by Lynne Hugo
“There’s nothing wrong with our crying a little bit together,” Cora said, sensing what had happened. “Sometimes it’s better than crying alone all the time.”
“I’m okay,” Lexie said.
Cora knew she wasn’t, but the moment had passed. I mustn’t cry around her, she reminded herself. Cora looked around the room that had been Rebecca’s. It was unrecognizable to her except for the placement of windows, closet and door. The pink dust ruffle and curtains, and white chenille bedspread had quite vanished. Tim, Lexie’s boyfriend, had used his father’s pickup truck to help Lexie move her room from Christine’s to Cora’s house: posters of dolphins, whales and panda bears, the colored beads that hung in strands between upper and lower windowsills in place of curtains, the stuffed animals, the bulletin board, the emerald-green-and-black zigzag quilt and pillows, even the nightstand and the lamps from her old room, shrouded with emerald green cloth over the lampshades to produce an eerie light. It certainly wasn’t Cora’s taste, and the mauve carpet, laid during Rebecca’s early teen reign, didn’t exactly complement the decor.
“How about we go get ourselves a bedtime snack?” Cora said.
Lexie swallowed irritation. Her grandmother was always trying to force-feed her, as if cookies were giant Valium tablets to be washed down with chocolate milk to mellow her out. “No thanks. I’m really not hungry.”
“You sure didn’t eat much dinner, honey.”
“I had a big snack after school.” It was a lie, but her grandmother had been at the grocery store and wouldn’t know.
“Oh, good. Well, goodnight, dear. Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Lexie shuddered. She couldn’t stand all the cheerful little admonitions. “Okay,” she said. “You too.”
Cora made her way out of Lexie’s room and closed the door softly behind her. She stood in the upstairs hallway leaning heavily against the banister, something she and Marvin had always told the children not to do. Then she went the wrong way down the hall and opened the door to Christine’s old room, little changed since she moved out to marry Alexander O’Gara. Cora had stored Christine’s personal papers and books in the closet, not having the heart to read anything except the legal documents she had to. Her jewelry was back in her old jewelry box, her makeup, which Cora couldn’t bring herself to throw out, was in the top drawer, and some of her best clothing—items that Lexie might want someday, a few good sweaters and the like, were folded into the dresser drawers with a sachet of Christine’s lilac perfume.
Christine’s old bedspread, a print of lavender and white lilacs, was in place over the pillow that had always been hers and sheets she’d actually slept in. Though the room was chilly, Cora turned on the little lamp on the maple night table next to the bed and sank onto the bed to think. She caught sight of herself in the mirror over the bureau: how old she looked, how deep the lines around her eyes and mouth. She pushed her glasses back up on her nose. Christine was always telling her to get them tightened. She did, when she went to the eye doctor, but they loosened up again right away. Nothing ever stayed the way it belonged.
Life is an endless circle of doing what you thought you’d already finished over and over. Shopping, dishes, laundry, weeding, now even raising children. Nothing stays finished until you die, and then you can’t enjoy what you finally got done. She was just sitting on the bed thinking thoughts like those when, on an intake of breath she felt Christine. Smelled her, rather: lilac, and then she remembered the sachet in with the sweaters. Surprised it was still strong enough to penetrate even the thin winter air, Cora gave way to nostalgia, and got up again to get one of Christine’s sweaters to wear for the scent and feel of her living daughter.
She opened the drawer and gasped out loud. On top of the loopy fisherman sweater, next to the sachet, was a picture of Christine in her coffin. Shock first, then a wave of anger washed over Cora, like the breakers she’d seen in Florida. A color close-up showed Chris’s eyes closed beneath the width of her forehead and arched, full brown brows. Her short, frosted hair was arranged more flatly than was Chris’s way, with too many bangs pulled down. The small, straight nose was completely itself, but the mouth—lips quite closed over her good, even teeth—looked puffy. Well, the whole face looked puffy, yet somehow drawn, when Cora really examined it. Still, there was a nearly translucent quality to the image that made it otherworldly.
Lexie put it there, she realized, which meant that weasel undertaker, Ogle Smith, hadn’t accepted the no thank you she’d given him and had approached Lexie. She turned away from the picture and pulled Chris’s black cardigan out of the drawer and slid her arms into it, though it was too small. All of Christine’s clothes would be way too small for her, but not for Lexie, though she still had a little growing to do for them to be a fit—even if teenagers did wear shirts the size of trash bags.
She backed up to the bed and sat again, rocking herself as she had in the funeral home, holding the casket picture and talking silently to Chris after another crying spell. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to raise her. She won’t talk to me.
One thing at a time. Let the picture be. She needs her mother. Cora heard it clearly, and understood it to be Christine, not that she could say she recognized the voice. There was no accompanying vision, and nothing further came to her, though she sat in the room breathing the faintly scented air, not pondering what she’d heard, but absorbing it and waiting in the silence. A half-hour later, when it was conceivable to sleep without fear of dreaming, she replaced the sweater and the picture, closed the dresser drawer and left the room. That night for the first time since Christine had died, Cora did not wake until morning, not even for the two trips to the bathroom she usually absolutely had to make.
“SO NOW WHAT?” Cora said to Brenda, recapping the pen she’d used to sign the petition to adopt. She stared at Brenda’s various diplomas, framed on the wall behind the oversize desk, and hoped again the woman knew what she was doing. The office held few clues to the lawyer’s notions: it was sparse, without plants or personal objects or even pictures that anyone could see.
“I’ll be sending a notice to Mr. O’Gara’s last known address, which I understand was the apartment he and your daughter shared, by registered mail, and also publishing our intent in the paper and two legal journals. I suspect the letter will be returned with no forwarding address. Our best hope is, I guess, for no response at all. After six months, the court would go ahead and approve your petition. Or, of course, he can contact us and agree, though, that does sort of open a can of worms for your granddaughter, yes?”
“Yes,” Cora murmured, because she thought it was true, not because Lexie would so much as acknowledge the possibility.
Outside, a slushy snow had started up again, and Cora tracked it through the dirty window using her peripheral vision. She didn’t like driving in snow, even this, this kind that plushed the road and liquefied traffic dirt almost simultaneously.
“You and Alexis will have to appear before the judge, well, at the first court date I can get you, probably next week sometime. Actually, it’s six months from that date, your appearance, when the judge can approve the petition. It’s just a formality, nothing to be concerned about in the least.”
“All right.” Cora fiddled with the buttons on her old blue cardigan as she looked at the lawyer seated primly behind the mahogany desk, randomly marred. Brenda looked the part: tailored brown wool suit, cream-colored silk blouse, a thin gold chain with some sort of charm on the end. “I was wondering, if you don’t mind my asking, do you have any children?”
“Yes,” Brenda said. “I have a son…I’m a single parent,” and didn’t offer any more. “My turn,” she went on. “Of course, you don’t have to tell me, but I’d like to know what happened to your daughter.”
“An aneurysm burst,” Cora said simply, “and then they couldn’t get her heart going.” She tried to hold Brenda’s eyes, but felt her own begin to tear and looked back out the framed re
ctangle of gray sky to get them in check.
Brenda’s brows went up and her uncolored lips parted in surprise. “There was no…warning?”
Cora shook her head. “Nothing. Far as anyone knew she was in perfect health.”
“And this situation with her ex-husband?” Even before the question was fully formed, Brenda felt the change in Cora. The older woman sat farther back in her chair and took a minute to check for the whereabouts of her cane. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes, after fumbling through her purse for a crumpled tissue, though the quick tears of the previous moment had already retreated.
“I don’t even know all of it myself,” Cora hedged. “Christine didn’t like people fussing or worrying over her, including me, maybe especially me. I took care of Lexie when she asked me to, and listened when she had something to say, but she didn’t want me upset. She said as much when we talked about it.”
“Do you know how she arrived at the current situation? I mean, legally, she should have been receiving child support all these years, and I was thinking you might want to ask for back support and offer relief from that or a future child support order in return for his agreement to the adoption. It gives you some bargaining room.”
“No, I don’t want money for Lexie, that’d be like buying and selling her.”
“I can assure you that’s not how the court would see it.” Brenda’s tone was a hair over the line into defensiveness.
Cora leaned forward. “It’s how Lexie would see it,” she said, vehemently. “No, we’ll just hope he doesn’t slither out from under his rock.”
“Really, Mrs. Laster, just hear me out. If you let me ask for back support, then you can always drop that request. Can you see that if we publish a request for a back support order along with the fact that if he’s not located in the next six months, Lexie will be adopted—he’s less likely to answer the summons?”
Cora slumped against the back of her chair.
“Do you understand? It’s that…”
Cora rubbed her forehead and then shaded her eyes with a drooping salute, as if she were being blinded. “I understand what you’re saying. It’s trying to make him think he’s got a lot to lose.”
“Right.”
“He’s already lost everything that counts. He’s just too dumb to know it. But do you understand me? I…don’t…want…his…money.” She emphasized the separate life of each word. “I just want him to sign the paper if he’s got to have anything to do with this at all. Can’t you just lay low, put the notice in print too small to read? I don’t think he’ll come forward.”
“Then let me see what I can do,” Brenda said, not resisting a slight shoulder shrug and headshake.
“I guess that’s what I’m paying you for. Are we done for today?”
“Yes, ma’am. Try not to worry.”
“Worry is my middle name these days, but thank you anyway.”
Without getting up as was her habit, Brenda watched Cora steady herself after she hauled herself up from the chair to make her slow way to the office door in a three-beat clumping gait.
Brenda picked up the one framed picture on her desk from where it nestled between her and some upright reference books. Her son had been just short of his third birthday when it was taken four months ago, needing a haircut, but his eyes still bright and penetrating from beneath his dark-blond bangs.
Brenda consulted her Rolodex and picked up her phone. “Hi, Dixie, it’s Brenda, I need Joe, please,” she said a moment later, then fiddled with a pencil, doodling little circles with jagged lines intersecting them on the yellow pad in front of her while she waited.
“Hey, Bren, what’s up?” a baritone voice came on the line.
“I need to publish for a father,” she said, making another doodle. In a perfect world, Alexis’s father would see the notice of intent. In admirable legal maneuvering, Brenda would extract back child support and then trade off his signature on the adoption papers for a termination of all parental rights and obligations. Cora and Alexis would have what they wanted, and a lump of money that could be planted like a seed smack in the fertile earth of Alexis’s future. “There isn’t a reason in the world why this asshole should get off scot-free.”
six
I DID IT. I OPENED the envelope from Mr. Smith and I was right, it was the picture. Mom doesn’t look like herself, but she doesn’t look like anybody, either. When I first saw it, I cried a long time because I hoped it would be like she was just asleep, but no, it doesn’t look like that. And then I started to get scared. What if Grandma sees it? She might get really mad at me. We’re not as close as we used to be. She says no to things I want to do, and she never did that before. Everything in my life seems to be no. No your mother isn’t coming back, no you can’t keep the house you and your mother lived in, no you can’t stay home from school, no whatever. I want to say yes, I can too have my mother’s picture even if she is dead in her casket, I don’t care. But I wouldn’t dare say that to Grandma. So I hid it in my mother’s room in the drawer with her sweaters.
Grandma won’t go in Mom’s room, she goes to the cemetery instead, but I know she comes in my room when I’m not here because sometimes there’ll be clean clothes on my dresser or my bed will be made. She just says, oh, Lexie, your sheets needed to be washed or makes some other excuse, but I know she’s trying to find out things about me. Grandma’s good, but she’s on my nerves always trying to hug and pet on me, and asking me questions. Aunt Rebecca says I can’t talk back or Grandma could get stressed out and…She didn’t finish her sentence, but I yelled DIE, real loud, because I knew she meant it would be my fault. Then Aunt Rebecca sighed and shook her head like I just belong in the fruit-and-nuts department at the store.
I don’t care if I am crazy. Sometimes if Grandma’s at the grocery or bank, I go into Mom’s room. I smell her sweaters and look at the picture. If I’d been a better daughter maybe she’d have lived. I tell her I’m sorry sometimes. I think about saying prayers, but nothing comes to me. I don’t know what to ask for, anyway. Even God isn’t going to bring my mother back, no matter how good I am now or how nice I say please. Sometimes I get so mad I want to kill something. Maybe Alex, my so-called father. I’d sort of like to know what he looks like, so if I saw him on the street I could spit on his shoes. All he cared about was himself and running away so he wouldn’t have to go to the stupid war even after my sister died.
Tim has dark hair and dark eyes and braces. I hope he doesn’t look like Alex. I don’t see why my mother had to go and name me Alexis. I want to change my name. When I go to college, I’ll go by my middle name, or have a new name completely. I don’t see how anyone there would find out since I don’t plan on taking my grandmother with me. Maybe I could be named Tina Laster, after my sister and my mom before she married Alex O’Gara. Or maybe I could be a whole different person, one with a regular mother at home. I’d like that.
I hope me and Tim stay together forever, but I’m afraid he feels sorry for me and I hate that. Last week he put his hand up my shirt and started to feel me up. First I told him no and he stopped, and I thought he stopped because he felt sorry for me so I told him he could go ahead and do it. Then he said no, he didn’t want to upset me. So I don’t know what to do. I wish I could talk to my mom, but I wouldn’t tell her that anyway. That’d be a ten on her Hindenburg Scale, that’s what she called it. I never asked her what a Hindenburg Scale is, and now I can’t.
I’m getting to where I can hardly stand Aunt Rebecca. I don’t care how sick she is. All she cares about is get the house sold, get the car sold.—Mom, I’ll help you pack up Christine’s stuff—she says all sweet. She took some things from our house, too, some lamps and some of Mom’s furniture and clothes. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on stuff, all the while pretending that she was just helping me and Grandma. Oh, right, big help. Grandma would just be a total wreck if she had to figure out what to do with Mom’s radar detector. It sure was big of Rebecca to take it off her hands
. I don’t get it. I don’t get what use it is to have a family. They ditch you, they spy on you, they steal from you, they die.
It’s cold and wet outside. I don’t think this winter is ever going to end.
seven
NOT AN HOUR AGO, Rebecca, who bore a striking resemblance to Marvin’s side of the family—dark-blond hair, hazel eyes and tendency to a scarring adolescent acne that always left its mark—had stared at her mother trying to digest what she’d heard.
“Don’t you know you’ll lose the social security money?” she said, outraged. Sometimes she thought her mother might not be crazy, but she’d do until crazy came.
“The lawyer thinks we might be able to get around it,” Cora answered, trying not to be defensive. “But I don’t care. She’s not right, I can tell, and this is something she thinks will make her feel safer. She’s really scared.”
Rebecca tried to keep her voice calm. “How’re you going to take on raising her, Mom, without help? I’ll do what I can, you know that, but…” She looked down then, faintly gesturing toward her chest where a prosthesis filled out one side of her bra, a little higher than her remaining breast. Her face was puffy, a bit mushroom-like, as Christine’s had been the night she died, from all the drugs. She’d picked up weight, too much, defying the conventional notion about the skeletal chemo patient.
“Don’t you worry. This will come out all right,” Cora said confidently. She had always believed a positive attitude made all the difference, and she was just getting around to reminding herself of that as the shock of Christine’s death wore off, and relentless reality set in like the dregs of winter in her cup. She had to cope, that was all. She had to make herself cope, for Lexie. It was the only gift she could still give.
Now, though, Rebecca was sorting through the boxes of knickknacks and collection of teacups from Christine’s house to decide who should get what, when the doorbell rang. Several brown cardboard boxes sat on the dining-room table. Since Rebecca was sitting on the rug laying out piles, Cora went to the front door slowly, making her way down the hall where family pictures hung three-quarters of the way, like an interrupted story. A uniformed man wearing a hat and star-shaped badge stood on the porch. Cora judged him to be thirty at most, and instinctively looked past him to the driveway. A blue-and-white patrol car idled there, Pender County Sheriff blazed in gold print across the side.
