Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  “Yeah,” Lexie said in some new mix of hopeful defiance. But Cora noticed that Lexie wasn’t talking to her when she said it, but shot the syllable in Alex’s direction.

  Cora looked at Alex, who was sweating, but maybe that was just from the heat. Lexie looked a bit damp, too, her bangs—newly cut thanks to the ten-dollar bill Alex had handed her when Cora said no, she really couldn’t advance any more allowance—sticking to her pale forehead. Just a smatter of freckles had popped out across her nose and upper cheeks from the few hours she’d spent in the sun. No sunburn, let alone the light tan she could muster with concentrated work; she and Jill hadn’t logged any time at the Knights of Columbus swimming pool since they had no transportation there except on the weekends.

  “Lexie is not ready to get her license,” Alex said, so Cora knew that at least one thing extra had been accomplished. Two down. Good enough.

  “Having trouble with…” Cora said, aiming it to Alex, who’d opened the freezer and was loading a glass with ice.

  “I am not having trouble. I drive fine,” Lexie injected, insulted, and flounced toward the bathroom. Midday flooded the kitchen, heating it.

  “You care if I finish off this tea?” Alex said, holding up the pitcher he’d pulled from the refrigerator.

  “Not at all. I’ve got another pitcher of sun-tea started,” Cora gestured toward the back porch where the sun was particularly intense in the mornings, then brought herself up short and went on quickly to distract Alex. “So really, how’d it go?”

  But Alex had caught it. “How you get it out there?” he said, eyeing the crutches propped against the kitchen table where Cora sat.

  Cora decided to chance the lie, since Lexie was still in the bathroom. “Lexie…before you left. What about her driving?”

  Alex dropped the tea-on-the-porch question. He glanced to make sure Lexie couldn’t hear him. “Not that bad, if you don’t mind whiplash and think you can always find a way to go forward since Reverse is ‘an unnecessary gear.’ And certain stop signs are unnecessary, too, of course.” He used the index and third fingers of both hands to draw quotation marks in the air around the word unnecessary.

  “HEY, LEX,” ALEX said maybe ten days later. “Get it in your head. I’m not signing for you to get your license until you can change a tire and use jumper cables. That’s for emergencies. And you’ve gotta know how to change your oil, too.” They were in Cora’s yard after Alex got home from work. The afternoon was sliding toward twilight while Alex was demonstrating the use of a jack and lug wrench and Lexie was giving him her bored inattention. A hummingbird hovered at the red sugar-water feeder between two baskets of bright-pink impatiens, all hanging from the porch roof.

  “Oh, my God, of course. Changing my oil would be the first thing I’d need to do in an emergency.” Lexie seemed to have inherited Chris’s gift for sarcasm. “But could you refresh my memory on exactly why?” She’d been to the pool over the weekend and her shoulders were still sunburned. Cora had reminded Alex to remind Lexie to wear sunscreen, an admonition to which she’d obviously paid little attention. The bridge of her nose was pink and her lips were peeling, too.

  “Okay. The rest is for emergencies, though.”

  “If it’s so important, how come the license bureau doesn’t put it on the test?”

  Alex didn’t even bother to try to come up with an answer. He just busied himself jacking up Cora’s car. Then he realized, this was sort of missing the point. He stepped aside and pointed to it. “Go on now. You do it. Just pump up and down, like I was doing.”

  “You just don’t want me to get my…”

  Alex interrupted. “Have you got fruitcake for brains? You think I’m spending every night driving around with you because I like the scenery?” In fact, it had nothing to do with liking the scenery; it had to do with liking the time with his daughter. She was starting to open up a little, just like Big Al had said happened when a teenager is past the initial stages of having to think about every single move behind the wheel and they’re just logging practice time. Alex had already decided he was going to make her learn how to drive a stick shift, too, just because, well, she might need to drive that kind of car in an emergency.

  Already she’d told him about how she’d been in Civics while her mother was dying and how she still didn’t like the cemetery and felt closer to Christine when she was feeding the birds. She had a picture of Christine in her coffin that Cora didn’t know about; that had sort of slipped out when Lexie was talking about how the cemetery seemed too cold and far away, but Christine’s room upstairs and the bird feeders were where she could talk to her. She’d shut up for the rest of the drive after she said that much, as if she regretted it. Alex hadn’t known what to say, so he’d shut up, too.

  “Well, I’d think you’d be in a hurry for me to get my license then. It’s not my fault you have to drive around with me. I could pass the test now and you know it.”

  It was quite true, not that he was going to admit that to her. “I dunno. And it don’t mean you’re ready to handle an emergency,” he said. “Now look, you’ve got the car jacked up, right? So…”

  But Lexie wasn’t to be deterred. “So since when are you so big on emergencies?” she said, a dangerous edge to her voice.

  Alex, who always used to be caught off guard by what anyone said, actually thought he knew what was coming. He set the lug wrench on the gravel of the driveway and went from forward-leaning kneel to one that rested his rear back onto his upturned heels. “Since I used to be really, really useless in one,” he said matter-of-factly. “And I feel real bad about it. I’m sorry.”

  Lexie dug in. He wasn’t going to get off now, not just like that, with some stupid simple little “I’m sorry.” She seemed to gather herself in, consider and decide to strike. “You killed my sister,” she said, her voice scraping the jagged rocks of an adult bitterness. “I know what happened.”

  That one did take Alex by surprise. He didn’t think Christine had told anyone. Did Cora know, too? “Yes,” he said simply, finally. “It was an accident, but yes, it was my fault. There’s no way to make it right. Hell, there’s no way. Nothing’ll ever be right no matter what I do.” He forced himself to look Lexie in the eye, but when he managed the contact she turned her head to break it. Alex felt tears but refused them the room they wanted so he wouldn’t seem to be asking her to feel sorry for him. “I’m sorry. I messed up about your mother and your sister. And you. I’m sorry. It was me. It was my fault.” By my fault. By my fault. By my most grievous fault, he’d been taught to say in the confession of sin, the closed fist of his right hand knocking against his left chest with each repetition. That came before the absolution from the priest during the masses of his boyhood. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to mass.

  Lexie’s head was rigid. She sat on the ground in denim shorts and a red tank top, an emergent woman who, he saw, had no more inclination to forgive him than the women lined up in his mind wearing their shrouds of condemnation. Cora’s kindness had given him a delusional hope. No matter. He’d already done what he could to make it right for Cora.

  “Well…I, uh, I guess I can show you about the tire another time. If you ever want to know,” he said with a shrug he didn’t feel. His feet and knees had stiffened and one foot was asleep; he knew he looked ridiculous trying to get up, using the handle on the car door for leverage. When he straightened up, he bent over to pick up the tools and headed toward the porch. He’d get the car off the jack after she went in.

  From behind him on the ground, Lexie’s voice barely reached him. “I burned up your trailer.”

  He stopped and turned around but didn’t walk back to her. “I know,” he said, from that distance.

  He saw from her quick look up from the ground that he’d surprised her. The hair she’d let fall to curtain her face swung away then, back against her cheek. She still sat on the ground, Indian-style, dwarfed by Cora’s car behind her, in a three-quarter profile until, with
that quarter turn of her head, she met his eyes.

  She looked down again. “I didn’t mean for the whole thing to burn down. That part was an accident.”

  “I know,” Alex said. Then he did walk over to her. When she didn’t look up, he touched the top of her head. The touch was soft and brief, the curve of his hand shaping itself over the curve of her head, the way to palm a baby’s head.

  forty-three

  NEITHER ALEX NOR LEXIE was in the house when Brenda Dunlap phoned. “I have news,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  Cora had had too much practice getting unbelievable news. She sat down, lodging her body between the chair and the kitchen table for support. “Oh, dear God,” she said. “You got the psychologist’s report. Is it bad?”

  “Not bad in the sense that there’s a single negative word in it about you.”

  “But…”

  “But she says that even though Alexis has a close and bonded relationship with you and there’s no evidence she does with her father…that he’s not psychotic or incompetent or unwilling and therefore there aren’t psychological grounds on which to terminate his parental rights. She does say she thinks Alexis would be happier with you…but…”

  Cora exhaled. The phone cord was taut and her wrist felt, suddenly, too weak and tired to hold the receiver. She needed to get off, to think about how she’d tried to prepare all of them for this. “I knew this could happen. I thank you for trying…”

  Brenda interrupted. “Hold up, Mrs. Laster. There’s more.”

  “More?”

  “Alex has dropped the suit.”

  “What?”

  “He’s dropping the custody action. You’ll remain the guardian and if you want to proceed with an adoption, he’ll sign over his rights so that you can.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, ma’am. You heard me right.” On her end, Brenda smiled. Sometimes she’d take a gift-wrapped win for a client and just breath out thank you without worrying about who or what she was trying to thank.

  OH, MY CHRISSIE, my Chrissie. Did you bring this about? Maybe Alex always was what you saw in him, the boy you loved. If he was, honey, I’m so sorry I missed it, I’m sorry your daddy missed it. Of course, I guess you and Daddy can work that out between you, can’t you. I’m so sorry. Or is this part of it, are you changing him? Or changing us all?

  Cora closed her eyes and tried to feel her daughter’s presence in the bedroom that had been hers, as she was sometimes quite sure she did when she had the patience to wait for it. When it didn’t come, she shook her head and talked on as much to herself as to Christine. The distant sound was that of the lawn mower out in back; Alex was mowing, but he had Lexie out there, too, weeding out the stalks of tall grassy weeds that had grown in the shrubbery nestled against the foundation—a task Lexie found particularly pointless. “I’ll explain why it needs to be done,” he’d said, “as soon as you climb down from your high horse.” When Lexie stood, hands on hips, waiting, he’d finally conceded, “I don’t know exactly why, and I don’t care. Your grandpa always kept it that way and that’s the way it’s gonna be. You wanna go to Kim McBride’s party tonight, then you get that done.” Lexie had given him her most disgusted sigh, tried to stare him down and failed. Her father had given the stare right back to her, started the mower up and pushed off walking in the path of green fragrance the rotary blade created.

  Ten minutes before the phone had rung, Cora had been watching the two of them through the kitchen window, thrown wide open more for the thought of air than the fact. Once she’d hung up, keeping her hand on the phone a long moment after it was cradled in the hook, she thought of flagging Lexie and Alex, motioning them to come in so she could tell them the news. Then she realized: of course Alex knew. He’d done this some time ago without telling anyone but his lawyer from what Brenda said. Cora would have to think through what to say to him, and let it be his to tell Lexie.

  Upstairs it was, if anything, a little cooler rather than hotter. Alex, bless him, had discovered and fixed the attic fan which Cora hadn’t even remembered existed and had no idea how many years it had been broken. He had a friend named Dink coming over to see about the cheapest way to do air-conditioning, too, though Cora was hesitant. Even now it was hard to do what she knew would give Marvin fits.

  I didn’t want to let Lexie get sullied by life, you know. Cora shook her head again and gave a small shrug as if to say “how could I have been so stupid?” As if I could back up time somehow and have her be what she might have been if you hadn’t died. When you’re little and your parents say you can do or be whatever you want if you just put your mind to it, all that faith we try to give them. That life is good and fair and it’s up to them to make what they will of it. I used to love your face shining up, yours and Becca’s, too—before you knew that some mistakes can’t be reversed and before you failed big-time at anything. Before you understood about lies or misery or sickness and dying. Cora closed her eyes, trying to invoke an image of Christine, how she would nod her head in understanding. So I tried to keep her from her father. I thought it was what you wanted, I thought it was the right thing to do. And then it all blew up, and he ended up with her so then fighting him seemed the right thing to do.

  Cora’s hands were nested together in her lap, though she didn’t think of herself as praying. Then I was trying to make it work with him, for her sake, make it better with him. I was getting somewhere, too, wasn’t I? He’s teaching her to drive and how to change a tire and change her own oil. Except now the court or you or God or your daddy up there putting up a stink—Someone or something has given her back to me. What am I supposed to do now?

  After minutes had passed, long minutes of listening to her heart count out its ponderous cadence, she got up and went to the closet. She’d not read Christine’s diaries, though she knew Lexie had. Some days while Lexie had been at school or with Alex, Cora had holed up in Christine’s room—though she couldn’t bear the picture Lexie had hidden in the top bureau drawer—and tried to capture some living trace of her daughter: will, spirit, yearning, faith, love.

  Now Cora took out Christine’s last volumes and began to look for directions.

  1983

  forty-four

  HERE’S WHAT IT IS. I saw potential in him. I knew he was a jerk a lot of the time, and of course there was the sex thing, but that wasn’t why I wanted him so much when I was in high school and it certainly wasn’t why I married him. Mom and Dad thought that was because I was pregnant and that I got pregnant so Alex could stay out of the war. After Tina died and he took off, I pretty much saw it that way myself, but in the past couple of years, now that Lexie is a teenager herself, I remember it more the way it was, the way we were. I loved him, and he loved me. I was the hope in his life. Really, I just wore myself better than he did; the only real difference between us was that I knew I’d be okay, that I could do what I had to do and that I was a good person that other people could count on.

  Alex had a good soul. The problem was that he didn’t know it himself. He didn’t have the words. Nobody ever held up a mirror to him and said, “Look, you can do this. You’re a good person.” I liked it that I could see what other people couldn’t. I saw inside him sometimes when he didn’t know I was looking. I saw how he touched the babies when they were sleeping; I know he could have been a good father. I hope he’s forgiven himself and I hope life has given him another chance.

  1988

  forty-five

  FALL HAD COME LATE, which meant the impatiens had grown leggy but they’d bloomed right alongside the marigolds and dahlias and the flame-shaped red salvia until an unseasonable—unreasonable, Cora said—freezing rain actually encased the blooms in clear ice. Cora wanted life, including God and the weather, to be reasonable. Jolene reminded her how rarely they were.

  “But look. Sometimes it’s not reasonable but it’s better than reason. You and I have to remember that,” she said.

  “Last year when it
turned cold, I still had Christine,” Cora pointed out, one of the non sequiturs she and Jolene routinely lobbed each other, confident of the return.

  “I know. And there’s nothing more unreasonable than that.”

  “Unless it’s Paul being gone, that whole pointless war,” Cora said. They were in Cora’s kitchen warming their hands around cups of coffee. Jolene had stopped in on her way home from her blood-pressure check. Cora had heated a Sara Lee coffeecake she’d had squirreled away in the freezer, and they were cutting themselves tiny slices. Many tiny slices.

  “Or Rebecca…she does look better, doesn’t she, though? So how do we know what’s the unreasonable part? That she got this cancer or that it’s in remission?” Jolene set the knife away from herself, where it would be harder to reach.

  “Remission for the time being. It’s not her first remission. Everything’s just for the time being,” Cora said, looking at her hands and then up, at Jolene. She could see herself faintly reflected in Jo’s glasses. “For the time being, it’s working out. I’m hoping she lives to see Jill graduate from high school.” She sipped her coffee.

  “From your lips to God’s ears,” Jo said, their favorite endorsement. “Give me just a half a thin slice more, will you?”

  Cora obliged without breaking her thought. “And I’m hoping Alex and Lexie stay here until she’s out of high school. That’s only two more years.”

  “She’s got the best of both worlds now, that’s another good thing,” Jolene murmured.

  “Sure, except that her mother’s still dead, which was the very worst of a world that’s gone forever.”

  Jolene leaned across the table and took Cora’s free hand into one of hers, the easy bridge of women who love each other. “It’s always that way, honey. It’s always that way. Anything’s for the time being. Time and being’s what we have. And sometimes another chance.”

  “My Christine didn’t get another chance.”

  “No. And neither did Paul. But you and I have. And maybe Becca will. And Lexie. And how about Alex?”