Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  Somehow, Alex made his body move. He’d just go upstairs and tell her before he left, he thought. She could come when he’d got them a place. The babies, too. They’d be bigger then, not so flimsy. The slam of the car door behind him made him think of a gunshot.

  Upstairs, in the apartment, Alexis and Tina were screaming in the one crib, swaddled tightly as Cora had taught Chris and tried to show him, at opposite ends of the mattress. Formula and baby powder and dirty diapers mingled into one choking scent. The bulb in the lamp was still burned out, so Chris had put on the harsh overhead light.

  “Here, walk around with them,” Chris said, thrusting first one baby and then the other into each of his arms in turn. “They’re hungry. I’ll put water in their bottles and go get the stuff.” She wasn’t even bothering to blow up at him, though she’d obviously figured out that he’d forgotten to buy the formula. That must have been why she was looking out of the window for him. The din was too great. Alex’s head hurt, but he moved his feet and tried to jiggle his arms a little to soothe the babies. When they weren’t crying they were sweet and fragile as little rosebuds and he felt something tender that made him want to cry. But their crying—this raw need and demand—terrified him.

  Chris slapped two bottles on the scratched coffee table. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  “Wait, I’ll go,” Alex managed to say.

  “No. It’s your turn to listen to them scream. You’re the one who had the car and forgot the formula.” She pulled on an old jacket and took Alex’s keys off the table. “I can’t take it any more. I’ve got to get out of here for a few minutes. But don’t worry. I won’t do you like you did me. I’ll show up with the milk.” The apartment door banged behind her. She hadn’t even remembered to ask what had happened at the draft board.

  Awkwardly, Alex laid one of the babies down. He’d not been alone with them before and wasn’t sure which one he put on the couch and which he was holding. Cora and Chris said they were easy to tell apart by their faces, but Alex had to rely on what they were wearing after Chris told him each time which was which and then he’d call them by whatever color they were wearing. Now one was in a yellow terrycloth sleeper and the other in a pink one. They were old enough that their navy eyes made tears when they cried, and both their faces were wet with tears and mucus. Alex tried to jiggle the arm cradling the enraged pink baby while pushing a nipple toward the yellow one on the couch with his freed-up hand. “Come on, take it,” he said. “Good baby, good girl.”

  The yellow baby rooted and clamped her mouth hard on the nipple, dragging deeply. A moment later she spat it out in a violent burst of coughing. When she tried to take a lung full of air to scream, a terrible noise came out of her, a gurgling, choking sound. Alex put the other baby, who was red-faced with rage and wailing ceaselessly on the couch next to her sister, and picked up the choking one. “Quit it! Please stop!” He shouted, without realizing he was shouting until his own voice was louder than the screaming.

  The baby needed air. Alex hit her on the back and held her up so he could see her face, now like a bruised peach, darkening toward purple. “Oh, my God,” he moaned, and shook her. “Stop!” he shouted. “Help! Please! Somebody help!” Alex’s ears roared with blood. “Breathe. Goddamn, somebody help me. Please!” He ran to the apartment door and threw it open. “Help!” He tried to make her breathe, but her head only flopped forward and then back, like an untended puppet. “Help!” Alex shouted. “Please!” The frantic cries of the other baby drew him back inside—he knew not to leave her alone—and the draft from the hallway or his spinning movements or the unfair chaos of the world banged the door shut as if on cue.

  He and his yellow baby daughter shook together. No one came to help. The pink twin screamed on until her screaming mixed with her father’s, and her father’s screaming and shaking mixed with the noise of the street, and her mother came home with the milk.

  thirteen

  CHRISTINE DROPPED THE BAG she was carrying before she reached the top of the stairs. The howling from the apartment was tormented, and she thought her husband and babies were burning to death. The door was locked and she banged on it, adding her own cries to the din, until she finally took the time to separate the right key and get it open. She threw too much of her weight onto the door—a shoulder, as her hand turned the knob—and fell blindly into the glare of the light inside like a rock into water.

  Alex held Tina at arm’s length, his hands like a hinge at her middle while her legs swung. Her head was loose, back against her neck and Christine sucked in the breath to yell, “Hold her head!” when Alex shook her and her head flopped forward.

  “Breathe,” he sobbed, “Come on, you’re all right, good baby, it’s just water, breathe, please breathe,” and his sobbing was hoarse, an agony. Christine screamed then and after a paralyzed second, bolted to get one hand behind the baby’s furry black head, the other beneath Alex’s, on the baby’s bottom, and drew her daughter toward her own chest. For a moment, it looked as though Alex might not let go, but then he did, though an inchoate stream of begging came from him. The other baby lay on her back on the couch, arms and legs flailing, her face blotchy red, shiny with tears and her screams like a high descant over Alex’s.

  Christine dropped to her knees and put Tina on the floor. “Call an ambulance,” she shouted. “Go, go—call for help.” She frantically tried to remember anything she’d seen on television about mouth-to-mouth and awkwardly tried to cover the baby’s mouth and nose with her mouth. Then she pulled back, to pry a thumb into Tina’s mouth, to open it, and tried again, long brown hair draping around their heads. Alex stood rooted to the rug. Christine came up for air and saw that the sense of motion she’d had was from her other daughter. “Put her on the floor and go call!” She could feel a cold draft from the open apartment door. “Go, go, go,” she screamed. “See if there’s anyone downstairs, or the pay phone!” The lawyer downstairs just locked up and left a sign on the door when he had to be in court during the afternoons. He could only afford a morning secretary so far.

  Alex looked wildly around himself, found the baby on the couch but couldn’t bring himself to touch her. “Keys,” he sobbed. That was the image Chris would have of him later, his hands clawing air, his whole being out of control, eyes like wild marbles, desperate and despairing at once.

  Christine fished in her coat pocket and threw them, an overhand motion while she gulped air and tried to cover the baby’s mouth with her own again. They bounced off Alex’s chest and clattered onto the floor where the rag rug stopped and cold linoleum started. Chris’s head was back down over Tina’s and she didn’t grasp what happened next. Alex hesitated perhaps two seconds.

  “I gotta go…sorry…sorry,” he rasped, the words squeezing themselves out as if Alex were being choked by enormous invisible hands. She felt rather than saw Alex bend to pick up the keys. Then the floor shook a little beneath her knees with the pounding of Alex’s steps running for the door.

  Chris scrambled on her knees over to Alexis, moved her onto the floor, all the while screaming “Tina, Tina, Tina,” and then threw herself back to the still bundle. She was not about to give up. If she gave up she’d have to think about what had happened, she’d have to ask how it happened. She labored on, leaving Tina for only a couple of seconds; once to run to the dinette table for the pacifier she’d left lying there and again to snatch cotton blankets to shield both her babies from the draft. As she ran back to Alexis, whose shrieks had subsided until she realized there was no milk in the nipple her mother had thrust into her mouth, Christine partially closed the apartment door to reduce the cold, yet still signal the emergency people to get right in. Other than that, she remained huddled over Tina, reaching to pat Alexis briefly, but puffing air ineptly into Tina’s tiny mouth and nose. Tears ran down her face; she wiped them off with her coat sleeve and kept breathing.

  She had no idea how long it was until the wail of a siren sounded far away, mixing with Alexis’s cries
. Alexis was hiccuping and sucking in long shuddering breaths while she wound herself up to scream again. Christine ran to the window to check for the flashing lights. A police car pulled up in front of the apartment while the ambulance was still a half-block away. Chris opened the window and yelled, “It’s my baby, up here, my baby,” and two officers slammed white cruiser doors scanning the building for the apartment entrance. “Around the side,” she sobbed, a thin streak of hysteria mixing into the sob. “My baby!”

  Seconds later, heavy steps pounded up the stairs and the apartment door was bounced violently against its backstop. The first police officer ran to the wrong baby, the crying one.

  “No,” Christine screamed. “There!”

  The officer bent over Tina. “Blue baby,” he shouted to the one behind him. “Blue baby!” The second officer ran across the room to shout out of the open apartment window down to the street, where the ambulance siren blared and the sound of slamming doors repeated. “Oxygen! Blue baby!”

  Christine felt as if she were hovering over the scene like a ghost, watching first one man in blue, then another, then two more in orange jumpsuits cluster around Tina while she dissolved, knees buckling toward Alexis’s ragged wails. Outside the open door the grocery bag with its four cans of formula had been kicked aside by one of the medics. Christine tried to tell someone to get it for her, for the crying baby, but she could not shape a single word.

  THE CLANGING AND screaming had stopped, at least immediately around Christine, as she sat, boneless, protected by an invisible force field of shock. A nurse had taken Alexis off somewhere and was giving her a bottle. “Your mother is on her way.” The nurse spoke just above a whisper and patted her hand.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” A man in a lab coat stood in front of Chris, but she shook her head numbly.

  “She’s in shock,” someone explained to Cora, who flew in the emergency room door wearing no coat and the soft-soled slippers she padded around in.

  “What happened?” Cora said, enfolding Christine in her arms, but speaking to the nurse. Her heart thudded up against Christine over and over.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” the nurse, who wasn’t too young and had bottle-blond hair, said quietly. “We think the baby choked first, and then—” she motioned with her head to indicate Christine “—she tried too hard to get her breathing. She must have panicked. But the baby’s color indicates she’d stopped breathing before she died.”

  Christine took in what the nurse said to her mother, and for the first time the idea began to take shape in her mind that Alex wasn’t on his way to the hospital or waiting at their apartment for her to bring their daughters home.

  The death certificate indicated accidental choking. It wasn’t that the doctor didn’t know the baby had been shaken; he did. He also knew that the baby had first choked, and he knew what panic does to a mother’s hands, especially a new, young, utterly inexperienced mother. He also knew that the dead baby had a twin sister who needed her mother, especially since there was no father in evidence. He was a compassionate man who talked gently to Christine about emergency procedures for choking, and about the delicacy of a baby’s spine, the potential effects of jarring, and he was absolutely confident he had done the right thing when he went home that night and kissed his own toddler girl who squirmed to escape her father’s too-tight embrace.

  Much later—when Alexis was asleep in a carriage next to Christine’s bed in her parents’ house and Christine, still silent, was staring at the ceiling in the numb darkness—she remembered about the induction notice and considered that Alex might be gone for good.

  fourteen

  THE CASKET WAS TINY and white with white satin lining, like a jewel box. Christine could have held it in her two arms and wanted to. Given Alex’s disappearance and the hushed questions flying around rooms like trapped birds, she had only felt up to a graveside service.

  At the cemetery, Cora had been holding Alexis, but when Marvin wouldn’t let Christine pick up the coffin—made her get off her knees from the cold dirt—she’d taken Alexis back and clung to her. The sky was a pewter ladle about to spill, though the wind wasn’t as bad as it had been when they’d first gotten out of the car and it had cut through them as if it intended to wound. Still-bare old trees arched over them.

  The last time she’d held Tina was at the hospital. She’d sat, Cora at her side until she asked her mother to leave her alone a few minutes, stroking Tina’s cheek and curling the little fingers around the perch of her own forefinger. Then a chaplain had come in and asked if the baby had been baptized, and if she wanted last rites.

  “No,” Christine whispered, transfixed with guilt, and there was something in her hesitant refusal that made the priest press on, though gently.

  “Are you Catholic?” the priest asked.

  “Not…really. Could…would you baptize her? It’s not too late, is it?”

  The priest hesitated, then said, “No, of course not,” and produced a white cloth and a silver vial of water he said was holy. Cora managed to hold her tongue about a Catholic baptism; anything Christine wanted was all right by her.

  Cora’s own grief hadn’t taken its black shape yet, though there’d not yet been a day of either baby’s life that Cora hadn’t fed or diapered or rocked her. She was consumed by the yawning emptiness she felt in her daughter, desperate to alleviate it, yearning to mother her own suffering child.

  “My baby.” Christine broke into sobs just once when the minister said “Suffer the little children to come unto me. Theirs is the kingdom,” leaning with Alexis against Cora, who braced herself with one foot wide and behind the other, planted in the slushy gray remains of the last snow to absorb her daughter’s weight. When Christine said my baby, Cora’s heart twisted in her chest and she looked at the stone marker over her stillborn son. Alexis waved a mittened hand aimlessly and let out a random sound. Marvin stood erect and separate, moving only to swipe his raw, bare hand beneath his nose, runny because of his tears. Jolene and Bob were planted, solemn and staunch as oak trees behind them, and minding Rebecca. A couple of cousins and Marvin’s sister had wanted to come, but Cora knew that Christine couldn’t handle any more, and had asked them not to. Jolene and Bob were there for Cora and Marvin, of course, but even more because their son, Paul, had died in South Vietnam in November. They and Christine lived in a foreign, isolated place now, one inhabited by people who have lost children and can only bear each other’s company, for whom they reserve anything they might be able to truly say.

  It would be a couple of months before the stone could be set. Cora and Marvin had quietly paid for it, the casket and the cemetery plot by their stillborn boy’s grave, without particularly discussing that part of it with Christine, who had recently enough been living with her parents that she didn’t automatically recognize such matters didn’t take care of themselves. At the end of the service, the casket was left discreetly beside the covered hole and Cora pressed Christine, who was wearing Cora’s too-large gray wool coat since her high-school jacket seemed inappropriate, toward their car.

  “No, I have to stay. I can’t just leave her,” Christine said.

  “Honey, you have to. It’s over now, it’s time to go home.” Cora looked at Marvin for support. He stepped closer.

  “Time to go,” he said, without his usual sternness.

  “No, I can’t.” Christine’s eyes filled again. Alexis squirmed and whimpered, a pink cloud with a fringe of black down sticking out of the front of her knit cap.

  Jolene came up behind Cora. “Let her stay,” she said. “You and Marvin take the baby and Bob back to your house. I’ll be here and bring Christine whenever she feels ready.” Jolene, in the black she’d worn to Paul’s funeral, still had grief’s rings around her eyes.

  “I should be with…” Cora began.

  “No. That’s good. You take Alexis, Mom,” Christine interrupted and it was the most she’d said since she’d left the hospital two and a half days ago.
The little cluster was inching uncertainly toward the drive where they’d left their cars to walk to the gravesite, in the same cemetery where Cora’s parents were buried, but not near them.

  Cora felt this was all wrong, that she needed to take care of Christine, but the baby was thrust into her arms.

  “Take care of her for me,” Christine said, and it chilled Cora, as if Christine weren’t coming back, but Jolene nodded and answered for her. “She will, you know that. You go on, now,” she added to Cora.

  When the family and minister had left, Jolene said, simply, “Now where do you need to be? We could sit there and watch over her, if that’s close enough.” She pointed to a large grave two plots away, one that had a flat ledge on which the marker itself stood. “That would let us sit and not be on the wet ground.”

  “All right.”

  Jolene put her arm around Christine’s back and walked her the fifteen feet. After they were sitting, thigh to thigh on the narrow edge, knees up and coats pulled around their ankles, Jolene knew not to say anything. She kept her arm around Christine’s back, that was all.

  Christine cried a while, Jolene handing her tissues when Christine’s breath was so jagged it seemed she couldn’t get air, and then just sat and looked over at the casket. A cemetery truck pulled up, but Jolene waved the two men away back into the chill daylight of the road. Then she went back to the silent place, deep and wide, where she and Christine mourned.

  “I have to go to Alexis,” Christine said, finally. She had been shivering and her lips were chapped and colorless. Her long brown hair lay limp and resigned on her shoulders.

  “All right, dear,” was all Jolene said. They picked their way across muddy, partly melted tracks to Jolene’s car, numb-footed, soul-seared after the gaping wounds through which their lives had bled out and disappeared.

  BACK AT CORA’S HOUSE, Christine kicked off her wet shoes and headed straight upstairs to where Alexis slept in the carriage in Christine’s room, the one that had just cooled from her leaving. She picked the baby up, violating every mother’s rule about not waking a sleeping baby, and held her close to her chest. Then she went downstairs to the living room, to the rocking chair Marvin had refinished, and nestled Alexis face-down on her chest to sleep in her mother’s arms. She fit the hollow of her cheek over the curve of the baby’s head, and breathed in her powdery, living scent.