominous hue, so many prescription medicines lined the kitchen counter. She hadn’t been taking this many pills when he left for Arizona. Had her going out of remission been a direct result of him not coming home?

  His father switched on the television, and Hank fought the urge to put his foot through the screen. “Come on, Dad,” he kidded. “What could be on? The Yuletide Golf Tournament?”

  His father gave him an uncertain smile and switched the set off. He cleaned his fingernails with a paper clip, then picked up a magazine from the coffee table and began leafing through it.

  The clatter of eggs being whisked into a copper bowl sounded much more alluring than trying to engage the old man. Hank got up to see if he could help in the kitchen.

  “Go visit with your father,” Iris said. She had pulled a stool up next to the stove and sat there chopping fresh spinach leaves. “I can manage.”

  “He’s reading Time. Let me make the toast. White or wheat?”

  “Wheat.” Iris began to assemble ingredients for the omelets. “You know, Sweetheart, cancer doesn’t render one incapable of preparing a meal.”

  Here was a little of her old spirit, then. Saying the word aloud meant she was still in there fighting. Hank kissed the top of her gray braid, wound around her head and secured with a silver and turquoise hairpin Oscar Johnson would have been able to place within a year of its origin, as well as name the mine from which the stone came. “Nobody said you weren’t. Just tell me he helps out once in a while.”

  She set down the whisk and sponged up a spill. “Henry, please. Don’t have flown all this way just to start an argument.”

  Hank dropped two slices of low-calorie whole wheat into the toaster. “You know, Mom, even in world wars soldiers call a truce for major holidays. Direct me to the DMZ, and I’ll gladly do my part.”

  “Be the bigger man,” Iris urged, turning the edges of the omelet. “Extend your hand first.”

  Hank handed her a Spode plate. “Hasn’t that been the prime directive of my life?” Her mouth was set, her face focused on folding the eggs evenly. He thought of Chloe’s approach to breakfast, which involved throwing eggshells toward the sink and, considering Hannah’s catching abilities, a 50 percent success rate. If the yolks broke, the eggs got scrambled. Chloe did things once and rarely fretted the small stuff. How many breakfasts had he wolfed down, never realizing what it had meant to his mother to serve them as turned out as prep school boys? Chloe said, Butter your own toast, and she meant it. Before she’d gotten so heavy with the baby, she’d sat on his lap and they’d eaten off the same fork. She had, in a manner of speaking, unbuttoned his top buttons. Insisted a little red meat wasn’t going to kill him, and it hadn’t. He had looked forward to beginning their own set of holiday rituals, hanging the baby’s tiny stocking in anticipation, marking a place for her. Reed was here now. Gowned and gloved, his face masked, Hank had held her exactly twice. At four pounds she felt as light in his arms as a Christmas package. All those monitors and IV lines connected her to the hospital, keeping him from feeling she was totally his, that he would ever be allowed to take her home. He glanced at his mother, wondering how it came to be that a couple who couldn’t wait to make love before they were married ended up so far apart.

  “Maybe I’ll give Chloe a call.”

  “I think you should wait,” Iris said. “She’ll be tired, just out of the hospital. When the baby comes home, she’ll get little enough rest. Let her sleep in.”

  For the second time that morning, Hank reached for the Polaroid in his shirt pocket. Shot through the plastic housing of the isolette, the image was grainy and indistinct. His daughter lay squinty-eyed and naked except for an oversize diaper. She was wired to various machines whose proper names he did not know. When Reed was born, Junior Whitebear had wrapped her in a clean, folded sheet and handed her to Corrine. From Corrine, Reed had gone to the ambulance attendant. Junior’s had been the first hands to touch her.

  Hank sensed his mother next to him before her hand reached up. Iris smoothed her fingers over the tiny face in the photo and her expression softened.

  “Well?” he asked, wanting her to fawn and dote, pronounce the baby perfect, acknowledge her presence as a good omen for everyone’s future. But Iris only handed it back to him, returning to easing the spatula under the last omelet.

  “Your father always says, ‘All babies look like Winston Churchill.’ He thinks that’s such a funny remark.”

  “Surely your firstborn granddaughter doesn’t fall into that category?”

  For a moment his mother seemed about to say something of importance. Her brow furrowed, and she bit her lower lip the way she often did when her opinion, differing from Henry’s just this once, mattered. “You know I tend to go along with whatever your father says.”

  “But not why.”

  “Let’s just say it’s easier and leave it at that.”

  “And God knows, easiest is best.” Hank turned the picture toward his heart and slid it into his pocket. Fine. Let them both wear brooms up their asses. He’d call the airlines and see if he could catch the late flight to Phoenix, ride a damn bus up the mountain.

  They sat down to a silent breakfast. His father brought the Lancer’s bottle to the table, and Hank inwardly fumed every time he looked at it. Drink had always been a tall order in the man’s vocabulary, but this A.M. tilting toward excess was new. Iris cleared her throat, which was Hank’s cue to say the blessing. Before he did, Hank took out the photo of Reed and propped it against the wine bottle. He looked at each of his parents, understanding that this might very well be the last year they three would sit at this table as a family, torn by the complex feelings that notion caused to flood through him.

  “I never knew what bounty meant until I saw my own daughter come into the world. Between Reed and Chloe, I find there’s no end to my blessings.” And then he gave them the generic “Blessed, oh Lord, are these thy gifts,” a prayer he’d recited since childhood. He unfolded his napkin, passed the salt to his father, and swallowed his precision omelet, concentrating on his women waiting for him, seven hundred miles away.

  “Dad, take a walk with me,” Hank said when he’d finished the supper dishes and Iris was resting on the couch, eyes shut, listening to the Pavarotti concert on PBS.

  “I’m tired.”

  “A short turn around the park won’t kill you.”

  Henry senior collected a golf sweater from the rack by the door. They walked outside into the approaching dusk of California winter: Coral-and-violet birds of paradise bloomed, fountains sprayed crystalline water, the well-trimmed grounds of World of Freedom proclaimed their eternal anthem of spring to the elderly.

  “What is it? Do you need money?”

  “No, Dad. I have enough money. I want to know what the doctor says.”

  Henry senior made his don’t-worry face. “Oh, you know. Things could always be better. You try the community college over there in Flagstaff? Sometimes lateral moves can provide the most secure routes.”

  “Dad, I have a job I like. Has the doctor given you any idea as to how long Mother will be able to fend for herself?”

  “She made a great meal tonight.”

  “That she did. But she’s failing. I can see it.”

  “Your mother is doing just fine.”

  Hank sighed. “If that’s so, then why the message that I should hurry home?”

  Henry senior inspected a blue hibiscus, some spindly new variation that coordinated perfectly with the landscaping. “Blue flowers. What will they come up with next?”

  “Dad.”

  “Hank, it’s Christmas. We can talk about it later.”r />
  “No, Dad, we can’t. Christmas is over. I have a family back there waiting for me now. I left them on our first holiday together because you made it sound like Mom was at death’s door. I find her preparing meals, shooing me out of the kitchen, but there’re ten different bottles of pills on the counter and she takes three naps a day. We need to talk about this now. We need to make plans.”

  Henry senior put his hands in his pockets and walked to a low brick planter spilling out blood-red bougainvillea. Unseen birds chattered to one another. An Anna’s hummingbird darted in and out of the blossoms, its iridescent breast flashing in the waning sunlight as gaudily as sequins. He looked out toward the empty clubhouse. “I don’t see the hurry.”

  “Are you trying to protect me? Isn’t that kind of pointless?”

  His father wouldn’t meet his eyes. “He said that it’s moving throughout her intestines. They can’t cut anything else out, just give her pills to control the pain. It has to, you know, run its course.”

  “Did he give you a timetable?”

  “Three months. With luck, as long as six.”

  Hank felt sweat trickle down his spine. Somewhere inside he’d known, but hearing his father voice the words was a terrible confirmation. He remained standing despite the loosening feeling in his knees. All his life his father had been remote, and not even his wife’s death was going to change that about him. Earlier, in church, surrounded by many other residents of the retirement community, his father’s face had gone vacant when he made the sign of peace and shook hands with the man seated next to him. Knock all you want, nobody got inside Henry Oliver. Sure, the minister was up against presents and family recipes, a tough combination, but even Hank felt affected by the ceremony, the familiar carols and the Christ child’s story, a reminder that birth, any birth, was a miracle of the most enormous order. Reed had tipped him over into sentimentality this year, but that feeling always enveloped him at Christmas. Just never his father. After the service they got in the car and drove home. His father poured brandy into his coffee, switched on the television, and didn’t budge until Iris called them to dinner.