Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  Cora looked out the window. She’d taken down the old curtains and replaced them with just a white valance so that from anywhere in the kitchen there was always a view of the bird-feeding station Alex had made for Lexie. They’d hung several kinds of feeders from a black metal contraption that looked like four shepherd’s crooks of different heights nestled back to back, with hooks extending north, south, east and west. A purple martin house was atop a high metal pole farther out in the yard. “Time flies,” Cora said out loud. In her mind she heard Christine’s voice, as clearly as she ever had: Like a bird… “I wish there was more of it. Time, I mean,” Cora said feeling tears start behind her eyes even as a small, close-lipped smile reached her face because right then she felt her daughter’s life much as she had in the first secret quickening, as if so many years hadn’t been lost.

  “Me, too,” Jo said, seeing the small battle on her friend’s face, the little muscle that jumped just below her cheekbone, the rue and tenderness in the eyes that opened after a few seconds during which Jo knew Cora was seeing Christine. She put her hand lightly over Cora’s and stroked along a ropy vein. “But sometimes we manage to stretch it out.”

  forty-six

  I ASKED GRANDMA if she believes there’s such a thing as angels. They’re getting pretty popular lately. Jill believes in angels for sure; she’s collecting little china ones and she’s got them all named and lined up on her windowsill where they’ve got a direct shot to heaven. She thinks they have something to do with Becca being alive. What I really wanted to ask Grandma was if she believes in God, but I knew she’d never say no I don’t, even if she thought God was a made-up bunch of hooey, which is what she said about my reason for not getting the dishes done. About angels, she finally said she didn’t know what she believes anymore. There was a time she did, then she didn’t, and now she plain doesn’t know. She said she’s sure some real people turn out to be angels in their actual life.—Like Jolene, she said.—And like your mother. Then she waited and said, real quietly.—Maybe like your father, Lexie. It’s so strange how things turn out. You sure couldn’t have predicted, could you?

  She wasn’t really asking a question, but I’ll answer it anyway. No, I couldn’t have predicted, even though he still makes me blind furious when he won’t let me out past eleven with the car. It’s Grandma’s car, even, so when she says it’s up to your father, I get mad at her, too. You’d think it would make her mad to have him say what I can do with her car, but no, it doesn’t faze her a bit. And at dinner, it’s questions, questions, questions. How’d you do on that Algebra test, Lexie? When’s that English paper due, Lexie? What do you think about the hostage crisis, Lexie? Did you make that dentist appointment, Lexie? Sometimes I feel like my neck’s going to break from whipping my head back between questions from the two of them while I’m trying to concentrate on avoiding whatever mushy vegetable on my plate is the grossest.

  Tim and I broke up because I found a note from Jennifer in his history book. It was signed Love and had x’s and o’s underneath her name and she used a dorky little heart sign to dot the i. It also stank—I mean really—because she sprayed perfume on the paper. Then he got mad back at me because I frosted my hair, and he said it was because I wanted to flirt with other guys. I don’t care, because now I like Matt Demos but I think the real reason Tim started liking Jennifer instead of me is because my father practically made him fill out a questionnaire every time he came to pick me up. I tried to get him to quit, but he said,—I know what’s on his mind, and told Tim,—I’m dusting her for fingerprints when she gets home, you get my drift? I swear he leaves Matt alone because Matt says Yes, sir, and No, sir, and We’ll be home on time, sir, Thank you, sir. Just Sirs him up and down like Alex is wood and Matt is a brushful of wet paint.—You don’t have to do that, call him sir all the time, I told Matt, but he said,—hey, fathers like that crap.

  I thought he was right, too. Until my father says to him, real slow,—You know, Matthew, I’ve got your number, and I can use it to count backward anytime. You get my drift…sir? Like a hiccup Matt says,—Yes, sir. And looks startled and scared at the same time. He was pathetic.

  I swear my only hope for ever getting married is to elope with a stranger while my father is in the shower.

  I still talk to my mother. Something happened yesterday, on the one-year anniversary of the day she died, and I didn’t have time to think about asking her and waiting to see if I felt an answer. Grandma was upstairs putting on warmer clothes, and I was just getting my jacket and gloves out of the closet when Alex asked if he could go to the cemetery with Grandma and me. It was just like a reflex when I said no. Then I realized he was sort of dressed up, in khaki pants and his blue plaid shirt he knows I like because sometimes if he’s gone to work before I leave for school, I sort of borrow it to wear to school over my light blue tank top. (It’s way too cold to wear that by itself now, but the shirt looks really good over it and Matt says it makes my eyes look like sky.)

  Alex didn’t get mad, though, he just said okay, real quietly. Then he took his wallet out of his back pocket and picked a ten-dollar bill out of it,—Well, on your way, would you get some extra flowers to take her from me? He knew Grandma and I were going to stop at Flowers by Frederick; we did on her birthday and holidays and sometimes for no reason.

  I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there in the kitchen like a big dummy, with all the dishes dumped helter-skelter in the sink—I was supposed to do them, but I hadn’t yet. My face got hot and I tried a couple of different words but I quit because anything I said was just going to make it worse. Then he said—It’s okay, Lexie. I understand. But could I give her some flowers? Please.

  And just stood there like he was waiting for my judgment, whether I’d take the money or just cut off his arm and be done with it. He was holding out that money, his hand jittering a little, and waiting for me to decide.

  I know it’s not just my story. It’s my mother’s and my father’s and Tina’s. Grandma’s, Becca’s and Jill’s, too, I guess. And we could throw in Jolene. But him standing there, holding out that ten dollars made me feel like it was all my story and I had to decide whether to let it end and how to let it end. And if it should start over and how it should start over. I know he’s sorry, and all he wants is a chance to do what he can to make it right. Well, some things you can never make right. But then there’s what you can do, and you’ve got to do that much. And sometimes it’s enough.

  So I took the money out of his hand and I said,—Yes, I will. What do you want me to get her?

  I thought he’d say, “Whatever you want.” But he didn’t. He said,—Get one pink rose and one yellow one. And one of those little cards for flowers that says thank you. That’s all. She’ll know.

  I looked at his face then and it was new-shaved, and his cheeks had spots of color I’d never seen before, like he’d scraped them. His eyes were too shiny, they wanted to water. I don’t know what came over me, but I just took one step and put my arms around him. It was the first time. I could hear his heart, fast and hard. He hugged me back and put his cheek on the top of my head.

  —It’s all right, Dad, I said.

  THE UNSPOKEN YEARS

  For Jan, my sister, with love

  I imagine us seeing everything from another place—the top of one of the pale dunes or the deep and nameless fields of the sea…Looking out for sorrow, slowing down for happiness, making all the right turns…—Mary Oliver, “Coming Home”

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Susan Schulman, my good-listener agent, and Tara Gavin, whose work editing this book I genuinely appreciate.

  The Mind Alive, mentioned in this novel, is by Harry A. Overstreet and Bonaro W. Overstreet.

  Alan, Brooke, David and Ciera deCourcy are consistent and steadfast in their support of my work. My love and gratitude to each of them, every day.

  PROLOGUE

  THE BLUE PITCHER I MADE SO many years ago isn’t my most perfect piece but it’s
precious to me. I wasn’t new to the pottery wheel when I made it, only to the notion of feeling what shape the clay will sing itself into when my hands listen and guide rather than fight it. (Like my life, which had finally begun taking its own shape at the time.)

  As I pick it up now from the hutch near the window that overlooks the bay, I remember the pleasure I took feeling it emerge like a new baby. I shaped a graceful handle, with a place for curling fingers, heel of hand and thumb to fit naturally; and the glaze fired exactly true: the shade of the ocean when it is pure sapphire, perhaps on a day when ashes are being released at its edge. I’d imagined it as a cream pitcher, a special gift, but it came out too generously sized, so I kept it myself, as a reliquary for my childhood’s dried tears.

  I did make the cream pitcher, though. I’ve always loved cream, especially the old-fashioned kind you can’t find anymore. For a little while when I was a child, we used to have a milkman bring whole milk that had to be shaken up to mix the cream in with the skim because it wasn’t homogenized. Or you could save the cream by pouring it off the top, like my mother did for her coffee and cereal. I took it as a sign that something fine and good could be saved, although I lost hope many times that such a natural law might apply to me. My brother and I were born to guilt, and we took it on like a mantle. Of course we were innocents. In her own way, perhaps our mother was, too, although that’s more difficult to see.

  I had to wait weeks longer until a lump of clay finally bloomed into the cream pitcher I’d hoped to make. I knew, the way you know something you have already lived, weather in your bones, that it was right. That one I glazed in a joyous array of ascending, blending color: gold and green for the sand and the marsh grass of the solid earth at the bottom, tones of aquamarine for the moving bay and ocean, to a lighter and lighter blue of opening sky. And it has endured, intact and beautiful, on the table in the center of our home.

  This isn’t a story I thought I’d ever be willing or ready to tell. My mind’s eye has retained a run-down glamour image from childhood: me, running off alone with only a brown bag lunch and babysitting money in search of my father by hitchhiking the country to look for men I resembled. Once I could have set out that way, without baggage, running to him for rescue. (Not that I knew him nor he me, but I idolized the idea of him.) Now, this story is my baggage and to know me, he would have to know what he left me to, and what I did to survive. But the cream pitcher on the table is brim-full; I have had enough very good years that I can bear to seek him out and let come what comes.

  And whether I find him or not, this story is part of the heritage I think my children will have a right to know. I hope I do not sound self-justifying as I tell it. I realize there are those who would say I am guilty of murder, and those who would say I am not. There are a few who would say my mother tried to kill me more surely than herself. I’ve told it without flinching, this story of all that has remained silent but unforgotten where I left it, in the blue pitcher of memory and dried tears.

  1

  SHE WAS ALWAYS CRAZY. Looking back, I see no doubt about it. It was a deceptive craziness, though, sometimes luminous and joyful. Even when it was, my brother and I knew it was important not to relax. If one of us let down our vigilance, a bottomless pit could open right beneath our feet, eclipsing the ground we’d been foolish enough to trust, and the sickening freefall would begin again.

  We blamed ourselves, of course. Mother blamed us, too. In a way, that was best, because we could all be saved if Roger and I only perfected ourselves, and I used to believe that was possible—until the summer after eighth grade, when she went for weeks without speaking to me. I had no idea what I’d done or how to fix it, and bang, one afternoon while I was lying on my bed, this thought came: it’s not me. Instead of being relieved, I cried a long time, letting the tap of water against our mildewed shower curtain obscure the sound. I was ill-equipped to deal with the insight, which didn’t last anyway. Maybe Mother smelled my doubt of her; she had an uncanny sense of when she’d gone too far, although I can see now she took full advantage of the vast and open space we gave her, the miles and miles before she reached our edge.

  But there was this, too: she had the most wonderful laugh, rich and tinkly at the same time.

  My mother had an undisguised preference for male over female, inexplicable considering the relationships she’d had with men. She both worshipped and loathed the memory of her father, who’d died before Roger and I were born, and implied grossly preferential treatment of her brother, Jacob, to whom she hadn’t spoken in a good fifteen years. It was all an enigma to me until she and I made a journey to Seattle to see her dying mother. Neither Roger nor I had never so much as met our grandmother before then. Mother had told us the distance from Massachusetts to Seattle was too great for visiting, but we also knew that when Grandmother called, Mother would often end up banging down the phone or pretending to have been disconnected.

  My brother and I speculated that we were the children of different fathers. Our discussions on the subject were rare and secretive because Mother gave us to understand that she was a Virgin. Any question that didn’t use that tenet as a given would bring quick punishment. As a reward for her purity and devotion, God gave Mother the Truth. It was a serious mistake to disagree with Him through Her. She had elevated her non-male status by having had adequate brains to become the Bride of Christ, as she put it, a position she evidenced by wearing a solitaire pearl on her wedding ring finger. Since He only needed one Bride, the lowliness of my gender was unredeemed.

  One time it was better to be a girl, but I couldn’t enjoy it. Mother had taken us on an impromptu camping trip, as she did at least once every summer. Each time she found us a new place to trespass; we never went where it was legal to camp, because, she explained, those places had already been discovered and ruined, or, more likely, they hadn’t been the best places to begin with or rich people would have already bought them up. Every year we collected treasures from our trip and after we got home we’d make a collage. “Look! A whelk and it’s not broken!” one of us would call out as we walked a heads-down souvenir search. “From an eagle!” we’d pronounce a feather fallen from an ordinary gull, and she’d proclaim, “It’s a keeper and so are you.” Of course, she also regularly threatened to return us to the Goodwill store, where she claimed to have found us at a clearance sale, but she loved us. I know she did. Even now, after all, I remind myself of that. And she had the most wonderful laugh.

  All in all, I hated camping, but I pretended to like it because it was God’s Great Outdoors and it would have added another flaw to the list she kept on me if I didn’t like laying my bony body down on God’s Great Hard-As-Rocks Rocks and hearing Mother remind us of the Rock of Ages on which we should rest our lives. We didn’t have a tent or anything. Three thin sleeping bags, a couple of dented pots, paper plates, ancient utensils stolen from various diners, matches and a red plaid plastic tablecloth constituted our equipment. Mother said a tent would spoil the view of God’s Great Starry Heavens. To myself, I added that it would also spoil the feast enjoyed by God’s Great Mosquito Plague, but I would never have been dumb enough to say it out loud. The thought was a grimy smudge of rebellion on my soul, and I was amazed she didn’t notice and purify me again.

  This particular trip involved a drive of two hours south into Rhode Island, to the oceanfront estates of Newport. She figured that by parking on a kind of no-man’s-land on the obscure boundary between two huge properties, we could unobtrusively carry our gear onto the enormous cliffs and climb down, out of sight from the main houses, onto lower rocks where cozy sandy nests were revealed between them when the tide withdrew. Now it seems absurd to even contemplate, but I guess security systems weren’t so nearly perfect in 1969.

  I was too nervous to enjoy the scenery. There was a catch to the plans Mother made. If some disaster befell us, such as being arrested, she’d be furious because, she’d say, she had been testing our good sense by inserting a flaw into the plan. By
not finding it, we would have proven again that her lessons had gone unlearned, she had Cast Pearls Among Swine. On the other hand, questioning the wisdom of a scheme was to certify Lack Of Faith, a major sin and stupid to boot; we knew that much.

  We set up camp just as she’d imagined, on a huge fairly flat rock above a tiny spit of sand, below the cliffs and the manicured lawns and formal gardens that spread from elegant verandas toward the sea. Finding driftwood was the first task she set us to, and not a simple one. There isn’t a lot of vegetation on those cliffs, and she was not happy with the skimpy pile we amassed. At some point we must have satisfied her, and she began working to get a fire started. We had to remember to praise the results profusely or we’d have displayed Lack Of Appreciation, another major sin. The wood fought back; there wasn’t enough kindling and nothing we’d found was adequately dry. Roger might have contributed to the green wood problem by sneaking onto a lawn and uprooting a small tree. He sometimes did things like that when we were desperate, and I didn’t say anything. We helped each other out that much, at least. Mother finally got a small blaze started, pale-appearing against the brilliant blue sky, and I breathed again. It was only late afternoon, too early for supper.

  “We’ll take a treasure walk.” She tended to announce her decisions. “Watch your step.”

  We set out, climbing from one level of rocks to another when necessary, along the jagged shore guarding the back of Newport’s spectacular mansions.

  “Children,” she exclaimed, her face animated and ecstatic, “You see? God’s riches are ours. We don’t need money.” (Thank goodness we’re not tainted with filthy lucre, observed a dangerous whisper in my mind.) But then Mother began to sing, “Amazing grace! how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” Her fine, strong contralto wove itself into the noise of waves stunned by their meeting with cliffs and, as always, I was immediately reconverted to every word she had ever spoken. Her face was sun-gilt, and what she said about being the Bride of Christ had to be true, I was positive, or no way would God let her be so beautiful. She put her arm around me and hugged me to her, and I thought I would die then and there of pure happiness.