Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  twenty-seven

  “WHAT THE HELL DO hummingbirds eat?” Alex said to Dink and Big Al. He was careful to have already struck his lighter so he could be lighting a cigarette the minute the words were out and have something other than either one of them to look at. It had taken him until their second break on Tuesday to ask.

  “What?” Big Al was just taking his own pack out of the rolled short sleeve of his T-shirt and stopped to stare.

  “Say what?” Dink said at the same time.

  “What do hummingbirds eat?”

  “How the hell should I know? You wanna date one or something?” Dink said, while Big Al laughed, appreciative.

  “You’d probably fit right in…” Big Al said, leering, pausing on the last words to signal that he was being lewd.

  “No, serious, you know what they eat?”

  “Bugs ’n shit, I suppose. I dunno,” Dink said. His mustache bobbed in concert with his shrug.

  “Prob’ly. Who cares?” said Big Al. The baseball cap came off and was resettled on his head, pulled farther down. A reddened track around his forehead that continued like a road on changing terrain was briefly visible, sweat above and below it. The dock was hot as July this afternoon.

  Alex considered whether to answer. “Detta asked me, only thing she’s said to me ever.” He stretched the bottom of his shirt over his hand and, hiking it halfway up his back, used it to wipe his face.

  “Detta? What the hell kind of name is that? Who’s Detta?”

  “Alexis, y’know, my girl. She goes by Detta. I told you that.”

  “Nah, didn’t know that,” Al and Dink backed each other up on the point.

  “Why’s she want to know that?”

  “Dunno.”

  “So she’s talkin’ to you now?”

  “Just asked me that much, is all.”

  Big Al and Dink both shook their heads, and no one returned to the subject of hummingbirds, mysterious as women and possibly as aggravating.

  ALEX CHECKED OFF THE cartons on the tracking sheet fastened to his clipboard. He’d never really thought those guys would know about the birds, but he didn’t know who else to ask. Damn Cora would’ve known, he guessed, but Detta must’ve already asked and Cora came up shooting blanks.

  He’d driven out to Cora’s on Sunday night to get the girl, pretty much wishing he wasn’t. It was damn hard to swallow how she’d just wither him with her eyes then stare out the truck window. He’d give her back to Cora, maybe, except if he did, his lawyer said he could get slapped for a truckload of back support, which he didn’t have, and for sure he’d have to pay up till she was eighteen. The lawyer told him Cora was still trying to get custody away from him, but not to worry, he’d win unless he came off like a complete lunatic in the psychological evaluation. Maybe that’d happen. Sometimes it just came into his mind that maybe he was crazy. He’d think about his life, and he’d think, Yeah, I’m crazy.

  It was Sunday night that Detta had spoken to him that one time and he’d been chewing on it ever since, one more sign he was nuts. He figured that Cora had fed her up good, so he wouldn’t worry about that part until tomorrow morning at least. But he had nothing to say, and she wouldn’t answer him if he asked her anything.

  “D’ja have a good visit with your grandmother?” which he’d said in an elaborately casual manner, had been answered with the death stare. So had “Pretty good weather, huh?” So Alex had gone silent himself, a familiar place for him, except he found himself thinking about the dead baby and wondering if she’d have looked like Detta and if she’d have talked to him.

  They were almost to the trailer when it had happened. Detta didn’t look at him, but she’d said it. It was right after he’d said, never expecting an answer, “I don’t guess you’re hungry. You must eat like a bird,” to which there was the expected silence for a good two minutes.

  “What do hummingbirds eat?” she’d said, not looking at him, but in a strong enough voice—though without a shave of feeling in it—so he knew he heard her right.

  Of course he had no idea. And she’d taken him so by surprise that all he’d done was stammer, “I—I—dunno.”

  DINK APPROACHED THE subject of Detta while Big Al was in the can for a while on Thursday morning, thanks to his having eaten four cream-filled chocolate-frosted donuts. Alex had bought a half-dozen donuts before he dropped Detta off at school thinking she’d take a couple by now, but no such luck. Tuesday night she’d broken down and eaten some of the meat he fried, though she’d done it without a word and put it between two pieces of white bread, blank and sullen as her face, and taken it to her room. Even though he heard the lock turn—loud as if she’d found a way to amplify it—he’d thought she might be coming around. But then Wednesday night he never even saw her, only heard her the one time she slipped into the bathroom, and wouldn’t even glance at the donuts on Thursday morning. “You’re bustin’ my balls,” he’d said to her as he started the truck again and saw immediately that he’d given something away. A little involuntary smile flickered before she turned it off.

  “I take it she’s still bustin’ your balls,” Dink said. Alex did a double take at the echo.

  “Man, I just said that to her. Wouldn’t even look at the donuts.”

  “I was thinkin’, the only time my kids didn’t hate my guts was when they wanted to get their license. She sixteen yet?”

  “Yeah, couple months ago.”

  “Got a license?”

  “Nah.”

  “Well, then. There you go.”

  “Where do I go?”

  “Man, you got bricks for brains? Ask her if she wants to learn to drive.”

  “Then she’ll want a car.”

  “Of course, you asshole. Welcome to fatherhood. That’s all you’re good for, cash and a car. But she’ll have to talk to you.”

  Alex thought it was possible, but not likely, that Dink was setting him up. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “You try it,” Dink said. “Works every time. Don’t work a long time, but works a while.”

  THAT EVENING, ALEX planned out how to ask Detta if she wanted to get her license. He prepared a little speech as he drove home from the plant. Detta had been taking the bus home from school now, and she’d taken the key he left in the kitchen on top of a piece of paper with Detta printed on it, so maybe things were better. A little bit anyway.

  She didn’t answer his knock at her door, but he was used to that. “Detta,” he called. “Detta. Listen up. I got something to say. I was thinkin’ and rememberin’, when I was your age how me and my friends, and…Christine…all of us was dyin’ for our license. I was thinkin’ I could maybe teach you how to drive so you could get yours. See that way, you could maybe have a car and, you know, then you could go see Cora when you want to, and you could drive to school. I mean, you make any friends? Maybe if you got a car, they’d like to go someplace with you…ya know?”

  All in all, he’d thought it went pretty well. He thought Dink was right, that she had to want her license; she was a kid, wasn’t she? So she didn’t answer him. That was all right. She was sitting on her bed thinking what to say back to him, to tell him she was sorry and that she wanted for him to teach her to drive.

  He drank a beer, called for a pizza, dozed on the couch for maybe twenty minutes, then woke with a start and laid out the money to give the pizza boy. He was catching on. Maybe he wouldn’t give her back to Cora after all.

  When the knock came, he called out, “Detta, I got a pizza,” and opened the screen door. The pizza boy, acne-plagued and gangly, held out the box and said something, but Alex didn’t hear. He stared over the boy’s shoulder at a girl who looked like Detta, just coming out of a door four trailers down from his, where the lane curved and the trailers alongside it staggered away from his like uneven teeth. “You come on back any time, you hear?” floated after her on the still air, called in a lilting, accented alto. He caught the motion of a shadow shutting the door as his daughter came d
own the three steps and onto the ground between them. Dark-skinned foreigners lived where she’d been.

  In Toronto, there’d been a black woman, Negro they were called then, big, with firm mounds of flesh that circled impossibly far in front and behind her, as if she were made with four basketballs just under her skin. Olivia was her name, and she’d said it “Oh-livia,” which wasn’t what came naturally to Alex’s tongue at all.

  twenty-eight

  ALREADY THEY WERE on their way for the fourth time that week. “I’m tired of this trip,” Rebecca murmured as she slid into the passenger seat of her mother’s car on Thursday at eight in the morning, “And I can’t be, you know?”

  Cora reached over the armrest to pat Rebecca’s hand, keeping her own counsel for a moment. She herself was exhausted; three and a half more weeks of the daily trips to Indianapolis were unfathomable, a murky lake in which she couldn’t see her own reflection. But she rarely knew exactly what to say to Rebecca anymore. It was as if her daughter were undergoing some sort of sea change or dreaming in a new language since this diagnosis: Rebecca had decided that if she had enough faith, the radiation would serve as God’s healing eye cast upon her in reward. That was, at least, the best Cora understood the notion.

  But Cora didn’t believe it. Not for a minute. Still, she knew the oncologist had encouraged Rebecca to visualize healthy cells multiplying, cancerous ones shriveling up and vanishing, and she knew better than to mess with whatever helped someone get through suffering, so when Rebecca started in on God’s miracles, Cora held her tongue. It did make the trip more lonely, not to be able to say, “If I lose you, too, it will kill me, Becca. And I know I can’t go ahead and just die with you because of Lexie, Christine leaving her to my care the way she did.” Sometimes she wondered if Rebecca had concluded that God had somehow taken her dead baby brother and grown sister for lack of faith. It was all beyond her figuring. She was unspeakably weary, and weary of looking in lightless places for answers.

  Then Rebecca chinned herself right back up, peering over the bar and saying, “But it’s a beautiful day, isn’t it? And not too hot. We’re lucky we get to see everything that’s starting to bloom, how the scenery changes from day to day. That’s the kind of thing people usually forget to notice, then all at once the dogwood is out, or all at once it’s gone. Are the lilies of the valley on the side of the porch opening yet?”

  “I’m not sure, honey, I haven’t looked.” Cora was grateful she could give a factual answer and didn’t have to comment on how lucky they were. If Rebecca had continued to sound disheartened, Cora was perfectly capable of thinking and saying exactly what had just come out of Rebecca’s mouth, but in the face of Rebecca’s relentless cheerfulness all week, Cora had been all too able to hear the counterargument in her mind, like an invisible saboteur. Cora noticed Rebecca hadn’t brought the thermos of green tea (noted for boosting the immune system, she’d said, used medicinally in China) and hulled strawberries or little bag of organic raisins and peanuts for them to snack on, and she put it on her mental list of things to be sure to do herself tomorrow.

  In fact, it was a beautiful day, the sort that smells like line-dried wash and makes whatever you have to do inside seem dark and pointless. Cora would have liked to have been setting out bedding plants. Bob had turned the soil over for her. Cora knew that Jolene sent him, out of her heart’s memory that Christine had done it every year since Cora’s arthritis started insisting she use a cane. Bob had spaded, cut the clumps, mixed in peat to loosen it along with handfuls of fertilizer, little white pellets that said, I will make you live to sickly seedlings. Cora hoped she didn’t seem ungrateful, since no plants were in yet. Maybe when Lexie came, she and Jill would pitch in and they could do it all in an afternoon. Of course, Bob had offered, but Cora had refused, and not out of politeness. She had a little gardening stool she sat on to plant and weed, and she wanted to. And she could still manage it if one of the girls helped her. Jolene said Cora just craved a patch of normal life to cultivate.

  They were passing the Old Time Holiness Church outside of Darrville when Rebecca floated a memory of Christine like a petal on light, dancing above what Cora most feared. She did it just as if she had no idea of the abyss below it, the erratic nature of the breeze.

  “Chrissy’s grave needs something more, I think.”

  Cora shot her a look but Rebecca’s eyes were casual on the dark, rich field where soy faintly greened through in long, mounded lines. Here and there were graceful curves, like wave marks on sand.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s too bare. I was thinking I might put a flowerpot on each side.”

  “Lexie wanted me to take her there yesterday. It’s the first time she’s been since the funeral. She wanted to put a bird feeder there. She had a suet holder, you know? I had to tell her suet’s a winter thing.”

  “Do you…I mean, do you think Christine knew she was going to die?”

  Cora felt herself closing up, like a moss rose sensing evening. “I think she was just a very organized person, you know, that all her affairs were always in order.”

  “No, I mean that day, when it happened. Do you think she was conscious, that she knew that something was happening right then?” Some of Rebecca’s hair had fallen out of the tortoiseshell clip she had used to fasten it at the nape of her neck, and she let it screen her face.

  “I don’t know. I hope not,” Cora said quietly.

  “Because if she did, you know, she would have had time to pray, and then…”

  Don’t go there, Cora thought. Please, Becca, don’t go that way because I can’t go with you. “I think aneurysms happen in an instant.”

  Rebecca spoke as if her mother hadn’t said a word, right on the next exhalation. “And of course, if we had known, we could have prayed for her.”

  Cora said softly, “Becca, don’t put that on me. I can’t bear it.” Cora was wearing a blue, long-sleeved button-down shirt, and she used the sleeve of her right arm to wipe her face where small tears had begun to gather in the corners of her eyes and a sheen of sweat felt like a hot flash starting up. She’d not had a hot flash in close to fifteen years.

  “I’m not putting anything on you, Mom. We’re talking about Christine.”

  “And whether anything might have saved her,” Cora pointed out. She did not want to be having this conversation, especially now, when there was plenty of time before they even were on the fringe of Indianapolis where traffic would pick up and she could claim the need to concentrate. “I don’t believe anything could.”

  “Nothing but God, you mean.”

  Cora hesitated. She wasn’t one to say less than what she thought, but if God was fixing to heal Rebecca in return for her faith, then it wasn’t going to be Cora and her nasty basket of despair to get in the way. But what was choking Cora was how Rebecca was wanting her mother to be on Becca’s side, not Christine’s, as if they could roll their faiths together like a ball of yarn and the bigger and more colorful it grew, the bigger and prettier the protective afghan God would knit them. That same God who had already cast Christine aside, as good a person as Christine was. Choose up, Mom, Becca was saying whether she meant to or not. And not for the first time. Becca and Christine had been vicious rivals when they were little: Who do you love most, they demanded, one way or another. Cora couldn’t think like Becca, but Christine couldn’t be hurt by anything Cora said and Becca could. “Anything but God,” Cora repeated dutifully, not misspeaking on purpose.

  ON THE WAY HOME, Rebecca’s fatigue was palpable as warm water in a tub and she thought about slipping below its surface. “Mom…” she said, after the air had been cotton-quiet for perhaps a quarter of an hour.

  “Yes, honey,” Cora answered, her eyes on the road after a fluttery anxious look.

  “Don’t, Mom. I’m all right. Quit looking at me like that. I just want to ask you, will you, I mean, if something happens to me, will you take Jill?”

  Cora felt a wire pull taut insi
de and then she was the brown and gray bird balanced on it. “Don’t talk like that. And why, anyway? She has her father.”

  “He’s a man. He couldn’t handle it and she, well, she needs a mother. Girls do.”

  “You never thought you needed a mother when you were her age.”

  “Yeah, well, you were busy fussing about Christine and Alex.” Rebecca tried to keep the wounding point of the knife toward the ground, for safety, as her mother had taught her, but Cora was injured anyway.

  “Becca…” she began, then sighed and shook her head a little to clear it and to shake off the impulse to defend herself. A headache hazed the edges of her vision to reddish brown, like the insides of her eyelids, like she could close her eyes and leave them be and scarcely notice the difference except for the relief of it.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not myself,” Rebecca said, sensing she’d not hear the simple yes she wanted. John would automatically get custody anyway. That much was clear to the whole world now if it hadn’t been before Alex showed up. And it was best, even if John was as about as sensitive to a woman’s needs as a dog to a squirrel’s. That had been her real reason for divorcing him. His one infidelity had provided a reason other people would understand, and she’d latched on to it with gratitude. But he was a good father in his bumbling way, and Jill knew he loved her.

  As Becca had told her mother, she wasn’t herself today. At least she wasn’t the new Rebecca; her careful cheer faltered toward irritation as she tired and the sheen on her optimism tarnished. She called it optimism when she couldn’t muster it and faith when she could. Maybe she could distract God with a change in terminology and He wouldn’t notice. She hoped as much.

  twenty-nine

  I HATE HIM AND NOW I know he’s crazy, too. After we lost in court, Grandma told me to try to wait to pass judgment until after I got to know him because people change sometimes, but obviously my so-called father hasn’t. I have to talk to some doctor before we go back to court and I’m going to say that Alex is definitely dangerous and nuts. He showed his true self today. I think he’s a psychopath. I saw a show about one on TV and he was skinny and smoked like Alex.